"It doesn't satisfy me the way it is."

[bronze_ribbons]

(Subject line = E.B. White on the first draft of Charlotte's Web. From the same letter: "I have put it away for a while to ripen (let the body heat go out of it).")

E.B. White's odd failure to produce other major works [besides Stuart Little, which took him from 1933 to 1949 to create, and Charlotte's Web] may, in part, be explained by a confession to one of his correspondents: "Unlike you, I have no faith, only a suitcaseful of beliefs that sustain me. Life's meaning has always eluded me, and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same."

- Selma G. Lanes, "E.B. White and Read All Over," a chapter in Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children's Literature (2004)

Also quoted from White, in Lanes: "...the man-on-paper is always a more admirable character than his creator, who is a miserable creature of nose colds, minor compromises, and sudden flights into nobility."

And one more: "The rewards of such endeavor are not that I have acquired an audience as you suggest (fame of any kind being a Pyrrhic victory), but that sometimes in writing for myself - which is the only subject anyone knows intimately - I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound."

Comments

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

E.B. White's odd failure to produce other major works

But Lanes is rather judgmental here as to what counts as "major works," n'est-ce pas? If I remember correctly from a paper I wrote a hundred years ago, White was a very prolific and renowned columnist. Why shouldn't that corpus count as a magnum opus, even if he didn't write any other children's books? Why should novels be the arbiter of success? I doubt he would have considered that a failure, unless he sat around lamenting his inability to write anything more than witty, concise observations.

Not to be confused with a magnum corpus...

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Lanes is writing specifically in the context of children's literature, in this instance. She certainly doesn't think of White as a failure at all, but that wouldn't be clear from me not-quoting-in-full-context-here (....and in all honesty, that same phrase rubbed me the wrong way when I read it too, but I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt (I *think* she's using it more in the sense of "goshdarnit I wish he'd made time to write more" rather than "he should have written as many books as Laura Ingalls Wilder") in part because she was trying to convey White's quirky personality (she talks about his "arrogant modesty" or somesuch a few lines later) and mainly because I haven't had nearly enough sleep and will take anything the wrong way even if it's just minding its own business. *rueful smile*

[There ought to be a prize for you if you managed to wade through that sentence, btw, but you'll have to take a rain check on that. Time for me to go home and crash on the sofa for a couple hours...]

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

It made perfect since, since I think my mind works in a similar way when it's tired and stressed, as it currently is, largely due to The Dissertation That Ate My Brain. Which is not, by the way, the same thing as "The Dissertation That Ate My Brian," which was what I initially typed. But anyway, I'm glad to know that Lanes - whoever she is - isn't dissing my man E.B., even if that paper I had to write about him scarred me for life. Not because of him, but because my 11th-grade English teacher threw us into the term paper without real direction on how to write one.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Lanes a kidlit critic - well-known within the field, in part because she wrote the first big Maurice Sendak bio-retrospective (Tony Kushner did the second one). (She and Sendak got on well in part because they could bond over stuff like both of them learning Yiddish as kids because they quickly learned that's what their parents used when they didn't want the kids to understand what they were talking about...)

And Andy White is definitely the man. I love reading about his fellow New Yorker writers and artists, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have lasted even fifteen minutes around most of them, given my non-existent threshold for unnecessary drama and competitive bitchiness. (Same deal with the Bloomsbury crowd, for that matter - fun to read about, but when I see that type in real life I run for the hills.) Telecommuting from Maine, on the other hand...

[xanthophyllippa.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention the Bloomsbury crowd. My entering grad school class was somewhat like that, only with a lower degree of wit. I finally stopped hanging out with them because I got tired of always having to deliver the withering one-liner or the most blasé comment in the face of something genuinely interesting and exciting. There's something to be said for having a real conversation from time to time, not just a verbal tennis match.

Interesting about Tony Kushner. If I were going to pick a name to go with "Maurice Sendak," I don't think I'd have picked Kushner.