Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances—including the characters in the barnyard, who were later to reappear in Charlotte’s Web—I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens.
AFTER THE UNITED States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eventually killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, Andy spent the last half of the 1940s expecting Armageddon. The war’s ravages, its global reminders of the innate human lust for blood and destruction, left scars on millions who never saw the front, and Andy kept thinking about it. Were human beings really about to annihilate themselves?
In late March of 1948 Andy was in New York, unable to celebrate the vernal equinox in the countryside. Shortly before his favorite seasonal milestone, he went out to a moody lunch alone at the Roosevelt Grill, in the Roosevelt Hotel on East Forty-fifth Street, only three blocks from the New Yorker offices. The Roosevelt’s two-story lobby was like a stage set and its grand ballroom complete with Cinderella mural to guarantee a fairy-tale feel to Guy Lombardo’s performances. Lombardo’s renowned New Year’s Eve concerts at the Roosevelt had established “Auld Lang Syne” as a holiday standard. The hotel’s other famous innovation—street-level shops to help replace the income it would lose from Prohibition—had been featured since it opened in 1924, the year after Andy moved to Manhattan and began his job at the Seaman advertising agency, back when he was contributing unsigned squibs to F.P.A.’s “Conning Tower” column in the World. Andy sat in the dark-paneled restaurant, with Vanderbilt Avenue distantly visible in golden light beyond the blinds, and picked at the sweet white flesh of the weakfish he had ordered. It was so dark in the grill that he could barely read the gloomy editorials in the News. Then the waiter silently appeared beside him, stared out through the blinds, and sighed eloquently. The day outside was beautiful, he said, but the forecast was “Tomorrow snow, turning to rain.”
Soon Andy wrote up the incident for “Notes and Comment,” adding a larger perspective on the waiter’s and his own melancholy: “He was a man carrying foreknowledge in his breast, and the pain was almost unbearable.”
The vague sense of yearning and loss that had haunted Andy’s teen years had only grown over the decades. He was the writer who had confessed some years earlier, “A man sometimes gets homesick for the loneliness that he has at one time or another experienced in his life.” Even tending animals could leave him half ecstatic and half melancholy. But in 1948 in particular, he couldn’t help casting a retrospective eye across his life and work. Over the previous few months he had been awarded three honorary degrees for his contributions to literature, from Yale, the University of Maine, and Dartmouth. It was difficult for Andy to maintain his outsider/country-boy pose now that Irving Penn had photographed him for Vogue, sprawling across a burlap-covered prop, dressed in a flannel suit and with his hands in his pockets.
As he approached fifty, his married life was mostly serene and comfortable and so was his professional life, except perhaps for his ongoing preoccupation with his health. It had always shown up even in his letters and poems to Katharine, in frequent updates about sniffles, fevers, dizziness, intestinal troubles. Once, when he omitted such intimate bodily details in a letter, Katharine replied, “You say nothing about nasal discharge or stomach upheavals. How are you—really?” On a 1934 trip to Florida with friends, he wrote home to Katharine that he had experienced a brush with death. The night before, he discovered that his face was swelling. Convinced that he had a brain tumor, he wrote a loving farewell note to Katharine, unlocked the hotel room door so that people could find his corpse without trouble, and collapsed on the bed in a panic attack. The next morning, surprised to find himself still alive, he consulted a doctor, who informed him that he had a sunburn. Andy considered this diagnosis ridiculous. He argued instead that perhaps he had been bitten by a spider. Even in describing his deathbed scene to Katharine, he included the detail that he went to bed “full of flatulence, dizziness & fear.” Earlier, while still in his twenties, he had published in The New Yorker a light-verse ode to how a hot-water bottle could warm and comfort a sick and lonely man who kept imagining that he was dying. “Small is the solace in being dead,” he observed, “With never a love at my side.” To the water bottle itself he murmured the creepy image “Pretend I’m a woman that’s birthed a child / And you are that warm little armful.”
ONE ISSUE THAT haunted Andy was the morality of raising farm animals. As he walked along through the early-morning mist, around the corner of the barn and down to the barn cellar, carrying a sloshing pail of slops for a pig, he faced again and again what he thought of as his own duplicity. His pig relied upon him to deliver the food and guard the door, and Andy performed these tasks conscientiously. But in a few months he was scheduled to betray the creature’s confidence and slaughter it. Andy had the same troubled relationship with those sheep that were to be eaten rather than merely sheared. He would sit up late in April, tenderly nursing a lamb back to health, only to slaughter it come August. So much gentleness to end in so much blood, in a hammer blow to the head, a knife slash to the throat—only hours after Andy had dutifully served what the lamb did not know was its last meal. There was no bucolic innocence in farming. It seemed a quiet and benign life only from the distant city, much as the lights of Broadway glowed naively festive when recalled from a twilit country porch.
