August 2004

A little summer reading

by Lindsay Thompson, Bar News Editor

On June 19, 1923, The Seattle Times' city editor fired a reporter called Elwyn Brooks White — Andy, to his friends. The editor told White, "it was no reflection on your ability." Then, for a week in July, White subbed at the P-I. The gig was not extended.

He kept a journal, thinking himself "a literary man in the highest sense of the term, a poet who met every train." He swam in the Ship Canal, alone at night, and never went to bed "before two or three o'clock in the morning, on the theory that if anything of interest were to happen to a young man it would almost certainly happen late at night."

After some adventures on a steamer trip to Alaska, White returned to New York and found a place with a fledgling magazine, The New Yorker. He became a renowned essayist, a humorist (with James Thurber, he penned Is Sex Necessary?), a writer of kids' books second to none, and collaborator on a classic guide to good writing.

Every August I pull down my dog-eared 1977 Essays of E.B. White. Fifty years ago this summer, White published one of his best essays in the collection, a centennial appreciation of Thoreau's Walden called "A Slight Sound at Evening."

"On this its hundredth birthday," White wrote, "Thoreau's Walden is pertinent and timely. In our uneasy season, when all men unconsciously seek a retreat from a world that has got almost completely out of hand, his house in the Concord woods is a haven. In our culture of gadgetry and the multiplicity of convenience, his cry, 'Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!' has the insistence of a fire alarm. In the brooding atmosphere of war and the gathering radioactive storm, the innocence and serenity of his summer afternoons are enough to burst the remembering heart, and one gazes back upon that pleasing interlude — its confidence, its purity, its deliberateness — with awe and wonder, as one would look upon the face of a child asleep."

White's prose is like the Maine barn he wrote in, simple, spare, and elegant in its own way. He was not one for ornament. He suggested every college senior get a copy of Walden for graduation. "Even if some senior were to take it literally and start felling trees, there could be worse mishaps: the ax is older than the Dictaphone and it is just as well for a young man to see what kind of chips he leaves before listening to the sound of his own voice. And even if some were to get no farther than the table of contents, they would learn how to name eighteen chapters by the use of only thirty-nine words and would see how sweet are the uses of brevity."

I've always thought lawyers could do worse than to spend a little summer hammock time with Andy White. His work is an excellent field guide to persuasive writing, and a goad to thought in a time when public discourse seems to be a relentless dive to the bottom. Consider 1949's "Here Is New York," in which White anticipated the destruction of the World Trade Center in the technologies of World War II: "The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition."

Fifty years since Andy White's praise, a hundred fifty since Thoreau's publication, both writers are worth some time in the summer reading pile. As White says of Walden, received at the right juncture, "the book is like an invitation to life's dance, assuring the troubled recipient that no matter what befalls him in the way of success or failure he will always be welcome at the party — that the music is played for him, too, if he will but listen and move his feet." Much the same may be said of White's Essays. Both are "a summons to the wildest revels of them all" — life.

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Lindsay Thompson grew up in North Carolina in the 1960s, when summer was lived on the screened porch, and time seemed endless. You can write him to snap out of it at tradelaw@thompson-law.com.

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