Stuart Little

Searching

THESE DAYS many of us do most of our searching with a keyboard. If we need to find something, the first thing we do is type some words into a box on a screen and hit ENTER. But that’s really asking, not searching. The computer does the searching for us—offering either, increasingly, an actual answer (the movie starts at 7:00 p.m.) or a list of sites that might have your answer (the local cineplex). It’s not the same as leaving the comfort of my home in search of something—something concrete or perhaps abstract—something I know is out there or only hope might be. The physical search involves an important set of tools that the computer search doesn’t require: fortitude, patience, persistence, and commitment. In a word: character.

Whenever I think about searching, true searching, I think about Stuart Little.

At age five, I first encountered and fell in love with Stuart Little, E. B. White’s novel about a mouse born to a New York family. That a human family should have a mouse as a child goes almost entirely without comment in the book. Stuart is simply the newest member of the Little family, albeit a rather small one. Accommodations—including “a tiny bed [built] out of four clothespins and a cigarette box”—are made as a matter of course.

When it’s time to weigh Stuart, Mrs. Little uses a scale originally intended for weighing letters. “At birth Stuart could have been sent by first class mail for three cents, but his parents preferred to keep him rather than send him away.” Fearing that Stuart isn’t gaining weight fast enough, his mother takes him to a doctor who is delighted to meet him, merely remarking that it is “very unusual for an American family to have a mouse.” And that’s really all anyone has to say on the matter; Stuart may be small, he may be a mouse, but he’s the Littles’ child, and that’s that.

This expression of unconditional love is, I suspect, one of the things that drew me to the book. I think I may have sensed even back then that at its heart Stuart Little is a tale of radical acceptance—you can be whatever or whoever you are born to be and not risk losing your family. Every child is in some ways different from her or his parents—even if not so different as Stuart was from his.

Why I suspect this is one of the things that drew me to the book—as opposed to knowing it—is twofold. First, I don’t remember most of what I thought and felt at five. And second, this thought occurred to me really only after reading a groundbreaking book by Andrew Solomon called Far from the Tree, in which Solomon explores the difference between what he calls vertical identities (those you share with your parents) and horizontal identities (the ones you share with others but not with your parents). Stuart’s vertical identity included being a member of the Little family and growing up in a pleasant part of New York City. His horizontal identities included being, well, a rodent—an attribute his parents and brother didn’t share. To know that whatever your horizontal identities might be they can be accepted by your family is a comforting thought, whether conscious or not.

But I’m sure that what drew me most to this book was Stuart himself, one of the great characters in children’s or any literature. He’s brave, dapper, stoic, soft-spoken, well mannered, charming, adventuresome, matter-of-fact, and, above all, loyal. Whether locked in a refrigerator, rolled up in a curtain, piloting a model boat on a stormy pond in Central Park and freeing it after a dreadful collision, or motoring off in a small car, searching the country for his beloved friend and onetime savior, the bird Margalo, Stuart experiences strong emotions but only once loses his cool. And that is the time he is facing almost certain death.

At first, Stuart takes his impending end in relative stride. When he realizes that he has, through bad luck and timing, been dumped onto a trash scow that is being towed out to sea, he thinks, “Well…this is about the worst thing that could happen to anybody.” He realizes he’s going to die and would rather not do it covered in banana peels and other trash. But that’s all bearable. It’s only when he realizes he will never see his family and friends again, never experience again the comforts of home, that he becomes inconsolable and starts sobbing. And that’s when Margalo swoops in to the rescue.

Quickly, Stuart is back to his practical self. As Margalo prepares to fly him off the barge, he has a few questions:

“Suppose I get dizzy,” said Stuart.

“Don’t look down,” replied Margalo. “Then you won’t get dizzy.”

“Suppose I get sick at my stomach.”

“You’ll just have to be sick,” the bird replied. “Anything is better than death.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Stuart agreed.

