Humorist

Quo Vadimus?--E.B. White--Harper ($2).

Elwyn Brooks ("Andy") White for eleven years wrote the oxymoronic introductory paragraphs to each New Yorker issue. The tone of these paragraphs, a kind of precocious, off-hand humming, has been imitated but never exactly reproduced by his successors. In 1937 he resigned from The New Yorker, after writing an inimitable farewell whose gamut ranged from a baritone sigh to a neurasthenic squeak. True to his theme (that the town was getting too much for him) he went off to live in the Maine countryside, at North Brooklin. Thence he contributes a monthly page (considerably duller than his New Yorker quiddities) to Harpers.

Last week was published E. B. W.'s second slim collection of little prose pieces--most of them from the files of The New Yorker--which will please the melancholy humor of many a modern Jaques. E. B. W. dips the broken reed with which he writes into various liquids--diluted acid, crocodile tears, the milk of human kindness; and the thread of his writing is like the trail of a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes exasperating, always bewildered insect.

Out-loud laughs, as in all up-to-date humor, are few, but E. B. W. sometimes unbends to such old-fashioned jovialities as pointing out the difference between a major and a minor poet: "Any poem starting with 'And when' is a serious poem written by a major poet. . . . Any poem, on the other hand, ending with 'And how' comes under the head of light verse, written by a minor poet." Or his suggestion for a digest to end digests, "which condensed a Hemingway novel to the single word 'Bang!' and reduced a long Scribner's article about the problem of the unruly child to the two words 'Hit him.' " The most polished baiter of TIMEstyle extant, he includes A Guide to the Pronunciation of Words in TIME.

In so serious a book as Quo Vadimus?, however, such relaxations are few. E. B. W.'s latest book shows that he still considers himself a humorist, and that he still considers being a humorist no laughing matter.

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