One mans meat, p.1
One Man's Meat, page 1
ONE MAN’S MEAT
E. B. White
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Removal
The Summer Catarrh
Incoming Basket
Security
Clear Days
Children’s Books
Progress and Change
Salt Water Farm
Sabbath Morn
Education
A Week in April
Movies
A Boston Terrier
The World of Tomorrow
Walden
Hot Weather
Camp Meeting
Second World War
First World War
Poetry
The Flocks We Watch by Night
Report
Fro-Joy
Farm Paper
Town Meeting
A Shepherd’s Life
Compost
Freedom
The Practical Farmer
Sanitation
Motor Cars
Maine Speech
Lime
Dog Training
The Wave of the Future
A Winter Diary
On a Florida Key
The Trailer Park
Spring
My Day
Once More to the Lake
Fall
Memorandum
Coon Hunt
Intimations
Songbirds
Questionnaire
Aunt Poo
Book Learning
Morningtime and Eveningtime
Getting Ready for a Cow
Bond Rally
A Week in November
Control
Cold Weather
About the Author
FOREWORD
Modest in its size and presumptions, engaging in tone. E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat has resisted becoming historic, even after a nonstop run of fifty-five years in print. Perhaps now, with this fresh edition, we should allow the laurel to descend, although we may be certain (the moment we open its pages) that the author would wince at the ceremony, or simply not attend.
First published in 1942 and reissued in expanded form two years later, the book was unweighty by design, being not a sustained single work but a compilation of the writer’s monthly columns for Harper’s (which he had begun writing in 1938), along with three casual essays first published in The New Yorker. Because of this format and the format of the author’s mind, the book has always had the heft, the light usefulness, of a bushel basket, carrying a raking of daily or seasonal notions, and, on the next short trip, the heavier burden of an idea. (The image owes much to White himself, whose remembered easy, unstriding walk across a pasture or down the shore road of his Maine farm remains unique, as does his touch with the homely utensils of prose.) Strewn with errands and asterisks, farming tips and changes of weather, notes on animals and neighbors and statesmen, One Man’s Meat is too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal. Perhaps it’s a primer: a countryman’s lessons that convey, at each reading, a sense of early morning clarity and possibility.
When White first removed, with his wife and young son, from a walk-up duplex on East Forty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, and went to live on a saltwater farm in North Brooklin, he seemed almost eager, in his early columns, to detect even the smallest signs of awkwardness in himself in his fresh surroundings (as when he found himself crossing the barnyard with a paper napkin in one hand), but the surge of alteration that overtook him and swept him along over the full six-year span of the book quickly did away with these little ironies. Despite its tranquil setting, this is a book about movement—the rush of the day, the flood and ebb of the icy Penobscot Bay tides, the unsettlements of New England weather, the arrival of another season and its quick (or so it seems) dispersal, the birth and death of livestock, and the coming of a world war that is first seen at a distance (White is shingling his barn roof during the Munich crisis), then sweeps across Europe (he is fixing a balky brooder stove during the German spring drive in the Balkans), and at last comes home (he mans a town plane-spotting post and finds a heron) to impose its binding and oddly exuberant hold on everyone’s attention.
Another change, though we don’t pick it up at first, is in White himself. Early effusions about the beauty of the egg, some Thoreauvian phrasings (“It is not likely that a man who changes his pursuits will ever succeed in taking on the character or appearance of a new man”), or a New Yorkerish dying fall about a faded wooden croquet set give way to more direct and more satisfying stuff about the way to build a dry-mash hopper, the obligations of freedom, and useful stratagems against cold weather. He had grown up (he turns forty in mid-book), and he was too busy around the place to be a full-time stylist. I think One Man’s Meat was the making of him as a writer. Freed of the weekly deadlines and the quaintsy first-person plural form of the New Yorker’s “Notes and Comments” page, which he had written for more than a decade, he discovered his subject (it was himself) and a voice that spoke softly but rang true. “Once More to the Lake,” his 1941 account of a trip with his son back to the freshwater lake where he had vacationed as a boy, is an enduring American essay—and could not have been written until its precise moment. Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and ten other books and collections were still ahead, but the author had found his feet.
What also becomes plain in the book is that Andy White was a born farmer—not so much an agriculturist as a handyman. He relished the work and he was good at it. He laughs at his preparations for taking on a cow (the first time he leads her out into the pasture he feels “the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theatre—embarrassed but elated”), but he is no gentleman farmer. While reading the late chapters “Winter Diary,” “My Day,” and “Memorandum”, (a list of some two hundred chores around the place that demanded immediate attention), you envy him the work but even more the sensual pleasure of its details and the workman’s amazing hoard of expertise. Not much escapes his eye, whether it lights on a loose tailboard or a dopey moment in a movie, the bloated appearance of late-model automobile fenders, or some fashionable and ugly trends in thought he finds afloat at the moment when the Nazi armies are overrunning France, but his powers of observation somehow go deeper the moment he concentrates on something small and at hand—the little running sea on the surface of the hens’ watering fountain on a windy morning; the dainty grimace of the dachshund, Fred, as he licks up a fresh-fallen egg on the cellar floor.
