Customer Reviews

One Man's Meat

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This collection of essays is such a fine book; it deserves a much better commentary than it currently has here. And given the times we live in, its subject matter is particularly timely for American readers -- the period of history leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the early years of the war effort -- all told from the point of view of a thoughtful writer on a small farm in Maine.

White had moved there with his wife and young son from New York, where he'd been writing for The New Yorker, and took up country living, turning his attention to the annual round of the seasons, farm work, the nearby seaside, and the company of independent rural people. Most of the essays in this collection were written and published monthly in Harpers from July 1938 to January 1943. In them, there is White's awareness of the ominous threat of fascism emerging in Europe, as well as the vulnerability that Americans felt as they found themselves facing prolonged armed conflict with powerful enemies. These were dark days, and they provide a constant undertone in these otherwise upbeat essays about rural and small-town life.

And they are upbeat, celebrating the pleasures and gentle ironies of daily life with a few side trips into the world beyond -- the birth of a lamb, paying taxes, farm dogs, hay fever, raising chickens, Sunday mornings, radio broadcasts, civil defense drills, a visit to Walden pond, a day at the World's Fair, and unrealistic Hollywood portrayals of the pastoral. There is also here his famous essay "Once More to the Lake."

In many ways, the world he writes about is gone forever. But it's a world whose spirit remains at the heart of the national identity -- participatory democracy, individualism, citizenship, self-discovery, and self-reliance. Reading these essays, while they are often about seemingly trivial matters, you sense White's deepening faith in the American Experiment -- a belief in America as a work in progress.

And, of course, there is the famous White style, both simple and elegant. Its language, sentence structure, and movement of thought convey both sharpness of mind and generosity of spirit, in a manner that looks and sounds easy, but it is very hard to imitate. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the WWII homefront, the essay as a literary form, and a curiosity about rural life before farm subsidies and agribusiness.

Understanding E.B. White is not an easy task. He was a reserved man, very straightforward in his writing and simple in nature. However, White found that he was able to express himself with his writing, and none of his books is a more direct window into his soul than "One Man's Meat." Written over the course of White's later years of living on a Maine farm, this book contains witty accounts of geographic novelty, reminiscences on the promise of youth, and powerful insights into the little things in life that can make all the difference. No reader of E.B. White can gain a full knowledge of what the man was all about without having thoroughly digested this book.

For one who aspires to write well--the most delicious book I've ever read. The words "witty" and "sharp" come to mind, but poorly describe White and his work. Maybe, no words do with any degree of accuracy and right praise.

E. B. White's essays are sweet and courageous. It's a rare and wonderful combination. They are also, to use that severely abused word, poignant, which means, painfully affecting the feelings. Consider the opening line to the essay, World War I: "I keep forgetting that soldiers are so young." He wrote that line in 1939. I think of that every day in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan.

One Man's Meat, first published in 1942, is the companion volume to the Essays of E. B. White. Both books include his classic, Once More to the Lake, an essay about taking his own son to the lake that made such an impression on him when he was taken there by his own father. There is minimal overlap between the two books.

In 1940 he lamented the effects of the automobile on community life: "Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car." This book also includes the best thing I have ever read about poetry. Poems must be short, he said, because, "Poetry is intensity, and nothing is intense for long."

One of the things that struck me most in this group of essays was his statement about writers, since I am one. He wrote: "In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty." I love this man.

I could rant on for hours about the joy of reading this book, but it's better that you spend your time reading his work instead of mine.

An experience awaits you.

(I recently overheard, or saw only in my peripheral vision, or almost read a comment by a professor of literature. "I would give anything," he said, "for the pleasure of reading 'Romeo and Juliet' again for the first time.")

That experience awaits you here. That experience and the companion experience that the sly, lively E.B. White is just behind you, just over your shoulder as you read. The words are that alive.

Listen to Mr. White contemplate as he attempts to complete a government questionnaire: "Under JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARE BEST FITTED I wrote "Editor and writer." Under JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARE NEXT BEST FITTED I wrote "Poultryman and farmer." But I realize . . .it is hard to tell about fitness. Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming, because farming takes great strength and great endurance. Intellectually I am better fitted for farming than writing."

