"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

[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.