Five years wide awake

"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 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. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper."

From One Man’s Meat, E.B. White’s collection of essays written for Harper’s Magazine, in a foreword written 40 years after its initial publication, in 1942. He moved to a “salt-water farm’’ in Brooklin, Maine, in 1938 from New York City (where he frequently returned to work at The New Yorker in stints). The farm most famously inspired the classic children’s (and adults’) book Charlotte’s Web.

‘Business-like cold’

Photo by Stephen Hudson

“There has been more talk about the weather around here this year than common, but there has been more weather to talk about. For about a month now we have had solid cold—firm, business-like cold that stalked in and took charge of the countryside as a brisk housewife might take charge of someone else’s kitchen in an emergency.”

— E.B. White, in 1944, writing in his Harper’s Magazine “One Man’s Meat’’ column on life at his coastal Brooklin, Maine, farm.

Life at his “salt-water farm’’ inspired E.B. White to write this classic.

'A classical tone'

"There is about Boston a certain reminiscent and classical tone, suggesting an authenticity and piety which few other American cities possess."

— E.B. White (1899-1985), the famous essayist and children’s book author. He’d often go through Boston to take the old Boston & Maine Railroad to approach his place on the Maine Coast.

Not very straitlaced Boston

An ad for what came to be known as "The Old Howard,'' which from time to time featured risque acts, including strippers, and in whose neighborhood were numerous sin-laden establishments.

Two good books for the beach or any other place:

First, there’s  the amusingly and quaintly illustrated Wicked Victorian Boston (published by History Press), by Robert Wilhelm, about, for example, such lovely late 19th Century activities as prostitution, drinking in illegal saloons, animal fighting, sports gambling, opium  dens and daughters of Boston Brahmins posing nude for photos in “the Hub of the Universe’’. Of course it’s all seasoned with the fragrance of the hypocrisy that was/is as rife in Boston as in most cities. But then, as the old line has it: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’’

Forget about Puritan rectitude and that old line “banned in Boston.’’

The other book is a collection of Roger Angell’s essays called This Old Man: All in Pieces (Anchor Books). Mr. Angell, who is 96, is a long-time reporterand essayist for The New Yorker, where he was also for decades an editor.  In this charming,  often humorous and wise volume he looks at the challenges of old age, without self-pity; baseball, on which he’s a celebrated writer; life in New York, where he mostly lives, and in Maine (where he has a cottage) and many other things. He also writes about his famed stepfather, E.B. White, and Katherine White, who was White’s wife, Angell’s mother and a formidable editor at The New Yorker.  The Whites spent much of the latter part of their lives living in Brooklin, Maine.

There are also letters Mr. Angell wrote to various exciting individuals, some famous, some not, as well as beautiful tributes to the dead, which of course comprise most of the people Roger Angell has known.

A funny line about Katherine White from Nancy Franklin, a critic, which Mr. Angell said was accurate: “As an editor she was maternal; as a mother she was editorial.’’