Why Charlotte?

 From E. B. White himself, at the request of his published. Coming to us from Harper Collins, by way of Letters of Note. 

 Transcript via Letters of Note:

"Transcript

E. B. WHITE
NORTH BROOKLIN, MAINE

29 Sept

Dear Ursula:

Thanks for your dandy letter and for the book. If I ever get time I'm going to read the book. I think it looks very nice and I agree with you that the endpaper is too bright. But on the other hand, I'm not sure that anybody thinks about endpaper except publishers, and probably not more than 1800 people in the United States have ever heard the word "endpaper", and they are all Stevenson people.

Enclosed are some remarks that I hope will satisfy your Publicity Department.

Sorry to learn that Dr. Canby is revolted by spiders. Probably doesn't meet the right spiders. Did you know that Dr. Canby has a wife named "Lady"?

Yrs,

Andy

------------------

I have been asked to tell how I came to write "Charlotte's Web." Well, I like animals, and it would be odd if I failed to write about them. Animals are a weakness with me, and when I got a place in the country I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did.

A farm is a peculiar problem for a man who likes animals, because the fate of most livestock is that they are murdered by their benefactors. The creatures may live serenely but they end violently, and the odor of doom hangs about them always. I have kept several pigs, starting them in spring as weanlings and carrying trays to them all through summer and fall. The relationship bothered me. Day by day I became better acquainted with my pig, and he with me, and the fact that the whole adventure pointed toward an eventual piece of double-dealing on my part lent an eerie quality to the thing. I do not like to betray a person or a creature, and I tend to agree with Mr. E.M. Forster that in these times the duty of a man, above all else, is to be reliable. It used to be clear to me, slopping a pig, that as far as the pig was concerned I could not be counted on, and this, as I say, troubled me. Anyway, the theme of "Charlotte's Web" is that a pig shall be saved, and I have an idea that somewhere deep inside me there was a wish to that effect.

As for Charlotte herself, I had never paid much attention to spiders until a few years ago. Once you begin watching spiders, you haven't time for much else---the world is really loaded with them. I do not find them repulsive or revolting, any more than I find anything in nature repulsive or revolting, and I think it is too bad that children are often corrupted by their elders in this hate campaign. Spiders are skilful, amusing and useful. and only in rare instances has anybody ever come to grief because of a spider.

One cold October evening I was lucky enough to see Aranea Cavatica spin her egg sac and deposit her eggs. (I did not know her name at the time, but I admired her, and later Mr. Willis J. Gertsch of the American Museum of Natural History told me her name.) When I saw that she was fixing to become a mother, I got a stepladder and an extension light and had an excellent view of the whole business. A few days later, when it was time to return to New York, not wishing to part with my spider, I took a razor blade, cut the sac adrift from the underside of the shed roof, put spider and sac in a candy box, and carried them to town. I tossed the box on my dresser. Some weeks later I was surprised and pleased to find that Charlotte's daughters were emerging from the air holes in the cover of the box. They strung tiny lines from my comb to my brush, from my brush to my mirror, and from my mirror to my nail scissors. They were very busy and almost invisible, they were so small. We all lived together happily for a couple of weeks, and then somebody whose duty it was to dust my dresser balked, and I broke up the show.

At the present time, three of Charlotte's granddaughters are trapping at the foot of the stairs in my barn cellar, where the morning light, coming through the east window, illuminates their embroidery and makes it seem even more wonderful than it is.

I haven't told why I wrote the book, but I haven't told you why I sneeze, either. A book is a sneeze.

(Signed) " 

Harper Collins

Letters of Note

"Capote in Kansas" by Kim Powers

"20th Century Ghosts" by Joe Hill

It should be hard to properly review, or write about, a book of short stories. By definition, each piece of writing work is an unique, stand alone piece of art which would be judged on the merits of its own few pages.

 "20th Century Ghosts" by Joe Hill is something different. Without knowing when or how each of Hill's stories were written, the effect they had on this reader was entirely unique. At once, the stories-- ranging from beautifully rendered post-modern/meta-physical (or, perhaps more frankly, categorized as new and original) ghosts stories to weird fiction to a type of writing which defies classification at every turn-- the stories in the collection are an experience. Mr. Hill is a talent all his own, and one needs to only read a story or two from this volume to know that, and to complete this volume is to marvel at the expanse of that talent.

 My favorite story in these pages is without question "Pop Art." Nothing I could have read, or even surmised from the title, could have prepared me for this beautiful little story gem with a heart so big, so pure, so all Joe Hill's own. A bildungsroman; childhood; prejudice; growing up; hatred; anti-Sematism; that which cannot be named. "Pop Art" may very well go down as one of my all time favorite short stories. When I read the summary-- a story about a boy who befriends an inflatable boy at school-- I did not expect anything but a slightly sci-fi piece of weird fiction. Not the deeply personal story that it almost would do a disservice to discuss. (And, no, I don't believe the short film adaptaion did much at justice, either.)

Amanda Boyle's short film adaptaion of "Pop Art" 

 Other stories that stand out in the collection are the title "20th Century Ghosts"-- wherein a ghost of a young movie-going girl haunts her favorite theater; "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" and "The Cape."

 I am very eager to get a start on Hill's novels.

From Hill's graphic novel adaptaion of "The Cape"

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"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 "'What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?' cried Daisy, ' and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'
 'Don't be morbid,' Jordan said. 'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.'" (118)

 I started reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" not knowing why the novel was written. I knew the novel is considered a classic deemed by the literary establishment and modern canon, knew the work is assigned to countless high school English students the country over, knew many readers see this among the great American novels. I started reading "Gatsby" partly out of a sense of duty; to read one of those books I should read, because it is one of those books that everyone should read. To check another one off my list-- and what better time than the present.

