E. B. White, like his friend James Thurber, was especially fond of dogs—and I suppose still is since, at this writing, he is still alive. One of the most memorable to him was Fred, a feisty dachshund who used to poke his nose into everything—until he got poked back.¹ He was not as arrogant as Thurber’s dog, "The Scotty Who Knew Too Much," who belligerently sought out larger adversaries and ended up "knifed" by a porcupine. Fred took easily to the city and later to the country, where, White once recalled, "his interest in every phase of farming remains undiminished . . . but his passion for details is a kind of obsession. . . . He wants to be present in a managerial capacity at every event, no matter how trifling or routine."² Like Fred, White liked to poke around in any urban corner or alley, but always with caution, out of respect for what might poke back, as an essayist, his own modest size. He liked to sniff out a subject and get its scent, size up the experience and pass on. He didn’t want to pick fights lest, like Thurber’s scotty, he’d have to offer excuses the next day. He, too, felt equally at home in the city as in the country, so long as the environment (for an essayist) was congenial and he was well fed (with material). And, like Fred, White assumed the unofficial manager’s role, becoming the New Yorker’s best detail man, most prolific staffer and, over the years, just about the magazine’s most versatile contributor.

While both dog and master possessed sensitive noses for news, White’s close-to-the-ground view, particularly towards the city, actually ranged wider and a little higher, probably closest to that of the New York denizen who most frequently turns up in his essays: the bird, most notably passer domesticus—the sparrow. In a New Yorker piece called "Interview with a Sparrow" (April 9, 1927), White wondered why birds struggle to live in the city when they have the country open to them. The sparrow answers unhesitatingly: "here in town I can get everything that the country offers plus the drama . . . and the stimulus of interesting contacts" (p. 31). So the sparrow takes to the city for the same reasons writers of magazines like the New Yorker do—or, rather, the reverse, for surely the sparrow nested first. The sparrow ranges far and wide, but not very high, preferring to feed on or near the ground. It will settle on any low-lying crevice. The interviewee found, in fact, a penthouse of a ledge, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which offered him, he boasts, "an extraordinary outlook on Greek statuary" (p. 31). "A sparrow," says the narrator of White’s parable, "The Wings of Orville" (August 8, 1931), "will gape at anything queer."³

White, too, liked to range far and wide, yet feed on or near the ground, searching out the odd or extraordinary amid the inexhaustible variety in New York, that most inexhaustible of American cities. Any ledge or

perch in town provided a point of departure, or he could take flight from his regular "nest," a drab office at the New Yorker’s West Side mid-town headquarters, with its liberating view of a solid brick wall. He might have identified with the sparrow’s dull coloring, which allowed him to blend into the cityscape. As an essayist, White liked to flit about unnoticed, savoring his anonymity. "Place yourself in the background," he urged writers in The Elements of Style, and keep in the foreground, "the sense and substances of the writing." Indeed, White spoke of style itself as a kind of flight, where "we leave the ground" of rules and, once airborne, the writer "will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion."⁴ A White essay takes the sparrow’s path, meandering about sentence by sentence, allowing the cross-currents of thought and insight to set direction and determine destination, with meaning something not entirely known until found. An essay was a way of traveling light, "a ramble," as he said of the essay Thoreau conceived at Walden Pond,⁵ but more uniquely like a flight, and one fraught with its own kind of risk. White celebrated one in "The Wings of Orville," in which a sparrow is determined to "prove the feasibility of towing a wren" from Madison Park to 110th street (p. 8). The small sparrow insists on doing what hasn’t been done before, as does the essayist, and nothing less than taking wing will suffice.

Manhattan’s building boom of the 1920s and 30s provided many a ledge or capital for adventurous low-flyers, bird or man, thanks to the Beaux Arts tradition in architecture and the subsequent emergence of art deco styles. But during the ’40s and ’50s the signature style in American architecture gradually gave way to the stark anonymity of Bauhaus-influenced modernism, hard architecture which White found symptomatic of a civilization’s decline and a culture’s decay. One consequence of sheath steel and plate glass was a shortage of ledges for city birds—and vantages open to inquisitive essayists. White linked the birds’ fate with his own and worried about their extinction in the contemporary city of glass. The great White way to New York lies open to us if we will, so to speak, play the wren and string along on some of the writer’s flights of fancy around town.

