[4/13/2011] E. B. White Tonight: Foreword (1954) and Introduction (1984) to "The Second Tree from the Corner" (continued)

"Now, thirty years later, I am again at work writing some introductory remarks for the same book, a man who publicly took his departure three decades ago and who, being still alive, is so hopelessly off schedule as to appear ridiculous in the eyes of the reader. 'Goodbye, goodbye!' I sobbed in 1954 and then failed to disappear."

-- from the 1984 Introduction

IN WHICH ORDER SHOULD WE PRESENT THE
1954 AND 1984 PREFACES TO SECOND TREE?

I didn't think about this seemingly obvious question when I first had the idea of posting them together. It seemed obvious that they should be read in the order in which they were written: 1954 first, and then the 30-years-later reflection on it. But a case can be made for starting with the more mature reflection, and that, after all, is the order in which White and/or the publisher decided to present them in the 1984 edition.

With a little scrolling you can take your pick, of course. I'm going to stick with my original impulse: 1954 followed by 1984.

Foreword to The Second Tree
from the Corner (1954)

A tendency to revisit, to try old places and other times in the hope of tasting again the sweet sorrow of parting, is discernible in these pages. The book, in some of its stretches, is a sentimental journey to the scenes of my crime. I am a goodbye sayer, too, it would appear from the evidence. There is an account of my bidding goodbye to a complete stranger in a barbershop merely because he is leaving; and as I look over this book that I have assembled from so many spare parts, I can't escape the disturbing realization that the whole thing carries an undertone of indiscriminate farewell. I even knock off the planet Earth at one point, in an attempt to tidy up the empyrean before somebody else does it for me. A man who is over fifty, as am I, is sure that he has only about twenty minutes to live, and it is natural, I suppose, that he should feel disposed to put his affairs in order, such as they are, to harvest what fruit he has not already picked up and stored away against the winter, and to tie his love for the world into a convenient bundle, accessible to all.

Whoever sets pen to paper writes of himself, whether knowingly or not, and this is a book of revelations: essays, poems, stories, opinions, reports, drawn from the past, the present, the future, the city, and the country. I could have called it "Weird Confessions" as well as not, but "The Second Tree from the Corner" sounds more genteel and is, in addition, the title of one of the pieces (the one where the fellow says goodbye to sanity).

Assembling the book has been a sobering experience, revealing, as it has, a man unable to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time, untouched by the dedication required for sustained literary endeavor, yet unable not to write. However, I do not come to this foreword in a spirit of derogation or with any idea of offering alibis. If these collected writings resemble a dog's breakfast, I shall insist that it is because of my unusual understanding of dogs and my sympathy for them in their morning problems.

For the most part I have aimed to select material that is not too dependent on the immediate events or portents that inspired it. In three of the chapters, the reader will encounter a section of notes that were published first in the Notes and Comment page of The New Yorker. [At right is the first paragraph of the original published version, in The New Yorker of Dec. 8, 1951, of that remarkable essay "Air Raid Drill," which we read Sunday night. -- Ed.] 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. Once in a while the reader will stumble on some antique ghost like Hitler, pottering about as though still alive, and will get a momentary jolt. But I am not one to pamper readers, and don't want them daydreaming their way through this book like drivers on a superhighway. This books twists and turns. Go carefully, and remember: the time you save may be your own.

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.

Most of the material in the book is presented in exactly the form in which it originally appeared. In a few places I've made slight revisions. Here and there I change a "which" to a "that," in memory of H. W. Ross, who cared deeply about the matter -- so deeply, in fact, that I still wince every time I discover myself violating the rule he loved so well. In a couple of places I have changed proper names, for symmetry, or for variety, or to save real people the possible embarrassment of being associated with me in my off-color enterprises.

Although as an observer I try to keep abreast of events, it is a losing game. Progress, deeds, overtake a man. Somebody (I think it was I) once remarked that today's fantasy is tomorrow's news event. The pages that follow confirm the truth of the remark. The future pales into the present. The space platform is old hat. Calculating machines are suffering nervous breakdowns. I wrote the "Song of the Queen Bee" on the strength of information from the Department of Agriculture that bees had not been inseminated by artificial means; but although I composed the poem during lunch hour, and lost not a moment turning it in, it had hardly been off the press when a Life photographer sent me graphic evidence that bees had gone the way of all modern flesh. I think there has never been an age more cruel to writers than this one -- rendering their stuff obsolete almost before it escapes from the typewriter. On the other hand, human nature is fairly steady and almost changeless: the first piece in the chapter called "Time Present" was written a number of years ago, during the Second World War, but it belongs to the present, and as I reread it I saw that time had stood still.

A book should be the occasion of rejoicing, but it is seldom that, imparting a feeling of completion but not of satisfaction. I suppose a writer, almost by definition, is a person incapable of satisfaction -- which is what keeps him at his post. Let us just say that I have tidied up my desk a bit, and flung out a few noisy and ill-timed farewells, like a drunk at a wedding he is enjoying to the hilt and has no real intention of leaving.

