I discovered, quite by accident, that reality and fantasy make good bedfellows.
BY THE END of 1949, Andy was moving forward on research for the book he was calling Charlotte’s Web in his notes. His longtime editor at Harper & Brothers, the legendary Cass Canfield, who had been president or board chairman since 1931, had encouraged Andy to pull together another collection of New Yorker pieces. It had been eight years since the publication of One Man’s Meat, and Canfield argued that in the interim Andy had written many essays worthy of preservation between the pages of a book.
Early in the writing of Charlotte’s Web, however, Andy was preoccupied with this exciting new story about a spider and a pig. With unusual optimism, he wrote to Canfield that he couldn’t find time to think about work that he had published years ago, but that by fall he might be sending Harper an entirely different kind of book than they had planned, although he remained coy about the subject matter. “I guess it depends on how many rainy mornings we get between now and fall,” he added, “rain being about the only thing that brings me and a typewriter together.” Rather than a gentleman farmer, Andy liked to pretend that he was a full-time farmer and a gentleman writer.
It turned out to be a hectic year, genuinely busier with farming than with writing. That summer he wrote nothing for “Notes and Comment” and made no progress toward his hypothetical essay collection. Harold Ross was suddenly ill with lung cancer, often unable to be at the office, but keeping up his correspondence as much as possible. He and Andy exchanged letters on various topics, including Andy’s new windmill at which to tilt—a campaign for larger taxicabs in New York City. Andy had actually gone so far as to measure the height of the door in cabs. He complained that thirty-eight inches was half the height of a man and a doorway of that size respectable only on an igloo.
That busy summer he didn’t completely ignore the world of publishing. He sent a poem to Gus Lobrano at The New Yorker, but it was light verse inspired by his experience of sowing rye grass seed that cost an astronomical forty cents per pound. He judiciously critiqued a new manuscript that Jim Thurber had written during his recent stint in the Bahamas, while he was supposed to be writing something else. It was a lyrical fairy tale called The Thirteen Clocks. Andy told Thurber that he thought at times the plot might be too fantastic and action-packed for its own good and that the characters’ names were confusingly similar; and he complained again about Thurber’s muddy habit of not starting a new paragraph for each new speaker in a dialogue. Always Andy advised clarity and straightforwardness.
He aimed for the same goal in his new book. He had faith in clarity of expression even on those days when he lacked any other faith in life. Directness and honesty would carry the day, he believed, bringing alive the story whose mythological simplicity became more compelling for him every day. Two years before, he had found himself empathizing at an almost frightening level with the pig whose demise he chronicled in his Atlantic Monthly essay. That story had been true. In Charlotte’s Web he was free to make everything up as he went along, which meant that he could change the outcome. This time the pig wouldn’t die.
It is a straight report from the barn cellar, which I dearly love, having spent so many fine hours there, winter and summer, spring and fall, good times and bad times.
FOR HIS OWN reference, Andy decided, he needed a layout of the stage for his animal drama. He folded a piece of typing paper in half, then in half again to pocket-size, and took it out to the barn. There he diagrammed the barnyard. He drew a horizontal rectangle filling most of this now small page. In its lower right eighth he drew a smaller vertical rectangle and labeled it Pig. Outside it to the left he wrote Sheep + geese. He drew two small lines indicating the door and faintly sketched a square outside it, which he labeled Pig pen. A tiny flat rectangle at the bottom he labeled trough. Underneath it all he scribbled Barnyard.
For the story he drew a three-dimensional view rather than a diagram. On a small piece of pink scratch paper, about three inches by five, he sketched the barn’s southward-facing façade, the left door with a slanting plank ramp, the right with its double doors. He added a hint of a wind vane, a punctuational flourish, atop the steeply slanting roof, and in the upper right corner of the drawing he even sketched in the sycamore tree at the northeast corner of the barn. In cursive he labeled everything—the open gate, its door angling outward; the Barnyard itself. He drew an arrow pointing toward the ramp and wrote Cows and one toward the double door that he labeled Sheep.
Realizing that the sketch was growing and would require more space than the small piece of paper could accommodate, he pasted the sheet inside the front cover of the old manila envelope on the front of which he had penciled Charlotte’s Web. Then he extended the drawing outward from the edges of the pink paper. He added more labels: Pig pen, with an arrow pointing toward it on the upper right, and Lane to pasture moving toward the lower right. Underneath all of it he wrote Zuckerman’s Barn.
The setting was now vivid in his mind. His characters were coming insistently to life. He was able to conjure the behavior of the creatures he dealt with every day. Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats—Andy knew all of these characters. He had participated in countless life-and-death dramas and last-minute rescues. He could sit on a three-legged milking stool in the barn, admiring the slapstick of lambs and the gluttony of pigs, while warm sunlight slanted through the doorway and across his back and chattering swallows flitted in and out of the big open doorway. He could recite the ingredients in a pig’s daily slop. He could close his eyes and still see every lurking step of a rat—the dastardly thieves on whom he had focused his despair and his .22 rifle during the war, imagining them as Nazis. As long ago as the stable on Summit Avenue, rats had crept into the subterranean pathways of his subconscious as the embodiment of gluttonous dishonesty.
But, try as he might, Andy couldn’t envision the intimate details of a spider’s life. He could stand in the barn and peer respectfully at one. But she wouldn’t sit still for microscopic examination—and even if she did, he wouldn’t know what to look for. He didn’t have on file in his mind the kind of details about spiders that he possessed about the other characters. He was an observant farmer, not a scientist. What was the spider doing out there in the barn all night by herself? How did she actually go about spinning the web that would be so important in this story? He needed more information. This book would require actual research.
For this reason, he spent many months researching spiders. More than once on his trips to Manhattan during late 1949 and early 1950, Andy returned carrying trophies from a research safari. When he walked down the marble steps of the New York Public Library, past the regal lions with their forepaws like clenched fists, he was carrying scientific tomes full of illustrations of monstrous spider faces and enough Gothic webs to satisfy Dracula. At the apartment in New York or back home in Maine, he eagerly delved into these sources for background information about Charlotte. He was ready to merge his tentative early scenes, his eavesdropped snippets of dialogue and stage notes of action, with the factual support that he craved this time. He hadn’t felt this compulsion for natural-history research when writing Stuart Little, but then Stuart wasn’t really a mouse; he only looked like one.
From the first, Andy’s scientific research and his whimsical imagination encouraged each other. He envisioned Charlotte performing certain actions in her web, such as writing letters that showed up well enough for people to see, and immediately turned to the scientists to learn by what chemistry and acrobatics she might accomplish what he had in mind. He pounced upon an unexpected tidbit of information in a source book, such as the detail that some stream-side spiders have been known to catch small leaping fish in their webs, and soon Charlotte was retailing these facts as anecdotes about her extraordinary family.