In the summer of 1948, White wrote a paean to the city for Holiday magazine called Here is New York. He said there were actually three New Yorks:

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Of these three, the greater is the last:

the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is the third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment,

 

its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.⁶

No contributor to the New Yorker felt that passion more than he who so succinctly defines it here. Unlike many New York "settlers" in quest of something, who came from afar, White was born and raised just beyond the shadow of the mid-town skyscrapers rising in the building boom, in Mount Vernon, New York. Thus, he early felt the dynamism of a tripartite city. He was something of a native, and hence disposed to accept the city’s inevitable turbulence; he became a commuter, and hence understood how schedules deaden the spirit; and both roles made the quester in him more flexible, more compassionate and, hence, more humane. He might even have been the youngest of the New Yorker "settlers" of his generation, having journeyed into the city often with his father; and, in his early teens, he attended tea dances held in mid-town hotels. In "Afternoon of an American Boy" (November 29, 1947), he recounted one of these held at the Plaza, calling it an "expedition of unparalleled worldliness":

Dancing or no dancing, this was certainly high life, and I knew I was witnessing a scene miles and miles ahead of anything that took place in Mount Vernon. I had never seen anything like it, and a ferment must have begun working in me that afternoon.⁷

A decade later, after he sated his wanderlust by motoring across the country to Seattle and shipping off to Alaska, White returned to New York, and, in 1923, began working as a layout man in an ad agency. He spent his leisure absorbing the city, allowing that "ferment" to work in him; and he gave lyrical form to his passions in brief poems published in Franklin P. Adams’s influential column, "The Conning Tower." Success meant being perfectly placed, in the quintessential American city, ready to be touched by revelation. As he recalled in Here is New York:

New York hardly gave me a living at that period, but it sustained me. I used to walk quickly past the house in West 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh were F.P.A. lived, and the block seemed to tremble under my feet— the way Park Avenue trembles when a train leaves Grand Central. (p. 32)

White’s precocious sensitivity to the city’s growing pains suffuses his earliest contributions to Ross’s fledgling magazine. To establish the New Yorker’s identity among hoped-for subscribers and the classier advertisers, contributors touted the magazine relentlessly. Ross wanted particularly to reach "the person who knows his way about, or wants to."⁸ White was the New Yorker’s most unabashed chauvinist. He had a street vendor’s savvy of the neighborhoods and a cabbie’s feel for the streets; and his unique grasp of New York detail gave, as Gerald Weales has noticed, reportorial substance to what was essentially fantasy.⁹ In his earliest "Notes and Comments" he liked to chide complaisant suburbanites for their neglect and badger ladies who sail for Crete but who have not

looked at Rivington Street or Tompkins Square, who come to the "phantom city" from grassy suburbs to confess their woes to psychoanalysts.¹⁰ In his first New Yorker piece, "Defense of the Bronx River" (May, 1925), White sought to awaken the even somnolent commuter to what the sparrow liked about New York, the "drama" that lies just beyond the train window. He concluded by seeing himself as one of a reborn race of nature enthusiasts: "here is one commuter who wouldn’t trade this elegant little river, with its ducks and rapids . . . for the Amazon or the Snohomtsh or the La Platee. . ." (p. 14). In "Lower Level" (May 22, 1926), White sought to awaken commuters to touch one another, by imagining a tipsy commuter as a protagonist—his soul "made articulate by wine"—who creates a fellowship with his quirky, unexpected greetings: "They liked simple homage paid by a humble soul in an age of inexpressible marvels" (p. 20). In "Hey Day Labor" (August 7, 1926), White found a fraternity of men himself when, mistaken for a pier laborer, he climbs aboard a coal truck and enjoys a bird’s eye view as it careens through the streets, all traffic giving way: "taxicabs, once held invulnerable, bend double to honor your passage" (p 21).

