Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Angell gives special attention to two of my favorite essays, “Once More to the Lake” and “This is New York”–which, coincidentally, I blogged here exactly two years ago, struggling to understand what makes White so funny.)

Angell offers delightful backstage details about White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart LIttle. He also includes somewhat Too Much Information about White’s illnesses, fretfulness, and fear of crowds. Well, it’s a sad fact of the way lifespans overlap that the our parents’ old age and frailty can fill so much foreground of our adult memories.

Of course the best bits are the bits that are written by White–a letter about baby birds, or this fragment from an essay on driving Maine highways:

Like highways everywhere it is a mixed dish: Gulf and Shell, bay and gull, neon and sunset, cold comfort and warm, the fussy façade of a motor court right next door to the pure geometry of an early-nineteenth-century clapboard house with barn attached. You can certainly learn to spell “moccasin” while driving into Maine, and there is often little else to do except steer and avoid death. Woods and fields occur everywhere, creeping to within a few feet of the neon and the court, and the experienced traveler into this land is always conscious that just behind the garish roadside stand, in its thicket of birch and spruce, stands the well-proportioned deer; just beyond the overnight cabin, in the pasture of granite and juniper, trots the perfectly designed fox. . . .
The Maine man does not have to penetrate in depth to be excited by his coastal run; its flavor steals into his consciousness with the first ragged glimpse of properly textured woodland, the first whiff of punctually drained cove.

Anyway, do yourself and your Valentine a favor–read this loving essay and pass it on.