E. B. White Tonight: Part 1 of the title story from "The Second Tree from the Corner"

"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)."

-- White, in the original Foreword
to The Second Tree from the Corner (1954)

by Ken

It may seem strange to say of the author of those kiddie classics Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970), but since however often I've tried I've found them pretty much unreadable, I'll just go ahead and say it: I think White didn't have the psychological makeup or whatever it is of a significant fiction writer. Too reality-grounded to have the whatever-it-is for fiction, perhaps?

(It may be worth noting that "The Second Tree from the Corner" was first published in The New Yorker of May 31, 1947, meaning that it was written after Stuart Little, and then appeared in book form not long after publication of the even more successful Charlotte's Web.)

There are undoubtedly writers who do both fiction and nonfiction well, but they're rarer than you might think. I've come up with a few names when I've thought about it, though the only one that pops to mind at the moment, is John Updike, and I tend to think of the "John Updike" voice heard in his criticism and essays as belonging to an elegantly created fictional character. 

In general, there seems to be something decidedly different about the mindsets, and in general it seems to me that good fiction writers have a better shot at slipping into nonfiction mode than vice versa (cf. Updike). Maybe my favorite working writer, Calvin Trillin, dazzles in a dizzying range of nonfiction modes but has seemed to me oddly out of his element in the novels he's insisted on writing. I also remember the shock of the plodding terribleness of that brilliant essayist Anna Quindlen's widely hailed first novel, One True Thing. (I hope she's gotten better at novel-writing, since it seemed important to her. I haven't checked in to find out.)

So why am I including a short fiction piece in this painfully brief (even stretching to Friday) sampling of E. B. White's work? First, because "The Second Tree from the Corner" seems to me an interesting story with serious real-world reach; second, because the title was after all pressed into service for book; and third, because it syncs up with the Whitean dictum we encountered last night in the original Foreword to this book: "Whoever sets pen to paper writes of himself, whether knowingly or not." It continues, as we saw again at the top of this post: "and this is a book of revelations."


TO READ PART 1 OF "THE SECOND TREE
FROM THE CORNER," CLICK HERE


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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