Last year I went on an E. B. White reading binge, methodically tracking down everything he’d written — or at least those of his books which our downtown library had in their collection. And since that binge I’ve gradually been acquiring personal copies of them all: they’re the sort of thing I’d like to have close at hand.

One of White’s books — Writings From The New Yorker 1925-1976 — gathers together pieces which were first published in that magazine’s “Notes and Comments” section. They would have run without a byline (since that was the editorial policy of The New Yorker at that time), and — again, in accordance with editorial practice — all were written in the first person plural, what some refer to as “the royal”, or “the editorial we.”¹ Yet even decades later it is clear that, despite the artifice of that first person plural, despite the lack of a byline, any regular reader would easily have recognized E. B. White’s distinctive voice.

His New Yorker pieces are all “of a size”, that size being “bite-” : easily digested in a single sitting by someone leafing through the magazine while commuting to New York on a suburban train. And they are, I feel, without exception, perfect little gems of prose. Which is precisely why they’ve lasted, even those which a casual glance might consider to be “mere fleeting thoughts”:

There’s a tropical-fish store in this vicinity, and one of the tanks contains a solitary piranha — a little fish that looks something like a sunfish. The price tag says $25 — quite a sum for a three-inch pet that sulks in a watery corner, slowly waving its pectorals. However, the piranha has this to be said for it: it is a man-eater. Fierce, remorseless, and with a taste for the flesh of warm-blooded animals, it will attack furiously. We pass the fish store almost every day on our way to work, the blood flowing warmly in our veins, the prospect of another day at a typewriter filling our head with suicidal fancies, and we always stop for a moment in front of the piranha. We like having a murderous fish in the neighborhood; it is reassuring to know that all we have to do is dive into a nearby tank to be stripped flesh from bone in a matter of minutes.

Somewhere in the midst of the collection I remember thinking that, “If blogs had existed in E. B. White’s day, then surely he would have been right in their forefront;” his New Yorker pieces are sterling examples of what any blogger would give his or her eye-teeth to pen.²

It’s enough to give any beginning blogger heart: to find ephemera such as White’s collected into print, and handling its years so well; proof that this new medium need not be the vaste wasteland than it often appears to be.

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The current The New Yorker — an 80th anniversary issue — is a nice, thick assortment of articles, fiction, and nostalgia, seasoned with their trademark cartoons. I picked it up a few days ago and the first thing I headed for was an extended memoir by Roger Angell, E. B. White’s stepson. That piece alone is worth the price.

In it Angell mentions a new edition of E. B. White’s letters, to be published sometime next year: “The stimulating Letters of E. B. White, out of print for some time, will reappear next year, in a new and updated printing, edited by his granddaughter Martha White.” I can’t wait…

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¹ The Introduction to Writings From The New Yorker 1925-1976 notes that White disliked the awkwardness of the practice, saying it gave “the impression that the stuff was written by a set of identical twins or members of a tumbling act”; a view with which we in t&p’s editorial collective are in complete agreement…

² Although I can’t abide the term “blog” and its variants, it appears to be too well entrenched to avoid completely, having somehow managed to successfully repel all courtship offers from more attractive synonyms…