Small is Beautiful

ANTHROPOLOGISTS INSIST that man is slowly growing larger, a fraction of an inch each generation, so that 1980 man bumps his head on the doorway that 1850 man sailed under easily. The subspecies of American writers, though, seem even more thyroidal--in the past few decades they have soared in size. Mailer, Wolfe, even John Irving; these men are literary Paul Bunyans, their typewriters 40 axhandles from base to carriage. Unafraid of any subject, they tackle modern life head on, to either conquer (Mailer and Wolfe) or be conquered. There is nothing quiet and little reflective about these men; they sally forth and produce huge, energetic books. Ego--the vain notion that they have some idea why things are so fucked--is their motive force. These are the writers of the ! and the Capital Letters and the almost never-ending sentences, the kaboom school.

And in their great light most writers of another, older sort look pale and foolish. It is not an age of literary craftsmen; most of the wordsmiths (and, lacking ideas, that is what many of them are) are left to moan about bad grammar and teach composition.

Only a few--and E.B. White is one--write so well they can get away with precision, with coziness, with beautifully turned sentences, with smallness. It is not dazzling, or attention-grabbing, and that is the point. Great carpenters plane and sand and join with such skill that they lend significance to their product, and writers can do the same. In an age of literary civil engineers, when the multitudes try to write novels taller than the Sears Tower, White is a carpenter, rubbing his essays and, in this instance, sketches and poems, with 600-grade sandpaper till they are silk, till they are more than functional.

This new volume--the third in a series that already includes White's collected essays and letters--proves once more White's claim to the title of master craftsman. Much of the material is dated or insignificant; the pieces that work, though, work so well. Two sketches, one the account of the birth of a baby deer in the Bronx Zoo, the other a description of city pigeons, are exemplary of White's best work. Nature, especially the small manifestations of nature--breezes not gales--and the precarious manifestations of nature, have traditionally been best expressed by writers of this ilk:

Beside her, on legs that were just learning their business, was a spotted fawn, as small and perfect as a trinket seen through a reducing glass. They stood there, mother and child, under a gray bench whose trunk was engraved with dozens of hearts and initials. Stretched on the ground was another fawn, and I realized that the doe had just finished twinning. The second fawn was still wet, still unrisen. Here was a scene of rare sylvan splendor, in one of my five favorite boroughs, and I couldn't have asked for more.

Describing nature, though, is ground the Mailers concede without contest to the Whites. The real question is: Can an author--can E.B. White--deal with big things in small writing? Big things--violence, love, sex, alienation. Little things--fawns, pine trees, letters that arrive in the mail. The latter are the province of those who read Elements of Style, the former the stuff of most who ignore it. How can you talk baout nuclear war and omit needless words?

White, though, pulls it off, at least some of the time. Several of his essays here, for instance, tackle that slipperiest of themes, man in the machine age: one, "About Myself," employs a now-aged device ("I am married to U.S. Woman Number 067-01-9807"), but halfway through it, when he talks about his operator's license which will expire in 1943, it is clear he was the first to use this form. Cliche isn't when it's used for the first time, and the reason things become cliches (and then hackneyed cliches) is because they have--or had--some special power to touch people. And the end of this two-page essay carries it beyond the realm of ironic comment to the realm of something worth saying. "In 1918 I was a private in the Army. My number was 4,345,016. I was a boy of medium weight. I had light hair. I had no absences from duty under G.O. 31, 1912, or G.O. 45, 1914. The number of that was Number One."

White's device is nothing new. Find a detail, use it to say something. It is careful writing, and even when the subject is the author, the viewpoint is detached. If it succeeds, it does so quietly, but if it fails it sounds trite and silly. There is one notable White failure in this book that illustrates the point--to bring the horror of nuclear war home he seizes on the instructions given schoolchildren for what to do in case of attack. The sketch ends with a line of girls, including White's granddaughter, walking with handkerchiefs over their mouths. "I went outdoors again to push the swing some more for the little girl, who is always forgetting her handkerchief. At lunch I watched her try to fold her napkin. It seemed to take forever." The scene is too personal, and the evaluations too subjective--"It seemed to take forever," doesn't work as well as "It took her half a minute" would. If one is to be a carpenter, all the corners must be flush.

But most of the time it works. White cleverly knocks the values of a bureaucratic society in an imaginary letter to the tax collector, and the nosiness of certain do-gooders in a similar missive to the ASPCA. The morbid obsession with news is caricatured in the (very funny) story of a family--"marooned" on the island where they have always lived--that is killed when as Associated Press helicopter crashes from on high, the even more morbid obsession with games ridiculed in a lampoon of a future sport-mad-society where 197,000 would jam the Yale Bowl to see Harvard (and the races from Belmont) on large screen t.v. Yes, he hits some easy targets, but easy targets are often the largest ones, and hence worth hitting. For the most part, the short sketches are better than the long sketches, and the sketches in general better than the poems. But in one of his verses, "Soliloquy of Times Square," his ear--his feel for the way people think--appears, and magnificently:

The time for little words is past; We now speak only the broad impertinences.

I take your hand

Merely to help you cross the street (We are such friends)...

Suppose I should forget, grow thoughtless--What if the little words came back, Running in upon me, running back Like little children home from school? Suppose I spoke--oh, I don't know--Some vagabond phrase out of the summer! What if I said 'I love you'? Something as simple

And as easy to the tongue as that...

Which very often is how it happens.

Everyone else is out chopping down the forest, Bunyans, nay Weyerhauesers. But White is standing still and looking at the trees, separating the solid lumber from the rotted. And from a single tree he can find the whole wood--almost the reverse of the more common sort of writing, which takes the world and boils it down into a single character. It is skill--not passion, not energy, not vision--that carries White; for anyone without the skill, his method of approaching big ideas is impossible. He is a singles hitter, but his average is high.