In those days, my imagination was always immensely stirred by the thought of wildlife, of which I knew absolutely nothing but for which I felt a kind of awe.
ELWYN SPENT AS much time as possible outdoors, and often his mind stayed outside even when his body was in the house. When he read a book, usually he chose one about animals, especially about animals in the wilderness instead of those he saw in the tame streets of Mount Vernon. His own moody, careening mind automatically invested the world around him with personality and character. He was drawn to writers who portray animals, or even the inanimate, with empathy that instills a sympathetic curiosity about the secret peering lives around us.
Around the time of his birth at the end of the nineteenth century, nature writers were lining up on both sides of a controversial issue—how to respond emotionally to nature, especially to animals, while keeping a science-informed reality in mind. The two camps were represented by writers such as John Burroughs and John Muir, who advocated nature’s virtues in a lyrical way but did so within a rigorously factual approach, and William J. Long and Ernest Thompson Seton, who dramatized and fictionalized the natural world while claiming to be meticulously realistic. The question wasn’t about the role of personification in literature. No one argued that Black Beauty was a bad book because it portrayed animal characters from the inside, imbued with human thoughts and emotions. Such books were avowed fiction, even fantasy. The uproar was over narratives that tried to have it both ways, claiming to be realistic—presenting true-to-life animal behavior—despite their outrageous tales of cunning, vice, and derring-do.
Elwyn gobbled up such tales. He enjoyed books by both Long and Seton. A Connecticut minister, William J. Long spent his summers in what he called “the wilderness” of Maine, until he found it too crowded with tourists—some of whom he may have drawn there with his own writings—and switched his allegiance to Nova Scotia. His first book was published in 1899, the year Elwyn was born. Many more followed, including Beasts of the Field, Fowls of the Air, and Following the Deer, and Elwyn read all of them. Some were published in the Wood Folk Series. Especially after Maine summers became a part of Elwyn’s life and imagination, Long’s first book, Ways of Wood Folk, could grab his attention even while lying around unopened. On the spine flew three wild ducks. The front of the green cloth cover showed a fox in silhouette on a lakeshore. Alert, its long brush almost touching the ground, it peered from under the low branches of an old pine, watching a canoe on a lake with behind it a sharp-edged northern mountain.
Charles Copeland’s black-and-white frontispiece drawing showed an encounter between fox and man on a snowy woodland path, the fox wary but surprisingly unafraid, the man—mustached like Elwyn’s father—simply standing and watching, with his hands in his pockets. Clearly this was no hunter. Long presented himself not as a scientist but as a gentle, admiring observer who frequently participated in the wild goings-on that he described. The book’s dedication read, “To Plato, the owl, who looks over my shoulder as I write, and who knows all about the woods.”
Elwyn especially enjoyed Long’s book A Little Brother to the Bear. The cover explained the title by showing a bear, in silhouette and facing away from the viewer, looking up at a raccoon that sprawled across the curve of the cartouche surrounding the title. The first chapter, “The Point of View,” presented Long’s manifesto:
Two things must be done by the modern nature writer who would first understand the animal world and then share his discovery with others. He must collect his facts, at first hand if possible, and then he must interpret the facts as they appeal to his own head and heart in the light of all the circumstances that surround them. The child will be content with his animal story, but the man will surely ask the why and the how of every fact of animal life that particularly appeals to him. For every fact is also a revelation, and is chiefly interesting, not for itself, but for the law or the life which lies behind it and which it in some way expresses.
Elwyn loved Long’s habit of referring to many animals of the region by what he described as their Milicete names. The Algonquin-speaking native people known by European-American settlers as the Milicete or Maliseet originally called themselves the Wolastoqiyik after the Wolastoq (St. John) River in northern Maine, New Brunswick, and Quebec. Using an approximation of their terms, Long called a chickadee Ch’geegee-lokh-sis, a lynx Upweekis, a porcupine Unk Wunk. In Long’s vocabulary, a toad was always known by the onomatopoeic name K’dunk. A woodcock was Whitooweek and a bear Mooween. Long called a raccoon Mooweesuk, describing it as “a pocket edition of Mooween in all his habits,” a typical sweeping generalization. The animals’ names sounded like a North American version of The Jungle Book. Their adventures sparked Elwyn’s imagination in part because some of them he ran across on his own adventures and others lurked still in the wilderness of the north and of his mind.
