E. B. White on the Exercycle

Letters of E. B. White By E. B. White Harper & Row, 686 pp., $15 All winter, frozen into a New Hampshire farm, I have taken exercise by riding a stationary bicycle. It’s been five miles a day every day, going nowhere, on this strange vehicle near the living room’s castiron Glenwood. To defeat the boredom of such pedaling, I have been reading E. B. White’s Letters. Five miles a day comes out to about 12 pages. I figure that the whole book consumed 285 living room miles, give or take a furlong. It’s been a pleasant journey, although for a long time I felt sure that the Letters, like the bicycle, were not going anyplace.

I learned a few things, reading White’s Letters. The first thing I learned was where The New Yorker’s style came from. I don’t mean the magazine’s dear eccentricities of content—Ivy League football columns, racetrack chit-chat, thickets of factual data on anything-, those large qualities came from Harold Ross. I mean instead the New Yorker tone of voice—at once self-mocking and self-assured, witty through comic juxtaposition, ironic and modest and uppity all together—which characterizes “Talk of the Town,” and which the whole staff caught like a communicable disease from E. B. White. When Thurber caught it he added his own grand touches, but he needed to catch it before he could begin to be Thurber. Wolcott Gibbs caught it, anonymous drones who churned out Talk pieces caught it—and John Updike in one of his incarnations, and Brendan Gill.

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Letters of E. B. White By E. B. White Harper & Row, 686 pp., $15 All winter, frozen into a New Hampshire farm, I have taken exercise by riding a stationary bicycle. It’s been five miles a day every day, going nowhere, on this strange vehicle near the living room’s castiron Glenwood. To defeat the boredom of such pedaling, I have been reading E. B. White’s Letters. Five miles a day comes out to about 12 pages. I figure that the whole book consumed 285 living room miles, give or take a furlong. It’s been a pleasant journey, although for a long time I felt sure that the Letters, like the bicycle, were not going anyplace.

I learned a few things, reading White’s Letters. The first thing I learned was where The New Yorker’s style came from. I don’t mean the magazine’s dear eccentricities of content—Ivy League football columns, racetrack chit-chat, thickets of factual data on anything-, those large qualities came from Harold Ross. I mean instead the New Yorker tone of voice—at once self-mocking and self-assured, witty through comic juxtaposition, ironic and modest and uppity all together—which characterizes “Talk of the Town,” and which the whole staff caught like a communicable disease from E. B. White. When Thurber caught it he added his own grand touches, but he needed to catch it before he could begin to be Thurber. Wolcott Gibbs caught it, anonymous drones who churned out Talk pieces caught it—and John Updike in one of his incarnations, and Brendan Gill.