Because White is such a prime noticer it is a while before a reader becomes aware of how much he has chosen to leave out of the book. There is very little here about his wife, Katharine—who was pursuing a demanding job of her own as an editor-by-mail with the New Yorker all this time, as well as running the household—and not much more about their schoolboy son, Joel. The ineffable Fred almost has a larger part in the daily drama, as does the neighbor lobsterman, Dameron. Nor do we hear about the help required to keep an operation of this sort afloat: the full-time hired man and his occasional assistants, and a cook and a housemaid indoors. These gaps have been commented upon in critical and biographical writings about White, but it is not my memory that he was any more heedless of those around him than most authors are; neither was he uneasy or apologetic about the comforts of his multi-income, triple-profession household. The omissions arise from his instinctive, lifelong sense of privacy—a dated, almost Victorian consideration in these confessional times—and must also be attributed to the writer’s sense that this story, however it turned out, was not going to be about the enveloping distractions of family life. The privacy was extended to himself, as well; there is more of Andy White left out of his writings than was ever put in.
Even as the war engaged the full energies of the Whites’ farm—among his production goals for 1942 are four thousand dozen eggs, ten pigs, and nine thousand pounds of milk—news of it remained thin, by today’s measurements. The engrossing events from Europe and Washington, arriving by radio and mailed newspapers, did not take up much of the day, and the writer, to judge by his pieces, responded by thinking more and more about the world at large and his place in it. Engaging himself in long colloquies about freedom and the chances of world federalism, once peace came, he goes one on one with his government, even as he accedes to its demands on his time and supports its immense gatherings and expenditures of men and materiel. People of my generation are often asked now what it was like to live in a nation engaged in a popular, all-encompassing war, and One Man’s Meat provides a vivid answer. White covered the war—at bond rallies, at civilian-defense centers—but also noticed that the passionate new love of Americans for America was a patriotism that would have to be relinquished, at least in part, if the world was ever to achieve a lasting peace. Elsewhere, he wrote that the hardest thing about the war was to maintain a decent sense of indignation about its deadly details.
Much of this, perhaps most of it, sounds naive to us now, in our time of instant access to bad news everywhere and surly apathy about it all. If truth be told, White’s passionate essays on world government sounded idealistic and simplistic even in their time—he was not a pundit by nature—but, what we can honor him for, then and now, is his clear conviction (no one was ever clearer on the written page) that he is qualified to think about freedom, all on his own, and to address his reader as one citizen to another about such urgent business. Who among us can be certain that when another time as vivid and dangerous sweeps us up we will find an E. B. White somewhere, to talk to us in these quiet and compelling tones?
April 1997
Roger Angell
Roger Angell, who is E. B. White’s stepson, has been a fiction editor with The New Yorker since 1956, and a frequent contributor since 1942. He has published collections of fiction and humor, and five books about baseball, including The Summer Game and Late Innings. He is the editor of Nothing But You: Love Stories from the New Yorker, which was published by Random House earlier this year.
INTRODUCTION
One Man’s Meat will be forty-one years old come spring. Published first in 1942, it has remained in print in one form or another almost without interruption since it appeared. Never a big seller, it early showed staying power. A book that manages not to fade away after a few years occupies a special place in the heart of its author. I confess to a special feeling for One Man’s Meat.
The original edition consisted of forty-five pieces assembled from the monthly column I had been writing for Harper’s Magazine since 1938. After the book came out, I continued to contribute to the magazine, and in 1944 a new and enlarged edition of One Man’s Meat was published. It contained an additional ten essays—a total of fifty-five. This edition was popular. The United States had entered the war, and the war had entered the book. Soon my casual pieces depicting life on a saltwater farm in New England were finding their way to members of the Armed Forces in a paperback Overseas edition, and letters of thanks were arriving from homesick soldiers in distant lands. This relieved my mind, as I had been uneasy about indulging myself in pastoral pursuits when so many of my countrymen were struggling for their lives, and for mine. The Overseas edition, incidentally, was banned for a while, then reinstated without the matter’s being explained. (Some conscientious watchdog must have found it too rich a diet for our fighting men.) I recall a twinge of satisfaction in having a book banned: it suggested that my stuff might be more substantial than it appeared on first glance.
In all, there have been eight editions of One Man’s Meat, not counting a British edition, two German translations, and one French translation. When it was twelve years old, my publishers decided that the book was a classic, and they forthwith brought it out (hardbound) in their “Harper’s Modern Classics” series. This established me officially as an American Author, no longer to be trifled with. The Classics edition opened with an introduction by Morris Bishop, and this delighted me, because it was Professor Bishop who, years before, when he discovered I was headed for the country, had said, “I trust that you will spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.”