That, for me, was the best of many extraordinary lines in one of many exceptional paragraphs in one of many excellent essays.

I have a habit of dog-earring pages of books where I feel wisdom is revealed. No book I have read in the last few years has as many pages folded over as this book of essays.

Read. Enjoy. Have that wonderful first experience. Allow in this avuncular Yankee; he will live in you forever more.

E. B. White's One Man's Meat is an ode to life in the country, a reflection of the author's unease with various aspects associated with modern life, and a prelude to the years of "the second war for democracy." The book contains the essays written during White's five years with Harper's Magazine (1938 - 1943), a time White referred to as "one of the most productive periods of my life."

Despite his move to Maine, White was not, in the strict sense, a farmer: instead, he owned what he often called "a private zoo," an indulgence he maintained because he liked to "play with animals." As White points out in "The Practical Farmer," farming is "about twenty percent agriculture and eighty percent mending something...a glorified repair job," and the would-be farmer is merely "a handyman with a sense of humus."

Some essays - "Walden" and "Once More to the Lake" - are well known. Others not so well known - "Report," "Town Meeting," "Compost," and "My Day" - give a wonderfully individualistic view of the country and of country life. "The Wave of the Future" and "The World of Tomorrow," on the other hand, show White at his critical and intellectual best. In addition, some of the remaining essays reflect White's unease with the coming war, but always in ways that are arresting, intensely human, sometimes humorous, and always accessible.

In short, One Man's Meat, along with Essays of E. B. White, is White's tour de force. No one reading these essays is ever quite the same afterwards.

For the grown ups who enjoyed reading Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little to their kids. This is the best clearist writing by the master of the short essay. He gives us pride in the values he holds and lives. A national treasure.

One Man's Meat, E.B. White [1899-1985]; Harper & Brothers (1938-42)

E.B. ("Andy") White, although pleased that it sold well, in the same letter disparagingly referred to a collection of his best columns as "a clip book" - as if somehow, on a second offering, what he had written had somehow diminished in value. He could not have been more mistaken.

Maine in the summer of 2012 had one perfect day allotted to it.

Maybe it had more than one. But the day that my wife & I were on Deer Island had to have been the best of that summer, with golden sunshine finally besting a five-day state-wide rainstorm that had at its onset, I also remember, a distraught (& increasingly pathetic) Portland TV weatherman ready to move to Seattle.

This was also the day that I found a vintage copy of OMM, of which I had heard about often enough but had never seen an actual edition. Well, there it was, on the bookshelf of a charming bookstore on DI, & there it went out the door in the hands of an appreciative new owner.

***

E.B., once fascinated by New York City, grew disenchanted with it & in the 1930s decided to move to Maine, where he would continue writing for The New Yorker magazine. His wife Katherine wasn't thrilled about the idea, but eventually, that's how things worked out.

They moved to a house on Allen Cove in Brooklin, Maine, which soon both featured a barn full of animals & fronted various agricultural endeavors, the breeding & harvesting of both producing an occasional profit & plenty of complications that provided fodder, instead, for his columns (did you know that the word "smut" has an innocuous definition - that your harvested oats have been ruined by fungus?).

For whatever reason, in the late 1930s, he left the New Yorker magazine (but not for long); most of the columns in OMM appeared in Harper's Magazine. There is risk in extracting quotations from the context in which they originally appear; they can turn into lifeless. disconnected, & unconvincing props (see - if you must - how this sterilized The Algonquin Wits, Robert Drennan, editor; The Citadel Press, 1968). Great care in this review has been taken to try to avoid repeating this mistake.

If swayed by what you read below, help Jeff Bezos make ends meet. Order a copy of One Man's Meat.

***

Removal (1938)

"Several months ago...desiring to simplify my life, I sold half my worldly goods, evacuated the city house, gave up my employment, & came to live in New England...

