Thursday, December 14, 2006

Radiant

My eleventh-grade English teacher was a short, sprightly woman in her late 50s, with a small, boyish shock of red hair on top of her head. She was dynamic, vigorous, and she loved great writing. Everyday she read to us a selection of poetry or prose.

She was an excellent reader, intoning each syllable with just enough hue of emotion. She left stark silence at the end of the well-crafted understatement, and she stutter-stepped through the comedic pieces, performing punchline acrobatics in a way that only the best readers can.

In all the times I heard Ms. Mason read, only twice did the class feel compelled to hush afterwards. Those two times we knew we had stumbled upon sacred literary ground. The first time was when she finished Seamus Heaney's "Mid-Term Break" with its bruising denouement: "A four-foot box, a foot for every year." The other time was when, the day after 9/11, fighting back tears, she read E.B. White's "The Meaning of Democracy."
We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on 'The Meaning of Democracy.' It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is. (July 3, 1943)
That's it. Two paragraphs, not even two hundred words, and E.B. White made me look at the world a different way. He starts with the assertion: "Surely the Board knows what democracy is." White isn't setting out to write a manifesto. He's not inventing any new idea of democracy; rather, he tilts the prism until the rainbow comes out. That's the genius of E.B. White's writing: he never feels compelled to do something different; instead, he contents himself with reminding the reader why the everyday things matter.

******

It was then, at age 17, that I first discovered my favorite author. It was by no means a natural match. I had spent most of my high school years reading Joyce and other committed aesthetes, and I loved the ars gratia artis ideals of the high modernists. So E.B. White struck me as something curious, a workaday newspaper man, sitting at a desk, living with the realities of deadlines and word counts.

The second book I read by White was a style and grammar reference. But The Elements of Style was no ordinary reference work. It had a voice and a life all its own. White's introductory essay created a character, the late Prof. William Strunk. He was a hard-driving freedom fighter, crusading against the prolix sentence and the unwieldy modifier. With short imperatives--"Omit needless words"--he could put the pompous hack in his place. In many ways, it was not the book that I loved; it was Prof. Strunk, leaning out over his podium, beseeching his brethren to stand firm against bad grammar and insipid writing. If White's sole contribution to The Elements of Style had been his introductory essay, it would have been a grand success, but he also added "An Approach to Style", which is perhaps the most succinct and ingenious guide to good writing that will ever be written.

In this chapter, he takes the best part of the book, Strunk's indelicate imperatives, and points that piece of artillery into writing's very essence. He condenses his commands with a drill sergeant's efficiency, barking out orders. Just three of White's words--"Do not overwrite"--have the power to topple the best writers, and he cuts the authorial aristocrat down with one quick jab: "Avoid fancy words." He remains forever committed to finding the dent in every high hat.

When I first encountered this man, perched in his glass building or working at his Maine farm, I had trouble accepting him as a great writer. In my mind, great writing could not be vocational; it had to be art, expression--the author had to believe it. The image of E.B. White sitting in the Manhattan offices of The New Yorker, watching the clock tick towards a deadline, looking forward to a week at the farm, wasn't the type of writer I wanted. I wanted the starving artist, writing phrases like "the ineluctable modality of the visible". White would have laughed at such a sentence. Not because the sentence wasn't good; he would have laughed the way my grandfather laughed at designer fashion--whether or not it was pretty was beside the point. It just seemed so unnecessary.

******

In my third year of college, I first visited New York City. I came alone--it was more of a pilgrimage than a vacation--and stayed at a hostel on the Upper West Side. I whiled away my days reading in Central Park and watching the joggers, strollers, cabs, working men, and children that populated the park. In New York, I found the one thing I never expected: I was alone. It is the only place in the world where I could be alone, but never lonely. When I came home, I lost the din of traffic noise and the comforting knowledge that everyone was content to ignore me. I had space here, but I had solitude there.

When I got back, I was eager to recapture that solitude, so I picked up White's essay, "Here is New York". "On any person who desires such queer prizes," White writes, "New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." I had spent my whole life in the Atlanta suburbs, crowded out by families and Little League games and too many PTA meetings, and I just wanted to be alone, to be private, to have no one know me or care. I found it in New York, and E.B. White provided incisive commentary, even though he wrote almost 60 years earlier.

It is this endurance that sets apart "Here Is New York." He finds a way to distill New York to its essence, in all its melancholy smiles, big dreams, and bruised egos. He finds the most meaningful expression of New York in a foot-and-a-half: "When I went down to lunch a few minutes ago, I noticed that the man sitting next to me (about eighteen inches along the wall) was Fred Stone. The eighteen inches were both the connection and the separation that New York provides for its inhabitants."

It was that distance, so close, but never touching, that I took away from New York.

******

The first of E.B. White's books I read, like most Americans, was Charlotte's Web. It is perhaps ironic, then, that I didn't fall in love with it until I was in college. When I was seven or eight, I had read it, but it had little appeal to a boy looking for pyrotechnics, wars, fighting, sports, blood, and all the thing that boys and silly men are consumed with. But one chilly November day, having just turned twenty-one, I saw a copy of the book for the bargain price of $6.99 and could not resist.

As an inexperienced reader of children's literature, what struck me about Charlotte's Web was how melancholy and small it was. The pig and rat talked, but they still rolled in mud and ate trash. The animals were so extraordinary, but they remained ordinary. It was this piece of whimsy--magic that was never terribly magical--that made the book so great. Charlotte's greatest magic trick was not the messages that she carved into her webs, but the way those messages transformed Wilbur. A spider grasping grammar and spelling is impressive, but Charlotte amazed not because she wrote, but because she prophesied. Charlotte writes that Wilbur is radiant, and before long, much to everyone's surprise (especially Templeton), he becomes radiant.

At the end of the book, Charlotte dies. Few children's books would have the will and boldness to end this way, and White had to fight vigorously with his publisher to leave the ending the way he wrote it. Is the ending happy? White answers that it isn't happy or sad, it's right.

Charlotte's Web is about a farm, and it is about a pig who is lonely. Into that loneliness comes Charlotte, and Charlotte makes life--and death--bearable. In her nighttime whispers to Wilbur, she says that she will be his friend.

E.B. White did the same for me. He stood perched high with the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients, and he narrated life for me. He found hope in democracy, art in grammar, solitude in New York, and a quiet, everyday joy in a condemned, artless pig, a wizened spider, and a creaky old barn.