The next time Stuart feels an intense emotion, it is heartbreak; Margalo, in peril, leaves without being able to say goodbye, and Stuart doesn’t know where she’s gone or why—but knows he must find her. Stuart is so stricken that he can’t eat or sleep. He resolves to do whatever he has to do to find the friend who saved his life, even if that means leaving his family and the comforts of home behind. Here’s where his practical self reemerges—while he’s searching for Margalo he might as well try to seek his fortune at the same time.

Most of the characters I had hitherto encountered in children’s fiction had been representative of one and only one character trait—they were brave or funny, confident or curious, adventuresome or retiring. In contrast, like the best and truest characters in life and fiction, Stuart contains multitudes. But one of his most prominent characteristics is kindness. If Stuart became the ruler of the world, he proclaims, he would make a law that everyone has to be kind (even knowing that most people wouldn’t follow it). That doesn’t mean he isn’t prepared to spring with bow and arrow to the defense of a friend—but he behaves cordially throughout until he has good reason to act otherwise.

While Stuart’s gallantry remains constant, other aspects of his personality change. At the start, he’s very much the family man. But he takes to life on the road and comes to see himself as a free soul; you might even call him a hobo.

As Stuart explains to a storekeeper he meets in a small town, “I’m not much of a society man these days. Too much on the move. I never stay long anywhere—I blow into a town and blow right out again, here today, gone tomorrow, a will o’ the wisp. The highways and the byways are where you’ll find me, always looking for Margalo.”

For those few unlucky readers who didn’t get to meet Stuart when they were young, and haven’t yet, you won’t want to read my next sentence or the rest of this chapter. At the end of the book, you discover that Stuart’s search is inconclusive, but what’s important is that he is still searching. Ultimately, Stuart is a romantic, a mouse with a cause, a seeker, alone, on the road, heading north—because that, he learns, is the way you head when you don’t know exactly where you are going.

I remember loving books before I read Stuart Little (or, rather, had it read to me). But I don’t remember ever so completely wanting to emulate a character in a book before encountering Stuart. He was my first fictional role model.

Less happily, Stuart also gave me my first lesson in the many ways real life doesn’t always follow the scripts of the books we read and can be deeply disappointing by comparison.

My obsession with E. B. White’s book at age five led me to believe that all I needed for complete happiness was a Stuart Little of my own, so I first asked and then begged my parents to find one for me. At the time, the popular rodent pet was a gerbil.

I promised my parents that I would take excellent care of my gerbil. How could I not? He would be my best friend. I would clean his cage religiously. I would give him water and feed him. We would be best pals. I wouldn’t ever ask for anything again. At night, I even prayed for this gerbil. If I was truly good, then God would give me a gerbil. And not just any gerbil: a dapper, brave, funny, adventuresome, and kind gerbil.

Finally, for my birthday, my parents bought me a gerbil. He was adorable. Everything I ever could have wanted. At first.

One evening, a few days after the gerbil’s arrival, I reached into his cage to hold him. I guess he didn’t want to be held right then, because he bit my finger. Hard. And there was blood.

I quickly withdrew my hand. I closed the cage door. He looked at me. I looked at him. And then I burst into tears.

The assault had taken place at cocktail hour, and I suspect the adults found the whole event somewhat charming. After my injured finger was Band-Aided, they went back to drinking, and I went back to my room. My gerbil looked at me. I looked at him. And I grew unhappier and unhappier with the present state of affairs.

Partly it was the gerbil’s disloyalty. He had betrayed me! Partly it was shame. Why was no one else surprised that this had happened? And partly it was the indifference of the adult world to my pain and suffering. I had been mauled, and no one seemed to care.

There seemed to be only one solution: I had to leave home, leave my gerbil, and leave the misery behind me. I went to the closet, climbed up on a chair, found my suitcase, threw some clothes into it, zippered it shut, and headed out the door, dragging it behind me. Where I was going, I would figure out later. But it was time to go.

At that time, we lived in a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Out I went, into the hot summer evening. Then, at about fifty yards, I paused. There was the house, my house. There was laughter from inside. The adults were still drinking. No one had even realized I had gone. I had thought I would leave my misery behind, but I was still miserable. And where was I going? All my life was in that house, even if its other inhabitants didn’t always understand exactly how I was feeling.