Ernest Thompson Seton, a prolific Scottish-Canadian naturalist, author, and illustrator, was even more explicit about his concentration on “the law or the life which lies behind” animal behavior. In his 1901 book Lives of the Hunted (dedicated “To the Preservation of Our Wild Creatures”), he wrote that in his stories he tried to “emphasise our kinship with the animals by showing that in them we can find the virtues most admired in Man.” A few years earlier, in Wild Animals I Have Known, he provided a legend for deciphering his morality plays: “Lobo stands for Dignity and Love-constancy; Silverspot, for Sagacity; Redruff, for Obedience; Bingo, for Fidelity; Vixen and Molly Cottontail for Mother-love; Wahb, for Physical Force; and the Pacing Mustang, for the Love of Liberty.” From any scientific point of view, this was bestiary turf. Yet Seton explicitly stated, “The material of the accounts is true,” even if he added a telling confession: “The chief liberty taken, is in ascribing to one animal the adventures of several.” Seton was a talented illustrator committed to accuracy; during his student days in Paris, he had been notorious for dissecting dog carcasses to better understand their anatomy. He was also an experienced outdoorsman. Yet his allegedly objective stories were steeped in old-fashioned Victorian romanticism.
In 1903, when Elwyn was four, the American nature writer John Burroughs published in the Atlantic Monthly an essay, “Real and Sham Natural History,” in which he denounced Long, Seton, and their literary kin as “nature fakers.” Burroughs was no data-driven lab scientist; he promoted nature appreciation, not just the accumulation of facts. “To absorb a thing is better than to learn it,” he insisted, “and we absorb what we enjoy.” He believed passionately, however, that falsely dramatized or even unconsciously mythologized nature writing performed a disservice to readers and besmirched a noble calling. He dismissed this subgenre of supposedly fact-based nature fiction as “yellow journalism of the woods” and suggested retitling Seton’s best known book as Wild Animals I Alone Have Known. “Are we to believe,” Burroughs asked, “that Mr. Thompson Seton, in his few years of roaming in the West, has penetrated farther into the secrets of animal life than all the observers who have gone before him?” As early as his first book, 1871’s bird-oriented essay collection Wake-Robin, Burroughs had felt the need to assure his own readers, “I have reaped my harvest more in the woods than in the study; what I have to offer, in fact, is a careful and conscientious record of actual observations and experiences, and is true as it stands written, every word of it.”
Over the next few years, while Elwyn was happily reading Long and Seton and their colleagues such as Charles G. D. Roberts, these authors defended themselves in what the New York Times called “the War of the Naturalists.” Finally President Theodore Roosevelt entered the fray. Taking time out from declaring Oklahoma the forty-sixth state and inventing the presidential press briefing and posing for photographs advertising his manliness, Roosevelt loudly sided with Burroughs in an essay titled “Nature Fakers” in Everybody’s Magazine. “We don’t in the least mind impossibilities in avowed fairy tales,” wrote Roosevelt; “and Bagheera and Baloo and Kaa are simply delightful variants of Prince Charming and Jack the Slayer of Giants. But when such fables are written by a make-believe realist, the matter assumes an entirely different complexion.” He called the writings of Jack London and these other authors “unnatural history.”
Meanwhile Elwyn reveled in the exploits of Upweekis and Wahb and Bingo and began to create his own stories about nature, not in the least worried about his habit of attributing human emotions to animals.
I was a writing fool when I was eleven years old and have been tapering off ever since.
EVERY FIRST OF September, while the family sat on the southbound train and looked past their own reflected sunburns as Maine’s dense dark pines slowly gave way to the softer-looking and more varied deciduous woods of New Hampshire, Elwyn thought about his glorious summer. Back in Mount Vernon, he daydreamed about Maine. As he grew up, he felt an ever stronger urge to preserve the memories. When he was in his midteens, Elwyn designed, handwrote, and illustrated a pamphlet, carefully titled in capitals BELGRADE LAKE AND SNUG HARBOR CAMPS, for his friend Freddie Schuler. Handwritten text surrounded pasted-in photos of the White family members cavorting outdoors—Stanley in the stern of the Jessie, Elwyn in his own canoe, Albert with a flock of sheep from a nearby farm.
“Maine,” wrote Elwyn ecstatically,
is one of the most beautiful states in the union, and Belgrade is one of the most beautiful of the lakes of Maine … The beauty of the surrounding country makes tramping a pleasure, and the well packed country roads are fine for bicycling or horseback riding. The lake is large enough to make the conditions ideal for all kinds of small boats. The bathing also is a feature, for the days grow very warm at noontime and make a good swim feel fine.
