POETS Day! EB White

I was disappointed to learn that his niece was named Janice rather than Charlotte. I assume she was too.

Photo by Luc Viatour / https://Lucnix.be

In the Victorian Era, the Brits were very competent. They had dispatches and requisitioning to attend along with all the other mechanism of empire, but suddenly they had real mechanisms in unseen number as the Industrial Revolution gained… sorry… steam. To maintain competence, a person of import suddenly had to be conversant on things that in simpler recent times were shut up in clocks or behind organ cabinetry. Now they were bigger and populating sooty factories. Sprockets and springs, cogs and belts. A piston required precision casting in a way a pitchfork didn’t. Everything had to be just so.

The age was infected through and through with exactitude so it should be no surprise that women who, pace the Queen, were left out of warring, administrating, and engineering picked up the persnickety habits of their eminently measured husbands/brothers/fathers/Darcys/Wickhams. The societal mood infected society ladies. As a result, the laying of a 5.08 x 8.89 cm calling card, a Regency convenience supercharged and transformed by the fast paced 1800s, conveyed affronts, condolences, respect, disdain, attraction, or congratulations depending on how, when, and by whom it is delivered. The result was a great deal of foot traffic, gossip, and stationer’s children attending better schools than they once had.

Initially the secret Atreides battle language of an elite few, the coded missives transmitted by font, weight, and fold were revealed to a status hungry public by newspaper articles and pamphlets funded by Big Stationery. It’s antiquated nonsense now, but arcana makes for fun cocktail party chat. If deployed at the right moment to the right audience, demonstration of obscure knowledge can be devastatingly effective.

Take your business card and bend the bottom right corner inward and leave it on your boss’s desk. This signals that you, named on the card, are leaving for a trip and so the recipient, your boss, is relieved from the duty of a reciprocal call. And then leave.

You might get fired. Not everyone is up on Victorian etiquette or thinks such things cutesy, but that’s not what’s important. It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Enjoy the weekend.

First, a little verse.

***

I found E.B. White on the poetry shelves at my local library.* That he wrote poetry was something I didn’t know that I didn’t know, to borrow a phrase from Robert Gates. It surprised me.

Like I assume is the case with most, I know White primarily as an author of ubiquitous children’s books and have repeatedly said “Oh. I forgot that was the same guy,” when reminded that he was also the White of “Strunk & White,” the two last names a handy eponym for the famous guide written by William Strunk and later revised and expanded by White, The Elements of Style.

Seeing White on a spine in the hit me with the same discontinuity I felt in childhood on seeing my first grade teacher shopping at the grocery store (“Mrs. Chandler was buying ice cream!”) Of course, like my teacher, he got up to things when I wasn’t looking. Wikipedia tells me White started writing children’s stories in the 1930s for his niece, but it wasn’t until 1945 when Stuart Little was published and 1952 until he released Charlotte’s Web. I was disappointed to learn that his niece was named Janice rather than Charlotte. I assume she was too.

In addition to writing poetry in addition to writing children’s books, White had an exceptional career spanning six decades with The New Yorker writing all manner of things. In 1927, he wasn’t E.B. White yet. He was a yeoman fired from his job as a reporter by a Seattle newspaper who did a stint on an Alaskan fire-boat and spent the next few years writing ad copy. The New Yorker wasn’t The New Yorker yet either. It was a baby at the time, founded two years before. After moving back to East, White started submitting to the magazine. They liked his stuff and offered him a position, which he accepted, though he presumptuously refused to set foot in the office. According to Wikipedia, it was months before he consented to attend meetings and still more time before he acquiesced to work from the office, but only on Thursdays; no need to Piss Off Early for him.

A lot of his poetry appears to be descendant from courtly entertainment. Guys like John Wilmot and Alexander Pope learned the art of poesie as part of growing up a gentleman and put themselves to work writing amusing recounts of small scandals or silly incidents for their fellow lords and ladies. White wasn’t the courtier type, he did well serving up pre-TV cocktail hour chat stuff.

In Charlie’s Bar
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985)

Adelburg, England (UPI)—Charlie’s Bar at the Brudunell Hotel refused to serve Miss Jane Waterfield because she was wearing a mod costume that violated the bar’s rule against showing belly buttons.—The Times

“Miss Waterfield, Miss Waterfield,
What’ll it be today?
The usual? The usual?
That’s all ye need to say.

“Miss Waterfield, Miss Waterfield!
What do mine eyes behold?
What is that darling circle there?
What’s that adorable fold?

“Miss Waterfield, Miss Waterfield,
What in the name of God
Has brought ye here to Charlie’s Bar
In clothes so utterly mod?

“Miss Waterfield, Miss Waterfield,
We’re plain as English mutton,
And yet we have our rules, my girl:
No ale for a belly button.

“Miss Waterfield, Miss Waterfield,
I fear ye must be going;
We cater to the middle class
Whose middle isn’t showing.”

