White fatefully became a mentee of English professor Strunk, he
was renamed Andy. (It had been a long-standing tradition at the
school to confer the name Andy on everyone with the surname
White in honor of Cornell’s founder, Andrew Dickson White.)
“From then on,” Sweet writes, “to friends and family, Elwyn
White was Andy White.”
White wrote often of his idyllic youth in Westchester County.
“If an unhappy childhood is indispensable for a writer, I am
ill-equipped: I missed out on
all that.” But he also
admitted that being the
youngest in a large family
could be isolating. He took
to writing early “to assuage
my uneasiness and collect
my thoughts, and I was a
busy writer long before I
went into long pants.”
The biggest crisis of
White’s childhood—an
allergy to pollen—actually
produced a life-changing
benefit. A doctor prescribed
dousing White’s head in
cold water every morning as a cure. White’s father, who had
recently visited his older sons at a camp in Belgrade Lakes,
Maine, thought the clear air and cold water might help his
youngest. August in Maine became a family tradition. Sweet
reproduces portions of the handmade brochure White sent to a
friend who was coming to visit him, promoting life at “one of
the most beautiful states in the Union... and the most beautiful
of the lakes in Maine.”
Condensing “Millions of Words”
Armed with so much information, memorabilia, and “the
millions of words” White himself wrote, Sweet at first felt
overwhelmed. Rider counseled her to take small steps and offered
loose deadlines. “She’d say, ‘Why don’t you start with just the
chapter headings?’ ” Sweet recalls. There was basic biographical
information she needed to include, but she was most interested
in drilling down to the origin stories of his novels. “What
information got him to Stuart Little Where did it come from
and how did it unfold?” she wanted to know.
Sweet unearthed a coincidence when reading an article on the
history of St. Nicholas magazine, in which White had published
poems and stories as an adolescent. His future wife, Katharine
Sergeant Angell, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, had also pub-
lished in St. Nicholas as a girl, including a story she wrote about
finding a spider’s nest. “It just gave me chills,” Sweet says, “to
imagine they both had this connection to spiders.”
After distilling all the information Sweet had collected to a
manageable amount, she then had to think about how best to
organize it. Her specialty is presenting facts in varied forms—
“I love portraying information in an atypical way,” she says.
“Instead of just words, I want charts and diagrams and legends.”
(One legend, attached to a map detailing White’s perambula-
tions west after college (see below), reveals he received $25 in
Minneapolis for winning a newspaper contest that required fur-
nishing the last line of a limerick.)
To offset White’s quotations from Sweet’s own text in the
finished book, she procured a 1940s-era manual typewriter—“a
beauty,” she says, “the
Mustang of typewriters”—
and typed out his words her-
self. “It slowed me down so
much but it turned out to be
a good thing, because it
helped me get really familiar
with his writing, and because
[the typewriter] didn’t work
perfectly at all,” Sweet notes.
“The font is really crazy. It’s
consistently off but the
imperfections mean it’s not
flat on the page and that was
what I wanted.”
Sweet also painted certain
scenes from his life and created the backgrounds over which
White’s quotations and family photographs were layered. She
created collages with found objects from the world he inhab-
ited—a Moxie soda-bottle cap (“Mr. White bought a case...
assuring his family that the new drink Coca-Cola would never
be as popular”), boat ropes, leaves, eggs, pencils, rulers, post-
marked stamps. “Your eye begins to train you that there is
nothing too weird to put in a collage,” she says.
When Sweet was unsure of a detail, she relied on Martha. Did
White have a mustache in the 1930s? Was he in Maine around
this time? When she was unsure of her words, she turned to the
subject himself. “Strunk and White was the book I went to when
I wrote my first book,” Sweet says. “I have one by my bed, one
in the studio. I probably have six or seven copies. [The book]
made me feel that [White] thought anybody could write and
surely if I followed his advice, I could do it.”
At the end of Charlotte’s Web, Wilbur muses on his spider
friend, concluding that “she was in a class by herself.” The same
could be said of Sweet’s book. It’s not a picture book, nor a
straight biography, but a hybrid volume of unique design that
brims with color and interesting visuals and tells an arresting
story of a man in love with his wife, his child, his dogs, and the
world.
“Editors have to read projects over and over again, and every
single time I read the part where his wife dies, I cried,” Rider
says. “That’s Melissa’s power to make us really feel for him and
[it] shows the deep, deep affection she has for him as well. I don’t
think she realized just how much work this was going to be
going into it, but I definitely think she found her voice.” ■
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