My parents later claimed that they saw me leave and kept an eye on me out the window, figuring that it was better for me to come back by myself than to be coaxed back. They were always a little fuzzy on the details after that, but clearly I came home. Soon, it was one of those funny family stories—the time that Will got bit by his gerbil, packed his case, and ran away. Oh, and the gerbil lived—as long as gerbils generally live. I fed him; cleaned his cage; gave him water. But we never really bonded. I’m not sure gerbils ever really bond with humans.

Fortunately, this misadventure didn’t diminish my love for Stuart Little one bit. Stuart was a mouse, after all—a mouse who could sail a boat and drive a roadster—not a gerbil. And a fictional character. And even if not, I could hardly hold the entire rodent group responsible for the viciousness of one gerbil. So I had learned nothing about Stuart from my unfortunate experience. But I did have occasion later to think more about our respective decisions to leave home. When Stuart left, he was on a quest. When I left, I was running away. And when you are running away from something, it often ends up coming with you, especially if the thing you are running away from is your own behavior.

Stuart Little was E. B. White’s first book for children. Prior to writing it, he was working for The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine and was one of the most admired essayists in America. (He would later cowrite with William Strunk Jr. what is widely regarded as the best style guide for writers: The Elements of Style. He would also later write two more classic books for children: Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan.)

In a letter to Anne Carroll Moore, the then current and first children’s librarian ever at the New York Public Library, White wrote in February 1939 that he had been at work for years on a book for children—but only when he was ill. He confessed that he had great fear about writing for children, as “one can so easily slip into a cheap sort of whimsy or cuteness. I don’t trust myself in this treacherous field unless I am running a degree of fever.”

Two weeks later, in a letter accompanying an early draft he sent to his editor, he wrote, “It would seem to be for children, but I’m not fussy who reads it.”

He would finally finish Stuart Little in 1943, and it would be published in 1945. But, as recounted in Letters of E. B. White, Moore, who had encouraged White, was terribly disappointed in the book when she read an advance copy of it—so much so that she told the book’s editor that it “mustn’t be published” and wrote to Katharine White, E.B.’s wife, urging her to convince her husband to stop the publication.

But she didn’t and he didn’t and the book would go on to sell more than four million copies in English alone.

About the inconclusive ending, E. B. White would later write to a teacher that it had “plagued” him, “not because I think there is anything wrong with it but because children seem to insist on having life neatly packaged. The final chapters were written many years after the early chapters and I think this did affect the narrative to some extent. I was sick and was under the impression that I had only a short time to live, and so I may have brought the story to a more abrupt close than I would have under different circumstances.”

But White explained further: “My reason (if indeed I had any) for leaving Stuart in the midst of his quest was to indicate that questing is more important than finding, and a journey is more important than the mere arrival at a destination. This is too large an idea for young children to grasp, but I threw it to them anyway. They’ll catch up with it eventually. Margalo, I suppose, represents what we all search for, all our days, and never quite find.”

White resisted all entreaties to write a sequel to Stuart Little. The hero’s quest had to remain open-ended. I never craved a watertight ending, because I didn’t much care whether Stuart found Margalo or not. What fascinated me wasn’t Stuart’s odyssey, but how he behaved while he was on it. The book ends with Stuart climbing into his car and heading north. White writes, “The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”

This nonending is one of the most beautiful endings in all of literature.

—

Inspired by Stuart’s quest, I’ve come up with some rules to live by. Most books don’t lend themselves to this kind of treatment. But for me, Stuart Little does. Here they are:

Try not to run away but to go in search.

Try to remain polite when possible, as Stuart always does, and to accept what can’t be changed—even though you might mourn what you’re losing, the way Stuart did when he was on the garbage scow headed out to sea.

Try to dress smartly. (I usually fail miserably on that account: A friend once told me that I “wear my clothes well.” English was his second language; he later clarified he’d meant that I wear them until they are worn out.)

Try to be as brave as Stuart, and as resourceful as he was when he piloted the model boat to victory.

But more than anything: Try to be as cheerful and optimistic as you can be in the face of whatever comes next.