As a result, Freddie came along one summer to the camp. Other writing efforts proved equally encouraging. Elwyn’s tribute to Maine was part of an already long-standing tradition in his young life—the conservation of beauty in prose. Early on he began distilling his memories by writing down his response to the world. By the age of eight, he was consciously looking at a blank sheet of paper and thinking, “This is where I belong.” Soon afterward he began writing his thoughts in a diary. Many of the entries concerned his questions about the natural world, such as how animals get along in their private lives, how birds hatch already knowing how to build a nest, or what a fox is trying to communicate when it barks in the night. “I wonder,” he often wrote to himself, “what I’m going to be when I grow up?”
Often he felt lonely amid the bustle at home, distant from the noise even while surrounded by it. When he could be persuaded to come indoors, he spent a lot of time by himself, writing down his day or imagining wild adventures, achieving uneasy accord with life only by laboriously translating his response to it into words on paper. He borrowed the big, heavy Oliver typewriter from Stan’s room to type up his thoughts, enjoying the labor of carrying it to his own desk, the zipping sound of the platen rolling until it caught the sheet of paper and pulled it down, and the bold ruckus of hammering the keys. When he wondered how to spell a word, he would run down the hall to Albert’s room and consult the fat Webster’s dictionary that sprawled on an iron tripod, sagging with the weight of its knowledge. This was the family source of information to which Samuel referred all questions about words.
In spring 1909, Elwyn drew upon his experiences with the secret visitor in his bedroom and wrote a poem, “To a Mouse.” The budding author, not yet ten years old, bravely sent the poem to Woman’s Home Companion. To his astonishment and delight, they accepted it for publication—and even awarded him a prize for it.
Not surprisingly, he soon took aim at other literary targets. He was devoted to St. Nicholas magazine and waited excitedly for its monthly arrival in the mailbox—the inviting red-framed cover, the two-column pages with their sprawling illustrations of dragons and soldiers, pirates and dogs. Founded in the early 1870s, it was at first edited by Mary Mapes Dodge of Hans Brinker fame. Her original mission statement for the magazine included the line “To foster a love of country, home, nature, truth, beauty, and sincerity,” and practically from birth Elwyn tended to think of these virtuous attributes as interrelated. But Dodge’s manifesto began with a goal that broke ranks with the didactic children’s literature of earlier decades: “To give clean, genuine fun to children of all ages.” The first page of the first issue playfully asked, “Glad to see us? Thank you. The same to you, and many happy returns.” Of course, the periodical reflected its era in unsavory ways as well. Nonwhite Americans were subservient helpers at best; the depiction of foreigners changed as Americans became involved in one conflict after another—the Spanish-American War, the Great War—with Spaniards or Germans or Italians turning unsavory or heroic in turn.
By the turn of the century, St. Nicholas was unquestionably the foremost periodical for children. It had introduced both Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad. Mowgli had fled Shere Khan across its columns. Cedric Errol, called Little Lord Fauntleroy, had first appeared in these pages, inspiring an international fad for cutaway velvet jackets and lace collars on little boys. During Elwyn’s time the magazine ran stories, poems, and articles of all sorts, from biographical profiles of prominent Americans—one about Lincoln was called “The Matterhorn of Men”—to the ongoing series “Stories of Useful Inventions” (“Next to its usefulness for heating and cooking, the greatest use of fire is to furnish light to drive away darkness. Man is not content, like birds and brutes, to go to sleep at the setting of the sun”).
Best of all in Elwyn’s eyes, St. Nicholas was devoted to animal stories. Besides featuring work by the best-known authors and illustrators of the day, it was gaining a reputation as a cradle for writers. In 1899, the year Elwyn was born, it launched the “St. Nicholas League,” a monthly writing competition edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, author of the charming Hollow Tree and Deep Woods Book for children. Three years after the contest’s founding, a girl named Vita Sackville-West wrote in about her ancient home of Knole in England. Elwyn read several poems in St. Nicholas attributed to a girl in Maine named E. Vincent Millay, until in 1910 she retired (she was almost nineteen, the age limit for contributors) in the same issue that included a prize-winning photograph by a precocious teenager named Scott Fitzgerald. The June 1911 issue included among the honorable mentions for a drawing contest a Mississippi boy named William Faulkner. Others whose prose Elwyn read in its pages included a Massachusetts girl named Katharine Sergeant.