"I recall a moment of particular desperation over a gold mirror, which, in spite of all our attempts to shake it off, hung steadfastly on till within an hour or so of our scheduled departure...

"So I walked out the door hatless... & went around the corner to a junk shop on Second Avenue... the proprietor stood in the doorway... 'I'm nut taking it,' said the proprietor, who, for all I know, may have been trying to simplify his own life."

It is now impossible to imagine Life Without Television, but 74 years ago, this was all in the future, the gifts of which are not always beneficial:

"The news of television, however, is what I particularly go for when I get a chance... television is going to be the test of the modern world... this new opportunity to see beyond our range of vision... radio has already given sound a wide currency, & sound 'effects' are taking the place one enjoyed by sound itself."

***

Security (1938)

White's initial farm endeavors oft went awry. Somehow, the cost of raising one (one!) turkey - according to his playful estimation of regretted expenses - was $402.85.

(In 2012 dollars = $6,889, what you might end up paying for a turkey-club sandwich & a beer at Yankee Stadium, during a regular season game. Say hello to Minka for me.)

"No doubt when I carve up this four hundred & fifty dollar fowl, I shall enjoy a momentary glow of self-sufficiency & thrift..."

Escape from New York did not mean ignoring the world. With the Second World War in sight (erupting less than one year from the date of this column):

"While the old wars rage & new ones hang like hawks above the world..."

***

Progress & Change (1938)

White in New York commuted to work on the Sixth Avenue elevated ("el") railway, which by this time was showing its age (look at Sixth Avenue today. Try & imagine the street completely covered by track tracks fifty feet overhead, with the trains above roaring & creaking). Mercifully, not long afterwards, it was torn down.

"Of course, I have read about the great days of the El, when it was the railroad of the elite & when financial giants rode elegantly home from Wall Street in its nicely appointed coaches. But I'm just as glad I didn't meet the El until after it had lost its money."

Maine meant roughing it, by the standards of his previous home. White welcomed the change, but some things on the farm had to be upgraded from what seemed to be War-of-1812 furnishings - something he did warily:

"I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary; one thing leads to another & the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair & is fast asleep in it."

***

Children's Books (1938)

Katherine was too valuable for The New Yorker to lose & she continued to edit fiction for the magazine from Maine. The publishers mailed dozens of books for review to her address; for whatever reason, this includes crates of stuff for the kids. The house not designed to function as a library, they piled up & space ran out fast.

White was a mild-mannered (but not unprincipled) man, but this increasingly rude intrusion finally got to him:

"Among [us]... are review copies... they lie dormant in every room... I have naturally come to know something about children's books from living so close to them & gazing hatefully at their jackets."

The books often were donated to the area libraries. If you're in the Brooklin neighborhood, drop in at the nearby Blue Hill, Maine public library. I've been there twice, both times inspired by one of the loveliest libraries in America & its staff. Yes, even by some of its customers - cranky, lanky, fussy sorts banging out their polemics on early 90s laptops whose keys & associated parts are so ancient, they'd be better off with the equally noisy electric typewriters (also known as "Els," giants that also towered over the taxicabs of Sixth Avenue in the 1920s, before the construction of Rockefeller Center led to the sad same disappearance of the above-ground trains & typewriters).

***

Movies (1939)

"There is no movie house in this town so I don't get to many pictures; but I keep in touch with Olympus by reading Motion Picture magazine & the daily papers... There is something else which Hollywood had done & is doing. By its adherence, over so long a period of years, to a standard of living well in excess of anything known in the lives of its audience, it has at last communicated to its audience a feeling of actually living in this dream world & a conviction that the standards of this world are the norm...

"In ["Dark Victory"], a wealthy young girl named Judith, played by Miss Bette Davis... goes to dwell peacefully in Vermont... 'Here I have nothing & am happy...'

