White and Sondheim

One more E.B. White-related post, which also brings us back to this blog’s obsession with Stephen Sondheim.

In two recent posts on The Sondheim Hub Substack, writer Sam Berit examines links between White and Sondheim, those two Turtle Bay dwellers. I've found a couple of additional links of note. 

1. In a post on the Sondheim Letters Instagram account, Michael Joseph Gross writes of his relationship with Sondheim, with whom he kept up a lengthy correspondence, and shares one final letter he wrote after Sondheim’s death. Remembering a face-to-face encounter, Sondheim told Gross that he didn’t read much for pleasure,

...except for books by E.B. White. His prose “makes me cry,” you said, because his craft was exquisite, his word choices always “correct” — and you pronounced that word, correct, with square-cornered matter-of-factness. And with awe, explaining, “It’s painful to see someone able to do so much with so little.” You also mentioned that E.B. White was practically your neighbor — from your back door, you could see a willow tree in his garden, a tree he had described in an essay about New York — you couldn’t remember which one. Although you’d never met him, you had gathered the impression that he was “a great artist, but not a good fellow."

(The essay in question is “Here is New York”.)

Towards the end of his last letter, Gross concludes:

I will remember you as much for being a good fellow as for being a great artist, and as much for your lavish generosity as for your exacting taste.

2. As E.B. White recounted in a 1980 letter:

In 1928, one of my many chores at the New Yorker was doctoring the captions on drawings. One day a Carl Rose cartoon turned up on my desk for a fix. I didn’t think much of Rose’s caption, so I wrote an entirely new one.

Here is that cartoon with White's caption, published two years before Sondheim’s birth:

This punchline became a “meme” of its time, frequently quoted and referenced. 

Forty years later, when Sondheim began to contribute cryptic crossword puzzles to the debut issue of New York magazine, he wrote an introductory essay, How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle. It begins:

There are crossword puzzles and crossword puzzles. The kind familiar to most Americans is a mechanical test of tirelessly esoteric knowledge: “Brazilian potter’s wheel,” “East Indian betel nut” and the like are typical definitions, sending you either to Webster’s New International or to sleep. The other kind, prevalent in Great Britain but inexplicably non-existent in the United States apart from The Nation and an occasional Sunday edition of The New York Times, is a test of wits…The clues of the author who calls himself “Ximenes” in the London Sunday Observer are, to the eye of a puzzle fan, as different from those in, say, The Manchester Guardian as Wilde is from Maugham. But a “Bantu hartebeest” remains a “Bantu hartebeest” whether it’s in The New York Times or The Daily News.

Sondheim then explains the torturous delights and methodology of the cryptic crossword. He concludes:

If you haven’t ripped these pages up by now, clip them out and keep them as a guide for future weeks. And as for “Bantu hartebeest,” I say it’s “lebbek” — and I say the hell with it.