Short takes

June 19, 2011

THE STORY OF CHARLOTTE’S WEB: E. B. White’s Eccentric
Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic
By Michael Sims
Walker & Company, 320 pp., $25

It will surprise nobody who loves Stuart Little that the mouse’s creator was also moody, sensitive, sentimental, and hypochondriacal. Elwyn Brooks White, known as Andy, was also shy, so averse to crowds that at his own funeral, stepson Roger Angell cracked, “If Andy White could be with us today, he would not be with us today.’’ In this immensely charming book, Michael Sims sketches White’s life along with that of what is perhaps his most enduring creation, the children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web.’’ The youngest in a large, happy family, White grew up with “a brooding anxiety about almost everything,’’ from school to girls to everyday mysteries and dangers. He found solace in nature, both in summers spent on a lake in Maine and in the books he avidly read. His first published writing, at age 11, in St. Nicholas magazine, was titled “A Winter Walk’’ and described a snowy landscape where “[e]very living creature seemed happy.’’

White never stopped writing about animals. While helping invent the New Yorker’s voice — “sophisticated, ironic, and literary without pretentiousness’’ — many of his best pieces concerned birds, spiders, and other urban beasts. After marrying fellow editor Katharine Angell and moving to a farm on the Maine coast, inspired perhaps by his wife’s columns reviewing children’s literature, he began working on something longer. First came “Stuart Little,’’ then “Charlotte’s Web,’’ in which an enterprising spider saves Wilbur the pig from near-certain death. Reviewing it in the Times, Eudora Welty wrote: “As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done.’’ Throughout Sims’s book, another heroine emerges (besides Charlotte, of course): Katharine. Both writers and pigs can be nervous about their place in the universe, not to mention their survival, and both need loving caretakers.

THE STORM AT THE DOOR
By Stefan Merrill Block
Random House, 368 pages, $25