Tuesday Morning

Elwyn Brooks White

[ July 11, 1899 - October 1, 1985]

Yesterday was E.B.White's birthday. I found this out by way of my dear friend Elizabeth. She sent the news from New York where she and her daughter Eleanor are taking art and dance classes. Respectively.

Elizabeth and I like E.B.White' writing very much. We like the quiet meanings that hide within the simplicity and elegance of his words. Like these from the 1st paragraph of "
Once More to the Lake":

One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond's Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after summer--always on August 1st for one month. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blows across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week's fishing and to revisit old haunts. [1941]

And there is more to think about on this day after his birthday. Here is a tribute to E.B.White from The New Yorker Magazine:

From THE BOOK BENCH

July 11, 2011

E. B. WHITE, ON HIS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY

Posted by Ian Crouch

E. B. White was born on this day in 1899. He’d not approve of that construction, I fear. Nor would Strunk. So how about, for colloquial clarity, if not quite temporal precision: today is E. B. White’s birthday.

In October, 1939, White used his monthly column in Harper’s to write about the Second World War by way of remembering the First. (The essay, and others, are collected in “One Man's Meat,” which everyone should own: men, women, even vegetarians.) “I am trying to remember what it is like to be as young as a soldier,” White writes, and then turns to a journal he kept in 1914, when he was a high school student “translating Caesar, studying ancient history, working with algebraic equations, and drawing pictures of the bean,” among other activities he then saw fit to record. A particular entry:

July 11, 1917. My birthday! Eighteen, and still no future! I’d be more contended in prison, for there at least I would know precisely what I had to look forward to.

Young diarists are often thusly spirited; and juvenilia is worth keeping and consulting for its honesty and its exuberance as much as for its historical usefulness. Even despairing hyperbole seems cheerful when seen at a distance. White explains:

Much of the stuff is sickening to read, but I have a strong stomach and a deep regard for the young man that was I. Everyone, I believe, has this tolerance and respect if he is worth anything, and much of life is unconsciously an attempt to preserve and perpetuate this youth, this strange laudable young man.

White writes about young people, and about older people’s backward drift to their younger selves, with wit and supreme humanity. (Read the essay “Once More to the Lake” for more on that.) A birthday is a good time to think about one’s past, and how a strange, laudable young man becomes and remains a strange, laudable man.