Stuart Little Turns 80 (On E.B. White)

1945 was the year of publication of one of my favorite children’s books Stuart Little.

This children’s classic was only about 25 years old when I discovered it. It just so happens that my young childhood coincided with a period in which E.B. White (Elwyn Brooks White, 1899-1985) was killing it as a children’s book author. The Trumpet of the Swan came out in 1970, and the animated film version of Charlotte’s Web came out in 1973. But I’ve always been partial to Stuart Little, which I recall my dad reading to me when I was quite young. My dad was a fan of White’s sometime collaborator James Thurber. I wonder if that’s how he tumbled to it. Anyway, I’m quite sure that the book is how I first learned that there was a different spelling of my surname. The fact that Stuart had my family’s name at all was a point of attraction. And the ambiguity of Stuart’s identity will always be intriguing. What do you mean, he “looks like a mouse”? Nothing LOOKS like a mouse. Either you’re a mouse or you’re not. The 1999 movie dispatched that enigma by deciding that he WAS a mouse, and that he was adopted, which is simple-minded and infuriating in the way that Hollywood invariably chooses to be. To me, it is much more interesting to have some woman give birth to this whatsit, who is not only rodential, but walks upright and talks from the minute he comes on the scene. He was never a baby.

White says the concept came to him in a dream, which I fascinating in a collective unconscious kind of way. King Kong had come to Merian C. Cooper and I’ll be damned if it’s not the exact same thing! They’re both about an animal creature with humanoid aspects who is scaled wrong in relation to humans. One is big, one is small. One talks, the other doesn’t. Otherwise, these premises are so similar that it seems to speak somehow to how the mind works, how it dreams, how it devises stories and myths. White’s character also reminds us some many fairy and folk tales about tiny creatures, Tom Thumb, Thumbelina, The Borrowers, The Shoemakers Elves, etc. And yet it is sort of grafted into familiar, everyday reality. Letting the premise play out logically, Stuart confronts all sorts of problems related to his size and shape. If this were realism, you would say that he was what they used to call a freak of nature. This, too, has a fairy tale aspect. Just think how the story might have fared in the hands of Tod Browning, whose birthday is tomorrow? His family is understanding about his difference and help him through his challenges, one of the book’s many virtues.

As is HOW the book was written. What kids didn’t know (and surely still don’t) was that before he wrote children’s books (and he only wrote the three), White was a long time staff writer at The New Yorker, one of the first writers hired by Katharine Angell, whom he then married. White was (and is perpetually) valued as one of the forgers of that magazine’s distinctive style, with his torturously wrought essays, humor pieces, and poems. In 1959 he spruced up The Elements of Style, penned by his old Cornell professor William Strunk in 1918, a guide that many still swear by (and I choose to ignore on a daily basis, if that’s not readily apparent). Students have been assigned “Strunk and White” for decades now. My first acquaintance with it was as a high school sophomore. My dusty copy was deaccessioned from my library some time ago. I can like his writing without wanting to spend 96 hours laboring over each of my own sentences. If the reverse would true, this blog (flawed though it may be) wouldn’t have 9,000 essays.

Of course, as we said, the E.B. White film classic of my childhood was Charlotte’s Web (1973), a story so sweet it has the power to transcend the arachnophobia of a dear friend of mine. It’s one of the few Hanna-Barbera features not to be based on their popular TV characters. With songs by the Sherman Brothers, this sweet meditation on death in a barnyard, has an all-star voice-over cast of Debbie Reynolds, Rex Allen, Henry Gibson, Paul Lynde, Agnes Moorehead, Don Messick, Pamelyn Ferdin, Martha Scott, Danny Bonaduce, Dave Madden, and Joan Gerber.

It may surprise you to know that I rather enjoyed the 1999 screen adaptation of Stuart Little, apart from the quibble mentioned above. I usually am pretty savage when beloved works of art are messed with, but the movie version was respectful to the spirit of the original, and I found it sweet and charming (unlike the smartass, nasty tone that a lot of so-called family films are injected with in our century). The cast is like a convention of beloved screen veterans: Michael J. Fox, Nathan Lane, Chazz Palminteri, Steve Zahn, David Alan Grier — and that’s just voiceovers. Then there’s Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Jeffrey Jones, Bruno Kirby, Allyce Beasley,  Brian Doyle-Murray, Estelle Getty,Harold Gould, Patrick Thomas O’Brien, Julia Sweeney, Dabney Coleman, Jon Polito,Taylor Negron, Stan Freberg, Jennifer Tilly, and of course the kid, Jonathan Lipnicki as George. As always, the sequels, not so much.