E. B. White and his dog Minnie.

If it happens that your parents concern themselves so little with the workings of boys’ minds as to christen you Elwyn Brooks White, no doubt you decide as early as possible to identify yourself as E.B. White. If it also happens that you attend Cornell, whose first president was Andrew D. White, then, following a variant of the principle that everybody named Rhodes winds up being nicknamed “Dusty,” you wind up being nicknamed “Andy.” And so it has come about that for fifty of his seventy years Elwyn Brooks White has been known to his readers as E.B. White and to his friends as Andy. Andy White. Andy and Katharine White. The Whites. Andy and Katharine have been married for forty years, and in that time they have been separated so rarely that I find it impossible to think of one without the other. On the occasions when they have been obliged to be apart, Andy’s conversation is so likely to center on Katharine that she becomes all the more present for being absent.

The Whites have shared everything, from professional association on the same magazine to preoccupation with a joint ill health that many of their friends have been inclined to regard as imaginary. Years ago, in a Christmas doggerel, Edmund Wilson saluted them for possessing “mens sana in corpore insano,” and it was always wonderful to behold the intuitive seesaw adjustments by which one of them got well in time for the other to get sick. What a mountain of good work they have accumulated in that fashion! Certainly they have been the strongest and most productive unhealthy couple that I have ever encountered, but I no longer dare to make fun of their ailments. Now that age is bestowing on them a natural infirmity, they must be sorely tempted to say to the rest of us, “You see? What did we tell you?” (“Sorely,” by the way, has been a favorite adverb of Andy’s- a word that brims with bodily woe and that yet hints at the heroic: back of Andy, some dying knight out of Malory lifts his gleaming sword against the dusk.)

Andy White is small and wiry, with an unexpectedly large nose, speckled eyes, and an air of being just about to turn away, not on an errand of any importance but as a means of remaining free to cut and run without the nuisance of prolonged good-byes. Crossing the threshold of his eighth decade, his person is uncannily boyish-seeming. Though his hair is grey, I learn at this moment that I do not consent to the fact: away from him, I remember it as brown, therefore it is brown to me. Andy can no more lose his youthfulness by the tiresome accident of growing old than he could ever have been Elwyn by the tiresome un-necessary accident of baptism; his youth and his “Andy”-ness are intrinsic and inexpungeable. Katharine White is a woman so good-looking that nobody has taken it amiss when her husband has described in print as beautiful, but her beauty has a touch of blue-eyed augustness in it, and her manner is formal. It would never occur to me to go beyond calling her Katharine, and I have not found it surprising when her son, Roger Angell, an editor of The New Yorker, refers to her within the office precincts as “Mrs. White.” (Roger Angell is the son of her marriage to a distinguished New York attorney, Ernest Angell; she and Andy have a son, Joe, who is a naval architect and whose boatyard is a thriving enterprise in the Whites’ hometown of Brooklin, Maine.)

At the risk of reducing a man’s life to a sort of Merck’s Manual, I may mention that Andy White’s personal physician, Dana Atchley- giving characteristically short shrift to a psychosomatic view of his old friend- has described him as having a Rolls Royce mind in a Model T body. With Andy, this would pass for a compliment, because in the tyranny of his modesty he would always choose to be a Ford instead of a Rolls, but it would be closer to the truth to describe him as a Rolls Royce mind in a Rolls Royce body that unaccountably keeps bumping to a stop and humming to itself, not without infinite pleasure to others along the way. What he achieves must cost him a considerable effort and appears to cost him very little. His speaking voice, like his writing voice, is clear, resonant, and invincibly debonair. He wanders over the pastures of his Maine farm or, for that matter, along the labyrinthine corridors of The New Yorker offices on West Forty-Third Street with the off-hand grace of a dancer making up a sequence of steps that the eye follows with delight and that defies any but his own notation. Clues to the bold and delicate nature of those steps are to be discovered in every line he writes, but the man and his work are so nearly one that, try as we will, we cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

-Brendan Gill

INTERVIEWER

So many critics equate the success of a writer with an unhappy childhood. Can you say something of your own childhood in Mount Vernon?

E.B. WHITE

As a child, I was frightened but not unhappy. My parents were loving and kind. We were a large family (six children) and were a small kingdom unto ourselves. Nobody ever came to dinner. My father was formal, conservative, successful, hardworking, and worried. My mother was loving, hardworking, and retiring. We lived in a large house in a leafy suburb, where there were backyards and stables and grape arbors. I lacked for nothing except confidence. I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood: fear of the dark, fear of the future, fear of the return to school after a summer on a lake in Maine, fear of making an appearance on a platform, fear of the lavatory in the school basement where the slate urinals cascaded, fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about. I was, as a child, allergic to pollens and dusts, and still am. I was allergic to platforms, and still am. It may be, as some critics suggest, that it helps to have an unhappy childhood. If so, I have no knowledge of it. Perhaps it helps to have been scared or allergic to pollens—I don’t know.

INTERVIEWER

At what age did you know you were going to follow a literary profession? Was there a particular incident, or moment?

