Last Look Around

ONE MAN'S MEAT--E. B. White--Harper ($2.50).

The 45 essays in this book (most of which appeared in Harper's) record the highly personal pleasures and displeasures of an ex-New Yorker humorist who escaped from the city to a Maine farm. But even in hither Maine, Humorist White could not stop reacting to the foolishness and nobility of a nation, and the crumbling of a world. He distilled his reactions in these gently sardonic, sometimes eloquent, always casual pieces. White confesses a guilty feeling at publishing so tranquil a collection at a time so far from tranquil.

But most minds, like houses, are built for peace, not war. Reading this book is like taking a last look around a house which you may not be seeing soon again, if ever.

One Man's Meat plays touch football with such subjects as war, farming, radio, the behavior of nervous dogs, Ferris wheels, children's books, rubber plants, Florida, the ideal State, the late World's Fair, a town meeting--the eyes, ears and prejudices of E. B. White. He is sharpest in his prejudices. He watches the meek, pale men crowding before a county fair tattooist to be embossed "not with anchors, flags and pretty mermaids," but with Social Security numbers, finds in the sight a sad historic symptom. He ponders upon the New Deal's gift of lime to farmers, observes that there are an awful lot of Republicans to bring over to the alkaline side. He notes the "cheerful bedside manner" of radio newscasters. When they speak of an armored division, "it sounds as though they had it right there in the studio with them and were scratching it behind the ears." To the devotees of Progress, long his favorite target, he remarks: "The sterile bandage is the flag of modern society, but I notice more and more of them are needed all the time, so terrible are the wars."

White's description of Dr. Townsend ("a skinny, bespectacled little savior, with a big jaw, like the Tin Woodman") is, by skillful indirect lighting, a brilliant piece of political reporting, and The Flocks We Watch by Night is one of the nearly perfect short stories of the past decade.

Country Matters. But book and author concern themselves chiefly with more homely matters:

> Neighbor Dameron, who each day tethers his cow near his landing, chugs out to catch lobsters "in the restless fields of protein," and each dusk picks up the cow and heads for home--he with his empty gas can, she with her full bag of milk.

> A town meeting: "New Engenders are jealous of their right to govern themselves as they like, but in my town we have learned that town meeting is no place to decide anything. We thrash out our problems well in advance, working in small queues and with a long history of spite as a background. The meeting is just to make everything legal."

-- E. B. White's failings as a poultryman--chiefly from an unwillingness to liquidate non-laying hens: "Those that like to lay eggs can do that; the others can sit around tire groaning board, singing and whoring."

> "The first sign of spring here is when the ice breaks up in the inkwell at the post office. A month later the ice leaves the lakes. And a month after that the first of the summer visitors shows up and the tax collector's wife removes the town records from her Frigidaire and plugs it in for the summer."

> About his own status as a farmer, White has no illusions: "I have been fooling around this place for a couple of years, but nobody calls my activity agriculture. I simply like to play with animals." "A good farmer," he observes, "is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus."

Over & over, in the context of world war, these essays shift from an easy equability to the sort of fierceness with which gentle men sometimes astonish bullies.

Some of Author White's more "sophisticated" friends make him rather sick: "I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. ... I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up. ... I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time. . . ."

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