The Story of Charlotte's Web by Michael Sims

Author:Michael Sims
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2011-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

FOREKNOWLEDGE

Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances—including the characters in the barnyard, who were later to reappear in Charlotte’s Web—I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens.

AFTER THE UNITED States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eventually killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, Andy spent the last half of the 1940s expecting Armageddon. The war’s ravages, its global reminders of the innate human lust for blood and destruction, left scars on millions who never saw the front, and Andy kept thinking about it. Were human beings really about to annihilate themselves?

In late March of 1948 Andy was in New York, unable to celebrate the vernal equinox in the countryside. Shortly before his favorite seasonal milestone, he went out to a moody lunch alone at the Roosevelt Grill, in the Roosevelt Hotel on East Forty-fifth Street, only three blocks from the New Yorker offices. The Roosevelt’s two-story lobby was like a stage set and its grand ballroom complete with Cinderella mural to guarantee a fairy-tale feel to Guy Lombardo’s performances. Lombardo’s renowned New Year’s Eve concerts at the Roosevelt had established “Auld Lang Syne” as a holiday standard. The hotel’s other famous innovation—street-level shops to help replace the income it would lose from Prohibition—had been featured since it opened in 1924, the year after Andy moved to Manhattan and began his job at the Seaman advertising agency, back when he was contributing unsigned squibs to F.P.A.’s “Conning Tower” column in the World. Andy sat in the dark-paneled restaurant, with Vanderbilt Avenue distantly visible in golden light beyond the blinds, and picked at the sweet white flesh of the weakfish he had ordered. It was so dark in the grill that he could barely read the gloomy editorials in the News. Then the waiter silently appeared beside him, stared out through the blinds, and sighed eloquently. The day outside was beautiful, he said, but the forecast was “Tomorrow snow, turning to rain.”

Soon Andy wrote up the incident for “Notes and Comment,” adding a larger perspective on the waiter’s and his own melancholy: “He was a man carrying foreknowledge in his breast, and the pain was almost unbearable.”

The vague sense of yearning and loss that had haunted Andy’s teen years had only grown over the decades. He was the writer who had confessed some years earlier, “A man sometimes gets homesick for the loneliness that he has at one time or another experienced in his life.” Even tending animals could leave him half ecstatic and half melancholy. But in 1948 in particular, he couldn’t help casting a retrospective eye across his life and work. Over the previous few months he had been awarded three honorary degrees for his contributions to literature, from Yale, the University of Maine, and Dartmouth. It was difficult for Andy to maintain his outsider/country-boy pose now that Irving Penn had photographed him for Vogue, sprawling across a burlap-covered prop, dressed in a flannel suit and with his hands in his pockets.

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