In these early chauvinistic pieces, White presents himself as a modern-day Whitman, a common man, one of the roughs, a man who was there and thus so shall be the reader.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

White is also kin to Thoreau, long before he wrote about him, the ambling amateur naturalist with notebook in hand, eager to make a good account of himself on his sojourns. The two poets blend into the one uniquely urban singer. "New York provides not only a continuing excitation," he observed in Here is New York, "but also a spectacle that is continuing. I wander around, re-examining the spectacle, hoping that I can put it on paper" (p. 32). The solitary singer’s convenient anonymity could also estrange him, when the surging city refused to open him to what the sparrow in White’s interview called "interesting contacts." In "Evening on Ice" (March 19, 1927), a lonely protagonist goes to Madison Square Garden’s public skating rink seeking the company of other skaters, only to find everyone crowding around a home show exhibit (p. 30). One cure for isolation in the city White found was to immerse himself in his favorite landmarks, to take imaginative possession of cherished monuments, so as to keep that old childlike "ferment" working in him. In "It’s a ’ome" (January 5, 1929), "Baedeker Jones" ambles through the Grand Central district and into the terminal’s "catacombs," when all the commuters are home sleeping peacefully. Commercial enterprises are suddenly disengaged from daily profit-making as the traveler liberates the building to serve instead a moment of exhilarating play:

I would buy a toboggan and a decoy duck at Van Lengerke and Detmolds

 

and coast, late at night, down the ramps and banisters until apprehended. When apprehended, I would hand the officer the duck, so he would know I was fooling (p. 19)

Robert Benchley would have converted such a nighttime triumph into a daytime disaster, in a farcical "casual" about the harassed "little man" upended by a few steps—and missing his train. Frank Sullivan would have plunged the tobogganer down into a cool sewer, there to meet a ghostly tribe of Mohawks. White was never an ambulance chaser, on the lookout for collisions to turn into funny copy, nor an armchair folklorist in the genteel manner of Irving. He thought, again like Thoreau, that daily life was sufficiently fantastic to occupy the attentive observer. Alone in Grand Central, White showed how a mere pedestrian could, in imagination, accomplish what the city itself, building ever upward, was doing—control gravity and defy nature.

By the late 1930s, after more than a decade exploring New York vantages and flitting about in search of the city’s "drama," White made the first of several departures. He provided a whimsical account in a "Talk of the Town" piece called "The Departure of Eustace Tilley" (August 7, 1937). "My departure was in part a matter of temper, in part of expediency," he noted, with deliberate evasions.¹¹ The reasons were many, both personal and professional, and included White’s longing for freedom from magazine deadlines. The following year, after he had decided to relocate in Maine, he tried to explain his departure, confessing to be ill-at-ease with developments in his own profession:

A certain easy virtue in everyone, myself included, and a willingness to accept the manner and speech of the promoter and the gossip writer. A certain timbre of journalism and the stepping up of the news with the implication that the first duty of man is to discover everything that has just happened everywhere in the world . . . a certain idiocy of the newsreel and the glorification of acrobatic eccentricity .

He added: "there is a decivilizing bug somewhere at work"—without naming it.¹² Certainly, the city itself, central generator of the nation’s commerce and communication, magnified the decivilizing weaknesses in the culture he disliked and whose consequences he most feared. In fact, the changing cityscape itself began to show disturbing signs of rot; and one of the "bugs" was modernist architecture. In the article critical of the new flashy journalism, White also said he was worried by "a hardness and brightness of the materials from which the world about me was being constructed: the steel that tarnished not, neither does it rust, but simply hits you in the eye twenty-four hours of the day with hollow splender."¹³ He recounted a visit to the 1939 World’s Fair in "The World of Tomorrow," published in the May 1939 issue of Harper’s, in which he seems vaguely apprehensive and tries to hide his uneasiness by pleading a sinus infection. He is ready to endorse the future—if it could cure the common cold. But the old chauvinism is conspicuously missing:

