Letters of E. B. White: Revised Edition Books Review

"I'm the father of two robins," E. B. White writes to his stepson in 1964 from his farm in Maine. The baby birds had been orphaned, "and without really thinking about what I was doing I casually dropped a couple of marinated worms into their throats as I walked by. ... This did it. They took me on with open hearts and open mouths, and my schedule became extremely tight." He has fed these robins a formula of "hamburg, chicken mash, kibbled worm and orange juice" for several days from a "yellow bamboo stick, split at one end, like a robin's bill." And now the birds "come streaming at me from bush and tree, trying for a landing on shoulder or cap, usually overshooting me in the fog and bringing up against a wall. This exhausts them and me." Next, says White, he will have to "hop about on the lawn with my head cocked to one side, to show them how to get their own living."

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White in his New Yorker office, December 1953.

LETTERS OF E. B. WHITE Revised Edition.

Originally edited by Dorothy Lobrano Guth. Revised and updated by Martha White. Foreword by John Updike.

Illustrated. 713 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. .

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That's pretty good. It's not twee or just whimsical, is it? No, it's pretty good.

Later that summer White writes, to a grandson, that when he went outdoors in the morning, these robins would be waiting for him. "One would fly up and sit on my head, and the other would perch on my shoulder."

St. Francis of Assisi, over here. He nurtures robins, and he writes fine affectionate letters to his loved ones, who include many old friends, like the humorist Frank Sullivan: "Thank you, thank you, sweet my Frank, for your lovely letter." Pretty darn warm and genuine, is how Andy, as White's friends called him, comes off in these letters. And danged peculiar.

To Scott Elledge, who would become his friendly but thoroughgoing biographer, he writes: "I was interested in your remarks about the writer as poser, because, of course, all writing is both a mask and an unveiling, and the question of honesty is uppermost, particularly in the case of the essayist, who must take his trousers off without showing his genitals. (I got my training in the upper berths of Pullman cars long ago.)"

Sometimes a thing "casually dropped" by White is not only unexpected, like "his genitals," but also passing strange. When he came upon those robins, he happened to be carrying worms? That were marinated?

In 1929, when he was 29 and a half, White wrote to his brother Stanley: "Sometimes in writing of myself - which is the only subject anyone knows intimately - I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure, an antic sound."

The redundancy of "sometimes" and "occasionally" aside, that's not very good, is it? He loves to squash capsules of truth? Humor these days is obliged to induce a cringe, but it's supposed to do it knowingly. Under White's name in the index to Elledge's biography there's an entry, "mice in life of." White enjoyed the company of an actual mouse in his workroom, but he was troubled by, and saw a doctor about, "mice in the subconscious." A poem he wrote entitled "Vermin" seems to be about his need, and reluctance, to elicit that "faint squeak of mortality" from some psychic mouse, which he couldn't put his finger on.

White is remembered as one of the old New Yorker's formative stylists, and any comprehensive anthology of American humor or prose is likely to include one of his graceful essays about small matters that made him uneasy, Down East. Like the mouse-boy hero of his children's book "Stuart Little," White loved canoeing. In a recent New Yorker cartoon, the host of a book-chat show is saying to an author, "I found your book ‘Canoeing the Small Puddles of Maine' really stupid." I'm not saying that was a dig at White. But it made me think how horrible it would be if old Andy - who was phobic about appearing publicly anywhere but on a page under his admirably obsessive control - had to do TV.

Though he died, at 86, in 1985, White is still read by young people. His books for children remain popular (on Amazon.com recently, "Charlotte's Web" was outselling most, though not all, of the Captain Underpants novels), and "The Elements of Style," his reworking of an old professor's rule book, is still sometimes recommended to college students as a handy, in fact an elegant, guide to sharp, sensible writing.

But is any recovering teenage solipsist taking him as a role model today? I did, in 1958 or so, but by the '70s I was off him. He had come to seem a bit - well, white, for one thing, but also cozy. From "Letters of E. B. White" (1976) and the Elledge biography (1984), I gathered that the old boy was an outrageous hypochondriac, with enough money put away that he could indulge in nervous breakdowns and long fallow periods. As a boy he'd been the beloved baby of a large, well-off family, and as a man he was sustained by his wife, Katharine S. White, a distinguished editor whom other people found formidable but who doted on her husband's vocation. You didn't have to share Tom Wolfe's "tiny mummies" disdain for the New Yorker's heritage to feel that the times demanded madder humor and stronger stimulants. My old hero was a hothouse flower.

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Roy Blount Jr.'s most recent book is "Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans."