Writer’s Seat

I was thrilled and moved by the prospect of seeing his house, and the barn out back where Charlotte wove her web, and the meadow behind the house that led down to the little waterside boathouse where White, in fair weather, pecked away at his typewriter. I had tried to worm my way in there before. Sometime in the early ’80s, White had graciously answered a fan letter I’d sent him, and his warm response, I saw at once, established a special intimacy between us. I didn’t learn till much later that he would type out a dozen or more such letters a day. Answering fan mail was the chief occupation of his declining years, and one he didn’t much like.

Anyway, a year or two after our exchange I found myself out of work, footloose, and broke. I reasoned that White, an octogenarian widower living alone and in poor health, would appreciate a visit of unknown duration from a young stranger with lots of time on his hands and no visible means of support. As a courtesy I dropped my friend a line letting him know I was planning to come see him in Maine—although planning was a deceptive word. At the time I couldn’t plan a trip to the grocery store.

This was years before email, and I had no idea the postal service could operate so quickly. Within four days an envelope was in my mailbox, with elegant pale blue lettering showing the return address in the upper left hand corner. “Dear Mr. Ferguson,” the letter read. “Thank you for your letter about the possibility of a visit.” After this uplifting sentence, the tone went brittle. He mentioned a couple of his stubborn ailments, including his failing eyesight. And then: “So here I am, one eye gone, half my wits gone, and you want to come and view the ruins. Figure it out. There’s one of me, at most, and there are ten thousand of you. Please don’t come. Sincerely, E. B. White.”

A couple years later, White’s death made the front page of the New York Times. And then, still later, came this assignment: airfare to Bangor, a high-end rental car, a generous amount of walking-around money, and three nights at the Blue Hill Inn, the famously quaint bed and breakfast down the road from White’s farm. A friend gave me the phone number of Roger Angell, like White a celebrated writer for the New Yorker, and also White’s stepson. It took me a while to work up the nerve to call him.

When I did manage it, I told him the story of my ill-fated correspondence with his stepfather, and he laughed. “That sounds about right,” he said. Angell apologized that he wouldn’t be at his own place in Maine while I was there, otherwise he could show me around himself. Instead he gave me the numbers of several locals who had been great friends of White, and of the couple from South Carolina who had bought White’s farm after his death and used it now as a summer getaway.

From the Bangor airport, an hour away, I drove a wandering route to Blue Hill. When I hit the outskirts of town—it’s a very short-skirted town—I passed a sign for the fairgrounds. I hit the brakes, threw the car in reverse (I hadn’t seen another car for 20 minutes), and turned onto the dusty drive through the open metal gates. I’d never been there, of course, but the grounds looked just like I remembered them. Later, after I’d unpacked at the inn, I pulled Charlotte’s Web from the canvas bag I’d brought, full of White’s books.

At the fairgrounds there were no hamburgers frying, no balloons aloft, not a sheep within earshot; the fair wouldn’t kick off for another month. But the pens were here—they were the same pens where Wilbur the pig won his medal at the fair, the pens where Charlotte the spider laid her eggs before she breathed her last, thereby prompting from readers, young and old, the largest disgorgement of tears since the death of Little Nell. When I got back to my car it was silted with a coating of fairground dust.

This feeling recurred as I moved about the neighborhood. I was seeing things I remembered seeing though I’d never seen them. A lifelong immersion in a writer’s work can do that to a reader, especially when the work is as vivid and particular as White’s. One morning I stopped at the general store in the crossroads town of Brooklin, near the post office where White used to pick up his mail every day, using a basket to carry home the bundles of unsolicited gifts and the stacks of fan letters, including, nearly 20 years before, those two breathless letters of mine.

When I crossed the stoop to the store I remembered the scene in an early essay in One Man’s Meat, White’s account of farm life in the years leading up to the Second World War. Having moved there from Manhattan a few months before, and regarded suspiciously by neighbors as a city slicker, White had been trying to befriend a local he’d hired as a farmhand. The youngster finally cracked through his Maine quietness and reserve, that carapace of reticence installed around every Mainer at birth. White took the moment as a small victory. It happened right here on this stoop, as the two men sat in the sun. It’s not a major event in the essay or the book, just a hint about the Mainers he was coming to know, and the stoop—and the store—looked just as I knew they would.

I spoke to the long, thin fellow manning the giant brass cash register, vintage 19th century, and he told me I could likely find the store’s former proprietor, who had known White for decades, across the road at the library. The library was built with funds raised by White’s wife Katharine, a celebrated editor herself, and there was a long shelf with copies of each of White’s books, signed by the author. I found the old fellow reading newspapers, and we sat on the porch to talk. I took out my pen and reporter’s notebook, a stupid move.