The architecture is amusing enough, the buildings are big enough, to give

 

the visitor that temporary and exalted feeling of being in the presence of something pretty special, something full of aspiration, something which at times is even exciting.¹⁴

He finds the exhibit itself oppressively commercial and the cityscape sterilized, artificially-lighted—all of it comprising a future programmed to elicit only canned responses. "There is a great deal of electrically transmitted joy, but very little spontaneous joy," he laments.¹⁵ The phrase itself lacks White’s former verve.

Earlier that year, White imagined himself literally trapped inside the "future." His New Yorker sketch, "The Door" (March 25, 1939), was provoked by a visit to a model home exhibit in Rockefeller Center. White’s youthful persona, the Whitmanesque enthusiast, has become a tense, neurotic skeptic, lost in a modern labyrinth like a rat in a maze. Surfaces are hard and plastic, and even the once magical names of things now lack identity, reduced to a bloodless collection of amputated prefixes and suffixes:

The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid or they were duroid (sani) or flexsam (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass). . . .

"The Door" is a parable about an increasingly alienating environment, the city of glass that New York has since become. It is all the more disturbing for being promoted in a crippled English expropriated by pseudoscientific entrepreneurs. One can imagine the ultramodern home, incongruously lodged inside one of the monuments of ’30s era art deco, as the rough beast of Bauhaus modernism sloughing towards the suburbs to be born. White’s parable also warns against urban renewal as the lobotomization of culture:

The doctors . . . know where the trouble is, only they don’t like to tell you about the prefrontal lobe because that means making a hole in your skull and removing the work of centuries.

"Maybe it was the city ," the besieged visitor keeps repeating as he struggles to escape the exhibit, "being in the city that made you feel how queer everything was."¹⁵

The transformation of the "phantom city" of inexhaustible delight into the "hollow splendor" of hard architecture became an objective correlative of White’s disaffection for "progress" on nearly all fronts. His skepticism about the future of life in cities grew during the 1940s, after he had found a more tranquil home on a salt farm on the coast of Maine. He established a half-life in the city in 1943; but the inevitable estrangement between the sensitive soul and the human community in a dense urban environment subjected to relentless modernization made him cling all the more tenaciously to the species of nature still alive in town. White’s search for some root in a forest of steel and glass took parable form in the New Yorker sketch, "The Second Tree from the Corner" (May 31, 1947), prompted by his unsuccessful treatment for a nervous breakdown. Its narrator is the protagonist of "The Door," ten years older and now

truly neurotic. Even his name suggests that he is a child of the new hard and plastic era — "Trexler"—built, as it seems, from the new "scientific" jargon. The canyoned city has become the main source of constant irritation that has reduced poor Trexler to total indecisiveness, as opposed to the apparently untroubled psychiatrist who is treating him, who wants only more leisure and wing on his house in Westport. The materialistic doctor’s disinvestment in the city proves to be a kind of sickness that prompts Trexler to reinvest in the city, to see urban life with fresh eyes. His restored enthusiasm, even his sensitivity for the older city details, sounds like White himself of earlier New York excursions:

It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor.

Trexler finds a genuine fraternity among "the unregenerate ranks" in dim-lit saloons on Third Avenue, far from the professional comforters on the fashionable upper East Side. There, he finds what alone can revive the spirit, another living species:

"I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands," he said, answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away.¹⁶

