A Conversation With Robert Root On February 6, Gotham Gazette held an online chat with Robert Root, author of E.B. White, The Emergence of an Essayist.
Gotham Gazette:
Welcome everyone, and thanks for coming. Today we are discussing E.B. White’s Here is New York with special guest Robert Root, author of E.B. White, The Emergence of an Essayist.
GG:
Good afternoon, Mr Root.
GG:
Good afternoon, everyone.
Robert Root
Good afternoon. I'm happy to be here.
GG:
Please feel free to send in any questions or comments about E.B. White’s Here is New York.
GG:
Mr. Root, briefly, how did you become interested in E.B. White? What do you think is unique about White as an American essayist?
Root:
That's a long story which I'll try to make short. E. B. White was someone whose essay, "Once More to the Lake" I read about thirty years ago. It was the greatest American essay, though I didn't know it then, and it moved me. It was about going back to a place he treasured as a child with his own son. I was a new father and connected with it. Later on, I was a writing teacher. White's prose style has always taught me a lot about how to use the language, so eventually I gravitated into researching his career. That was the start of my writing about him and led to the book I wrote.
GG:
E.B. White wrote Here is New York in 1949. Yet many of the essay’s themes and points are current for a 2003 reader. What has enabled White's essay to endure?
Root:
I think White was good at putting his finger on the essential qualities of everyday living. He was observant and interested in small things. The small things in life may be the things that endure. He also had an elegiac streak. Many of his best essays are about what's lost or what's losable, like Once More to the Lake and The Ring of Time. He was also a principled individual, and maybe principles of a certain kind are also enduring.
Edgewater:
His style seems to have influenced a lot of writers. Who were his influences? And can you think of any contemporary writers he's influenced?
Root:
He mentions some of his influences in Here is New York. He was influenced very much by Thoreau but also by New York writers, the colyumists as they were called. These included F.P.A. (Franklin Pierce Adams), Christopher Morley, Don Marquis, and Heywood Broun. The people influenced by him are most of the people who admired the Talk of the Town, especially Notes and Comment, in The New Yorker. Writers like Joseph Epstein and Philip Lopate think of Once More to the Lake as indispensable. It's clear that Adam Gopnick has read White. Susan Allen Toth has written admiringly of him as well.
MartinB:
What do you think would surprise E.B. White about modern day New York City? "Here is New York" seems to account for everything from the ever-increasing clutter of city restaurants during lunchtime to a possible terrorist attack.
Root:
I'm not sure much would surprise him. In another article, "Rediscovery," in The Second Tree From the Corner, he wrote this about the city: Sometimes our affection for New York becomes dulled by familiarity. No building seems high, no subway miraculous, no avenue enchanted. All, all commonplace. Then in a moment of rediscovery, it is as though we were meeting the city again for the first time. White knew the city's power to renew itself and he spent thirty years there watching it do just that.
GG:
Gene Russianoff asks, "White's chillingly accurate words on the city's vulnerability 50 years ago leads me to ask: What do you think White would have thought of the September 11th attack on the city? Can you guess what White would have thought should happen now in lower Manhattan?"
Root:
It's risky to try to put words in another writer's mouth. White would have been deeply aggrieved by the loss of life and the horror of the attack. He had predicted such a thing but he didn't hope it would happen. He was haunted by the atom bomb and wrote often about the fear it had brought into the world. He wanted more care taken to assure such weapons weren't used. As for what he would want as a memorial, I'm sure it would be something simple, beautiful, moving. In his book, The Wild Flag, he thought all countries should adopt the iris as their national symbol, a universal and uniting symbol, something shared. In the end of Here is New York he spoke about that old willow tree. Whatever he would recommend it would be something that made us value life on the planet.
GG:
Joe Rosenbaum asks: Were his comments about the U.N. and the diversity and nonviolence of the city his response to the dangers of war and how war had changed during and after World War II?
Root:
Yes, I think they were. He advocated World Government in The Wild Flag, giving more teeth to an outfit like the United Nations. Even as WWII was winding down he argued for a world system of justice, not merely revenge, not merely vigilantism. He wanted to think that there was a possibility of lasting peace after the war and it troubled him even as it ended that we and other nations were thinking of ourselves as loners rather than part of a world community. Of course, as anyone who has read him knows, he was a gentle man, accepting of the way of the world. His great children's book, Charlotte's Web, is accepting of death as part of life but it teaches respect for all living things.
GG:
A question for Mr. Root and the audience: are there specific elements of E.B. White’s vision of New York that are no longer true for the city today?
Root:
I'm originally a western New York boy and now a Michigander. That's not a question I can answer.
Gail:
White's essay shows a great love for the city yet he chose to leave it and live much of his life in rural Maine -- sort of the antithesis of Manhattan. What made him leave the city?
Root:
White was in love with rural life as well as in love with New York. One of the amusing things about his writing is how he tried to bring country values to the city and city references to the country. In a couple of books there are essays about leaving the city or returning to the country--Removal at the start of One Man's Meat, Goodbye to 48th Street in The Points of My Compass. He originally went to Maine because he wanted to do something more than his weekly grind for The New Yorker. He wrote Notes and Comment for ten years straight by 1938. He ended up writing a column for Harper's from Maine, which became the book One Man's Meat, then returned to New York when the New Yorker became short handed during the war. He liked the simpler life on the farm in Maine, the values his son was learning from rural people, but he stayed on at the New Yorker until his wife Katharine retired in 1957. She was a fiction writer at the magazine and an important influence on it in her own right. From that point on he lived mostly in Maine and wrote somewhat less.
