(Continued from E.B. White, Part 1)
White uses and reuses the device of surprise reappearance by an apparent digression. We readers have seen this trick before, but each time we love it all over again. The “retired” soprano comes back for just one more concert? Hurray! And if the soprano comes back at the end of the show, for just one last bow, we’re even more thrilled.
A joke with a “capper” gives twice the dose of humor (both surprise and congruence.) Revival with a new image or a new setting gives you new insight into big topics like change, eternity, death. (White attempts a much wider range of subjects than Barry.)
White’s diction is quirky. He writes for New Yorker readers and for himself–the general level is quite a bit higher than Barry’s. He rummages through his treasure-chest of words looking for just the one needed right now, bringing forth things new and old. Most often, a short, direct word does the job–“his hard little body, skinny and bare”–but White has no false shame about “teeming” or “petulant.” And he makes no apology for “slummiest” or “pawed over.” White himself is not slumming. He is writing for equals.
The girders that hold up White’s essays are found in Strunk (later Strunk and White.) “Use the active voice.” “Put statements in positive form.” “Omit needless words.” I would like to compare the original Strunk (available online) to the more famous Strunk and White. White’s additions would be full of meaning–but this is a pleasant goal for a more-leisured future.
Strunk says, “…the proper place for what is to be made most prominent is the end.” This rule “applies equally to the words of a sentence, to the sentences of a paragraph, and to the paragraphs of a composition.” White took the advice to heart.
In Once More to the Lake, White’s last two paragraphs draw together all the essay’s big themes. Then, in this now comfortable, familiar setting, White’s ending delivers an even-more massive surprise.
Here’s how he does it: A thunderstorm brings back the themes I call “Then” and “Now”– the long-ago summers of childhood and this summer’s trip with his own young son. White also revisits two closely-related themes I call “Eternity” and “Change” –the indestructible one-ness of lakeside summers, despite an admission that “Now” some detail has changed. (The others are all going swimming, but “Now” the narrator sits languidly watching.) One last time, we share White’s “Illusion” of changing places with his son or his father. The author watches the boy of today, feeling once more what he felt as a long-ago boy, but in the final word of the final phrase of the final sentence, we see what has been, so far, so carefully hidden: “death.”
Wow.
The essay Here is New York (only excerpts online) is less finely crafted. White’s major theme throughout is “his” New York–a brisk catalog of the city’s pleasures and fears, virtues and flaws, tossed off in a series of small, sharp images that add up to one huge impressionistic daub, like a “face” made up of a hundred tiny photographs. This part is brilliantly done. Less successfully, the end (an expression of hope for the United Nations) seems merely tacked on, for all his craftsmanship.
Still, let’s see how the master tries for his effect. This essay has lots of short-run themes–ideas that crop up a few times in successive paragraphs, then disappear. In the final paragraphs White brings back many of these, reminding us of our shared journey thus far–images of construction, housing projects, the invisibility of big events, racial harmony, sky-scraping buildings with planes overhead, now seen as an emblem of menace.
The final paragraph comes back to specifics, one single specific tree in Turtle Bay, a symbol both of the city itself and of all that we have to lose when we lose what we love. By no coincidence–White first published “Once More to the Lake” in 1941; “Here in New York” dates from 1948–the final word of both essays is the same image of the fear of infinite loss: “death.”