During the cold war period of the late ’40s and early ’50s, White became increasingly worried about the fate of mankind itself, threatened with nuclear annihilation. He was living on the East Side, near United Nations headquarters, which helped to focus his attention on larger, more urgent questions of war and peace. His contributions to "Notes and Comments" during this time tended to be soberer, often extended meditations on national political crises such as nuclear testing. One of the likely first sites targeted for destruction was White’s beloved New York, just when the city was, architecturally, leaping recklessly into the ultramodern future—an irony that shadows many of his contributions at the time to the New Yorker and other magazines. White described the city’s terrifying fate at the end of Here is New York. But first he conjured up memories of beloved monuments — other "trees" that rooted him to the city of his youth. He recalls nostalgically the old elevated railways, Greenwich Village of the ’20s and the open, airy places undarkened by skyscrapers. He regrets changes that have cheapened the city. Grand Central, where he once fantasized a wild toboggan ride, has become "honky-tonk": "the great hall seemed to me one of the more inspiring interiors in New York, until Lastex and Coca-Cola got into the temple" (p.45). Many of the great mansions are gone and that second (or third) tree from a corner that might mark one’s kinship with the living is going too: "rich men nowadays don’t live in houses; they live in the attics of big apartment buildings and plant trees on the setback, hundreds of feet about the street" (p.46). Such a city may excite new "settlers" but the "passion" it requires is lost to White. He sees instead a city that is "destructible," and at the end envisions the

citizen sparrow of earlier parables transformed into a murderous flock.

A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy. . . . The intimation of mortality is part of New York now (p. 51).

He links the survival of the city, if the UN succeeds in its mission, to the survival of another solitary tree, one standing in Turtle Bay Gardens, where he was living at the time, on East 48th Street:

It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: "This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree." If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death (p. 53).

By the mid 1950s, White’s boom-threatened "monument" had lost nearly every trace of the "marvelous," becoming instead a temple devoted only to getting and spending. In his contributions to "Notes and Comments" at the time, White became unusually acerbic at moments, for example, on the subject of "the function lunch in New York, how drastic and purposeful,"

everyone there for some reason of business or intrigue: salesmen, applicants, supplicants, agents provocateurs, contact executives, actresses gaming with managers, writers taking the temperature of editors, lovers sparring for the strange vantage, everywhere a sprig of personal increase garnishing the cold salmon.¹⁷

Here was the sort of living "deliberately" that was the very opposite of the kind advocated by Thoreau and once practiced by White in the city. Now, everyone is seeking advantages, not savoring vantages. The new city fosters the first by preventing the second, as White explained in "The Rock Dove" (April 20, 1957), where he took once again the bird’s eye view, wondering anew why birds live in cities:

Because a city offers cliffs and ledges. . . . What a pigeon needs is just what a city provides in abundance: a nook, a ledge, a recess, a niche, a capital.

But modern glass towers offer no vantages and White felt, like the birds, dispossessed:

Because of the trend toward plainer facades, the city of the future may hold no charm for pigeons. Lever House offers little inducement to a nesting pair. . . The city of the future may be inhospitable to men and doves alike.¹⁸

In a letter written six years later, White was more direct in criticizing the city in which the plainer facades had multiplied alarmingly:

New York is becoming lost among the enormous glass boxes that are its new buildings. With one or two exceptions there is nothing intrinsically good looking about them, and in cluster, they are overpowering and debilitating. I suppose they look quite splashy if you are on the deck of an incoming liner, but I’m not. There’s something about these immaculate stone and glass surfaces that destroys all the street-level detail that used to be so much fun.¹⁹

 

The vanishing nest thus became a fitting emblem of White’s lost city. What remained for him were vivid memories of rich and varied details, some of which were lovingly evoked in the pages of The Second Tree from the Corner (1954), one of his essay collections that he said in the "Foreword" was in stretches "a sentimental journey to the scenes of my crime" (xi). "Hotel of the Total Stranger," first published in Harper’s in 1947 but reprinted in Second Tree, is literally that, in parable form. A Mr. Volente, en route by taxi to the hotel named in the title, passes countless city landmarks that jog his memory:

"It was in the doorway . . .
"It was down that side street . . .
"It was in the back room of this cafe that . . ."
That was the thing about New York, it was always bringing up something out of your past, something ridiculous or lovely or glistening. (p. 200)