This Mainer’s carapace showed no signs of having ever been breached; it shone unblemished as an egg. “Mr. White always left town on his birthday,” he said, “because that’s when all the reporters would show up, bothering him.” He glanced down at my notebook. “He’d tell us at the store where he was going, but nobody else. He always went to the same place to hide out.”

Where was that? I asked.

“We always kept mum about it to the reporters,” he said.

Was the place close by?

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you that.”

Why not? I asked. After all, I said, Mr. White is—well, dead.

He straightened up, offended.

“Sir,” he said, “I told Mr. White I wouldn’t tell anybody. And I’m not going to.”

And he didn’t.

Every night I ate dinner in the dining room at the inn, where the fish was fresh and simply prepared. In the middle of dinner one night, the host—and, from what I could tell, the owner and chef—hustled over to my table.

“Mr. Angell is on the line from New York and would like to talk to you,” he said.

He took me back to the kitchen where the phone was, and I picked up the receiver amid the clatter of dishes and the chatter of kitchen help.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked Angell.

“Well, where else would you be?”

He had a couple more phone numbers he’d forgotten to give me, including the number of Henry Allen, who’d worked full-time for White for nearly 40 years as manager of the farm. Allen figured often in White’s writing as a stalwart of Yankee knowhow and savvy. I had assumed he was no longer alive—a mythic figure beyond reach. Angell had a few other pointers about things to see, by way of making me feel at home, even if he could only do so by long distance. I took his friendliness and generosity to mean that he was as eager as I was to see that White’s centenary didn’t go unnoticed.

When I returned to my table, the host asked if I was writing about White. “He would come here for dinner several times a week, after his wife died,” he said. “Always alone. This was his table right here.” He gestured to the table next to mine. It was a table for two, up against a large window, on the other side of which was a riot of foxglove and asters. Had he been there, eating plump scallops gathered from the bay down the hill, I hoped I would have had the courage not to bother him.

The jealousy for his privacy became legendary. When he wrote from his farm in dispatches for the New Yorker, he was fuzzy about where he was. The dateline was always “Allen Cove,” a nautical designation known only to sailors. Of course, diligent admirers could always find it. Angell cleared the way for me to see Russell Wiggins, an old friend of White’s and a fellow escapee from the city life, and a lifelong newspaperman who had bought the local paper to run in his dotage. He used to stop by White’s house on his way home from work for a martini “or two or three,” he said.

“People would be coming by all the time,” Wiggins told me in his office. “Perfect strangers, parking in the driveway, just walking right up to the front door and knock-knock-knock.” The impertinence still shocked him. Usually, he said, White wouldn’t answer the door, though he might call his housekeeper to shoo them away. Unless .  .  .

“He could look out the window and see who was on the drive,” Wiggins said. “And if it was a pretty girl, well, you bet the door was flung wide open. She was welcome to have a martini too.”

The privacy was selectively enforced. He was after all a man who made a large part of his living writing about his own life—a master of the personal essay who over a long career gave only a handful of interviews, refused to appear on television or talk on the radio, and vanished whenever a neighbor spotted someone with a reporter’s notebook. The paradox is all the more noticeable nowadays, when an essayist in these confessional times is liable to expose his innards until readers recoil or beg for mercy. White had better manners, but he thought about this tension a great deal, between the essayist who invites readers in and the private man who insists they mind their own business.

“Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays,” he wrote, in an introduction to his collected essays. “I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.” In the end it was a means of freezing his readers in place: Stay right where you are, this far and no farther.

If he sounds waspish, the man that White left on the page was unfailingly companionable. In his essays he is modest, self-aware, wry, generous, a bit jittery, well-meaning, and never more than a beat or two from uncorking a joke. That man is why, on any given day, you can find one book or another of White’s lying open somewhere around my house. It may go undisturbed for weeks or months, but I like to know he’s there. As I went around Brooklin, I was relieved to hear from his friends that the White they knew was roughly compatible with the one I had met through the books. But no one claimed to know him well. And that was as far as they wanted to go. “We’re private people,” one of his neighbors told me. “We respect the privacy of others. And we’re always rather surprised when someone else does not.”

After the third or fourth such encounter I began to get a creepy feeling. I wondered if it was the same feeling a stalker gets.

White’s will stipulated that the house remain in private hands after his death—it was not to be turned over to a foundation and made a shrine or a museum or a writer’s retreat. White’s son Joel, who survived his father by only a decade, waved off a couple of offers coming from that direction before finding a suitable private buyer. But the desire to enshrine the house as something other than a home lives on. When word of the impending sale made the news last month, the president of PETA sent a letter to the realtor asking that “the owners convert the home into an empathy museum for pigs, complete with a vegan café offering veggie sausages, vegan BLTs, and more.”

