Good old Elwyn reminds me why I am sometimes in the mood for nothing but American literature. Russian literature is all well and good until the Grand Inquisitor's aura wears off, and I stop wondering if I'd better manage my guilt than Raskolnikov did. My obsession with the Russian culture even becomes somewhat laughable, and I fall back on the American traditions that I so often overlook.
E.B. White has the rough but kindly spirit of an America that I never knew. It is not as a passionate artist that he achieves greatness. Instead, he was a citizen, a grammarian, a New Yorker legend, and a correspondent. His greatness is in the way he presented himself as fully human. He, like American literature itself, is complex but subtle, riveting but calm. The author of Charlotte's Web, or Stuart Little, could easily be passed over with a nod and a smile of approval, but to me E.B. is the essence of small town America--wise but not unnecessarily dramatic.
He once wrote to a friend: "Have just written a piece for the Yale Review on the subject of Walden and am having nightmares from the fear that I have plagiarized myself. At my age, Miss T., a writer repeats like an onion." E.B. White knows himself, knows how to laugh at himself, and, beyond that, invents a quality onion metaphor.
Perhaps I am romanticizing both the author and the America that I imagine him to have inhabited. An American of Model-T's, of Maine farmhouses, of intellectual New Yorkers. But the foreigners to whom I have recommended E.B.White have silently wondered at my enthusiasm. He does not possess the European requisite traits of genius. He once wrote, "I must read the Book of Job, for laughs." So no, it does not seem that he takes tragedy seriously, or that he is sucking at the marrow of life, the way the Europeans have in their densest fiction. But the lightheartedness of American Literature is not to be passed over as naive. It is with humor and subtlety that authors like E.B. White slyly comment on society, on the life of a writer, on America, and on themselves. Everything he wrote is great because of the spirit in which it was written.
2 comments:
You know what's great about the onion metaphor? There's no center in the onion; just layers upon layers. Which, if we take this thought to its obviously postmodern end, E.B. White therefore repeatedly repeats nothing.
But zero is the flipside of infinity, so nothing becomes everything.
God, do you really want to spend a summer actually living with me? I annoy myself!
Well said.
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