Yet paradoxically he found it even more confusing when nature did the killing and interrupted his own plan. He had been left especially melancholy after the death in September 1947 of a pig whose life he had worked hard to save. With seventeen-year-old Joel assisting, Andy had followed a neighbor’s advice, pulled the pig off-balance and turned him upside down, to pour castor oil down his throat—which orifice Andy learned, glimpsing it for the first time at this angle, was a striking corrugated pink. Fred, the Whites’ beloved, arthritic old dachshund, also attended the sickbed. With his two-legged and four-legged assistants, Andy visited the pig at all hours during foggy nights and unseasonably hot days, delivered medicinal slop to an apathetic patient, imitated the pig’s own slurping noises to inspire memories of the joy of gluttony, even performed an enema on the poor animal—all to no avail. The veterinarian was unable to help. Andy empathized strongly with the pig. On good days he had often felt a kind of kinship in its noisy appetite, seeing it as a healthy lust for life, so he found it dispiriting to watch the pig lose interest in food and finally even in water. At last the exhausted animal was unable to even push his snout through straw to fluff his bedding. Soon afterward he died. Andy found him outside the barn, stretched on the grass, his face neither anguished nor peaceful.
Andy had also delivered piglets, taking each in hand as it slithered out into the glow of a lantern in the shadowy barn. He had seen both ends of life. He knew the cycle as well as he knew his own breathing. Still, this loss preyed disproportionately upon his mind, and finally he mused over it in a Harper’s essay, exploring his new job as failed savior and also his usual role as tender executioner. “The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig,” he wrote. “He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world.”
A SENSE OF loss, the pig’s eventual fate had it survived illness, a farmer’s dual role in this ancient drama—these worries had been circling around in Andy’s mind for months when, in early 1949, an editor at Doubleday and Company invited him to take a trip down memory lane. Doubleday had been the original publisher of Don Marquis’s three volumes about Andy’s favorite fictional characters—Archy and Mehitabel in 1927, Archy’s Life of Mehitabel in 1933, and Archy Does His Part in 1935. In 1940, three years after Marquis’s death, Doubleday had combined all three in a handsome fat omnibus volume, retaining the rakish illustrations by George Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat. Now they wanted a new edition and they offered Andy five hundred dollars to write an introduction for it. This pleasurable assignment took him several weeks. In late August, he wrote to a friend that the Archy introduction was all he had written during the summer.
Although Andy had referred to Marquis numerous times, quoted him, honored him, he had never devoted a full-length essay to him. In 1939 he had been writing a Comment paragraph when he decided to divide its sections with asterisks. He typed
* * *
across the page and then asked, “Asterisks? So soon?” and typed three more.
* * *
The look of the page then reminded him of Don Marquis’s punctuational and other acrobatics in his newspaper columns. “The heavy pauses between his paragraphs,” Andy wrote, “could they find a translator, would make a book for the ages.” Andy had typed more asterisks of his own and then remarked out of nowhere, “Don knew how lonely everybody is.” Andy suggested to the reader that loneliness might drive reading itself: “You’re not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration.” A few weeks after Marquis’s death Andy had written to James Thurber, “What a kick in the pants life gave that guy!” and described Marquis as “one of the saddest people of our generation.”
When thinking about politics, Andy often returned to Marquis. He referred to his own vision of ideal government as “the perfect state,” after Marquis’s satirical essay “The Almost Perfect State.” In a passionate but playful 1940 Harper’s essay called “Compost,” Andy wrote the line “A seer a day keeps Armageddon away,” only to interrupt himself with a question: “You’re trying to sound like Don Marquis, aren’t you?” He admitted to himself and to the reader that he was indeed.
In the spring of 1946 Andy had invoked Archy and Marquis again. While contemplating the news about Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, where the native islanders were being forcibly relocated so that the U.S. military could test nuclear weapons as part of Operation Crossroads, Andy read naturalist Edwin Way Teale’s recent book Near Horizons. “If you sat up nights trying to invent an indestructible bug, especially fitted to survive,” wrote Teale, “you would have a hard time outdoing the roach.” Andy realized that cockroaches, which were already considered one of the most ancient forms of life, might be the creatures likeliest to survive a nuclear holocaust. “Well,” he sighed, “Archy’s boss is dead, God rest his untransmigrated soul, but Archy himself is probably good for another hundred million years.” Clearly the same couldn’t be said for human beings.
Thus Andy responded congenially, even gratefully, to the need to re-immerse himself in Marquis’s skeptical but compassionate view of life. While writing his introduction for Doubleday, Andy lingered nostalgically over the virtues of the era’s newspapers, especially the Evening Sun itself, and Marquis’s decades of contributions. In doing so Andy was forcefully reminded of how Marquis had freed his own antic imagination, had created what were unquestionably his greatest writings, his funniest and most perceptive and most original, by creating animal characters, especially the humble vermin who served as his avatar. “Archy and Mehitabel, between the two of them,” he wrote, “performed the inestimable service of enabling their boss to be profound without sounding self-important, or even self-conscious.” Of Archy he said, “The details of his creative life make him blood brother to writing men. He cast himself with all his force upon a key, head downward. So do we all.” But Andy couldn’t explain the depth and resonance of Marquis’s humor. Instead he came back around to his own ongoing preoccupation with a particular kind of animal by stating flatly, “To interpret humor is as futile as explaining a spider’s web in terms of geometry.”