PETA, so far as I know, got no response from the owners, Robert and Mary Gallant, who bought the house from Joel and have used it as a summer house ever since. When Joel White met the Gallants, a few months after his father’s death, he saw they satisfied all his criteria: They loved Maine, they loved Brooklin and Blue Hill, and they wanted the house to be a place for a large extended family, where children and grandchildren and cousins could gather.

When I phoned them they said they were happy to cooperate with anything that would honor Mr. White on his birthday. The house was a couple miles south of Blue Hill on another two-lane state road. I told myself I didn’t need directions, and I didn’t: When I got there I knew the place, a handsome clapboard colonial of stately proportions, set back from the road behind a rail fence. After I pulled into the drive I saw the cupola on the barn out back, and I recalled from One Man’s Meat that White was putting the final touches on the weathervane when he heard the news that Germany had invaded Poland. (The contrast between the banality of the chore and the enormity of the event was not lost on him; the carrying on of domestic duties amid the calamitous news from Europe is one of the themes of the book.)

Off to the side stood an ancient elm, presumably the “coon tree” of the essay of the same name, where a family of raccoons made their home in its hollow right outside White’s bedroom window. I parked and went around to the back of the house, as Mr. Gallant had instructed me, along the lane where the two geese, one old, one in the bloom of youth, had conducted their epic battle in “The Geese,” the last great essay White wrote. It’s about regeneration and old age—a kind of memento mori in prose.

And so it went as Mr. Gallant showed me around. I remembered sights I’d never seen. Mr. Gallant was tall and imposing but his voice was soft with a South Carolina lilt. First he took me to the barn, which had not been used as a barn for many years; it was swept clean, and the sea breezes had long ago blown away whatever remained of the barn smells. The inside was awash in light from the windows the Gallants had installed. The plank floor was spotless, gleaming from polish. It wasn’t a barn but a showcase of a barn. A spider web, even one woven by Charlotte, wouldn’t have lasted a half-hour here.

The Gallants, a sociable couple, liked to string lights along the walls, slide open the big doors, and throw parties. But still there was the basement pen that Wilbur called home, the workbench with White’s tools, and a bizarre contraption dangling from the ceiling. Mr. Gallant explained what it was, though I already knew. “My doctor has ordered me to put my head in traction,” White wrote, in an essay from 1956. “I have rigged a delightful traction center in the barn, using a canvas halter, a length of clothesline, two galvanized pulleys, a twelve-pound boat anchor, a milking stool, and a barn swallow.” Like many writers, he suffered horribly from the disease hypochondria. This ingenious contraption was material testimony to its incurable nature.

Beyond the traction pulleys I saw the rope swing from Charlotte’s Web: “Mr. Zuckerman had the best swing in the county. It was a single long piece of heavy rope tied to the beam over the north doorway.” Mrs. Gallant occasionally entertained grade-school groups here “to do the whole Charlotte deal,” as she put it. She’d arrange hay bales in a semicircle for the kids to sit on and play a recording of White reading from the book. Best of all, she let them take turns on the rope swing, an item that could only survive from a long-gone era: A child gets access to it by jumping from a loft, with no guard rails, no foam floor, no halters or strings to prevent a scraped knee or sprained ankle. I think this is the way White wanted it. “Mothers for miles around worried about Zuckerman’s swing,” we read in Charlotte’s Web. “They feared some child would fall off. But no child ever did. Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.”

Now that the mothers have won, aided by liability lawyers in cushioning their kids from every imagined danger and hint of trouble, I was happy that the Gallants were on the side of children who simply hang on tight—White’s side too.

“Try it out,” Mrs. Gallant said. I remembered a photo of White by the great portraitist Jill Krementz, taken when he was nearly 80: White on the swing holding tight to the rope, passing through the doorway from the dark barn into the brilliant sunshine. His family had chosen it for the cover of the program for his memorial service. “I’ll pass,” I said.

Mr. Gallant took me into the house through the back. Nobody in Maine uses a front door, he said. The Gallants had a keen sense of the house’s importance to people like me, and he said he hoped the changes they made were done with the appropriate tact—the woodshed attached to the house became a sunroom, the chicken coop became an artist’s studio, the pasture where White’s sheep once grazed bloomed with wildflowers. The Whites’ old icebox sat by the kitchen, but as a decorative antique, not a functioning appliance. The wood-burning stove was still there—“I like the cold,” White wrote in “The Winter of the Great Snows,” “I like snow. I like the descent to the dark, cold kitchen at six in the morning, to put a fire in the wood stove and listen to weather from Boston”—but it showed no sign of having been used. In fact, none of the many fireplaces showed signs of use; it was a summer house now.