The recollections—of success, but also of doubts and embarrassments—are actually White’s own, all connected to "the interminable quest for the holy and unnamable grail, looking for it down every street and in every window and in every pair of eyes, following a star always obscured by mists" (p. 203). The "hotel" might stand for the city itself in constant flux and the "stranger" for White the anonymous sojourner—exactly the relation between urban setting and viewer that he had found both liberating and enthralling. The story also illustrates that the real city is, after all, the one we imagine and carry around within us. White himself seems to have reached this partially consoling conclusion as his city of ledges and niches disappeared. He said as much in 1951, conceding:

The only way to dwell in cities these days, whether it be wise or foolish, is to the conviction that the city itself is a monument of one’s own making, to which each shall be faithful in his fashion.²⁰

White’s fears for New York were well grounded, for destruction hasn’t waited for a bomb drop. Since the 1970s, Manhattan has been overtaken by a massive gridlock of anonymous glass boxes that threaten to darken all of nature’s street-scene creatures. Even the few remaining trees are facing extinction—or, rather, they are being "protected," by being glass-encased in mid-town corporate arboreta. This new city has its connoisseur in Donald Barthelme, in a way White’s successor as the New Yorker’s reportorial fabulist. He has written a number of "city life" fables about people strung out on the grid coordinates, trapped beneath the futuristic city’s flat, hard skin. In Barthelme’s dystopia, there are no monuments, no memories and certainly no second tree from the corner. Fortunately, enough ledges and capitals survive to offer protection to the hardier low-flyers. "While they endure," White insisted in "The Rock Dove,"

We must note their locations, elevate our gaze about the level of our immediate concerns, imbibe the sweet air and perfect promise: the egg miraculous upon the ledge, the bird compact upon the egg, its generous warmth, its inevitable patience, it, natural fortitude and grace. (p. 133)

 

The same might be said of White himself, whose own lyrical flights in words continue to warrant close watching.

University of Hartford

Notes

     ¹On matters of fact in White’s life, I have depended on the recent authorized biography by Scott Elledge, E.B. White: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1984). See chapter XIV on Fred, the dachshund.
   ²Quoted in Elledge, p. 277.
   ³White, Quo Vadimus? Or, The Case of the Bicycle (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939), pp. 6–7.
   ⁴"An Approach to Style" in The Elements of Style, Second Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 59–62.
   ⁵From "A Slight Sound at Evening," in Essays of E. B. White (New York: Harper, 1977), p. 230. See also "Mr. Forbush’s Friends" for White’s passion for ornithology.
     ⁶Here is New York (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), pp. 17–18. Citations hereafter in the text.
     ^{7  8}Quoted in Elledge, p. 101.
      ⁹"Not For the Old Lady in Dubuque," in The Comic Imagination in American Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973), p. 239.
     ¹⁰From "Note and Comments" reprinted in Every Day is Saturday (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934), pp. 5–6.
     ¹¹Reprinted in Second Tree, p. 145.
     ¹²Harper’s (October, 1938), p. 555. Reprinted in Elledge, p. 209.
     ¹³Elledge, p. 209.
     ¹⁴From "The World of Tomorrow" reprinted in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper, 1966), pp. 66, 68.
     ¹⁵Reprinted in Second Tree, pp. 76–81. See William R. Steinhoff, "The Door: ‘The Professor,’ ‘My Friend the Poet (Deceased): ‘The Washable House,’ and ‘The Man Out in Jersey,’" CE, 23 (December, 1961), 229–232. In "The Retort Transcendental," reprinted in Second Tree, White imagined a cavernous house "whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest" (p. 94).
     ¹⁶Reprinted in Second Tree, pp. 95–101.
     ¹⁷Reprinted in Second Tree, p. 206
     ¹⁸Reprinted in The Points of My Compass (New York: Harper, 1979), pp. 130, 132.
     ¹⁹Letters of E. B. White, ed. Dorothy Lobrane Guth (New York: Harper, 1976), p. 508. See also p. 645.
     ²⁰ "Life in Bomb Shadow," reprinted in Second Tree, p. 217.