REVIEW POTPOURRI: E. B. White

by Peter Cates

E. B. White

Some time ago, I wrote about Brooklin Maine’s most famous resident E.B. White (1899-1985).

E. B. White

When his Collected Letters and Essays was published during the mid-’70s, Mississippi’s grand lady of literature Eudora Welty (1909-2001) reviewed one of them for the New York Times and commented that one could see and smell the Maine seacoast through the evocative naturalness of his prose.

Another writer commented that White’s notes to the milkman achieved effects that other writers slaved all week to achieve.

The 1987 Maine Speaks anthology contains White’s essay Maine Speech, from which some precision tooled quotes are worth savoring:

“Sometimes when a child is talking it is all one can do to translate until one has mastered the language. Our boy came home from school the first day and said the school was peachy, but he couldn’t understand what anybody was saying. This lasted only for a couple of days. “

“The tongue spoken here in Maine is as different from the tongue spoken in New York as Dutch is from German. Part of this difference is in the meaning of words, part in the pronunciation, part in the grammar. But the difference is very great.”

“Manure is always dressing, never manure. I think, although I’m not sure, that manure is considered a nasty word, not fit for public company. The word dung is used some but not as much as dressing. But a manure fork is always a dung fork.”

(A Baptist I knew preferred saying cow dung to manure and dressing.)

“The word dear is pronounced dee-ah. Yet the word deer is pronounced deer. All children are called dee-ah, by men and women alike. Workmen often call each other dee-ah while on the job.”

(Really, E.B. ? Not the men I ever worked with. A minor quibble here.)

The New Yorker Magazine remains rightfully a very successful weekly magazine since it began publication 100 years ago and publishing numerous fine writers such as James Thurber, John Updike, Dorothy Parker, etcs; much of the credit can be given to its founder Harold Ross (1892-1951) and E.B. White, along with his wife Katherine (1892-1977), both of whom continued editing manuscripts for the magazine even after moving full time to Maine and making sure their work was on the Monday morning mail boat back to New York City.

When folks would ask White what books he would recommend, he sometimes stated that neither he nor Harold Ross ever read books.

However, White did once admit that he read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in a year and a half but much preferred dealing with baby chicks, ducklings and piglets on his Brooklin farm.

Strange Love of Martha Ivers

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a 1946 suspense film starring Barbara Stanwyck, Kirk Douglas, Van Heflin, Lizbeth Scott and Judith Anderson, taking place in a small industrial city in Pennsylvania.

Lizbeth Scott

Judith Anderson

The story begins in 1928 , then transitions to 1946 within 20 minutes. It involves murder, blackmail, loveless marriage, the moral corrosion of too much money and power.

Stanwyck portrays an heiress who owns several factories, Kirk Douglas, in his film debut, is her morally weak husband who is district attorney and hopelessly alcoholic. Van Heflin almost steals the show as a gambler who lives off his wits most of the time and, as a boy, was Stanwyck’s best friend.

Lizbeth Scott is a parolee who does have redeeming human qualities while Judith Anderson, who in 1959 did brilliant work as the wife of Burl Ives’s Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, portrays Stanwyck’s rich authoritarian aunt.

The movie’s pacing and black and white cinematography and sets make for magnificent entertainment.