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.

Profile: Robert Benchley (with some Hodgman for good measure)

I have a quotes widget on my Google homepage, and the other day I was greeted by this as I logged on:

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Friend of Dorothy Parker, writer of things for and The New Yorker and Vanity Fair (he filled in occasionally reviewing theatre for our friend Wodehouse), wearer of pencil-thin mustache, minor movie star, and grandfather of the Jaws novelist Peter Benchley, Robert Benchley apparently thinks I'm a bore (pshaw, as if he wouldn't have had this exact same blog if he'd had the means). Anyway, I'll assume he wasn't trying to pick a fight through time with me and chalk it up to the Algonquin Hotel crowd's need to incessantly turn clever phrases.

The quote did pique my curiosity about this fellow I'd never heard of, so I did a little research on Robert Bentley. The more I learned about him, the more Benchley struck me as a kind of proto-John Hodgman. He started as a writer from the upper-right hand corner of the country in New Hampshire (Hodgman, Massachusetts), worked for the Harvard Lampoon (Hodgman, McSweeney's/The Believer) and hung out with other interesting writers like George S. Kaufman and the aforementioned Parker (Hodgman, Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket and Amy Sedaris). Benchley then worked his way into Hollywood with various writing treatments and minor starring roles in, among other things, a series of satirical short "How To" films. Hodgman, of course, can been seen in Mac commercials, that "Bowie" episode of "Flight of the Conchords," and "Baby Mama."

Below is Benchley's explanation for why the United States found itself in the midst of the Depression. (Though maybe at that point it was simply "a depression," as the proper-nouning of things tends to happen after everything is concluded.) As the feeble-minded economist, Benchley is very "PC" and not very "Mac," don't you agree?



Some transcribed highlights, for those of you who don't like to watch old black-and-white footage. (What is it with you guys, anyway? Where does this fear come from?):

Now what were the primary causes of the "depression," as we call it? Overproduction, maladjustments in gold distribution, overproduction, deflation, too little thyroid secretion (or Platt's disease), too much vermouth, overproduction, and, by the same token, underproduction. Then, too, there was the Gulf Stream. All of these helped lead to inflation, deflation, and overproduction, with a consequent depression.

It brings to mind Hodgman's turns as Resident Expert on "The Daily Show." Here he is on our current recession:



They even use props in the same way. Hodgman's dead canary in the old-timey stock-ticker = Benchley's ambiguous graph. Eerie! Too bad about the sands of time, etc., I bet Hodgman would have fit in perfectly around that Algonquin table.

Wodehouse, Part the Second

You know how it is. You devote an entire blog post to talking about a man, you think he is out of your system...that your life can move forward without him at the center of it, always at the center; maybe you will even find new men to be interested in.

Not so when that man is P.G. Wodehouse. In my various Britishing of the Internet, I've dug up an article that Television's Hugh Laurie wrote for the Daily Telegraph in 1999 about the experience of reading Wodehouse. Since, after all, Laurie is a professional...


...I'll let him at it. Gear up for some serious Anglo (note the punctuation OUTSIDE of the quotation marks! Oh-ho, those Britons!). It's long but worth it.*

To be able to write about P. G. Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison.

If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookery nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again.

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that P. G. Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. I speak as one whose first love was Blandings, and who later took immense pleasure from Psmith, but Jeeves is the jewel, and anyone who tries to tell you different can be shown the door, the mini-cab, the train station, and Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a clear conscience. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral, every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear, and considerably funnier.

Now let the pages of the calendar tumble as autumn leaves, until 10 years are understood to have passed. A man came to us - to me and to my comedy partner, Stephen Fry - with a proposition. He asked me if I would like to play Bertram W. Wooster in 23 hours of televised drama, opposite the internationally tall Fry in the role of Jeeves.

"Fiddle," one of us said. I forget which.

"Sticks," said the other. "Wodehouse on television? It's lunacy. A disaster in kit form. Get a grip, man."

The man, a television producer, pressed home his argument with skill and determination.

"All right," he said, shrugging on his coat. "I'll ask someone else."

"Whoa, hold up," said one of us, shooting a startled look at the other.

"Steady," said the other, returning the S. L. with top-spin.

There was a pause.

"You'll never get a cab in this weather," we said, in unison.

And so it was that, a few months later, I found myself slipping into a double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check while my colleague made himself at home inside an enormous bowler hat, and the two of us embarked on our separate disciplines. Him for the noiseless opening of decanters, me for the twirling of the whangee.

So the great P. G. was making his presence felt in my life once more. And I soon learnt that I still had much to learn. How to smoke plain cigarettes, how to drive a 1927 Aston Martin, how to mix a Martini with five parts water and one part water (for filming purposes only), how to attach a pair of spats in less than a day and a half, and so on.

But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done. You begin with a diamond on the page, and you end up with a blob of Pritt, The Non-Sticky Sticky Stuff, on the screen.

Wodehouse on the page can be taken in the reader's own time; on the screen, the beautiful sentence often seems to whip by, like an attractive member of the opposite sex glimpsed from the back of a cab. You, as the viewer, try desperately to fix the image in your mind - but it is too late, because suddenly you're into a commercial break and someone is telling you how your home may be at risk if you eat the wrong breakast cereal.

Naturally, one hopes there were compensations in watching Wodehouse on the screen - pleasant scenery, amusing clothes, a particular actor's eyebrows - but it can never replicate the experience of reading him. If I may go slightly culinary for a moment: a dish of foie gras nestling on a bed of truffles, with a side-order of lobster and caviar may provide you with a wonderful sensation; but no matter how wonderful, you simply don't want to be spoon-fed the stuff by a perfect stranger. You need to hold the spoon, and decide for yourself when to wolf and when to nibble.

And so I am back to reading, rather than playing Jeeves. And my Wodehousian redemption is, I hope, complete. Indeed, there is nothing left for me to say, except to wish, as I fold away my penknife and gaze up at the huge oak towering overhead, that my history teacher could see me now.

*That's what she said.

Profile: P.G. Wodehouse

As some of my friends know, my mother is a hard-core Wodehouse pusher. She has a collection of used Wodehouse paperbacks specifically for getting people hooked (the first-edition hardback library doesn't leave the house, not even in the hands of immediate family). She keeps a framed picture of Wodehouse and his Dachshunds on the bookshelf in the study, with the rest of the family portraits; a list of all the Wodehouse books she already owns on her iPod nano so she doesn't double-purchase; and she has instructed the Duvall Used Bookstore to call her as soon as they get any Wodehouse in stock.

Once, before she was on the call list, she went to pick up my younger brother Adam from a friend's house in rural Woodinville. As they pulled out of the neighborhood, she felt she just HAD to go to the Duvall Bookstore. In spite of Adam's grumbling, she turned left instead of right and headed to Duvall...she just knew there was a Wodehouse on the shelf for her. She parked right in front of the door, and three minutes later she was back in the car with a $10 first edition. Adam was impressed enough to quit bellyaching, and we haven't doubted her supernatural abilities since.

So what is there to know about Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (or "Plum," as his friends called him)? He lived from 1881-1975 and in that time wrote ninety-six books, fifteen plays, some lyrics for about thirty musicals (like Anything Goes and Show Boat) and various screenplays. In 1939, he was living in France, and didn't bother leaving when the war broke out, as he wasn't very politically savvy. The Germans imprisoned him in 1940; he was interned in Belgium and later in Upper Silesia (now in Poland). His response was "if this is Upper Silesia, one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like..."

Because of his distance from Britain and its wartime experience, Wodehouse didn't entirely grasp the severity and somberness of the national mood. After being released, he recorded a series of radio broadcasts for the Germans about his internment. In retrospect, it is clear that he was just trying to be jolly--the tone is light and pokes fun at the Germans, and reflects the plucky morale of the Brits with whom he had shared his internment time. Goebbels, et al, however, knew Wodehouse's tone and depiction would come across as good P.R. for the Germans, and they played on his naivete.

In a cable to the editor of the "Saturday Evening Post," who had mentioned Wodehouse seemed "callous about England" in his broadcast, Wodehouse responded, "Cannot understand what you meant about callousness. Mine simple, flippant, cheerful attitude of all British prisoners; it was a point of honour with us not to whine." However, there was a huge and wrathful backlash in Britain: he was labeled a spy and a traitor in the press, accused of being a Hitler sympathizer, and the BBC banned all his work. A.A. Milne was one of his major critics, though both George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh came to his defense. Wodehouse was even investigated by MI5, and only in 2006 did they release the files clearing him of any wrongdoing. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel moved to New York after the war, deterred from going home by the seething dislike that was waiting for them, and by the fact that Leonora, Ethel's daughter and Wodehouse's step-daughter, died during surgery in London in 1944. He lived in the United States for the rest of his life.

His most famous characters are, of course, Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves, played to my extreme satisfaction by Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry on the BBC and Masterpiece Theatre, long before both Fry and Laurie began popping up in shows on FOX. The Blandings Castle stories are also popular, about the daffy Lord Emsworth, his family, and his pig the Empress. Mr. Mulliner stories identify the characters not by name but by what they drink (i.e., Hot Scotch and Lemon). There are plenty more, and an overview can be found here. His writing style is wry and clever, rife with puns and bumbled situations, and characters named Freddie Threepwood and Gussie Fink-Nottle. However, he isn't the type to preen--reading his work, you can tell he just delights in being able to tell jokes, and he wants more than anything to make his reader happy. I emphatically encourage you to dabble in some Wodehouse. Carry On, Jeeves, a collection of short stories from 1928, is a wonderful gateway book. Plum (and my mother) just want you to be happy...won't you give in?

In the hope that you might, I'll leave you with some of Wodehouse's best one-offs:

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
Jill the Reckless, 1921

He, too, seemed disinclined for chit-chat. We stood for some moments like a couple of Trappist monks who have run into each other by chance at the dog races.
Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, 1954

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
The Code of the Woosters, 1938

He was in the acute stage of that malady which, for want of a better name, scientists call the heeby jeebies.
Spring Fever, 1948

And perhaps the best book dedication in literature, from The Heart of a Goof (UK, 1926):

TO
MY DAUGHTER
LEONORA
WITHOUT WHOSE NEVER-FAILING
SYMPATHY AND ENCOURAGEMENT
THIS BOOK
WOULD HAVE BEEN FINISHED
IN
HALF THE TIME

"But he TOLD me IT WAS HIS LEG! ! ! ! !"

Mark Twain is a pretty solid resource for funny. "Mark twain" was, history and the Internet tell us, a Mississippi River term: the second mark on the line that measured depth signified two fathoms—safe depth for the steamboat. So even his nom de plume was a play on words.

Among his many works of genius, one of my favorites is 1897's "How to Tell a Story." Here's an excerpt:

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the "nub" of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

...

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you—every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years. The teller tells it in this way:

The Wounded Soldier

In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear, informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained; whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortunate, proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were flying in all directions, and presently one of the latter took the wounded man's head off—without, however, his deliverer being aware of it. In no-long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:

"Where are you going with that carcass?"

"To the rear, sir—he's lost his leg!"

"His leg, forsooth?" responded the astonished officer; "you mean his head, you booby."

Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood looking down upon it in great perplexity. At length he said:

"It is true, sir, just as you have said." Then after a pause he added, "But he TOLD me IT WAS HIS LEG! ! ! ! !"

* * * * *

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings and shriekings and suffocatings.

As far as I'm concerned, all still true today. Even the sweeping generalizations about national humor have a basis in truth. To update his argument, I can think of several modern comparisons to Twain's point. For instance, "How I Met Your Mother" with its multi-episode, elaborately structured jokes versus "Two and a Half Men" and gags about how whoa, Charlie sure does like to have sex with the ladies. Or Ellen Degeneres stand-up versus post-1995 Robin Williams (particularly his appearances on talk shows, when it seems someone dropped a quarter in him and he got stuck). Or Conan O'Brien's monologues versus Jay Leno's.

There is much more where "How to Tell a Story" came from. I suggest you check it out here; it will only take you a couple minutes. Don't have time? Enjoy these gems:

"To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct."

"...he would say eagerly, excitedly, 'I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn't a tooth in his head'—here his animation would die out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily, and as if to himself, 'and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw.'"

So What's So Funny?

Last night, I went to the first of a series of monthly writing workshops that 826 Seattle is holding for adults, How to Write Like I Do. Last night's was How to Be Funny, with John Moe (of NPR and McSweeney's) and Ryan Boudinot (also of McSweeney's, and author of books with titles like The Littlest Hitler).

Free coffee was enjoyed, space accoutremonts were sold, and some very interesting points were made:

• John Moe believes that "funny" is empathy, warmth and the act of exposing humanity in inhumane places. There is a relief and a joy in finding shared humanity, and relief + joy = funny. As he pointed out, the alternative to that is that everything is crude and horrible, like a bad MadTV sketch or that guy in your 11th grade biology class who was popular for making fun of people.

• John Moe also believes that "Richard Pryor is funny, and Dane Cook is obviously...not." For instance, as you may know, one time Richard Pryor was supercrazy1980high after freebasing cocaine, and he set himself on fire and ran down the street. He worked it into his act for his 1982 special, noting that "When you're on fire and running down the street, people will get out of your way." This is funny because, among other reasons, Pryor survived this psychotic episode, made sure to observe what was going on around him when it happened, then took the time to comment on it later, in the same way a lesser comic might make a joke about how buses don't always wait for the people running after them. A similar Dane Cook quote that John Moe found ("and this isn't verbatim, but I think it is pretty close") is "Blah blah blah MySpace blah blah blah I'm Dane Cook."

• Ryan Boudinot raised the question, "What is so funny about Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks?" It isn't the walking, although maybe a sketch could survive on that alone. It is John Cleese's face. Except for the legs, he looks like any English bureaucrat might on his way in to work. I think I'd also add that it is funny in two shifts, specifically: the first being the doubtful fact that Britain would need and sustain (and create plaques for) a Ministry of Silly Walks; and the second shift is, as Ryan pointed out, the deadpan execution. Monty Python works so well because they are entirely committed to the absurdity and refuse to wink at the audience.* This is why "Fawlty Towers" isn't as funny, at times, despite the similar materials and players - it can get too aware of the people watching it. Like a hipster on a fixed-gear bike.

• John Moe pointed out that it is funnier when something good happens to someone who doesn't expect it than when something bad happens to someone who deserves it. Think of the Soggy Bottom Boys' accidental concert at the grange in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and their shock and delight that the attendees not only know them, but adore them.

• When asked about how he constructed his plots, Ryan waffled a bit, and finally settled on the fact that he didn't, really. Writing - and concluding a story - is like being Ed Harris in "Apollo 13." You send your folks out into their setting, and when a problem or obstacle presents itself, you and your engineers figure out everything that your characters have at their disposal, then solve the crisis with those tools, and only those tools. If you've come across a better Ed Harris metaphor, I'd love to hear it - because I think that one gets the gold.

* Not to say that winking negates funny. For instance, drag queens are funny, and there is no comedy that is winkier - in every sense, I suppose - than drag, right?