Book Review: E.B. White

I've been itching to take advantage of last summer's new MLA style revisions (NERD!), so I'm pleased to introduce a new facet of Spit Takes: book reviews, complete with MLA-compliant citation!

White, E.B. Writings from the New Yorker, 1925-1976. Ed. Rebecca M. Dale. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Print.

I've given up my New Yorker subscription since my trek to work has changed and I'm no longer spending forty-five minutes on the bus every day. While it was sad to give up my commuter reading (it can be nearly impossible to finish a New Yorker every week when not a denizen of public transit), I seized the opportunity to indulge in more diverse reading material. I've had excellent forays, thanks both to a brilliant book club and well-chosen gifts, but sometimes, you have to get a fix of what you miss. After having read George Packer's collections of George Orwell essays (Facing Unpleasant Facts and All Art is Propaganda, both excellent), I was in the mood for more New Yorker-connected prose. I picked up this collection of White writings at Powell's when I was in Portland last August. I'm so glad I did.

The book collects pieces that had only previously been published in the magazine: particularly the anonymous bits (like "Notes & Comments" and "Talk of the Town"). About White's prose, Dale says in her introduction, "[w]hile he was often playful in his writing , sometimes delighting in the spirit of fun for its own sake, he also dealt with important subjects...[h]is humor, which permeated nearly all of his writing, is the type that 'plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth.'" (This quote of White's comes from another essay, "Some Remarks on Humor," which is included Essays of E.B. White). My favorite writers and performers all operate in this vein--fun for fun's sake, but not at the expense of the important subjects. Jon Stewart's first show back after September 11, 2001, comes to mind.

Dale has organized the collection by topic, rather than date, which a gentle and supportive way of curating writing like White's. Issues at hand include Maine, the academic life, business, Christmas spirit, and whims, among others. Many pieces are written in the first-person singular, which is a mark of the magazine's editorial column; we learn in Dale's intro that White apparently disliked having to speak in that voice, noting that it gave "the impression that the stuff was written by a set of identical twins or the members of a tumbling act." Very Wodehousian!

In one section Dale has termed "The Word," there is a piece called "Satire on Demand," published sixty-one years ago this week:

One of our contemporaries, the Russian humor magazine called Crocodile, has been under fire lately. Crocodile got word from Higher Up that it would have to improve, would have to bear down harder on "the vestiges of capitalism in the consciousness of the people." This directive, according to the Associated Press, came straight from the Central Committee and was unusual only for its admission that there were any such vestiges. Crocodile was instructed to gird on its satiric pen and by "the weapons of satire to expose the thieves of public property, grafters, bureaucrats..." It has never been our good fortune to observe a controlled-press satirist who is under instructions from his government to get funnier, but it is a sight we'd gladly crawl under a curtain to see. A person really flowers as a satirist when he first slips out of control, and a working satirist (of whom there are woefully few in any country) careens as wildly as a car with no brakes. To turn out an acceptable pasquinade is probably unthinkable under controlled conditions, for the spirit of satire is the spirit of independence. Apparently the Russian committee anticipates difficulties in stepping up humor and satire by degree. Crocodile used to be a weekly. From now on it will appear only every ten days. Three extra days for each issue, for straining. [1/8/49]*

Most of the pieces in White's book are about this short, though some stretch to two or three pages. They aren't always funny, but they are almost always humorous. The dated references are generally helpful when you know what he is referring to, but when you don't, it casts a fog over the whole piece (not White's fault, of course--he lived and wrote through many decades and references). Dale usually provides footnotes for context, but if you didn't know about the controversy of Bertrand Russell's appointment to the City College of New York and Bishop William T. Manning's open letter denouncing it before you read "Our Contentious Readers," learning it about it halfway through won't help much. In general, though, it is an excellent book for picking up when you have a couple spare minutes--short, often fluffy pieces that are well-wrought and (surprisingly) educational. If you only know E.B. White as the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web, then Writings from the New Yorker is a great intro to his "grown-up" writing.

*Incidentally: if you haven't seen Jon's monologue recently, I highly suggest you watch it again. Not only is it generally worth 8:49 of your life--but he also speaks a bit in the first-person plural and addresses the idea of satire in a free country. Humor writing is humor writing, no matter the medium or subject.