E.B. and me
In 1938, E.B. White moved to Hancock County, Maine, to take up the farming life and write a magazine column called "One Man's Meat." In 1942 he published a collection under that title. The book is still in print, from Tilbury House, a Maine specialist. I read it when I was 20, and so loved its style and wit that I wrote to White. He kindly replied in a letter, which I still have. "I quite agree with you," he wrote, "that a writer hasn't much of a show if he lacks respect for his ability to think and put a value on things. He also has to have the stomach to entertain a few self-doubts at teatime."
It's gratifying to know that E.B. White quite agreed with me on a literary matter, but since I have no memory of my letter, I can only imagine what fatuous pronouncement elicited his genial response. The message is clear enough: You're foreclosed as a writer if you don't believe in what you're writing. Stay alert to vanity or smugness, however.
One of the finest pieces in "One Man's Meat" is "Memorandum," an account in nimble prose of about 120 jobs needing attention around the farm, such as "tighten the packing nut on the water pump so it won't leak," earmark two new lambs, replace the burned-out bulb in the woodshed, build new stands for the hens, etc. My favorite is, "I've also got to write a letter today to a publisher who wrote me asking what happened to the book manuscript I was supposed to turn in a year ago last spring, and I also should take the green chair in the living room to Eliot Sweet so that he can put in some little buttons that keep coming out all the time." Such a phrase as "I ought to" or "I should" begins almost every item, leaving doubt whether all or any of them got done.
I can identify now, far better than I could at age 20, with the endless queue of waiting tasks. Pull the weeds, sand and paint the dory, spray that hornet's nest, paint the replaced clapboard, waterproof the little deck. Not only chores, but pleasures, too. Grandchildren to dandle and read to, people and movies to see, music to listen to, birds and wildflowers and art to savor, gifts to buy, cities to visit, trout to catch. And big things: finish that research, read (oh, so many!) and write those books. Contemplating these, and feeling like Andy White with his farm chores, it astonishes me to remember how crushingly bored I was as a young person.
I wonder now, how was that possible? Didn't kids without iPods and video games come up with their own entertainments? Yes, in winter we sledded after snowstorms and skated if the ponds were clear. In summer we played hide-and-seek and pickup ball games, fished off the town pier, went to the beach and to the library to take out books, but still I remember vast stretches of time dominated by that gnawing feeling of boredom. Ceaselessly I would moan, "There's nothing to do!"
I have come to think that boredom is a young person's complaint. You don't have the power to pursue your own plans and ambitions as adults do. Your dreams are mostly impractical fantasies. Other people arrange your life; they say, "you must do this," but "you can't do that." Since you can't do the latter and don't want to do the former, you're suspended in a boring no-man's land.
Besides that suspension, there is the young person's sense of time, which seems to open out ahead endlessly, like the ocean seen from shore. When I was 14, how I yearned to be 16 and get my driver's license, and what light-years away that venerable age seemed. If only time would move. "I'll never get through high school," I said. "God, three more whole years!"
Now, of course, it's just the opposite. Diminishing time whizzes past like a shooting star. You look at the calendar, not to mention the mirror, and begin compulsively, like E.B. White, to make lists of things you ought or want to do, aware of how little time there is to do them in.
Come to think of it, this might be one of the mature sensibilities hidden in White's message to me. No, you can't have perfect assurance about whatever task you're facing. You might not get it done. But you're on deadline. Better get started.
