[4/10/2011] E. B. White Tonight: A brilliant essayist who essayed funny, and my go-to E.B.W. demo piece, "Air Raid Drill" (continued)

"Air Raid Drill" originated as a New Yorker "Notes and Comment" piece, of which White contributed so many over the years. "Notes and Comment" pieces were always unsigned, and to readers probably appeared as "editorials" -- i.e., as expressions of the voice of the magazine. In fact, the views expressed by White were entirely his own. Luckily, when he was preparing the invaluable 1954 anthology of his writing, The Second Tree from the Corner, he sought and received permission to include many of his "Notes and Comment" pieces under his own name, which make up a substantial portion of the book.

Later in the week we're going to have both the Foreword that White wrote for the original 1954 edition of The Second Tree and the remarkable Introduction to the new 1984 edition that was published as part of Harper & Row's extensive series of new editions of his work. For tonight, I want to quote some notes White included in the 1954 Foreword concerning the pieces that originated as notes for "Notes and Comment":

These are, of course, couched in the first person plural, a device as commonplace in journalism as it is harebrained. I do not know how the editorial "we" originated, but I think it must first have been employed in an effort to express a corporate or institutional opinion and that in no time at all the individual charged with formulating this opinion forgot all about his basic responsibility and got talking about himself and peddling his personal prejudices, retaining the "we" and thus giving the impression that the stuff was written by a set of identical twins or the members of a tumbling act. There is nothing I can do about this, and the reader is advised to dismiss it from his mind.

I have not dated the notes, preferring to depend on the reader's perspicacity and good will. Whenever I came across a note that seemed unintelligible without a date, I simply threw it out, serving it right and teaching myself a lesson. . . .

Incidentally, the publication over my signature of items that formed part of the New Yorker's anonymous editorial page is not to be taken as an indication that I am the fellow responsible for that page. The page is the work of many. I am one of the contributors to it. I feel greatly indebted to the magazine for its willingness to let me use these paragraphs, for when something is published first anonymously and then later an author is unveiled, the public draws wrong conclusions about the workings of a magazine and tends to give credit where credit is not due. Theoretically, it is a mistake to break anonymity, and though I am guilty of it, I commit the sin knowingly and for selfish reasons.

I don't think I agree with White's decision not to include dates for the "Notes and Comment" pieces. I've always felt that "Air Raid Drill" suffers particularly from the absence of a date, since our relationship to the nuclear menace evolved over time. Of course, I would have hated it if White had felt the same way and tossed the piece according to his odd criterion of not including pieces that he felt required a date.

In any case, the readily available New Yorker index made it a snap to unearth the date. "Air Raid Drill" appeared originally in The New Yorker of Dec. 8, 1951.

Air Raid Drill

(from The Second Tree from the Corner)

Five minutes after the all-clear sounded, everyone on our floor of The New Yorker offices was back at work. Nobody escaped, in the confusion, to another part of the city or to another planet; nobody tried to prolong the recess period in order to savor his freedom; none seemed desirous of meditating on the heavy implications of an A-bomb drill. To slip back into harness -- that was the compelling aim. It was the same story all through the city -- eight million well-behaved citizens, docile as lambs, huddled in hallways and tunnels while a hush fell over all. The city fathers were delighted, as indeed they might be. Yet how discouraging, really, such behavior is! It might have been more promising for the future had we all rushed wildly into the streets, punched wardens in the nose, and screamed our defiance of the implausible and crazy design that had led us to this pretty pass. But there was no sign of that. Only one fellow, of all we heard about, questioned the normality of eight million people creeping into the walls like mice. He stepped out on Broadway, gazed up and down, and asked, "What's this -- something new?"

We inmates of the nineteenth floor were supposed to proceed, by easy stages, to the tenth floor, and that is exactly what we did. Bubbling with good spirits and bright as birds, we assembled at the elevators and were piped aboard, in lots of a dozen, for the weird descent to the survival chamber, or tenth-floor corridor. This descent from the nineteenth to the tenth is, in our building, the dodge that has been agreed upon as the means of eluding the atom -- a queer piece of magic but one that is probably as good as any other. The tenth floor is an important station on the lift, being the first express stop, and in a few minutes the corridor of the tenth was full of people. Cars discharged passengers briskly. There was an overtone of uneasy mirth, rising to a slightly exaggerated pitch, as though each of us had had one cocktail. There was a temptation to clown, reminiscent of grammar-school days, when a fire drill brought sudden relief from classroom tedium. Underneath the mirth and chatter, easily discernible in the faces, was the deep current of loneliness, of fear -- the imagination, carefully controlled at the surface level, operating miles down in the dark unfathomable regions.

