The Trumpet of the Swan E. B. White HarperCollins ISBN 006028935X hardcover, 272 pages $22 (CDN)

One of the several books I’ve got on the go right now is E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan, the third of his classic children’s books (first published in 1970). I’m using this book as a delaying action and a warmup — in a kind of prolonged anticipation of diving into the recently published revised edition of Letters of E. B. White (of which I will have much more to say at some later date). I’ve been impatiently awaiting this revised Letters ever since I first saw a reference to it in a New Yorker essay by White’s stepson Roger Angell, about a year ago (the essay is included in Angell’s recent memoir Let Me Finish). The Trumpet of the Swan was the only other E. B. White book I’d never read; this seemed like the perfect time.

White’s other two children’s books are much better known: both Stuart Little (published in 1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952) are timeless, and generations of children have fallen in love with Stuart, the self-assured mouse, Wilbur the pig, and Charlotte the spider who saves him. Their affection is, I think, due to White’s evident fondness for his characters, which he expresses without a trace of schmaltz. But credit should also be given to the wonderful illustrations of Garth Williams.

Garth Williams was one of my favorite illustrators when I was younger. Anyone who’s read Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers series will know that the early books in the series featured Garth Williams’s illustrations, and that his depictions of the stalwart Bernard and the beautiful Miss Bianca (both mice, for the benefit of those not in the know) defined those characters and brought the stories to life; the later books in the series featured another artist’s work; Bernard and Miss Bianca just weren’t the same.

The fact that Garth Williams was not the illustrator of The Trumpet of the Swan is one of the things that kept me from it for so many years. Even though E. B. White is one of my favorite writers, I’d avoided reading that one book of his, convinced that, without Williams, it couldn’t be as good as the other two. But the current edition (from 2000) features new illustrations by Fred Marcellino, and even though he’s no Garth Williams I think he’s done a great job of giving a face and personality to Louis, the trumpeter swan who was born without a voice.

One added bonus to the book is discovering that part of the action takes place in Canada (“a big place. Much of it is wilderness. To get lost in the woods and swamps of western Canada would be a serious matter.”) About halfway through the book Sam (the young boy who befriends Louis the swan) goes off to Camp Kookooskoos, located “deep in the woods of Ontario.” As the camp director explains to the boys,

a boy’s camp should have a peculiar name; otherwise it doesn’t sound interesting. Kookooskoos is a terrific name. It is a long word, but it has only three letters in it. It has two s’s, three k’s, and six o’s. You don’t find many names as kooky as that. The queerer the name, the better the camp. […] It rhymes with moose — that’s another good thing about it.”

The story is pure E. B. White — the slightly surreal logic of a swan mingling with humans, communicating (in well-formed script) by means of chalk and a slate, and learning to play the trumpet as a way around his “speech defect”. There’s economics (complete with shopping list):

“When it comes to money,” [the zookeeper] said, “birds have it easier than men do. When a bird earns some money, it’s almost all clear profit. A bird doesn’t have to go to a supermarket and buy a dozen eggs and a pound of butter and two rolls of paper towels and a TV dinner and a can of Ajax and a can of tomato juice and a pound and a half of ground round steak and a can of sliced peaches and two quarts of fat-free milk and a bottle of stuffed olives. A bird doesn’t have to pay rent on a house or interest on a mortgage. A bird doesn’t insure its life with an insurance company and then have to pay premiums on the policy. A bird doesn’t own a car and buy gas and oil and pay for repairs on the car and take the car to a car wash and pay to get it washed. Animals and birds are lucky. They don’t keep acquiring things, the way men do. You can teach a monkey to ride a motorcycle, but I have never known a monkey to go out and buy a motorcycle.”

and there’s wordplay:

“Pop,” said Sam, “what does ‘crepuscular’ mean?”

“How should I know?” replied Mr. Beaver. “I never heard the word before.”

“It has something to do with rabbits,” said Sam. “It says here that a rabbit is a crepuscular animal.”

Now that I’ve finished The Trumpet of the Swan, I can’t wait to start the Letters over Christmas, and spend a bit more time in White’s good company.