"A Way With Words"

All writers have one.

But they are not equally… the thing you feel after you’ve read them.

Writers are not ranked like racehorses.

It’s an individual reaction.  More or less.

My reaction's admiration and smiles, reading E.B. White.

Of the legendary Charlotte’s Web.

A book has to be good to make you care about spiders.

On a recent trip to New York, we dropped in on the “Tenement Museum”, charting the immigrant experience in erstwhile Manhattan.  Awaiting a tour of a restored “Period” Apartment”, I bought a slim book entitled, Here is New York, written by E.B. White, whose work I enjoy even when he’s not writing about farm animals.

Published in 1949 (and republished 1999), Here is New York is a reworking of a magazine article written in 1948; it’s subject – a man perambulating New York, chronicling musings and noticings.  

Showing his hand about the way things are going, White announces a refusal to bring his rewritten article “down to date.” 

I did not buy Here is New York to learn things.

I came for the words.

Hovering on the outskirts of poetry, White sketches views and vignettes in a way where, although the subject is of shrugging importance, you still marvel at the approach.

Some random examples:

“No one should come to New York unless he is willing to be lucky.”

The inevitable impact of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade:

“… the Irish are a hard race to tune out, there are 500,000 of them in residence, and they have the police force right in the family.”

Showcasing “Urban Immigrants” White labels, “young worshipful beginners”:

“… whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

The elasticity of “Traveling Distance.”

  

“Irving Berlin’s journey from Cherry Street on the Lower East Side to an apartment uptown was through an alley and was only three or four miles in length; but it was like going three times around the world.”

About a former “speakeasy”:

“How dark, how pleasing; and how miraculously beautiful the murals showing Italian lake scenes – probably executed by a cousin of the owner.”

 “… a cousin of the owner.”  Can you believe that?

About the skid row Bowery:

“The glib barker on a sight-seeing bus tells his passengers that this is the ‘street of lost souls’ but the Bowery does not think of itself as lost; it meets its peculiar problem in its own way – plenty of gin mills, plenty of flophouses, plenty of indifference, and always, at the end of the line, Bellevue.” (A public hospital in Manhattan.)

Describing a tenement area open-air dance:

“Women push baby carriages in and out among the dancers, as though to exhibit what dancing leads to at last.”

There are scads of other glittering concoctions, but I had better quit now. 

Seven examples, and it’s plagiarism.

Informed by his editor he might “have fun” writing about New York, White replied, grumpily – or perhaps just correctingly:

“Writing is never ‘fun’.”

Another elevating distinction.

He makes it feel like it is.