Of mice and librarians the new yorker

10/6/2017

Of Mice and Librarians | The New Yorker

Page-Turner

Of Mice and Librarians

By The New Yorker

August 12, 2008

In this week’s issue, Jill Lepore writes about the battle over E. B. White’s “Stuart Little.” She also discusses “Stuart Little” with Roger Angell, White’s stepson and an editor at this magazine, on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast.

We asked Lepore to tell us how she researched the article.

Why would anyone want to ban “Stuart Little,” a sweet, wistful, very funny book about a kind and clever mouse? The scant published accounts of the controversy surrounding Anne Carroll Moore and E. B. White rely almost invariably on a handful of sources written decades after the events they describe. An essay White wrote for the New York Times in 1966; another written by his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, in 1974. A few pages in “ The Letters of E. B. White,” edited for publication in 1976.

Not much more. This irked me. These sources, on their own, raise more questions than they answer. “Stuart Little” appeared in 1945. Didn’t anyone say anything about all this then? Worst of all, the letter Moore sent to the Whites on June 20, 1945, urging White not to publish the book, had disappeared. What the deuce did it say? I decided to look for the letter.

One thing became quickly clear: I wasn’t the rst person to look. In 1972, Moore’s successor at the New York Public Library, Frances Clarke Sayers, sent White her transcription of Moore’s copy of the letter—she

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planned to reproduce it in her forthcoming biography of Moore. White and his wife, Katharine, read it and agreed: it was very shy. E. B. White offered to look for the original—or originals, since Katharine White remembered two or even three letters from Moore about “Stuart Little”—but Sayers, pressed by a deadline, proceeded with publication.

The Whites decided to look for the letter anyway. E. B. White had been shipping his papers off to his alma mater, Cornell; he asked the archivists in Ithaca to search, to no avail. At home, he and his wife trudged to the attic where they emptied box after box, ri ing through old papers. When Sayers's biography of Moore came out, Katharine White was more than miffed, but, without the letter, there was nothing she or her husband could do. She wrote to her friend Louise Seaman Bechtel, “I am sure it was dumped in the wastebasket and burned up because Andy often dumps things that displease him and so do I.” Or maybe it was somewhere else. With the help of unfailingly generous librarians and archivists, I looked and looked. The Anne Carroll Moore Papers (pdf ) at the New York Public Library are fairly extensive— librarians are good at saving stuff—but Moore either didn’t le her copy with her papers or it had since been lost. Cornell, whose E. B. White Collection contains a treasure trove of letters to White written by children, had several letters from Moore, but not this one. The Katharine Sergeant White Papers, at Bryn Mawr, con rmed what I had begun to suspect, that the real battle was between Anne Caroll Moore and Katharine White. They contain a tantalizing letter to her from Bechtel, written in June, 1974: You may remember you wrote me at length the horrid details at a time when I thought I could make public use of them. Thank God

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that is no longer on my conscience.

But, my White le will preserve your version of the story for posterity. If only old A. C. M. were here to read it.

Good God, where was this “White le”? Bechtel, a former children’sbook editor, sent one set of her papers to the University of Florida; the bulk of her correspondence went to Vassar. The missing letter is in neither collection. But, if Bechtel didn. . .t have that particular letter, she had, in fact, preserved the Whites. . . story for posterity.

But...the letter. Maybe Sayers, who presumably found Moore’s copy at the New York Public Library, held onto the letter. That did not, at rst, appear to be the case. And then, miraculously, an altogether intrepid archivist at UCLA, where the Frances Clarke Sayers Papers are deposited, found it: not the original, but a copy, in Moore’s handwriting, of the letter she wrote on June 20, 1945. (It had been mis led.) The Whites were right. It is an incomplete copy, and suspiciously so.

By now, of course, that one letter mattered less than nearly everything else I found while I was looking for it. But the quest reminded me of something about which even the Whites and Anne Carroll Moore agreed: there are few things under the sun ner than a library.—Jill Lepore

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Of Mice and Librarians | The New Yorker

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