E.B. White

Charlotte’s Web

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Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

1952

Illustrated by Garth Williams

E.B.White divided his time between New York City, where he wrote for the New Yorker, and a salt water farm in Maine, where he raised chickens, geese, sheep, and pigs.  In 1948, he published an essay, “Death of a Pig”, in the Atlantic Monthly, which told a sad tale of his unsuccessful ministrations to a sick pig.  He was unsettled by the irony of the scenario: his attempt to prevent the premature demise of a pig he was raising for eventual slaughter.  He decided to write a children’s book about a pig who is saved from the seemingly inevitable butcher’s knife, and he eventually happened upon a barn spider as the instrument of salvation.

Charlotte’s Web is an intricate book that seamlessly interweaves the human story of Fern, an eight year old girl, with the animal story of young Wilbur, the pig, and Charlotte, the wise spider.  Wilbur is saved by the carefully chosen words that his friend weaves into her web: SOME PIG, TERRIFIC, RADIANT, and HUMBLE.  She is aided, sometimes accidentally, usually begrudgingly, by Templeton, the scurrilous rat, while the stuttering geese provide the comic chorus in the background.

Charlotte’s Web is arguably the best children’s book ever written.  It has all the elements: a tight storyline that naturally overlays fantasy (talking animals and a writing spider) onto a lovingly depicted barnyard world, an assortment of nuanced and evolving characters, and an honest depiction of the loneliness of death while celebrating life, friendship, and the rhythm of nature.  E.B. White was a consummate literary craftsman (he co-wrote The Elements of Style) and few have matched his ease and clarity of style, or his simple honesty.

E.B.White’s lack of pretence is apparent in his sound recording for the audiobook version of Charlotte’s Web. Dissatisfied with the reading by a professional actress, he chose to do a simple reading himself with his “famous monotone”.  “I think a book is better read the way my father used to read books to me – without drama.  He just read the words, beginning with the seductive phrase “Chapter One”, and I supplied my own dramatization.”  He recorded the book, not in a sound studio, but in a friend’s living room, and he had to pause whenever a car drove by.  He also recorded The Trumpet of the Swan, his third and final children’s book, and it is a pleasure to hear him read both stories.

Aside:  Garth Williams illustrated both Charlotte’s Web and the earlier Stuart Little.  His early renditions of Charlotte featured a woman’s face.  E.B.White, distressed, referred Williams to several arachnid natural histories.  Fortunately, White prevailed.

Stuart Little

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Star's Stuart Little Book

Stuart Little by E.B. White

1945

Illustrated by Garth Williams

It seems hard to fathom, but Stuart Little was blacklisted by Anne Carroll Moore, arbiter of children’s literary taste for decades while head of the children’s room of the New York Public Library. Was it the “monstrous birth” that some decried upon its publication? There was something unseemly about a two inch mouse being born, fully formed, to Mrs. Frederick C. Little, enough so that in the film version made half a century later the diminutive character was fetched from an orphanage. Children, forever willing to suspend disbelief, had no trouble with the details of Stuart’s arrival and immediately embraced him, gray hat and little cane and all.

For what a character E.B.White created – the debonair, steadfast, adventurous romantic who recognizes Beauty in the form of Margalo, the rescued bird, and goes in quest of his holy grail when she flies north. There is excitement along the way – his accidental roll-up in the window shade, his knight-like protection of his friend from the predation of the feline Snowbell, his being dumped into a garbage truck and taken out to sea.

The most memorable is his adventure at the Conservatory Water in Central Park. Dressed in sailor suit and sailor hat, he captains the schooner Wasp to victory over boorishness in the form of the Lillian B. Womrath. Few who have read the story can walk by the model boat pond without remembering the race. White could write movingly about boats, with which he had a lifelong and complex relationship. In a late essay (The Sea and the Wind That Blows), when he was thinking of giving them up, he wrote, “A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.” All of which comes across in Stuart’s experiences.

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The tone changes when Stuart heads out of town. As he motors north in his beautiful yellow and black miniature automobile, filling up with five drops when he needs to refuel, White waxes lyrical. We hear the notes of Thoreau as Stuart enters the lovely village of Ames’ Crossing. In place of the schooner, Stuart acquires a canoe, Summer Memories, in which he paddles in an idyllic and completely imagined interlude. This is a book of exquisite tenderness, of quiet honesty, of goodness. It is a book about the search for the unattainable and the quest for beauty. When asked by Stuart what is important in the world, a boy responds, “A shaft of sunlight at the end of the dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby’s neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy.” What other writer for children had such respect for his young readers?