E. B. White Tonight: A brilliant essayist who essayed funny, and my go-to E.B.W. demo piece, "Air Raid Drill"

E. B. White (1899-1985)

"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?' . . .

"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."

-- White, in "Air Raid Drill"

by Ken

I don't know whether anyone else has wondered at the absence so far in this series of E. B. White. It has kind of surprised me, and I can only explain that every time I've thought of representing him here, I've been forced to consider that although White was often thought of as a humorist -- the general classification to which I would assign the writers we've had -- I really don't think of him that way. He could write humor pieces, but for the most part what he wrote are pieces that involved humor -- or, maybe better, an ironic sensibility. Or maybe "wry" is closer to the quality I'm groping for.

Nevertheless, White has already popped up frequently in these posts and in other DWT posts of mine. Most obviously, it's not possible to write about Thurber without including White, so closely were their sensibilities and careers intertwined, especially in the early New Yorker years, which led to pieces like this and this. For that matter, it's almost possible to write about the writers and writing of the first several decades of The New Yorker without reference to White and/or his wife, Katharine White, who was for so long a pillar of the magazine.

However, White looms large in my literary cosmos as probably the most brilliant essayist I know, and naturally I've gravitated to a piece that has haunted me since I first read it in my old Perennial paperback copy of the White anthology The Second Tree from the Corner, called "Air Raid Drill," which I've already written about and quoted from. So to kick off this week of "E. B. White Tonight," we're going to have "Air Raid Drill" in its entirety.


FOR E.B.W. NOTES ON HIS REPRINTED "NOTES AND COMMENT"
PIECES, AND TO READ "AIR RAID DRILL," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW in E. B. WHITE TONIGHT: Part 1 of "'Afternoon of an American Boy"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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