Because a friend on Goodreads raved so passionately about Melissa Sweet's Some Writer! The Story of E. B. White that I could not wait to get my hands on a copy, and because said copy was not immediately available at the local branch of the blessed New York Public Library, I found myself drawn to a languishing edition of One Man's Meat. It is ridiculous to review a seventy-five-year-old book, but that hasn't stopped me:
One Man's Meat by E. B. White
This house, this house now held in Sunday's fearful grip, is a hundred and twenty years old. I am wondering what Sabbaths it has known. Here where I sit, grandfather H. used to sit, they tell me—always right here. He would be surprised were he here this morning to note that the seams in the floor have opened wide from the dry heat of the furnace, revealing the accumulation of a century of dust and crumbs and trouble and giving quite a good view of the cellar. (46)
For the last six days, I have been inhaling my mother's 1944 edition of E. B. White's volume of heavenly essays, written between 1938 and 1943 when White was both farming in Maine and doing his duty as a watchman to support the War effort.
My edition lacks a dust cover but has an inscription dated 10/27/45 from a long-dead friend to my now-dead mother, Edna, on the occasion of her twenty-fourth birthday. This browning tome has been on my shelf for decades. And when I finally took it down and began to read, I almost drowned in the accrued feelings: This book, this book is seventy-five years old. And I am wondering about all the hands that held it—from the printer's to warehouse workers' to bookstore clerks' to my mother's dear friend Tommy, to young, optimistic Edna, a budding writer, who—once we were both finally grown up enough to be friends—often mentioned E. B. White and kept this book through marriage, popped fantasy bubbles, and numerous dwellings. We never talked much about books, and although I remember her expressing reverence for White's writing, in my arrogance, ignorance, and youth, I never thought to explore his work beyond Stuart Little, which was enough to make him my hero for life. (I didn't see the need to read Charlotte's Web until a few years ago when it beckoned from my top shelf and ended up being a driving force in my own novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg—so it was research. I blush at my oblivion.) Edna died in 1990 at age sixty-eight, the age I will turn in two days, and I want her back so we can talk: "I get it! I get it!" I cry. "If only I had known more when you were alive so we could share our love for Andy White." Read More