The doomed pig, and the relationship between humans and animals on a farm, kept running through his mind. Finally, thanks to these natural and literary nudges, Andy began to consider exploring these events in another children’s book. Already he envisioned the farm animals’ lives as much like his own, half comical and half melancholy. But how might a pig’s life be saved from the dastardly farmer’s plan?
THE SPIDER LIVED on the underside of the barn’s roof. Sheltered from the elements by an overhang, her web was an elegant orb whose loops and strands glittered on dewy mornings like an antique necklace. Every night she made the rounds of her miniature cosmos, tightly wrapping prey, cutting loose and jettisoning debris, reweaving broken strands.
By the time Andy came outdoors in the dawn, she had retired to a corner of the web and only her handiwork was visible. Each morning he was impressed all over again with the spider’s industry. That busy autumn of 1948, as Andy went in and out of the shed during the endless daily routine of farm chores, he kept an admiring eye on the work of the tiny creature who lived her equally conscientious life above his head. He had been observing her for several days, watching the dew glitter in the mornings and the web almost disappear as the moisture evaporated by midday, glimpsing the spider herself as she emerged in the twilight to begin the night shift. In the evening he stood below her web and peered up at it, watching his gumdrop-size neighbor scurry toward prey or hang upside down in the center of the web, patiently waiting.
Then one cold October evening he saw that she was clinging to a little roundish object, which upon closer examination turned out to be neither an insect nor another spider. Finally Andy realized that his spider must be spinning an egg sac. This new development required a closer look. He went to get a stepladder and an extension light—a shielded bulb with a hook for hanging, an essential item in every barn—and carried them out to the barn doorway. He climbed up the few steps and hung the lamp nearby and peered closely at the spider’s now spotlit trophy. Never having found spiders frightening or repellent, Andy decided that this one was rather beautiful. Her body was an elegant gray and brown, her legs dramatically striped. Now and then as she moved, he could glimpse a curious pattern on her underside reminiscent of the hourglass on a black widow’s belly. Andy watched her for a long time. Finally she merely perched atop the object with her eight legs spread over it, and he assumed that she must be laying eggs inside it. She attached the sac to the wood of the projecting roof, not to the web itself. Rounded and soft-looking, the egg sac seemed to have been spun out of peach-colored cotton candy. Finally Andy climbed down from the ladder, put away the light, and left the spider alone in the darkness that was home to her. The next morning her egg sac hung secure under the shed roof, but the spider herself was not in sight. He didn’t see her again.
Only a few days after this provocative reminder of the overlooked life-and-death dramas surrounding him every day, Andy had to return to New York for work. Unwilling to leave his new discovery behind, he got out the ladder again, this time bringing along a razor blade. He carefully cut the binding strands of web that held the egg sac to the wood of the barn door and carried it indoors. The sac’s material felt like a cross between silk and paper and seemed to weigh nothing at all, but it looked sturdy. He found an empty candy box, punched a few holes in the lid, tucked the egg case inside, and took it with him to the apartment on East Forty-eighth Street. There he put the box on his bureau and forgot about it.
But as he went about his urban business, riding in elevators and dodging cabs and typing at his desk at The New Yorker, alchemical mysteries were taking care of themselves inside the candy box. One day several weeks later, he noticed on the bureau a movement so slight it might have been imaginary. He bent down and peered more closely at the box. Tiny spiderlings, so small they were barely visible, were climbing up through the air holes he had punched in the lid. Delighted with this renewal of life so many weeks after the mother’s apparent death, Andy stood at the bureau and watched the latest generation of spiders. Even newly hatched, they seemed as busy as a Lilliputian construction crew. Bustling across his daily artifacts, they strung almost invisible web lines from nail scissors to hairbrush, from mirror to comb. Deciding that barn spiders were unlikely to be dangerous to people, Andy let the hundreds of spiderlings cavort across the bureau for the next week or two. Some had departed by the time that he reluctantly evicted the rest because the maid who came in to clean refused to work around a spider refugee camp.
After the spiders left the bureau, they continued to scurry around in Andy’s imagination. From childhood he had admired spiders and their webs—the flytraps in the corners of the stable in Mount Vernon, the gleaming tents he found spread in the fields around the Belgrade summer cabins, and nowadays the elaborate webs in his farm buildings on Allen Cove. As early as the St. Nicholas days on Summit Avenue, he had seen science-minded but admiring photographs of spiders. In his writing over the decades since, he had often invoked the elegance of their creations. “Nobody styled the orb web of a spider,” he acknowledged, but he insisted that it is beautiful because it is “designed to perform a special task under special conditions,” like a canoe or (he added in what had become his trademark sudden left turn in sentences) a guillotine. Even in his now extensive political writings, he turned to spiders for his metaphors. In one longer-than-usual Comment piece on academic freedom, he made the analogy that “the elasticity of democracy is its strength—like the web of a spider, which bends but holds.”
In his idiosyncratic poem to Katharine, “Natural History,” he had seen affection and commitment in the spider’s tightrope daring. But it was more than a romantic fancy. In the poem he admitted that he saw himself as the spider, groping his way on a tenuous thread of his own creation, hoping eventually that—by trusting the very act of making the web—he would find his way home to where he started.