Books: Humorist

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Quo Vadimus?—E.B. White—Harper ($2).

Elwyn Brooks ("Andy") White for eleven years wrote the oxymoronic introductory paragraphs to each New Yorker issue. The tone of these paragraphs, a kind of precocious, off-hand humming, has been imitated but never exactly reproduced by his successors. In 1937 he resigned from The New Yorker, after writing an inimitable farewell whose gamut ranged from a baritone sigh to a neurasthenic squeak. True to his theme (that the town was getting too much for him) he went off to live in the Maine countryside, at North Brooklin. Thence he contributes a monthly page (considerably duller than his New Yorker quiddities) to Harpers.

Last week was published E. B. W.'s second slim collection of little prose pieces—most of them from the files of The New Yorker—which will please the melancholy humor of many a modern Jaques. E. B. W. dips the broken reed with which he writes into various liquids—diluted acid, crocodile tears, the milk of human kindness; and the thread of his writing is like the trail of a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes exasperating, always bewildered insect.

Out-loud laughs, as in all up-to-date humor, are few, but E. B. W. sometimes unbends to such old-fashioned jovialities as pointing out the difference between a major and a minor poet: "Any poem starting with 'And when' is a serious poem written by a major poet. . . . Any poem, on the other hand, ending with 'And how' comes under the head of light verse, written by a minor poet." Or his suggestion for a digest to end digests, "which condensed a Hemingway novel to the single word 'Bang!' and reduced a long Scribner's article about the problem of the unruly child to the two words 'Hit him.' " The most polished baiter of TIMEstyle extant, he includes A Guide to the Pronunciation of Words in TIME.

In so serious a book as Quo Vadimus?, however, such relaxations are few. E. B. W.'s latest book shows that he still considers himself a humorist, and that he still considers being a humorist no laughing matter.