`Smelling Slightly of Camphor'

For a week, my 6-year-old and I measured out nightly doses of Stuart Little, even stopping mid-chapter to prolong our pleasure and delay the inevitable conclusion to a story so open-ended it never really concludes. Not since finishing Roald Dahl’s ample shelf have we so helplessly enjoyed a book.

Published in 1945, Stuart Little was E.B. White’s first book for children and has for too long been eclipsed by Charlotte’s Web, a lesser work. White patented a tone of poker-faced whimsy. The events are fantastic – the Littles of New York City give birth to a two-inch boy with the appearance of a mouse – but the premise is treated matter-of-factly, with little cuteness. Stuart is dapper, intelligent, resourceful and idealistic. Much of the dialogue is archly formal, presumably for the amusement of adult readers, though Michael sometimes laughed at Stuart’s elevated manner of speaking. We were disappointed when Stuart turned his back on a budding relationship with Harriet Ames, who is also two inches tall but otherwise resembles a conventional little girl. Stuart’s decision, instead, to continue his search for Margola, an elusive bird, casts a satisfying adult shadow across the ending of the story.

I mention White (1899-1985) because Stuart Little is so much fun, but also because he seems almost to have vanished from our common culture, if such a thing still exists. Someone, I’m certain, is reading the children’s books, but he or she may never consult The Elements of Style or read the personal essays that earned White so ardent a following. I confess I have never been able to embrace his work without reservations. His style is described as crisp and graceful, but just as often it is precious and arch, like Stuart Little’s speech. Look at this conclusion to one of White’s most-admired essays, “Once More to the Lake”:

“When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

Why does this seem false to me, so cloying and almost offensive? Because a trivial event is made to carry a disproportionate burden of significance. White’s love for his son and the pang of mortality any parent feels are not in question. A passage like this, and I speak as a writer and father, belongs in a private notebook, not an essay for publication. White seems to have had some awareness of this objection, though it may be a stylized awareness, a self-defensive part of his writerly persona. In the foreword to Essays of E.B. White, he wrote:

“I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in this complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egotistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others. I have worn many shirts, and not all of them have been a good fit. But when I am discouraged or downcast I need only fling open the door of my closet, and there, hidden behind everything else, hangs the mantle of Michel de Montaigne, smelling slightly of camphor.”

This is disingenuous. From its birth, the essay was an undefined, open-ended form, and that has been its glory and curse. From essayer, “to try,” it never guaranteed the attempt would prove successful. Of course, in the 30 years since White wrote his foreword, the floodgates of memoir, confession and MySpace narcissism have burst, drowning us in oceans of self-infatuation and leaving White’s trifles, by contrast, reading like models of reticence and discretion. Are all essays “much too self-conscious and self-serving [a] form?” No, I seldom feel that way reading Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Orwell, Hubert Butler, Guy Davenport or Cynthia Ozick. The openness of the essay demands a self-imposed discipline beyond the willingness and reach of most essayists.