E. B. White Essays

Pulling this up from the comments of yesterday’s post—a question I keep meaning to ask here:

As for White, this reminds me I wanted to put one of his essay collections on my birthday/Christmas wish list. Any favorites, anyone? Becky of Farm School, are you reading blogs these days? I’m guessing you’ll have an opinion on this topic. 😉

Essays of E. B. White? (Perennial Classics paperback.)

One Man’s Meat?

Writings from the New Yorker?

If you had to pick just one.

Updated: just found a 1977 New York Times review of Essays:

They’ve brought out “Essays of E. B. White” as a companion volume to his recently published “Letters.” “To assemble these essays,” writes the author in his foreword, “I have rifled my other books and have added a number of pieces that are appearing for the first time between covers.” This means that a reviewer gets to read or re-read “Farewell to Model T” and “Here is New York,” which came out as little books in 1936 and 1949, respectively; all but three chapters of “One Man’s Meat” (1944); selections from “The Second Tree from the Corner” (1954) and “The Points of My Compass” (1962); the introductions to “A Subtreasury of American Humor,” Don Marquis’s “Lives and Times of archy and mehitabel,” and “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk, Jr.; as well as several previously uncollected pieces that have appeared in magazines and newspapers along the way. They call the reviewing business work, but in this particular case it is pure pleasure.

So that seems a good bet, eh?

More from that review:

But then E. B. White will always be coming back into style. That’s because, as he himself observes of Thoreau, he writes sentences that resist the destructiveness of time. Besides, he’s an essayist’s essayist. With his relaxed serendipitous technique of seeming to stumble on his subject by way of the back door, he lends you confidence that you don’t really have to know much about a thing to write about it intelligently; you need only possess the skill to write, along with a lot of sanity. Thus, if you’ve got the hang of it, you can arrive at the subject of disarmament by way of Mary Martin’s furniture, or at the prospects of American democracy by the route of a dachshund named Fred.

Of course, it’s only an illusion that Mr. White gets by alone on skill and sanity. He happens to know a great deal about a lot of things–about birds and boats and literature, and, best of all, about how silly it would be to worry about the strictures against anthropomorphism and the pathetic fallacy that children’s-book librarians and French new-wave novelists tried to impress upon us in the 60’s.

Help Me Out

A while back I read something—it might have been in a book, but I’m pretty sure it was in a post or article online somewhere —that put a name to the emotional response a reader or viewer may have to a particularly moving part of the story. You know, the way you tear up at an episode of Little House on the Prairie. (What, you don’t tear up at those? My husband mocks me ruthlessly because I always, always, always do.) Or an old Hallmark commercial. Or the ending of Stone Fox.

If you’re a sap, like me, then you get choked up easily—for me it’s whenever someone in the book or movie makes a kind of noble gesture or sacrifice, like when Jo March sells her hair, or when Hugh Grant’s character walks onstage with the guitar during Marcus’s excruciating talent show performance in About a Boy. Whatever it was I read recently, it named this response and described it in a way I hadn’t heard articulated before, and it made me go YES! That’s IT!

Not catharsis—that’s deeper, more enduring, and is usually a response to a serious and intense event in a story, not the often cheap plot points that elicit my sappy tears. But a real and definable response nonetheless, with (probably) a Greek term to name it. Not sentimentality, though of course that is closely related. A response to a noble act, that’s the part I remember. Is this ringing any bells? Did any of you read the post I’m half-remembering?

I was trying to think of it today when my girls were teasing me for getting choked up while reading aloud Gloria Whelan’s picture book, The Miracle of Saint Nicholas. Every year, we read this, and every year I cry.

If you don’t know what article I’m talking about, then how about chiming in with your favorite sentimental, move-you-to-tears moments in books and movies?