A working writer with a career more varied than many of his contemporaries, E.B. White is best known as the beloved children’s book author of books like Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, and as co-author (along with his Cornell professor, William Strunk Jr.) of the longtime standard handbook for first-year college writing students, The Elements of Style. However, White spent much of his professional writing life filing the kinds of slice-of-life stories that one rarely sees beyond the “About Town” section of the New Yorker magazine any longer. White, in fact, began his writing life at the magazine in 1926. Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that his first piece, published in February of that year, has to do with a dog evading both oncoming traffic, and a policeman who was determined to capture her.
Earlier we wrote about how the New Yorker has devoted numerous of their weekly covers to canines. So too, did White devote a considerable number (about one every six months or so, when he was first getting started at the New Yorker) of his weekly columns to his beloved pets. In subsequent decades, White moved on to Harper’s writing a column entitled “One Man’s Meat” where his eye for character and detail reveal his understanding of the deep inner lives of the many animals he kept over the years. He is especially good at translating canine feeling and putting it into human speech. In “A Boston Terrier” (1939), White interprets his pet’s incessant barking as a cry of “I’m in love, and I’m going crazy” for the female Scotty living with her vacationing family just down the way. With his neighbor’s permission, White lets his dog run free, and as a consequence his dog suffers a “complete paralysis of the hip” after being injured in a road accident, while the neighbor’s Scotty “returned to Washington, D.C., and a Caesarian section.”
These anecdotes and observations—alongside a scattering of family photographs and letters from White’s correspondence with other luminaries, such as his New Yorker friend and colleague, James Thurber—have been compiled into a slender volume, edited and introduced by the writer’s granddaughter, Martha White. What you’ll find here has enormous charm, but don’t come looking for an overarching narrative. These pieces of once-timely occasional prose dangle for you to pick a few at time, whenever the mood strikes. Likely you’ll come back to peruse your favorites over and over again, as I found myself doing. Particularly lovely are the poems discussing the qualities that typify different dog breeds, from December, 1937; the obituary for Daisy (killed by a rogue taxicab) from March, 1932; and his piece “Khrushchev and I”, from September of 1959—this last one in particular because it ventures beyond White’s characteristic tendency toward light comedy.
A lighthearted take on dog ownership, some readers may notice White’s attitude toward his pets is out of step with our modern sensibilities. Although he clearly views his many companions as intelligent creatures, fully capable of emotions as complex as ours, they remain subordinate accessories, rather than full family members. Of his lovesick Boston terrier, for instance, he writes, “If [a Boston terrier’s nervous system] resembles anything at all, it resembles the Consolidated Edison Company’s power plant,” adding later that, “I knew a Boston terrier once (he is now dead and, so far as I know, relaxed)”. His obituary for Daisy, too, leans into humorous celebration rather than grieving, concluding that “She enjoyed everything in life except motoring,” and that “she never grew up, and she never took pains to discover…the things that might have diminished her curiosity and spoiled her taste.”
Light as a dandelion seed, it’s still more than likely that you might find a finely captured detail that reminds you of your pet—or just possibly of yourself—captured in these pages.
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