When I look back almost half a century to the events leading up to my move from New York to Maine, events that conspired to produce this book of essays, I am appalled. My decision to pull up stakes was impulsive and irresponsible. Prior to 1938, I had been working happily and gainfully for The New Yorker, writing its editorial page “Notes and Comment,” contributing stories and articles, and doing odd jobs around the place. My wife, an early career woman, had a job with the magazine that absorbed her and fulfilled her. We were living in the city in a rented house, uptown on the East Side. The depression had left us unscathed, the war was just a rumble in the sky. Everything was going our way.
Yet, sometime in the winter of 1938, or even before that, I became restless. I felt unhappy and cooped up. More and more my thoughts turned to Maine, where we owned a house with a barn attached. I don’t recall being disenchanted with New York—I loved New York. I was certainly not disenchanted with The New Yorker—I loved the magazine. If I was disenchanted at all, I was probably disenchanted with me. For one thing, I suspected that I was not writing quite the way I wanted to write, and sometimes I was oppressed by my weekly deadline. For another, in my job as commentator, I was stuck with the editorial “we,” a weasel word suggestive of corporate profundity or institutional consensus. I wanted to write as straight as possible, with no fuzziness.
Quite aside from all this, I had never felt really at home in the house we were renting. The rooms were always too hot and dry; I fell asleep every night after dinner. And the house wasn’t downtown in the Village, which had been my stamping ground for years and where I still felt at home whenever I returned. Some sort of drastic action seemed the only answer to my problem—and that is exactly what happened. Without considering what it would do to my wife to be uprooted from The New Yorker, or what it would do to my son to be switched from a private school in Manhattan to a two-room schoolhouse in the country, and without a thought of what I would be using for money in my rural incarnation, I led my little family out of the city like a daft piper. My wife was deeply shaken by the exodus, but she never flinched. She was sustained by her weird belief that writers were not ordinary mortals and had to be coddled, like a Queen Bee.
One Man’s Meat was not a premeditated book, it was an accident. Two days before I left town for good, Lee Hartman, editor of Harper’s Magazine, asked me to lunch. Before the meal was over he had invited me to contribute a monthly department. He offered me three hundred dollars a month, and I accepted on the spot. This last-minute, unexpected job as columnist was the genesis of One Man’s Meat. It turned out to be one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. I was a man in search of the first person singular, and lo, here it was—handed to me on a platter before I even left town.
Once in everyone’s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me. Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances—including the characters in the barnyard, who were later to reappear in Charlotte’s Web—I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper.
The saltwater farm that served as the setting for this most tumultuous episode in my life has seen many changes in forty years. The sheep have disappeared, along with several other accessories. The elms have disappeared. I am still visible, pottering about, overseeing the incubations, occasionally writing a new introduction for an old book. I do the Sunday chores. I stoke the stove. I listen for the runaway toilet. I true up the restless rug. I save the whale. I wind the clock. I talk to myself.
Certain things have not changed. Despite the great blizzard of April, the swallows arrived on schedule and are busy remodelling the mud nests in the barn. The goose sits. Rhubarb is showing. (I used to eat rhubarb because I loved rhubarb. Now I eat it because it retards arthritis.) The Egg has been an enduring theme in my life, and I have allowed my small flock of laying hens to grow old in service. Cosmetically they leave much to be desired, but their ovulation is brisk, and I greet them with the same old gag when I enter the pen: “White here. Cubism is dead.”
I keep telling myself that it is time to quit this place, with its eleven rooms and its forty acres, and cut myself down to size. I may still do it. But I can envision what would happen if I did: I would no sooner get comfortably settled in a small house on an acre of land than I would issue instructions to build a small barn and attach it to the house through a woodshed. A bale of hay would appear mysteriously in the barn, and there would soon be a bantam rooster out there, living in the style to which he feels he should be accustomed. I would be right back where I started.
EBW
May 1982
[ July 1938 ]
REMOVAL
Several months ago, finding myself in possession of one hundred and seventeen chairs divided about evenly between a city house and a country house, and desiring to simplify my life, I sold half of my worldly goods, evacuated the city house, gave up my employment, and came to live in New England. The difficulty of getting rid of even one half of one’s possessions is considerable, even at removal prices. And after the standard items are disposed of—china, rugs, furniture, books—the surface is merely scratched: you open a closet door and there in the half-dark sit a catcher’s mitt and an old biology notebook.
I recall a moment of peculiar desperation over a gold mirror that, in spite of all our attempts to shake it off, hung steadfastly on till within an hour or so of our scheduled departure. This mirror, which was a large but fairly unattractive one, rapidly came to be a sort of symbol of what I was trying to escape from, and its tenacity frightened me. I was quite prepared simply to abandon it (I knew a man once who, tiring of an automobile, walked away from it on the street and never saw it again), but my wife wouldn’t consent to abandoning anything. It seems there are rules, even to the sort of catharsis to which we were committed: I could give the mirror away or sell it, but I was not privileged to leave it in the house, which (she said) had to be stripped clean.
