HERE IS NEW YORK
By E.B. White
With a New Introduction by Roger Angell
56 pp. New York:
The Little Bookroom. $16.95

Reviewed by Laurie Meunier Graves

New Yorkers…do not crave comfort and convenience—if they did they would live somewhere else.
—E.B. White, Here is New York

Even though I live in the hinterlands of Maine, a part of me is bound to New York City. This is true both literally and figuratively. As a writer and someone who is keenly interested in the arts, I often turn my attention to New York City. It is, after all, the epicenter of arts in the United States, and although I might not want to live in the city, I certainly want to know what’s going on there.

However, there is another reason why New York City holds my attention. My eldest daughter lives and works there. September 11, 2001 made it perfectly and painfully clear just how intimately I was connected with this city of cities. As I waited for events to unfold and feared for my daughter’s safety, New York City was at the center of my thoughts.

Therefore, when I received a copy of Here is New York by E.B. White, I turned to it with double interest, so to speak. Not only is the book about New York City, but it is also written by someone who was from Maine.

I realize I am venturing into treacherous territory by implying E.B. White was a Maine writer. In Maine, over the years, there has been much debate as to who qualifies as a Maine writer. Since E.B. White was born in New York rather than in Maine, the purists maintain he was not a Maine writer. Perhaps the best answer to this never-ending debate is to adopt William Maxwell’s approach when he wrote about the writer Maeve Brennan. Was she an Irish writer or an American writer? Never mind, William Maxwell said, both Ireland and the United States should be proud to claim her. And that’s pretty much the way I feel about E.B. White; both Maine and New York should be proud to claim him.

As Roger Angell, Mr. White’s stepson, states in his introduction, Here is New York is a “slim book.” My edition, published in 1999 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of E.B. White’s birth, has fifty-six pages, and that includes the introduction. However, what it lacks in quantity is more than made up for in quality, with a prescient ending that quite literally made me catch my breath.

From Mr. Angell’s introduction, we learn the book was originally published in 1949, which, oddly enough, was the fiftieth anniversary of E.B. White’s birth. I suspect that most books lack this symmetrical and symbolic publishing history.

We also learn that Here is New York first appeared in Holiday magazine in 1948, and in just a year, the city had already started to change, and fifty years later the change is even greater. “Many of White’s places and references…are long gone….The Third Avenue elevated, the neighborhood ice-coal-and-wood cellars…the ancient book elevators at the Public Library…” No matter. This was Mr. White’s New York City, and in the end, that’s all that really counts. We see the city through his 1940s eyes, and that’s exactly how we want to see it. Besides, as E.B. White writes in his own foreword, “the essential fever of New York has not changed in any particular…” New York City maintains its character, despite the changes.

Then there is E.B. White’s writing itself. Mr. Angell describes it as “Modest and effortless, White’s prose almost effaces the brisk efficiency of his plan—a whole city (well, it’s mostly Manhattan) delivered in seventy-five hundred words—and the elegance of his beginning and closing lines.” Mr. Angell does not exaggerate. E.B. White’s style is incomparably good. I discovered E.B. White’s essays when I was in my early twenties, and I could hardly believe it was possible for anyone to write so well.

Here is the opening line: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York City will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” In that same paragraph, Mr. White concludes, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” Yet for those who are willing “to be lucky,” New York City offers a heady mix of “art and commerce and sport and religion and entertainment and finance.”

Mr. White writes how in New York City, despite its size, “every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.” This certainly is not true of every city, and it is perhaps why even today, New York has such a beating pulse of creativity that it is almost audible. Mr. White reminds us “creation is in part merely the business of foregoing the great and small distractions.” In other words, despite its large population and its many distractions, New York allows individuals to be single-minded.

But perhaps more importantly are the “three New Yorks.” First, there are the natives, the people who were born in the city. Naturally, they take all its wonders “for granted.” Second, there are the commuters who travel great distances in the course of a year, but see and experience very little. “The commuter dies with tremendous mileage to his credit, but he is no rover.” Third, there are the people who are, as we say in Maine, from away. Mr. White thought it was this third group that was the most important. “[They] came to New York in quest of something [and account] for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.” However, all three groups have something to give. “Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it its solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.”

Mr. White reflects on what New York City felt like when he arrived as a questing young man. He was not yet famous and “burned with a low steady fever just because [he] was on the same island with Don Marquis, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley….” And no doubt even today, young artist reflect on their “own stable of giants.”

In Here is New York, E.B. White captures what is elemental and timeless about the city while at the same time describing aspects of it that are gone—speakeasies and the whirring fans to provide relief from the heat wave. The book presents an image of E.B. White wandering through the hot city. As he wanders, he looks, listens, thinks, and takes notes. He reflects on the particular—a young man trying to persuade a young woman to come live with him. He reflects on the universal, on the overall character of the city.

For me, however, the most startling part comes at the very end. Lulled by the beautiful writing and the descriptions of the city during a heat wave, I was unprepared for Mr. White’s conclusion. This is typical of Mr. White’s writing; he leads you along and then hits you at the end.

As it turns out, Here is New York is more than just a pleasant exercise in nostalgia and memory. It was written just after World War II, and Mr. White reflects on the future of the city and indeed the world. “The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers…cremate the millions.”

No doubt Mr. White was writing about the atom bomb, but his descriptions and warnings can’t help but turn our minds to what happened on September 11. When he writes “All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation…of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightening, New York must hold a steady irresistible charm”, it almost seems as though he is predicting the event.

Yet he does conclude on a note of hope. “The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the prefect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence…this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and nations…housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.”

He is writing, of course, about the United Nations, which was under construction in the late 1940s. Although the planes were not “stayed” on September 11, 2001, I think he is absolutely correct when he sees that our best chance for stability comes from the United Nations. Countries must learn to work together. It’s just as true now as it was in the 1940s. Unilateralism is a luxury no country can afford, as our experience in Iraq certainly illustrates. E.B. White figured this out in the 1940s. Now, if we can only figure it out in the twenty-first century.

 

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