 Not until I was almost a hundred pages into the short novel did I understood why this work has the reputation it does. After finishing the later half of the novel in about a day, I still do not know why this is commonly assigned high school reading. Yes, I am sure there are high schoolers who may have been through certain experiences that help in understanding the novel-- but I believe they must be few and far between. "Gatsby" seems to be one of the major American novels for its themes-- for it's explorations of the personal, of love found, lost and never able to be gotten over; for its documenting of the act of the American dream, the desire, the longing; for all it comments on understanding the timelessness of American society, class. And how all of those experiences are linked together, seamlessly.

 "The Great Gatsby" is, on it's plain, beautiful, crafted face a simple story. A story people have such a variety of reaction to; a painfully simple story. If any one selection from the novel speaks to its heart, I believe the quote I have opened with-- "'Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall'" -- is truest. "The Great Gatsby" is immediately a novel about people who are living a cycle, constantly repeating. Though Jordan in this passage seems to convey that the start of autumn promises a new beginning, the characters in Gatsby's world experience the emotions of their lives and situations as intensely and as steadily as the seasons. After finishing the novel, I read many comments, reviews and others' thoughts that seemed to think no character in these pages is sympathetic. At times, I thought Daisy Buchanan-- trapped in her mansion with her children and her unfaithful husband, yearning for the romance of her younger years, her truer romance with Jay Gatsby-- was the most sympathetic. But in the end, Daisy does not come off so well; succumbing to her situation, and giving into the life she has in the safety of her marriage over the possibilities of Jay Gatsby, forever; after Gatsby, unable to help himself, has given up everything to her.

 I don't believe there are no sympathetic characters in the novel. Yes, there are many pathetic characters, who just cannot find the strength to rise above and out of their situations. But I believe Jay Gatsby warrants sympathy, as does Nick Carraway by extension, of whom we see Gatsby through his eyes. Jay Gatsby-- forever, truly, homeless. Drifting through the classes and places and people and sights of America; dreaming his own dream, dreaming the American dream of this young country. Jay finds love, or what he believes to be, in his youth with Daisy, and he can never recover. He feels somehow ashamed of his place in society, because he believes that is what kept him from Daisy-- and perhaps, because of who Daisy is inside, it was-- and he spends his life after Daisy creating a world, a person and a life that she could-- for all her class snobbery-- accept and be with. When, in the end, this all comes crashing down, proving not to work as intended, and for all her suffering Daisy cannot will herself to be anything other than who she is and what she has become-- Jay has been left without a purpose. Without an identity, without a life. Without, even, more than a ghostly memory of what Nick has experienced, seen.

 Yes, I feel sorry for the great Gatsby. There is something so timeless, so tragic, so literary to this failed love, this failed life, these failed dreams. And that, I believe, is why the novel endures as a classic, remains as truthful and current today as it was when published.

 "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eldued us then, but that's no matter-- to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--
 So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (180)

"Unsaid" by Neil Abramson

You know a novel is something special when, within the time of the first few pages, you know those who live within the pages see, feel the world the same as you.

 "Every living things dies. There's no stopping it." (1) So begins "Unsaid," a novel that denies category at every turn one is available. The novel is narrated by Helena, a veternarian who has died of cancer. The reader is never told any specific thing about the afterlife Helena inhabits; we feel, see and experience it along with her. We don't know why Helena has stayed behind-- but we see through her all she has left behind, and still is connected to in life. Her husband, her animal companions, the friends who shared her cause she worked with.

 In "Unsaid" Helena explores death. Her death, what it means to the living she has left behind, what role death played in her life while she was alive. She relives the decisions she had to make as a verternarian and human, when the choice came to end the life of an animal, and she relives the struggle she put up against her own death to cancer. Helena cannot interact with the living; she simply watches. As her husband, David, comes to understand her in ways he never did, or could never fully, in life. As her rescued dogs live and grieve for her. As the man she shared a veterinary practice with continues to try and keep a morally sound practice amid a world where ethics are not always considered. As the colleauge she shared a life of work on chimpanzee communication with struggles to continue her work; as the chimpanzee she focused on, Cindy, is at the mercy of the humans who care for her while this all goes on.

 There is so much beauty in this book. On loss, and all life-- animal and human alike. Subjects that could come off as heavy-handed in the hands of a lesser writer are handled here delicately, and always so movingly, by Neil Abramson. The connections the characters make and share-- and how they all do, cannot or learn to communicate with each other-- human and animal-- are beautifully rendered truth.

 While so much of this novel's power is subtle and natural, it nonetheless carries great, consistent power. I can't remember a novel that has moved me to tears earlier or more consistently in quite sometime. Beginning with Helena's recollection of her meeting her husband, as they move an injured deer out of the road; to the disabled child of one of Helena's colleagues new colleauges being able to see the world in a way which is the only one to bring comfort to an elderly woman who just lost her dog in surgery; to the many epiphanies David has as he, left behind, comes to understand his wife and her work.

 For anyone who has loved, lost an animal companion. For anyone who has loved, lost a person of any consiousness. To anyone who loves the power of literature and bearing-witness and writing stories and longed to understand another person or being, and gain entrace in that most secret of gardens-- Neil Abramson has written a novel of comfort that understands, knows.