There are some very New Yorker poems in Poems and Sketches of E.B. White. Short lyric jabs at domesticity, musings on modern inventions: Sunday morning breakfast table fare. He’s not Yeats, nor does he try to be. White peddles a lot of momentary and pleasant distractions, the type of thing that might be welcome printed next to a crossword puzzle or off in a corner of the Features section. That sounds horribly dismissive, though I don’t mean it to be. He does it very well.

The Misstep

Keepers at the London zoo have taught an orangutan to clean its own cage, says the National Geographic Society.
—The Times

This is the way it starts, you know:
A first misstep in the long ago,
An Early She in the foul cave’s gloom
Fumbles with twigs, and behold—a broom!
At first, the dimmest sort of revulsion;
Centuries later, a washing compulsion.
From jungle dark with fern and creeper
Up to the light of a Bissell’s sweeper;
A fateful moment—Woman Emergent,
Sowing the seeds of a pink detergent.

Ponder your deed, O tidy ape!
There’s no road back and no escape.
This single spark from your cloudy dome
Kindles the watchfires of The Home.
In one wild moment of feeling superior
You’ve opened the floodgates of The Interior.
And distant monks in a distant age
Will sigh when they think of Early Cage.

In the Preface to Poems and Sketches, White likens himself to a troubadour or house minstrel. He’s an entertainer who writes in verse. It’s a charming self assessment.

“This is a fraudulent book. Here I am presented as a poet… Having lived happily all my life as a non-poet who occasionally breaks into song, I have no wish at this late hour to change either my status or my habits even if I were capable of doing so, and clearly am not… no need to travel the wine-and-cheese circuit, where the word ‘poet’ carries the aroma of magic and ladies creep up from behind carrying ballpoint pens and sprigs of asphodel.”

Just a guy who likes to play around with words, but there are a few poems in the earlier chapters that show what I assume to be an early – though that assumption relies on a chronological layout that is not confirmed by the author or editor – artistic ambition.

Trees of Winter

Oh, they are lovely trees that wait
In the still hall of winter
Silent and good where the Good Planter
Fixed the root, wove the branch delicate.

Friendly the birches in the thin light
By the frost sanctified,
And here, too, silent by their side
I stand in the woods, listening, upright,

Hearing in the cold of the long pause
Of the full year
What trees intend that I should hear:
Interpretations of old laws…

Hearing the faint, the chickadee cry
Of root that moulders,
Of branch bent, and leaf that withers,
And little brown seed that does not die.

It’s better to call his poetry verse and enjoy it for what it is. That’s not hard to do. It was clever to intersperse his poems (or verse) with prose because he writes very, very good prose. After reading a few of his “sketches” and passages in the library book and here and there on the internet, I bought one of his adult books and I’m practically giddy at the prospect of cracking into it.

Despite his remote worker status, White struck up a friendship with New Yorker star James Thurber, he of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and inscrutable comics fame. The two co-authored Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do, a collection of essays spoofing self help guides of their time. Satirical self help might by my favorite genre and I’m not kidding. As a fourteen-or-so year old I found P.J. O’Rourke’s Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People. That’s the book that made me a reader. I’d never come across anything so celebratory of id. It was a book I felt like I needed to hide from my parents. O’Rourke’s Bachelor Home Companion came next. Later I found Christopher Buckley’s God Is My Broker. I can’t believe I only just picked up Walker Percy’s Lost In The Cosmos. Thurber and White take on Freudians?

“Thurber and I were neither more, nor less, interested in the subject of love and marriage than anybody else of our age in that era. I recall that we were both profoundly interested in earning a living, and I think we somehow managed, simultaneously, to arrive at the conclusion that … the heavy writers had got sex down and were breaking its arm. We were determined that sex should maintain its high spirits.”

I can’t wait. If you’re like me, there’s a $0.99 kindle version available here.

I Spy

The games of little boys at play,
I-Spy and Run-Sheep-Run,
Trouble the street the livelong day
And all is for the fun.

And when the lads grow up in fame
And make a subtler noise,
They plot and plan and play the game
They played when they were boys.

In darkling street they seek and hide,
The game grows wild and drunken;
They spy upon the other side,
Keep secrets in a punkin.

So let us think on little boys
And love-of-fire that lingers,
On simple and remembered joys
And how to burn the fingers.

The street grows dark, the night is hot,
And so the game has trended.
Whether we know it, lads, or not,
The game is nearly ended.

Run, sheep, run! Run wild and fast—
A game to end the day with.
Look at the sky! A fire at last
Too big for boys to play with!

* The phrase “local library” is trite and calls to mind Reading Rainbow inspired after school special commercials aimed at dull children susceptible to alliteration whose god-parents sent them money instead of Shel Silverstein. I was one of those dull children and the jig phrase comes to me easily despite my hopes to type something otherwise. “Favorite library” would probably do. “Book depository” has baggage. Any suggestions welcome.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]