WHITE

I never knew for sure that I would follow a literary profession. I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight before anything happened that gave me any assurance that I could make a go of writing. I had done a great deal of writing, but I lacked confidence in my ability to put it to good use. I went abroad one summer and on my return to New York found an accumulation of mail at my apartment. I took the letters, unopened, and went to a Childs restaurant on Fourteenth Street, where I ordered dinner and began opening my mail. From one envelope, two or three checks dropped out, from The New Yorker. I suppose they totaled a little under a hundred dollars, but it looked like a fortune to me. I can still remember the feeling that “this was it”—I was a pro at last. It was a good feeling and I enjoyed the meal.

INTERVIEWER

What were those first pieces accepted by The New Yorker? Did you send them in with a covering letter, or through an agent?

WHITE

They were short sketches—what Ross called “casuals.” One, I think, was a piece called “The Swell Steerage,” about the then new college cabin class on transatlantic ships. I never submitted a manuscript with a covering letter or through an agent. I used to put my manuscript in the mail, along with a stamped envelope for the rejection. This was a matter of high principle with me: I believed in the doctrine of immaculate rejection. I never used an agent and did not like the looks of a manuscript after an agent got through prettying it up and putting it between covers with brass clips. (I now have an agent for such mysteries as movie rights and foreign translations.)

A large part of all early contributions to The New Yorker arrived uninvited and unexpected. They arrived in the mail or under the arm of people who walked in with them. O’Hara’s “Afternoon Delphians” is one example out of hundreds. For a number of years, The New Yorker published an average of fifty new writers a year. Magazines that refuse unsolicited manuscripts strike me as lazy, incurious, self-assured, and self-important. I’m speaking of magazines of general circulation. There may be some justification for a technical journal to limit its list of contributors to persons who are known to be qualified. But if I were a publisher, I wouldn’t want to put out a magazine that failed to examine everything that turned up.

INTERVIEWER

But did The New Yorker ever try to publish the emerging writers of the time: Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Miller, Lawrence, Joyce, Wolfe, et al?

WHITE

The New Yorker had an interest in publishing any writer that could turn in a good piece. It read everything submitted. Hemingway, Faulkner, and the others were well established and well paid when The New Yorker came on the scene. The magazine would have been glad to publish them, but it didn’t have the money to pay them off, and for the most part they didn’t submit. They were selling to The Saturday Evening Post and other well-heeled publications, and in general were not inclined to contribute to the small, new, impecunious weekly. Also, some of them, I would guess, did not feel sympathetic to The New Yorker’s frivolity. Ross had no great urge to publish the big names; he was far more interested in turning up new and yet undiscovered talent, the Helen Hokinsons and the James Thurbers. We did publish some things by Wolfe—“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” was one. I believe we published something by Fitzgerald. But Ross didn’t waste much time trying to corral “emerged” writers. He was looking for the ones that were found by turning over a stone.

INTERVIEWER

What were the procedures in turning down a manuscript by a New Yorker regular? Was this done by Ross?

WHITE

The manuscript of a New Yorker regular was turned down in the same manner as was the manuscript of a New Yorker irregular. It was simply rejected, usually by the subeditor who was handling the author in question. Ross did not deal directly with writers and artists, except in the case of a few old friends from an earlier day. He wouldn’t even take on Woollcott—regarded him as too difficult and fussy. Ross disliked rejecting pieces, and he disliked firing people—he ducked both tasks whenever he could.

INTERVIEWER

Did feuds threaten the magazine?

WHITE

Feuds did not threaten The New Yorker. The only feud I recall was the running battle between the editorial department and the advertising department. This was largely a one-sided affair, with the editorial department lobbing an occasional grenade into the enemy’s lines just on general principles, to help them remember to stay out of sight. Ross was determined not to allow his magazine to be swayed, in the slightest degree, by the boys in advertising. As far as I know, he succeeded.

INTERVIEWER

When did you first move to New York, and what were some of the things you did before joining The New Yorker? Were you ever a part of the Algonquin group?

WHITE

After I got out of college, in 1921, I went to work in New York but did not live in New York. I lived at home, with my father and mother in Mount Vernon, and commuted to work. I held three jobs in about seven months—first with the United Press, then with a public relations man named Wheat, then with the American Legion News Service. I disliked them all, and in the spring of 1922 I headed west in a Model T Ford with a college mate, Howard Cushman, to seek my fortune and as a way of getting away from what I disliked. I landed in Seattle six months later, worked there as a reporter on the Times for a year, was fired, shipped to Alaska aboard a freighter, and then returned to New York. It was on my return that I became an advertising man—Frank Seaman & Co., J. H. Newmark. In the mid-twenties, I moved into a two-room apartment at 112 West Thirteenth Street with three other fellows, college mates of mine at Cornell: Burke Dowling Adams, Gustave Stubbs Lobrano, and Mitchell T. Galbreath. The rent was $110 a month. Split four ways it came to $27.50, which I could afford. My friends in those days were the fellows already mentioned. Also, Peter Vischer, Russell Lord, Joel Sayre, Frank Sullivan (he was older and more advanced but I met him and liked him), James Thurber, and others. I was never a part of the Algonquin group. After becoming connected with The New Yorker, I lunched once at the Round Table but didn’t care for it and was embarrassed in the presence of the great. I never was well acquainted with Benchley or Broun or Dorothy Parker or Woollcott. I did not know Don Marquis or Ring Lardner, both of whom I greatly admired. I was a younger man.