This weekend past I took my daughter to see the movie "Charlotte's Web." I thought the film was quite good, and very faithful to the original book. It was, as Hollywood productions tend to be, a bit too sentimental -- more so than the book, but that is not the worst thing in the world. Any film made in the U.S. is bound to go for the tear ducts. It is in our cultural makeup: The mere sight of a flag snapping in the breeze or a grieving family placing flowers on a tombstone is all it takes to render the average Yank misty-eyed.
My movie review ends here. The film was fine; go watch it. It was worth the $7.50. The reason I mention "Charlotte's Web," and the reason I was unlikely to miss it (aside from the fact that my daughter had been begging me to take her for the past three weeks) was that I am an unqualified admirer of the book's author, E.B. White.
Charlotte's Web is by far E.B. White's most famous book, though some readers may also recognize the title Stuart Little, as well as the well-known writing guidebook, The Elements of Style, which White wrote with his mentor, William Strunk. I did not read Charlotte's Web as a child. I think I skipped it because its protagonist was a little girl, and as a little boy, I preferred books about boys. I also only had a passing interest in children's books. For some reason, when I turned eleven I decided to jump directly into adult literature, beginning with Hawthorne and Twain and then moving on to a lengthy romance with the Greek myths. So I missed a joyful stage of reading, missed Charlotte's Web and Peter Pan and The Jungle Book and Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland. It was a mistake. Sometimes you get too smart and grow up too fast, and miss some very fine things. Come to think of it, not missing the finer things of childhood is one of the things Charlotte's Web is about.
I aged into my thirties oblivious of my loss, until one day after a first-year medical school lecture, as I was packing away my notebooks, I noticed a friend of mine handling a red hardback volume. I asked him what he was reading. It was Essays of E.B. White. Eventually I talked him into lending it to me, and I found the writer of my admiration.
E.B. White was primarily an essayist, working for New Yorker magazine from 1929 until his retirement in 1976. From the very beginning White gripped me with his sharp, clear style. His writing is very accessible, and peppered with humor and wisdom. One of the entries in that book Essays, "Farewell, My Lovely," is a reminiscence of the vagaries of the Ford Model T. It is, in my humble opinion, the best short essay I have ever read. The literary greats -- Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky -- always seemed unattainable to me, but somehow the crisp, friendly language of White was so close that I dared to want to be like him. I have always thought that if I could trade another writer's talent for my own, I would take E.B. White's. He may not be the all-time best, but he is dearest to me. His style is the one I would have as my own.
After I filled myself with that first book, I read another, One Man's Meat, and then a few other essays. Eventually I alighted upon Charlotte's Web. It is rightfully a cherished and remembered book, one of the few American children's stories that stacks up against Kipling, or Alice in Wonderland. The story, if you do not know it, is about an ingenious spider named Charlotte that saves the life of Wilbur, a pig otherwise destined for the slaughterhouse, by spinning clever sayings about him into her spider webs. The webs are seen by the humans in the story as a miracle, and as a result the farmer that intended to turn him into Christmas bacon relents and keeps him on as an eternal family pet.
Like all excellent children's stories, there is much in it for the adult to appreciate. The process in which Wilbur is saved is, in a vague way, a meditation on the inevitability and cyclical nature of life and death. The spider Charlotte dies after saving Wilbur. This is an interesting contrast: Wilbur is saved from death but his savior dies as a matter of natural course. White does not say much about this incongruous fact. I think this is because (1) trying to resolve it would just ruin the plot with excessive philosophizing, and (2) there is really nothing to resolve. People die when it is their time. Charlotte's time had come, Wilbur's had not, and that's that.
Since I was already christened a doctor by the time I read Charlotte's Web, the part I responded most strongly to was when Mrs. Arable, the mother of the little girl who owns Wilbur, pays a visit to her family doctor. Although the particulars are different, the conversation they had sometime echoes in my ears when I talk with with real patients. The doctor is a very wise soul, and has thoughtful things to say about impossibilities.
"Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider's web?" asked Mrs. Arable nervously.
"Yes," replied the doctor.
"Well, do you understand it?" asked Mrs. Arable.
"Understand what?"
"Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider's web?"
"Oh, no," said Dr. Dorian. "I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody's pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."
Ah, now that is the doctor I want to be. The conversation goes on, and Dr. Dorian closes with a statement that should be engraved in gold in in the lobby of every medical school on earth.
"I suppose so," said Mrs. Arable. "I never looked at it that way before. Still, I don't understand how those words got into the web. I don't understand it, and I don't like what I can't understand."
"None of us do," said Dr. Dorian, smiling. "I'm a doctor. Doctors are supposed to understand everything. But I don't understand everything, and I don't intend to let it worry me."
Amen. Not every question has an answer to it. Sometimes we induce way to much misery in ourselves trying to find one.
In both the movie and the book, Charlotte's Web closes with one of E.B. White's finest paragraphs, a short epitaph of high praise for the spider, Charlotte. But all of us White fans also feel the words aptly apply to the author himself.
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.