The New Yorker was in its infancy when it discovered Elwyn Brooks White, who made his first contribution in 1925, the year of the magazine’s founding. By the following spring, he was writing everything from cartoon captions to editorials, all of which would help establish its manner and voice. The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, regarded The Talk of the Town as the keystone of each issue, and sent as much of it as possible through White’s typewriter. Yet for all of White’s ubiquity—he contributed reporting, essays, humor, fiction, verse, criticism, and even copy for subscription advertisements—he despaired, as he turned thirty, and then forty, of leaving only magazine clippings behind.
White published his first major work, “Stuart Little,” no less significant for being a children’s novel, when he was forty-six. By that time, he had come to be prized at The New Yorker as a “paragrapher,” a writer of short commentary. With perfect paragraphs set one after another like flagstones in the high grass, White knew, you could lead a reader anywhere. Ross knew it, too, and for decades White’s paragraphs, unsigned as Notes and Comment, opened the magazine.
On Wednesday, July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission departed for the moon, powered by a Saturn V rocket and years of government investment in science and education (a pretty thought today). At around 11 P.M. Eastern Time that Sunday, Neil Armstrong took his small step. The New Yorker had dispatched Talk reporters to various quarters to watch people watch the landing on TV, but writing a lead piece fell to White. What could measure up to the occasion? His idea was both simple and audacious: a single perfect paragraph.
White, who had turned seventy that month, sat down at his typewriter. After two World Wars and the start of the nuclear age, he had become a champion of what he called world government—eventually the United Nations. In his first, chaotic draft, he focussed on the sour nationalism represented by the planting of “the artificially stiffened American flag,” and imagined its replacement by a white banner. By the second draft, the banner had become a handkerchief, “symbol of the common cold.” White worked over the paragraph a third time, and telegraphed it to the magazine.
He seems, almost immediately, to have had misgivings. Back at the typewriter, he started fresh: “The moon is a great place for men, and when Armstrong and Aldrin danced from sheer exuberance, it was a sight to see.” What followed—his fourth draft—was as messy as his first. He kept working. An explicit point he had been making (“This was the last scene in the long book of nationalism”) vanished—in recognition, I think, that the grim history of nationalist conquest was there already in the images of wind and sea and flags. Struck by a new thought, he added, at the top, “two happy children,” giving the paragraph a quiet, moving inner arc of human time—from childhood to lovers and the infirmity of the last phrase.
By his sixth draft, White was making small, startling refinements: changing “couldn’t have foresworn the little” to “did not foreswear the familiar,” adding an “and” in “every great river, every great sea.” With these adjustments, the paragraph fell into focus: it sounded, all at once, like the mind and soul of E. B. White. According to the biographer Scott Elledge, White sent another telegram to Ross’s successor, William Shawn. “My comment is no good as is,” it said. “I have written a shorter one on the same theme but different in tone.” When White read his paragraph over the telephone, Shawn transcribed it himself, down to the comma, and it opened the magazine that week.
I have read countless paragraphs about the moon landing—hundreds, I’d guess. White’s is the only one I can recall. It does not read like something written by a gray-haired man born in the eighteen-hundreds. It reads like a piece that could have run last week. If part of The New Yorker’s special endeavor is to report the present so that it continues to seem alive much later, White still guides that effort. But he also inspires a long line of the magazine’s writers who dared to mark the difference between writing that was perfectly great—eminently publishable—and the stuff that lasts. “I hope you find that bird,” goes the rending last line of dialogue in “Stuart Little.” At seventy, returning to his typewriter to get it right on the final try, White did. ♦
