It sometimes seems as though everything is on the internet. If you suspect you might have an obscure disease, you need only Google to discover that it is not obscure at all, although whether or not you have it is still up to you.
So it comes as a surprise, for the remaining readers of books, to learn that a selection from a volume we hold in our hands has no ready digital life. That is the case with much of the writing done in the last century by Elwyn Brooks White.
He is known as E.B. White – the author of “Charlotte’s Web.” We seem always to be in a world of lost manners and things with White, not because he lived and worked so long ago but because he was punctilious with his observations.
White was a journalist as well as an author. We hesitate to call him a stylist because we fear that may lead someone to expect fireworks when his prose was as handsome and plain as a Shaker chair.
While he was at Cornell University, White met English Prof. William Strunk Jr. Later, White would adopt Strunk’s style guide, which he took to be a meditation on the nature and beauty of brevity, and update it as Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.”
In 1925, White mailed some of his writings to The New Yorker magazine, where he worked for the next 50 years. He was a shy man off the page. His office mate, James Thurber, wrote, “Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape.”
In 1956, White wrote a New Yorker piece, “Bedfellows,” later collected in “Essays of E.B. White,” which was the volume we were holding at the top of this piece. In it, he is under the weather, at home in Manhattan, with the ghost of his dachshund Fred and the newspapers.
President Dwight Eisenhower, running for re-election, is in the news. And it is what White says almost in passing – this is the mark of his style – about Fred and Eisenhower and the world that makes the essay still modern and sound.
In life, Fred “seemed never to tire of his work,” sitting on the bed with White and gazing out the window.
“Spotting a flicker or a starling on the wing, he would turn and make a quick report,” White writes.
“‘I just saw an eagle go by,’ he would say. ‘It was carrying a baby.’”
The matter of faith was in the papers then, with Eisenhower saying Christian prayer was a part of democracy. “This,” says White, “is just wrong.”
The troublesome Fred held views that were largely “of a dissenting nature,” White writes. “Yet in tearing us apart, he somehow held us together.”
The wind-up, and the pitch: “Democracy is itself a religious faith. For some it comes close to being the only formal religion they have. And so when I see the first faint shadow of orthodoxy sweep across the sky, feel the first cold whiff of its blinding fog steal in from the sea, I tremble all over, as though I had just seen an eagle go by, carrying a baby.”
By all accounts, White was so shy that he would not have said that. He could write it, however. Many animals, like whales and birds, have language. What might set us apart is our ability to turn our speech into substitute forms, says Joe Moran in his essay, “Do Shy People Make the Best Writers?”
“We alone leave marks that can be read when we are not there, perhaps even when we are no longer alive.”
Is the internet forever? We have seen online archives evaporated. We hope for the best. But those marks still live unaltered in books.
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