Maine
In a word: Reflecting on Maine’s E.B. White
“Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.” – E.B. White, “Charlotte’s Web”
Even though he wasn’t born here, E.B. White lived for nearly 50 years on a farm in Brooklin, Maine, and did almost all of his best work here. That said, I thought I’d take a brief look at the life of one of Maine’s favorite writers.
Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1899. After graduating from Cornell University in 1921, he roamed across America taking jobs as a reporter and freelance writer.
In 1927 White landed a job at The New Yorker, the magazine with which he’d spend his entire career, working first as a writer and contributing editor, and later as a monthly columnist right up to his death. In the witty pieces he produced, he mused about everything from life in the city to literature and politics.
After more than a decade in New York he came to the realization that “I was stuck with the editorial ‘we,’ a weasel word suggestive of corporate profundity or institutional consensus. I wanted to write as straight as possible, with no fuzziness.” (Later in the book “The Elements of Style,” he opined, “Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say ‘Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!’”)
So, in 1938, he moved to a saltwater farm in Brooklin, where he lived until his passing in 1985. As he was about to leave the big city, Harper’s magazine offered him the princely sum of $300 a month (over $6,000 in today’s dollars) if he’d send them monthly essays about rural life.
Fifty-five of those essays would be collected in White’s 1942 book “One Man’s Meat.” Forty years later he’d write in his introduction to the book’s revised edition, “Once in everyone’s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years (1938–1942) in Maine as the time when this happened to me. . . . I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment.”
Still, White said he found writing difficult and bad for one’s disposition, saying, “Writing is hard work and bad for the health.” But he kept at it. He began writing “Stuart Little” as a story for a 6-year-old niece of his, but before he’d finished it in 1945 she had grown up. “I am still encouraged to go on,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where else to go.”
“If the world were merely seductive,” he concluded, “that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
“Stuart Little” was followed in 1952 by “Charlotte’s Web,” the poignant children’s classic about the friendship between Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig. After those books came “The Trumpet of the Swan” in 1970, the same year he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte’s Web.”
In his New Yorker column of July 27, 1957, White praised a 43-page handbook on good writing written by his former professor, William Strunk Jr., as “a summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” Two years later Macmillan and Co. published White’s revision of Strunk’s 1935 edition of “The Elements of Style.” White’s expanded version (my 1979 third edition comes in at 85 pages not counting the index) went on to sell more than 2 million copies.
“Vigorous writing is concise,” he wrote in his revisions. “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
And if you’re a writer, remember that “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.”
I’ll leave you with two of what I think are the best pieces of E.B. White’s advice: “The best writing is rewriting,” and “Use the smallest word that does the job.”
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
Many Maine municipalities will open cooling centers this week with the National Weather Service issuing a variety of heat advisories covering the next few days.
The Maine DEP also issued an air quality alert for Wednesday with ground-level ozone expected to reach levels that are unhealthy for sensitive groups.
All of York County, interior Cumberland and Androscoggin counties, and the southern half of Oxford County will fall under an extreme heat warning from 11 a.m. Wednesday to 8 p.m. Friday.
The warning calls for “dangerously hot conditions” that could feature heat index values of up to 110 degrees, with overnight lows only expected to fall into the 70s, according to the weather service’s office in Gray.
The rest of the state — save northern Aroostook, Piscataquis and Somerset counties — falls under a heat advisory from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday. However, the weather service has also placed much of the state under an extreme heat watch for Thursday.
Heat index values, which measure how hot it feels to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature, are expected to reach up to 104 degrees during the heat advisory period, the weather service warns. They could reach 110 degrees Thursday, when the extreme heat watch is in effect.
Northern Oxford and Franklin counties, and central Somerset County, can expect a heat index value of up to 99 degrees Wednesday, according to the weather service.
The weather service advises people to drink plenty of fluids, stay in air-conditioned rooms when possible, avoid extended periods in the sun and check up on relatives and neighbors. It also warns not to leave young children and pets in unattended vehicles, as “car interiors will reach lethal temperatures in a matter of minutes.”
Cooling Centers
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has also issued an air quality alert from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Wednesday along the coast from Kittery to Acadia National Park. The agency warns that ground-level ozone concentrations are expected to reach levels that are unhealthy for sensitive groups.
Ozone levels may reach “moderate levels” further inland, according to the Maine DEP, including in all of Androscoggin and Kennebec counties, as well as parts of Cumberland, Knox, Lincoln, Penobscot, Sagadahoc, Waldo, Washington and York counties.
Elevated ozone levels can pose a risk to children, older adults and people suffering from respiratory or heart diseases, according to the Maine DEP. Anyone exerting themselves outdoors may also experience health effects, which could include coughing, shortness of breath, throat irritation and mild chest pain.
Ozone levels were already climbing in southern New England on Tuesday, according to the Maine DEP, and winds are expected to bring those conditions to Maine on Wednesday.
The Maine DEP recommends that vulnerable populations avoid strenuous outdoor activities, keep windows closed, and circulate indoor air with fans or air conditioners. Those with asthma are also advised to keep quick-relief medication handy.
Particle pollution levels are also expected to be moderate across the state on Wednesday due to wildfire smoke, the Maine DEP said in its announcement Tuesday. Wildfires in Colorado, which have claimed the lives of three firefighters, had burned nearly 90,000 acres as of Tuesday, according to the Denver Post.
Maine could face up to $50 million in penalties next year due to errors in its payments for federal food benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Newly released data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture find that Maine’s error rate last year was nearly 11%, the bulk of which were overpayments. That’s in line with the U.S. average. But starting in October of next year, states with error rates above 6% must cover a portion of the SNAP benefits.
Anna Korsen, executive director of Full Plates, Full Potential, said the overpayments aren’t fraud — they’re human error. She said this new cost-shifting policy enacted last year under the Trump administration further complicates the SNAP application process.
“Instead, we could make this program more accessible and more efficient,” Korsen said. “And that would reduce the number of errors and also ensure that Mainers who are eligible for SNAP have access to it.”
She’s urging Congress to delay or reverse the policy under the farm bill that’s currently under consideration.
Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services said it’s taking steps to reduce the error rate, including modernizing its systems and hiring an additional 40 eligibility specialists.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.
-
Lifestyle17 minutes agoGreetings from London, where Banksy’s flag man is a warning cry
-
Education20 minutes ago
This Little Robot Cleans Windows
-
Technology25 minutes agoComcast’s split could make or break Peacock
-
World32 minutes agoState Department congratulates Keiko Fujimori as Peru’s president-elect following razor-thin vote count
-
Politics35 minutes agoMamdani ripped for claiming victory over capitalism after NYC’s multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded bailout
-
Health40 minutes agoAmerican vaccines that transformed public health over 250 years: ‘Outweighs harm’
-
Sports47 minutes agoEx-NFL reporter Dianna Russini interaction with police officer to dodge traffic ticket comes to light
-
Business55 minutes agoJoby Aviation creates a joint venture with Toyota to build air taxis
