How do we judge "value" for services rendered? Eventually we'll get to some imperishable thoughts from E. B. White

"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 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."

-- E. B. White, in "Air Raid Drill," included in the

anthology The Second Tree from the Corner

by Ken

Earlier today we were talking about the tricky process of putting a dollar value on services rendered. At that time I promised some follow-up thoughts on the subject from one of my favorite writers, E. B. White.

I mentioned too that this will be finishing some DWT business.

Last February, contemplating the wildly overblown compensation of all those bankster and other corporate CEOs, I tried to propose a new system of payment based on a reasonable hourly wage for a strict 35-hour work week.

NOTE TO THOSE HERE FOR THE ECONOMIC
STUFF, NOT ENDLESS BLATHER ABOUT EBW . . .

. . . who is after all just some dead old writer, remembered now mostly as the author of the celebrated children's books Stuart Little, Charlottte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. (As a matter of fact, despite my near adulation of EBW, I've never been able to read more than a few pages of any of the children's books.) Those readers may scroll all the way down -- scroll, scroll, scroll -- to the section with the boldface subhead that begins: [SKIP TO HERE].

In trying to establish what might be a reasonable rate of compensation, I acknowledged a difficulty:

Unfortunately, I have to make do without a quote I would have like to introduce from a New Yorker "Notes and Comment" piece by E. B. White, I guess from the early '50s. Somehow my cheesy old Perennial issue of The Second Tree from the Corner (and also One Man's Meat) has mysteriously gone AWOL. I'm not pointing any fingers, just suggesting that anyone who knows anything about the vanished paperbacks would do well to spill his/her guts now rather than later. (Okay, so I've been watching too much Law and Order.)

The piece was an account of what I recall was a New York City-wide bomb-alert drill, in which, eerily, the entire city came to a standstill. I recall the report of a visitor unaware of the proceedings happening onto a no-longer-bustling city street and commenting, "What this, something new?" And I remember in particular White's report of calculations of economic loss from that "lost" hour.

In The New Yorker's own offices, the business people were lamenting that by bad luck they had the company's lawyers present (and presumably billing). And they had a dollar figure to put on that loss.

But that calculation of loss, White suggested, depended on the quality of the advice the lawyers were giving. If by chance it was poor advice, he pointed out, then missing out on an hour's worth of it actually put the magazine ahead.

It took me awhile, but eventually it occurred to me that between Amazon.com and eBay pretty much any book should be findable. I was amazed by how much White I found available, much if it at shockingly low prices.

I was even more amazed to discover that, unbeknownst to me these several decades, there had been a wonderful flowering, even explosion of the White bibliography following the publication of two new collections: Letters of E. B. White, in 1976 (edited by White's goddaughter Dorothy Lobrano Guth, the daughter of perhaps his closest friend, Cornell crony and onetime New Yorker managing editor Gus Lobrano), and Essays of E. B. White, in 1977. (The Essays collection was in fact prepared first but was delayed, on the thinking, which turned out to be correct, that the letters volume would be the bigger attention-getter and commercial draw.)

The development I missed entirely, and remained unaware of these several decades, was that in the late '70s and early '80s (which by coincidence were also the author's late 70s and early 80s, since he was born in 1899) Harper's, encouraged by the sales of the Letters, green-lighted a fantasic project dear to White's heart: a uniform edition of his writings, including both new and republished books, for all of which the author provided beautiful new introductions. It was also during this period that the gifted photographer Jill Krementz visited the White farm and took a lot of remarkable pictures of a singularly camera-shy subject, surely the best photos we have of him.

THE REVISED LETTERS: A FAMILY AFFAIR

There's also revised edition of the Letters, published after White's death (in 1985), adding letters from the last ten years of his life. The new edition, with a new introduction by John Updike, was "revised and updated" by the Whites' granddaughter, Martha, herself a professional editor and writer, and I imagine that her participation would have been a source of boundless pleasure to both Andy White and Martha's grandmother, the legendary New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, who died in 1977 -- as I recall, shortly after the Essays volume was published.

(In addition to all the White I've been reading in recent months, I've also been reading about EBW, including Scott Elledge's excellent 1985 biography, written with cooperation and comments on the manuscript from the subject, and also a fascinating book, Katharine and E. B. White: An Affectionate Memoir by Isabel Russell, the Whites' part-time secretary in the '70s, including the time when the Essays and Letters volumes were being put together. I've learned an enormous amount of stuff, which I've been managing to quickly forget.)

All of which is by way of saying that I've had the great pleasure of replacing my lost copies with the lovely "new" One Man's Meat (the collection of the remarkable essays White wrote for Harper's magazine in 1938-43, when he lived year-round on his saltwater farm in Maine; it's now available in a 1997 edition) and Second Tree from the Corner (which seems to be out of print again, though there are zillions of copies available online; just be sure to get an edition based on the 1984 one, which includes not just White's original 1954 foreword but the new introduction he wrote in February of that year, which I think may have been the last thing he wrote for publication), not to mention a bunch of other books.

Not that I'm bragging or anything, but I'm relieved to find that my recollection of that piece, written originally for The New Yorker's unsigned "Notes and Comment" section, was pretty good. The piece, sure enough, is titled, "Air Raid Drill" (still, frustratingly, undated, so I'll stick with my earlier guess) and begins:

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.

White himself rather regretted the orderliness of this extraordinary event, noting:

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?"

In White's case, the drill involved evacuation -- from the 19th floor to the 10th.

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 . . . 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 descent from the 19th floor to the 10th, he notes, is --

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 cheeful 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.

[This leads directly into the passage I've quoted at the top of this post.]

[SKIP TO HERE] OKAY, WE'RE FINALLY AT
THE PART ABOUT THE ECONOMIC ISSUES

Are we all back together? Okay, let's proceed:

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. . . . It was eerie, but it was not necessarily a loss. The Consolidated Edison Company noted a sharp drop in the curve of kilowattage, giving stockholders a nasty turn but relieving consumers of fifteen minutes of expensive electrical existence. . . .

And now the final paragraph in its entirety:

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-price 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 god or bad. If it should turn out to be bad, then every minute they were rendered inarticulate was a 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.

I doubt that EBW was paid anything like what this piece of writing is worth, but there's no doubt that he was paid -- presumably at his agreed-upon New Yorker rate. That deals is what made it possible (a) for White to write such a piece and (b) for The New Yorker to publish it. As deals go, this one strikes me as eminently civilized. And I don't think even my pirating of bits and pieces of this lovely text undermines the deal. I'm assuming that at least some readers may discover that not having a copy of The Second Tree from the Corner represents a serious but mercifully remediable gap in their mental well-being, and may be moved to do something about it.

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