Today is the birthday of the writer E.B. White in 1899. The E. stood for Elwyn, which White said he “never liked”.
“My mother just hung it on me because she’d run out of names. I was her sixth child.”
I guess it didn’t take long to get to “Elwyn” during the last summer of the 19th century. Just one of the ways in which things have changed.
White wrote for the New Yorker Magazine and celebrated the city in prose, but he and his wife Katherine were also drawn to the countryside. They bought a farmhouse in rural Maine and lived there in the company of animals from 1938 on.
Observing nature gave him inspiration for plenty of wonderful work, including “Charlotte’s Web”, a classic tale about a philosophical spider and a fabulous pig.
Here’s an E.B. White quote:
“I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.”
There’s a lot of the human/animal struggle in White’s writing, including this letter to a friend.
My poultry operations have expanded considerably since you were here: I have a large laying house with a flock of would-be layers that turned and bit me in mid season. It was the most stinging defeat of my life, for I put a good deal of my energy into the project, raised the birds by hand from infancy, ranged them on green range, groomed them for the battle, designed and built the house, and saw them go into production in early September looking like a million dollars and shelling out in great shape. All of a sudden some little thing went wrong and they began to come apart, the way pullets do when the vitamins don’t add up right, or when a couple of them get going to the bathroom too often. From forty dozen eggs a week I slid off to about fourteen dozen, and cannibalism began taking its ugly toll. Ah welladay! A man learns a lot in a year, if he hangs around animals.
I have to wonder how E.B. White would feel about all the action these days around the issue of keeping chickens in the city.
He wrote about everything, from poultry to polling. Nothing is off-limits to a talented observer.
“The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs, and although you can take a nation’s blood pressure, you can’t be sure that if you came back in twenty minutes you’d get the same reading. This is a damn fine thing.”
Chickens and people – he seemed to have an affinity for unmanageable things.
Though he died in 1985, E.B. White remains an inspiration to writers everywhere, thanks to his books, poems and a slim but powerful guide, “The Elements of Style.”
If E.B. White gives you a hankering to write, I’d be happy to put you on the list for a guest blog appearance! I’m hoping to take next week off, so drop a line to connelly.dale@gmail.com.
What are some of your feelings about chickens?
Trail Baboon