The magazine had sprung for a local photographer to tag along and take pictures for the article. (I was told it could be no longer than 700 words, amounting to a single magazine page; still, no expense was spared. The good times .  .  .) Carl, the photographer, was energetic and full of ideas. He disappeared outside with Mrs. Gallant so she could show him her vast and beautiful flower beds. Mr. Gallant took me into the old living room, where the Whites had waited out the hurricane in “The Eye of Edna.” Like the enlarged kitchen, it was immaculate, a page out of House Beautiful, a Martha Stewart dream. No doubt the Gallants had straightened up for the reporter and photographer who were coming to visit, but the whole house had the immobility of a museum exhibit—a museum dedicated to flawless taste in home decoration.

Mr. Gallant gave me to understand that it hadn’t always been like this. The house they bought, he said, was a house that a single family had lived in for 40 years, and an old widower for another 10, and it showed. Now it had been turned into an ideal of a Maine farmhouse by the sea, a picture that White’s essays had helped form in the public imagination. “Suburbanized,” one Mainer sniffed at me when I mentioned how spruced up the house was.

We went down the hall to White’s office, across the hall from his wife’s. The walls were still papered over with nautical maps, as they had been when he worked there—by the end, mostly answering letters like mine. The creepy feeling, the feeling of doing something a bit unseemly, returned and intensified as we climbed the stairs into the private rooms of the house.

“The Whites had separate bedrooms,” Mr. Gallant said. “And a room for the night nurse. After his wife died he didn’t want to be alone.” The bathrooms had been renovated to contemporary tastes, though I had no desire to look. Mr. Gallant turned and pushed on a door reverently. “And this is Mr. White’s bedroom.” Its window faced north. I could see the coon tree. Mr. Gallant opened the closet and showed me a rope ladder that had been rigged there, ready to toss out the window. “In case of fire,” he said. “I guess he was terrified of fire.” (From “Home-Coming”: “The fact that my chimney was on fire did not greatly surprise or depress me, as .  .  . I have learned to be ready for anything at any hour.”)

“Toward the end he was in bed most of the day. Joel would come and read to him—mostly from his own books and essays.” Hearing the words he had written long before, Mr. Gallant said, had a calming effect on the old man. Suddenly I thought this was the saddest piece of information I’d ever heard. “He died in here.” I turned and made for the staircase.

Outside we found Carl on the lawn, cajoling Mrs. Gallant into acrobatic poses, flowers in hand. She seemed reluctant but Carl was insistent. “Come on,” Mr. Gallant said to me. “One last thing to show you.” He led me down through the woods to the water—past the spot where White buried the pig from his essay “Death of a Pig.” (Don’t tell PETA.) A weathered boathouse stood on the shore. This was where he liked to work, weather permitting. Jill Krementz—one of the pretty women who made it past the driveway—took a much-reproduced photo of White in his boathouse, sitting before a typewriter at the desk he had made for himself, with the cove showing through the open window. The Gallants took care to keep the boathouse much as he left it. They had even found the little wooden barrel he kept for waste paper.

Carl joined us, clicking madly. I ducked into the boathouse. A breeze came off the bay and into the room, where at last there was a smell of age and living, a place beyond the devitalizing hand of Martha Stewart and home decor. Carl took a picture of the Gallants at the doorway and then turned to me. “There,” he said, pointing. “Have a seat.” He meant the same bench where White had sat for Krementz, in the fullness of age, at the close of an honorable career, bent over his typewriter with the light bouncing off the bay.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “No typewriter.” No typewriter, and no good reason to be imitating E. B. White. “Go on,” Carl said. “Maybe the magazine can use it on the contributors page.” I sat on the bench and instantly regretted it. I popped up, thinking, “Nope, too much, too much.” I might have even said it aloud.

The magazine paid for lunch at a local fish joint, and then I said goodbye to the Gallants and to Carl. I still had the number Angell had given me for Henry Allen, the caretaker, but I didn’t call him. That night at the inn, since it was my last dinner, the host suggested I might like to sit in “Mr. White’s seat.” I told him I’d pass and took a table across the room.

After dinner I worked out a draft of my 700 words. I got into it nothing of what I was feeling, as a reader, as an admirer, as an intruder. It was fine but false—lacquered newsmagazine prose and utterly artificial. I got up early the next morning and checked out and almost forgot the canvas bag that contained every book that I owned by E. B. White. I found it and threw it into the back of the rental car. In there, right in the bag, was all I needed to know of him, or was entitled to know.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.