"At the moment of making [this] remark, she was standing in a kitchen which had been modernized at considerable expense... with her... were two domestic servants & two English setters... Now let's look at the rest of this set-up which Miss Judith tossed off as 'nothing.' "

And so he did, presenting an entertaining yet serious-minded list of annual individual expenses which would accumulate were one to live in the Style of Judith, amounting to $11,693.00

Do you happen, today, to be able to spend $181,573 each year on a housekeeper, a cook, heat, pets, food & taxes? Then you, too, have nothing & should feel as free & as easy as Miss Judith.

***

A Boston Terrier (1939)

His neurotic dachshund, Fred, has "innumerable obsessions. His particular study (or mania?) at the moment is a black-&-white kitten that my wife gave me for Christmas, thinking that what my life needed was something else that could move quickly from one place in the room to another."

(Later, in "Fall," an unidentified pet achieves a sly immortality by being described as "my ex-cat." Tonight, my wife is having kittens in the next room, watching the Kentucky Wildcats being temporarily befuddled by the South Carolinian ex-high schoolers.)

***

Walden (1939)

"As I wandered along, the toc toc of ping pong balls drifted from an attic window."

***

Second World War (1939)

The romance of farming, sustained romantically in the imaginations of those living amongst asphalt, is easily cured. Buy a farm. See what happens when you try to make it work - at the same time that you're listening to the news of military conquests, expressed with an infectious stentorian political lingo:

"Now, a whole year later, with four times the number of birds under my protectorate, I make no bones about culling."

***

First World War (1939)

From his adolescent diary of 1918, ruefully re-examined as World War II has erupted:

"On August 31st I wrote a poem strongly advising myself to get killed in action."

***

Poetry (1939)

" 'I wish poets could be clearer,' shouted my wife angrily from the next room... a poet dares be just so clear & no clearer; he approaches lucid ground wearily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid."

***

Report (1939)

Robert Benchley's "Treasurer's Report" may be more famous (& was infinitely more lucrative as an act on Broadway woven into a burlesque), but I think this is just as dead-pan funny & an equal achievement. White went through his town's annual budget, drolly:

"In all, it cost the town about $2,400 to support the poor. Some of the towns in this county in recent years have unloaded some of this burden onto the Federal government, but in our town we have walked alone. Our first selectman does not approve of the Federal government as now constituted & has never participated in any of its gay & mischievous adventures in which Washington puts up a dollar & the town matches it with another dollar."

"There were seven marriages in our town in the fiscal period. Of the fourteen individuals implicated..."

***

Fro-Joy (1940)

"Today, this town hasn't even a doctor... for movies you drive twenty-five miles. For a railroad junction, fifty. For a mixed drink, twenty-five... Everything in life is somewhere else, & you get there in a car... the automobile is at the bottom of every plot."

***

Farm Paper (1940)

White's penchant for the mail delivery that might include his "The Rural New Yorker" magazine reminded him of when, as a younger man, he submitted items to columnist Frank Adams of the New York World, whose column was generously receptive to such original submissions by many aspiring authors:

"And there was a period, later, when I felt the same anticipatory emotion for the morning 'World' & those tense midnights when I would approach a newsstand & squander a nickel on the early edition to turn with secret torment of suspense to the 'Conning Tower' to discover whether some noble nubbin of [my] poetry had achieved the decent fame I hoped it deserved."

***

Town Meeting (1940)

In 2010, after decades, I returned to Maine, for a vacation with my wife. But I didn't have to wait to get there to see a word, which surfaced in the reading of Walter MacDougall's wonderful "The Old Somerset Railroad, A Lifeline For Northern Mainers" (Down East Books 2000), that set me instantly on edge:

"Vacationland."

I'm not saying that "Vacation or Die" (if trying to top New Hampshire's state motto is your thing) is a good alternative. Let EBW explain it:

" 'Vacationland' is a loathsome word, assembled by a person of drab, untrustworthy mind... the residents of the State of Maine do not regard their state as a vacation land: they know from bitter experience that it is a place of hard work & long hours & tough weather."

The last thing in the world either one of us, that day on Deer Island - or on any other day when we visited Bingham & Bar Harbor, Sanford & Alfred, Skowhegan & Corea - was to feel as if we had been ushered into the insincere & artificial oasis of a "Disneyland" (although at the rate they're asphalting & thus asphyxiating Ogunquit, the town might be issuing ESPN stock dividends before long).