Michael McCall:
In the essay, he writes about three different kinds of New Yorkers. The people who were born here, who move here, and commuters. Who do you think White identified with most?
Root:
At one point in the book he calls himself a transient, a vagabond. He had moved to the city after growing up outside of the city and had been a frequent visitor as a child. In that sense, and in his travels to Maine and back, he was like a commuter. But he also moved into the city as a young man to make his mark. He said he had lived in eight different places over thirty years--four digs in the Village, one in Murray Hill, three in Turtle Bay. In that sense he was an immigrant. The strength of his little book is his ability to identify with everyone.
GG:
Arlene Herring asks: Why do you think White wrote children's books?
Root:
The children's books started as stories he told his son Joel and his stepchildren Roger Angell and Nancy Angell. But they also have an autobiographical side. Stuart Little even looks like E. B. White, the youngest of six children, and a small man. Stuart has White's love of sailing, love of the outdoors, devotion to heading north, and his beloved bird, Margo, has many of the qualities of Katharine. Charlotte's Web of course is set on his farm, in his barn, the same setting as his true-life essay, Death of a Pig. The Trumpet of the Swan, with Louis trying to redeem his family after his father's theft of a trumpet, connects to the shame of accusations against his father when White was young. I think his children's fiction was a way for him to write about things very close to him that he was too shy or reserved or well-mannered to approach in his essays, particularly when the essays were written for public magazines. By that I mean, White tried to be timely and current and relevant in what he wrote, no matter how personal. The children's books are timeless.
Gail:
Stuart Little is set in New York and seems to show that a childhood here can be exciting. What else do you think the book says about White's attitudes toward NYC?
Root:
It's been a long time since I read it but I was struck by the inclusion of the natural world in the city setting. White used to walk the streets of New York a lot looking for ideas for Notes and Comment. Often he looked to nature. One of his pieces, called the Rock Dove, was started trying to answer questions about pigeons. White clearly had observed a great deal about them, where they lived, what their lives were like. In a short piece called Transient he noticed a thrush in the garden and wrote this about the city: The city is the place for people who like life in tablet form, concentrated: a forest resolved into a single tree, a lake distilled into a fountain, and all the birds of the air embodied in one transient thrush in a small garden. I think he gets that feeling in the Central Park scenes in Stuart Little.
GG:
Arlene Herring asks: How does his style differ from Joseph Mitchell's in his New York essay Up in the Old Hotel? They both seem to have written by ear.
Root:
Yes, they are both fine writers and both influential now when there is great interest in what we call literary or creative nonfiction. Mitchell was more of a reporter, his style plainer, more direct, his presence in the piece less pronounced. White often took greater risks with the language, his ear was more directed toward the music of the language. As you said, White claimed to write by ear, "with little idea of what's under the hood." That's why he's so good to read aloud. Like Thoreau his prose often sang.
GG:
Do you have a favorite passage from Here Is New York? Can you share it with us, and explain why you like it so much.
Root:
My favorite passage is in the middle of the book. I'm looking at page 40 of the new edition with White's picture on the cover.
Root:
It's a long section that begins: It is seven o'clock and I re-examine an ex-speakeasy in East 53rd Street, with dinner in mind... All throughout this section of the book White gives us a tour of several blocks in Manhattan. It's told in first person, in present tense. I like that particularly because it reminds me that most of the literary devices most of us use now as if they were news, White was doing fifty, seventy years ago. But I also love the immediacy of the moment, the sense that he is in the streets, recording what he observes, and how alive the streets of New York come for the reader in that passage. Notice a page later where the cornet player and the Queen Mary play a duet. The section runs to page 46, and all of it is very evocative and immediate. White is able to generalize, as when describes the three New Yorks and what distinguishes them, but he is also able to personalize his own experience of the city. I'd like to see someone--say, Adam Gopnick or John McPhee--walk the same streets and write up what the experience is like now.
Root:
In a sense that's what Steve Doughterty did in The New York Times on December 13, 2002. He went back to the Turtle Bay Gardens looking for that willow tree that ends Here is New York. It too has great immediacy and connects back to White's writing in ways that enrich Doughterty's.
GG:
Last question: for people that enjoyed this book and are looking for books in similar vein, what would you suggest?
Root:
There are a number of new series about place. Edmund White's The Flaneur about Paris, Michael Cunningham's Land's End, about Provincetown, David Levitt's book about Florence. Of course Joseph Mitchell's The Bottom of the Harbor, also included in Up in the Old Hotel. Adam Gopnick's Paris to the Moon. Vivian Gornick and Phillip Lopate and Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City. Those are city books that spring immediately to mind.
GG:
Thanks for dropping by everyone, and thank you, Mr. Root.
Root:
I'm happy to have the opportunity. Thanks for asking me.

|
This website is brought to you by Citizens Union
Foundation. It was made possible by a grant from the Charles Revson
Foundation, and receives support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New
York Times Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Altman Foundation, and viewers like you. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution.
|
|