We never got around to mentioning Roger Angell’s nice little remembrance of his step father, E.B. White, of a few weeks ago. It didn’t add a lot to the canon, as far as the personal and professional lives of Andy and Katherine Angell White, other than the lovely image of them working across the hallway from each other—the writer and the editor at their antipodes, which Roger Angell describes in a memorable turn-of-phrase that is certainly worthy of his stepdad:
“Soon the noises of her typing out another letter to Harold Ross or Gus Lobrano are joined by the slower clatter of his Underwood: a New England light industry is again in full gear, pouring out its high-market daily product, and the labor force, for the moment, seems content. Soon it will be lunchtime.”
The other interesting aspect of the piece was Roger’s thoughtful meditation on the Whites’ complimentary cases of hypochondria. One of the things we mourned about the only biography that has ever been written about Mrs. White, an above-average personal history by an amateur biographer, was that it dwelled heavily on her later years, and gave the impression that she was constantly afflicted with one dread disease or another—to the exclusion of what a singular role she had in shaping and maintaining the voice of the New Yorker throughout her life. (This topic has been given short shrift in every book ever written about the New Yorker, including Ben Yagoda’s excellent “About Town” and Thomas Kunkel’s “Genius in Disguise.” There are plenty of bread crumbs for the serious historian, though, sprinkled through the published “Letters From the Editor” in which Harold Ross cannot hide the fact that Katherine was his right-hand-woman from almost the beginning.) Roger toys with the idea that the White’s hypochondria was actually an important expression of their dependence and love for one another, and a meaningful development in their identities in later life, not an artifice or an affectation.
The other thing we noticed: In discussing Andy’s main gift to writing, which was a sacred committment to clarity, Roger slipped a sly inside-joke into his piece:
“Clarity is the message of “The Elements of Style,” the handbook he based on an early model written by Will Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell, which has helped more than ten million writers—the senior honors candidate, the rewriting lover, the overburdened historian—through the whichy thicket.”
This was, of course, a gentle slap at Tom Wolfe, the most high-profile case of a well-known writer who has been excommunicated by the New Yorker. The cause? Wolfe’s most famous early magazine story was a 1966 takedown of William Shawn written for Clay Felker at New York magazine. The title of that piece was “Tiny Mummies,” and it poked a great deal of fun—at the apparent exepnse of the truth—at the New Yorker’s intense, well-oiled machine of old-fashioned prose. He lampooned the style as being full of “whichy thickets.”
Ever since, professional writers have held Wolfe in a kind of state of horror-envy. There is no higher aspiration in the business than being published in the great ship of state once helmed by Ross and Shawn; the converse is that there is no greater transgression than disrespecting it. There is no consolation for permanent exile—such are the contingencies of an icon—and we think we can detect the bitterness in almost everything the dapper southern gentleman writes.
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