On My Bookshelf: “One Man’s Meat” by E.B. White

One of my earliest and most enduring literary influences was E.B. White, who contributed regularly to The New Yorker Magazine and Harper’s Magazine in beautifully concise and elegantly simple writing.  Most will know him best for the beloved books, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little,” and students of language may know him as one-half of the team of Strunk & White, who crafted the small Bible of writing, “The Elements of Style.”

White wrote magazine columns, which were the blogs of their day, I suppose.  Virtually “something about nothing very momentous,” but with a point.  If we’re lucky as writers, that point stays with people – they wonder about it, they apply it to their own lives, and they come out a little different for having read it. 

 “One Man’s Meat” is a collection of columns and essays set from the years 1938 through 1943, when White lived in Maine on a salt water farm, raising hens, sheep, blueberries and mackerel.  It’s the kind of book you can pick up anytime: on a plane or a subway, on vacation or a break at work, and read a little gem of a story in its entirety that will make you smile and sometimes cry, but always, think.

One example: White attended the World’s Fair in 1939, grandly titled “The World of Tomorrow,” but he did it with a head cold.  In his lovely understated style he wrote: “When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday,” but he bravely set forth to see it all.

The World of Tomorrow had a ride, set in the far future of 1960, full of purple light, fast cars, and trees enclosed in glass bubbles.  White watched a small boy named David as he traversed the magical future, and then listened to him describe the ride afterwards.

David, in his excitement, chose the one thing that he would always remember.  At the end of the ride, David said, “the car gave a great—big—BUMP!”

And White wrote:  “…mostly the Fair has vanished, leaving only the voice of little David Wagstaff and the rambling ecstasy of his first big trip away from home; so many millions of dollars spent on the idea that our trains and our motorcars should go fast and smoothly, and the child remembering, not the smoothness, but the great—big—BUMP.”

I realized then, and have felt it true since, that we always remember the bump.  When we talk about our weddings, we recall the words transposed, the trip up or down the stairs, the wind, the rain, the cake never delivered.  They make for good stories afterwards, and we laugh, and feel stronger for having moved through them with grace and good humor.

White saw that, right away.  He celebrated the bump as a thing to learn by, a way to connect to each other, and a reason to smile.

This is a book I loved when I first read it thirty years ago.   The real test is that I love it even more today.

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