At any rate, the town meeting was the time & the place for a standoff between two acerbic debaters:

"Both men held the floor without yielding... it had the heat & turmoil of the first Continental Congress without its nobility of purpose & purity of design."

***

A Shepherd's Life (1940)

Farm doors don't necessarily close as quickly as you would like them to:

"We don't encourage animals to come into the house, but they get in once in a while, particularly the cosset lamb, who trotted through this living room not five minutes ago looking for an eight-ounce bottle."

***

Compost (1940)

Poland is gone. France, although White would have no way of knowing this, is next.

"The most honest book that was ever written was Mein Kampf, & nobody gave it a second thought... Diplomacy reached its lowest ebb at Munich, when a conservative Briton carrying an umbrella entered a cage of live Panzers."

***

Freedom (1940):

France is gone. White is amazed & disgusted that some Americans think it is now necessary to get along by going along with the German conquerors of Warsaw, Oslo, Copenhagen & Paris.

"I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century & a half ago... I am in love with freedom & that it is an affair of long standing & that it is a fine state to be in, & that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism & dictators merely because they are succeeding in war."

***

The Practical Farmer (1940)

"My publishers have presented me with H.A. Highstone's book Practical Farming for Beginners, the sly inference being that I have much to learn. Publishers are on the whole well satisfied to have their writers disappear into rural circumstances..."

"Mr. Highstone... knows one importance truth about country life: he knows that farming is about twenty percent agriculture & eighty per cent mending something that got busted... the repair aspect of farming looms so large that, on a place like my own, which is not really a farm at all but merely a private zoo, sometimes months go by when nothing but repair goes on."

"Mr., Highstone proposes to lick plumbing with a pipe vise. His is the manly approach. But I know my limitations. The practical way for me to lick plumbing is not to have any."

***

Maine Speech (1940)

"For lift, the word is heft. You heft a thing to see how much it weighs... Ewe is pronounced yo... Hunting or shooting is called gunning... tackle is pronounced taykle. You rig a block & taykle... persons who are not native to this locality are 'from away'... you've got to be born here - otherwise... road is pronounced rud. The other day, I heard someone call President Roosevelt a "war mongrel"... Library is liberry. Chimney is chimney... the word dear is pronounced Dee-ah. Yet the word deer is pronounced deer... the final word 'y' of a word becomes 'ay.' Our boy used to call our dog Freddie. Now he calls him Fredday."

The Maine Dictionary, by John McDonald & Peter Wallace (Applewood Books; 2000) has a great deal more of this gold mine, & it's even funnier (Mainers, relax. They mock people from Massachusetts. Bosoxers, calm down! The book satirizes the Not-Aways).

***

Intimations (1941)

"As I write, this is the third day of the war [December 11, 1941]... Along with this... goes the feeling that it is nip & tuck now, with mankind on earth... the canny & careful reconstruction of barbarism, against the defense of old liberties & ideas...

"The whole history of the war so far has been the inability of people in the democracies to believe their eyes & ears. They didn't believe the Rhineland or the persecution of the Jews or Poland or France or any of the rest of it. That phase of the war is over. Now, at least, we can see & hear."

***

And with that I call it a good night.

I adore E.B. White, and what I was concerned about while buying this paperback edition was that the paper, cover, or the font of the text be of low quality and interfere with my enjoyment of the book. However, the book is a trade paperback, the cover being non-glossy and the paper and font being perfect. I fully recommend this edition to anyone.

Once upon a time i belonged to a book club. This was one of our choices. I have been trying to pull out fragments of memory. What i recall most fondly is that E.B. White's observations were tinted with a certain innocence. Why did we become so jaded? The last 50 years have brought along a heightened level of cynicism, and it was refreshing to read a grown man's slightly naïve comments.

At the same time, after a while I became a bit bored with the simplistic remarks of life in the country. My own shortcoming, not the book's.