E. B. White, author of
Charlotte's Web and a New Yorker essayist and reporter, was photographed on his Maine farm in 1977 by Harry Benson for
W and
Women's Wear Daily to accompany Hillary Johnson's story, "Maine Life" in 1977. (c) Copyright, Harry Benson
It was summer, school was out, yet I was in bed with a cold. In my hands I held—though barely noticed I was holding--Charlotte’s Web, the story of a barnyard pig named Wilbur whose life is saved by a spider named Charlotte. I was nine, and suffered from a fear of small, unpredictable creatures like beetles and moths and spiders. That was forty years ago. To say I haven’t once killed a spider since reading Charlotte’s Web, though accurate enough, barely conveys the degree of the transformation wrought upon me that day by E.B. White, author of this masterwork.
Charlotte was a shocking sort of heroine for a girl of my generation, or any other. She survived by sucking the blood from her victims, and she made no apologies. “It’s true, and I have to say what is true,” she told the horrified Wilbur. Nor did she affect a false modesty. “I am pretty…there’s no denying that,” she agreed, after Wilbur said he found her beautiful.
White seemed to have chosen one of the most difficult creatures in the world to render sympathetically, and then he revealed Charlotte to be not merely a genius but a loyal and loving one. Spinning a few thoughtfully chosen adjectives into her web, each of which further enobled Wilbur, she rescued her friend from a Christmas butchering. By the time humble appeared in the glistening strands, the invidious human notion of turning Wilbur into bacon had become thoroughly untenable. (Charlotte, as faithful readers may recall, used words like untenable in conversation; she also knew that humble meant “low to the ground,” as well as “modest.”) Charlotte died shortly after mounting her campaign, a terrible sorrow mitigated by the fact that she had conferred upon Wilbur a kind of porcine immortality.
I read Charlotte’s Web to the end, and then I lay still, the book collapsed on top of me. I was thinking in a brand-new way about spiders and other tiny living beings; about the relationship between people and animals; and about the spectacular results that could be achieved with words.
Seventeen years later, I was a writer myself—a newspaper reporter. I think I had mostly forgotten Charlotte and her brilliant ploy to avert a murder, but the seventy-eight-year-old man who had conjured her, Elwyn Brooks White, was on my mind as I drove along a coastal road in Maine one Saturday afternoon in November 1977. I was searching for his white clapboard house beside the ocean where, according to a traitorous local who broke under my questioning, the essayist and author lived. I was hoping for an interview. One the seat next to me lay a newly issued collection of White’s essays, which had been edited by his wife Katharine, a New Yorker editor, who had died that year in the forty-seventh year of their marriage.
I found the Colonial-style house. Behind it, and closer to the ocean, stood an imposing gray barn—the building, I assumed, where White had attended in a state of helpless dread the demise of a young pig, an event that inspired his famous essay, “Death of a Pig.” “He had evidently become precious to me,” White had written of the ailing animal, “not that he represented distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.” White, too, it was inevitably revealed in his writing, was a sufferer in a suffering world. Soon after completing this essay, White began Charlotte’s Web, a labor of two years’ duration. In the intervening half century, ten million copies, printed in twenty languages, have been sold.
I passed White’s house three times before summoning the courage to stop. My knocks on the front door were answered by a voice at the back of the house, and I walked to the rear, coming face to face with the author. He was white-haired, his face nearly smooth but for deep vertical lines between his eyebrows. He wore suede saddle shoes, purple and green argyle socks, corduroy pants, and a plaid oxford-cloth shirt. Before I could introduce myself, he bade me enter his kitchen, noting that the air was too frigid to waste another minute on his stoop.
I had expected to be shown the door when I told White I was a reporter, but he lit a flame under a kettle instead. He poured the boiling water into patterned teacups with matching saucers and, carrying the cups on a tray, led me from his kitchen to his study at the front of the house, its walls papered with an antique map of the Maine coastline. White’s unkempt terrier, Jones, positioned himself between our feet, curling up for warmth, but keeping a watchful eye on me.
“Jones is a perfectly terrible dog,” White commented when the dog had settled. “Affectionate in a back-handed way. He’s a lot like me—anxious, insecure, all tied up in knots. He’s been disconsolate and nervous ever since Katharine died.”
I had stuffed twelve pages of questions for White into my handbag before leaving for Maine. I was drunk with admiration for his essays about topics like the singularity of New York City, where he had lived as a young writer. “[No] matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings,” White had written thirty years before. But his comments flung me back to the storybook world of Charlotte and Wilbur, where animals are sentient, emotional beings; where death is a given, but immortality is always a possibility, too.
“What I want to do,” he continued, “as soon as the dust settles around here, is publish Katharine’s garden articles. I’m not interested in my own stuff anymore. I’ve had my share of writing. I’m too old now—the words don’t come anymore.”
I never once thought to retrieve the material in my handbag after that. We sat together until the early shadows of winter dimmed the room. White expressed his admiration for the carpenters and boat builders who were his neighbors—“I’d rather watch a good carpenter than read a bum poet,” he noted—and his qualms about New York, which he had just that year described as having “suffered a personality change, as though it had a brain tumor yet undetected.” He ruminated about the unsolicited poems and stories piled in a great heap on the floor nearby. These offerings were from amateurs seeking encouragement from an American master, and I realized White felt the weight of their collective longing, their yearnings for immortality, in a visceral, barely tolerable way. Eventually, he showed me Katharine’s study, next to his, where her writing tools and stationery remained in perfect order on her antique secretary, as if she would soon sit down to work.
We discover in middle age that we have become a particular kind of person, grown into some profession, and that certain information acquired early in life is never really forgotten, just subsumed into the unconscious as if a spell had been cast. Charlotte cast her spell on me, leading me to the writer’s life—a life in which I believed, given her example, one might find honor and even the potential for heroics. And then she led me to her creator.
More than twenty years have passed since that day when I was so young and hungry for experience as to impose upon E.B. White, fifty-two years my senior, depriving a “writing man,” as he once described himself, and a husband in mourning, of his privacy and his afternoon nap. If he minded, he never let on. Now, edging perilously close to fifty, I wish I had remembered to tell him how very much Charlotte’s Web had meant to me, but that was something I didn’t yet know myself.