—E. B. W.

Introduction to The Second Tree
from the Corner (1984)

Thirty years ago, I sat down one day and wrote the foreword for a book of mine to be called The Second Tree from the Corner -- a collection of odd (some of them very odd) pieces. The book came out, and I gather it is about to come out again. In that 1954 foreword, which will be retained in the new edition, I noted that the book seemed to carry an undertone of indiscriminate farewell. It was to be my swan song, in which I bade goodbye to everybody and every thing. I had grown old -- I was fifty-four -- and was bathed in the "sweet sorrow of parting." By putting the book together, I was neatening up my affairs, preparatory to the death that I assumed was imminent.

Now, thirty years later, I am again at work writing some introductory remarks for the same book, a man who publicly took his departure three decades ago and who, being still alive, is so hopelessly off schedule as to appear ridiculous in the eyes of the reader. "Goodbye, goodbye!" I sobbed in 1954 and then failed to disappear. It is unnerving, and the whole business puts a heavy strain on a man of my advanced age, to find that he never seems to get done with anything in a clean-cut fashion and must write not just one introduction to a book but two.

I have not reread The Second Tree from the Corner in preparation for my current ordeal, but I have prowled around in its pages to see what is still afloat after so long a period of time and have been pleased to discover some old friends. I was glad to encounter Mrs. Wienckus again, the woman who was arrested in Newark, New Jersey, because she was found sleeping in two empty cartons in a hallway. She was arraigned, as some of you may remember, charged with being "disorderly." In all the years that have gone by since my report, I have never lost my admiration for Mrs. Wienckus. She had apparently eliminated everything she couldn't carry with her and had established her own kind of order. Her spirit, I am glad to report, still lives in our latter-day world. I have just been reading a newspaper account of a woman found living in a pup tent deep in the winter woods of Maine -- a blood sister to Mrs. Wienckus although of a different stripe. The game wardens who discovered this "tent woman," as she is now called, brought her out of the tent, took her into custody, and turned her over to a mental health institution, presumably because the tiny tent contained nothing much to suggest a civilized life, not even a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue in whose pages she could have learned of the many conveniences that are available today to any right-minded woman -- a portable dry-ice maker, an ultra-sonic cool-mist humidifier, an English heated towel stand, an electronic wine guide, a digital alarm pillbox, an electric kitty litterbox, an oversized electric heating pad, and a cordless electric peppermill. To the wardens the tent must have seemed bare indeed. The woman kept warm at night by heating stones over a small fire and putting them in her sleeping bag. The woods were cold but not the woman. When found she was in good condition. It is encouraging to know that the spirit of Mrs. Wienckus lives on into these desperate days, even though the two women are unlike in other respects.

Another character in The Second Tree whom I was glad to greet again was Don Marquis, whose work I tip my hat to in "The Wonderful World of Letters" section of the book. The literary arbiters of Marquis's day never put much stock in him as a poet, but I thought he was greatly endowed. It would now appear that he had another admirer in John F. Kennedy. It was to Marquis that Kennedy apparently turned when he was writing his inaugural address. The famous passage that begins, "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ." is right out of Marquis's poem about Warty Bliggens, the toad. Warty, at ease beneath his toadstool, considered himself to be the center of the universe. The earth existed to grow toadstools for him to sit under, the sun to give him light by day, and the moon and wheeling constellations to make beautiful the night for the sake of Warty Bliggens. You will remember that when they asked the toad to what act of his he imputed this interest on the part of the creator, Warty replied, "Ask rather what the universe has done to deserve me." Kennedy couldn't pass up a chance like that, and the passage turned out to be the high point in his maiden address to the nation. Looking back to those happier days, I feel a renewed surge of affection for the author of archy.

Well, the years have flown by, the world has not stood still. I sometimes draw the curtain against the twilight, but it would be fatuous of me to apologize for my being alive. A much greater miracle is that the book itself is still alive. One of the characters in the book predicted, thirty years ago, that in fifty years only five percent of the people would be reading. I have no statistics at hand that would either support or contradict this prophecy, but I do know that last year (1983) the average family in America watched seven hours of television a day, and it is reasonable to assume that, whatever else they were doing as they sat before the screen, they weren't reading.

Reading, however, is obviously not dead -- a staggering number of books and non-books is published every year. Another character in this book of mine -- the poet for January in the Old Farmer's Almanac -- felt more optimistic about the future of reading than did the prophet quoted above, who would have us down to five percent by the close of the century. The poet, after taking a good look at the twilight,

Where all's collapse and chaos, now,
And dust of these obscures the sun . . .

advises the reader to

. . . take your stand and stay to see
The wild and frightened and absurd
Collapsing chaos turn and flee
Before the grave compulsive word.

As far back as 1954, I thought that was good advice. After a lapse of thirty years, I still think so. One rarely meets the grave compulsive word on the TV screen. To encounter it, one sits down and opens the pages of a book.

-- E. B. W.

February 1984

RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

#