I’m reading E.B. White’s Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976, edited by Rebecca M. Dale. First, I’ll read the introduction by Dale.

Rebecca Dale worked on an independent study project at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1988, where she read all of E.B. White’s New Yorker work. This book is a result of collecting many pieces of prose that had never been included in any of his previous books. The collection was published in 1990. 

E.B. White wrote for Harper’s from 1938 to 1943, which means everything he wrote after 1943 was in The New Yorker. He and his wife, along with their children, split their time between New York and Maine from 1943 to 1957.

I finished the first section titled “Nature.” I was surprised to see just how these short pieces weren’t chronologically ordered at all! Perhaps though, it’s better this way. The ones that stood out to me were “Dismal?”, “The Arrival of Spring,” and “Turtle Blood Bank.” I’ll have to revisit them later as to why they stood out to me.

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I just realized that I don’t really think about verbs versus predicates and participles. Apparently gossip writers used them a lot in the late thirties and it drove White nuts!

I can see the roots of the idea that writing isn’t a profession in this 1929 piece called “Writing as A Profession” — White writes: “Some of the best writings of writers, it seems to us, were done before they actually thought of themselves as engaged in producing literature.” This is actually a really interesting point. Once it becomes a job, the inspiration rarely comes as it does at unexpected moments.

Perhaps now while I certainly still think of myself as being occupied as a writer,  I have noticed a certain amateur spirit, as Anderson notes, return to my words in recent years. Perhaps writing is an occupation after all, long as one doesn’t expect to be paid for it —so that makes it then a hobby instead?

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The book’s third section deals with white’s admiration of Henry David Thoreau.

I must read “Walden” as White declares it’s the only book he owned. Not literally, but the only one he claimed it as his own. Considering his other writings on Thoreau, this seems a valid statement. (I have read Walden rather closely a few times since then.)

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The next section of the book is one of my favorite subjects and one of White’s too: that being Liberty. Apparently even in 1933 when someone became a US citizen the last question was something to the effect of: “Do you believe in communism, anarchism, polygamy — or anything like that?” I do believe this actually happened and that White witnessed this. I think his point is that it is a ridiculous question. Knowing how history would play out, it looks even more ridiculous.

White wasn’t shy about exposing political double talk and not really being such what “liberalism” really means. He leaned Democrat from what I can tell but had misgivings about that party, as well.

This is a very interesting sentence… they’re all interesting when written by White, but this bit in “A voice heard in the land” really got me thinking: “A distinguishing political feature of America is that it has never had a voice; it has had a lot of hoopdedoo but no voice, and that’s the way we like it.”

This got me to thinking about something I contemplate often but have never cogently expressed: government is a lot more fragile than people realized. Tomorrow we can all just decide that the constitution is outdated and needs to be done away with. Suddenly we are split into fifty different countries. What a delightful thought…