Soon Elwyn joined these august ranks. Two houses up the street lived a slightly older boy named E. Barrett Brady, who was also a reader of St. Nicholas. Barrett was the son of a writer for the Saturday Evening Post, and with backstage savvy he advised Elwyn to stress in his early writing efforts the evergreen theme of kindness to animals. Elwyn agreed that this was a smart commercial notion as well as an ideal with which he was genuinely sympathetic. He followed Barrett’s advice. In June 1911, the month before he turned twelve—just about the time that Lillian, his last older sibling, was leaving home—St. Nicholas published his first story.
When the June issue arrived, he would have flipped past the frontispiece, a painting of a Huck Finnish boy with a rakishly torn straw hat, and the photo-illustrated article on “Model Aëroplanes of 1911.” The “St. Nicholas League” pages were in the back. There under the elegant logo with its seasonally changing oval illustrations, the first listing under the heading “Prize-Winners, Competition No. 136” was his name and enough additional information to prove to skeptics that he, not some other Elwyn B. White, was the author to whom they were referring: “PROSE. Silver badges, Elwyn B. White (age 11), Mt. Vernon, N.Y.”
On the opposite page was his story, under an ode to June by fifteen-year-old Doris H. Ramsey, and to the left of a hymn to trillium by twelve-year-old Elsie Louise Lustig, on a busy double-column page that also held photographs of a footrace and the roaring falls of Niagara embodying the theme “At Full Speed.” Elwyn had given the narrator’s dog the name of the dog from William J. Long’s A Little Brother to the Bear.
A WINTER WALK
BY ELWYN B. WHITE (AGE 11)
(SILVER BADGE)
I awoke one morning in my little shanty to find the ground covered with snow. It had fallen rapidly during the night and was about six inches deep.
I dressed, ate a good breakfast, did some of the camp chores, and set about taking down my snow-shoes and preparing them for wintry weather. Soon I heard a short yelp which reminded me that Don, my pointer, had been left hungry. I gave him some bones and a few biscuits, then, pulling on my heavy overcoat and buckling the snow-shoes on my feet, we started out in the frosty morning air to pay the forest a visit.
Such a morning! There was a frosty nip to the air that gave life to everybody and everything. Don was so overjoyed at the prospect of a walk that he danced and capered about as if he was mad. Jack Frost was busy for fair! My nose and ears were victims of his teeth.
After a small stretch of smooth ground had been covered we entered the forest.
All the trees wore a new fur coat, pure white, and the pines and evergreens were laden with pearl. Every living creature seemed happy. Squirrels frisked among the branches, chattering because we trespassed on their property. Once in a while we caught an occasional glimpse of a little ball of fur among the fern, which meant that br’er rabbit was out on this cold morning. A few struggling quails were heard piping their shrill little notes as they flew overhead.
All these harmless little wood creatures were noticed by Don and he wanted to be after them, but I objected to harming God’s innocent little folk when He had given the world such a bright, cheery morning to enjoy.
The issue offered a range of other material. That month’s installment in the exciting series “Nature Giants That Man Has Conquered” featured electricity. Motion pictures were all the rage, and so was the collecting of bird eggs; thus there was a cartoon of birds watching a movie called The Nest Robber, showing other birds retaliating against an egg-stealing boy. This month Edward F. Bigelow’s column, “Nature and Science for Young Folks,” was titled “Jewels on a Spider’s Web” and featured images by Wilson A. Bentley, who was already famous for his exquisite photographs of snowflakes, taken through a microscope. The article instructed readers in how to photograph dewdrops on a spider’s web: “Perhaps the smallest object on which these tiny, pearl-like formations may be observed is a thread of a spider-web. Here the drops are so small that they do not elongate, but keep a beautiful spherical form.”
Two years later, the magazine awarded Elwyn one of its half dozen monthly gold prizes for another piece about animals, “A True Dog Story,” about the heroic nature of another White family dog—Beppo, an Irish setter. One morning in Maine, as Elwyn and Albert and Stanley walked across a pasture with their father, short-tempered steers left their herd to challenge the trespassers. Instantly Beppo raced to the family’s rescue, barking and transforming himself from bird retriever—the breed’s traditional job—to a combination guard and herd dog. Not that St. Nicholas accepted everything that Elwyn submitted. The October 1914 issue, for example, honorably mentioned but did not publish his drawing “The Love of a Mother Rabbit.” Despite this and other setbacks, he kept scribbling and typing. Distilling his experience into words on a page was the only way he could find to prevent his daily life from blowing away like clouds.