Remembering E.B. White

E.B. White begins an essay called “Removal” this way: Several months ago, finding myself in possession of one hundred and seventeen chairs divided about evenly between a city house and a country house, and desiring to simplify my life, I sold half my worldly goods, evacuated the city house, gave up my employment, and came to live in New England.

One hundred years after the birth of Elwyn Brooks White, on July 11, 1899, is a fitting time to remember that New York City’s loss was Brooklin’s gain. His move to Maine may have seemed strange to his urban neighbors, many of whom at that time looked upon Connecticut as wilderness, but his decision left Brooklin and this state with an unparalleled chronicle of one man’s life. His witty, insightful stories and essays have lost none of their strength over time.

It is hard to say how E.B. White is best known. Certainly, his children’s stories — Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little — are still read often. His collection of essays from Harper’s Magazine, called One Man’s Meat, remains wonderful. His Notes and Comment pieces and casuals from the New Yorker magazine, so clear and pointed, show how far the magazine has fallen since his generation inhabited its pages. Other works, especially The Second Tree from the Corner, demonstrate his range and versatility.

But for sheer usefulness, for a delightful understanding of language put to its best use, nothing beats The Elements of Style. The book was not his alone, of course, and many grateful owners refer to it simply as “Strunk and White,” an unintended professor-student collaboration that continues to ably serve both groups.

William Strunk Jr. taught at Cornell, where Mr. White was a student and where generations of students used the professor’s small book of grammar. Thirty-five years later and well after Mr. Strunk’s death, the famous student was asked to revise it. He did, adding his own thoughts on style and an introduction that serves as an excellent example of why this still-thin, finely honed razor of a book remains vital. Part of it reads as follows:

” `Omit needless words!’ cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he seemed in the position of shortchanging himself – a man with nothing more to say yet time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and, in a husky conspiratorial voice, said, `Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!’ ”

Start quoting passages of E.B. White and you will find it difficult to stop, although space and copyright laws keep things from getting out of hand. Better to suggest, in precise and unambiguous phrasing, that readers review any of Mr. White’s work and see for themselves the treasure we had in Brooklin.