“The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic” by Michael Sims (post 1)

Halfway through this biography (1) of Elwyn Brooks White (2), author of the children’s classic, “Charlotte’s Web,” I am intrigued by his use of names and animals.

In college, he was jokingly nicknamed Andy, but since he didn’t like his first name, Elwyn, he continued to use Andy, informally, in subsequent years.

And in Andy’s poems and personal letters to Katharine (3), before and after they were married, a spider expressed his feelings in the first person, and a dog referred to him in the third person.

“Andy spent a lot of time thinking about Katharine. Finally he wrote a poem to her that united his close-up observation of nature and his growing sense that their marriage was the right antidote to his rootlessness. Over the three decades of his life, he had spent more time watching spiders than he had experiencing romance…

The spider, dropping down from twig,

Unwinds a thread of his devising;

A thin, premeditated rig,

To use in rising.

And all the journey down through space

In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,

He builds a ladder to the place

From which he started.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,

In spider’s web a truth discerning,

Attach one silken strand to you

For my returning” (1, pp. 117-118).

After they were married, Andy and Katharine had a dog, Daisy, who wrote this letter to Katharine (Mrs. White), referring to Andy (White) in the third person:

“Dear Mrs. White,

        White has been stewing around for two days now, a little bit worried because he is not sure that he has made you realize how glad he is that there is to be…a blessed event [she is pregnant]…I know White so well that I always know what is the matter with him, and it always comes to the same thing—he gets thinking that nothing that he writes or says quite expresses his feeling, and he worries about his inarticulateness just the same as he does about his bowels, except it is worse, and it makes him either mad, or sick, or with a prickly sensation in the head.

        Lovingly, Daisy” (1, pp. 119-120).

Is E. B. White just shy and eccentric? After I finish this biography and read “Charlotte’s Web,” I hope to have more to say.

1. Michael Sims. The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic. New York, Walker & Company/Bloomsbury, 2011.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._B._White

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Sergeant_Angell_White