Our descent from the nineteenth floor to the tenth floor was, we realized, a drop not of nine flights but of eight. This building has no floor called "13"; hence the "fourteenth" floor is a euphemism, and all the other floors above the twelfth are numbered not by a system of mathematics but by witchcraft. In our descent, then, in the cheerful lift, we not only had to evade an atomic explosion by taking a short journey but we had to subtract ten from nineteen and get eight. It occurred to us, gliding by the thirteenth floor and seeing the numeral "14" painted on it, that our atom-splitting scientists had committed the error of impatience and had run on ahead of the rest of the human race. They had dared look into the core of the sun, and had fiddled with it; but it might have been a good idea if they had waited to do that until the rest of us could look the number 13 square in the face. Such is the true nature of our peculiar dilemma.

For a minute or two during our sojourn on the tenth floor, we tried to take stock of our life, tried to understand what had brought us to this ignominious pass. We wondered whether the very qualities that are so generally admired -- industry, ingenuity, loyalty, faith -- whether they had not played a big part in it. Centuries of good behavior, centuries of brilliant achievement in the arts and sciences, and we take cover in a steel-and-plaster corridor, standing erect and tractable in fantastic assemblage, next to those we love, to await the messy results of some basic mismanagement, some distant fury, some essential cruelty and bestiality.

The papers reported that millions of dollars in manpower were lost by the quiescence of eight million persons. For fifteen minutes, wealth ran down the drain. This, like the missing thirteenth floor, was a mathematical enigma that stopped us cold. What happened, exactly? Who lost what? How can anyone say for sure that millions of dollars were lost? Probably the dollars, like the people, were not lost -- just deeply troubled. Like the people, the dollars stood still for a brief while. For a quarter of an hour, no citizen, no dollar, did anything much. Travel, busy-ness, creation, connivance, promotion, shopping -- all were at low ebb. It was eerie, but it was not necessarily a loss. The Consolidated Edison Company noted a sharp dip in the curve of kilowattage, giving stockholders a nasty turn but relieving consumers of fifteen minutes of expensive electrical existence. It was one of those intense moments (as at midnight on December 31st) when it is hard to say what, precisely, is taking place. People are so addicted to activity that the sudden stoppage of it gives them a quick sense of something being wrong, when, in point of fact, it may be the beginning of something being right.

A fellow we stood next to in the corridor, and who survived, confided to us that the drill was costing The New Yorker a pretty penny, because at that very moment a couple of high-priced lawyers were in the office and they were being paid by the hour. But what he failed to say was whether the advice they were peddling was good or bad. If it should turn out to be bad, then every minute they were rendered inarticulate was so much gain. We regard the published estimates of community loss during the test as highly suspect. Who knows? Maybe if everybody in the world stood still for a quarter of an hour and looked into the eyes of the next man, the mischief would come to an end.


AFTERTHOUGHT: I SUPPOSE I SHOULD
HAVE DONE MORE HIGHLIGHTING, BUT . . .

For example, in that previous post I wrote about this piece, I remember I called attention -- in addition to the two chunks I quoted at the top of this post -- to the last graf, in which White raises the question, regarding the lawyers reported to have been running up a tab in the magazine offices during the drill, "whether the advice they were peddling wag good or bad." ("If it should turn out to be bad, then every minute they were rendered inarticulate was so much gain.")

The thing is, every time I read this piece -- and by now I must have read it hundreds of times -- I find myself wanting to highlight every single sentence. Even writing on The New Yorker's tight weekly deadlines, White generally did a lot of rewriting, and the result is usually writing as notable for economy as for illumination. I really don't see a word wasted in "Air Raid Drill," and hardly a sentence that wouldn't be most other writers' "most quoted ever." -- Ken


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