Sondheim and E.B. White, Side By Side
Plus, more from our conversation with Bella Brown, and a Baker's Wife-themed crossword
Today, Sam Berit takes a closer look at Sondheim and E.B. White, side by side:
As we explored in Sunday’s essay, E.B. White and Stephen Sondheim were two of the most extraordinary talents to reside in the neighborhood of Turtle Bay Gardens. They were both able to see the world for all its meaning and meaninglessness and tactfully put that experience into words. Let’s look at some of the many instances of overlap in the content of their work and in the shape of their lives.
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The organizing principles that guided both White and Sondheim in their professional pursuits are framed as lessons throughout their work. In the case of White, one of his most direct and impactful teachings appears in his additions to The Elements of Style:
Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.
In Sunday in the Park with George—the Sondheim show with the most to say on craft itself—George voices his own disillusioned insights in “Putting it Together” that align with White’s:
Art isn’t easy.
Overnight you’re a trend,
You’re the right combination,
Then the trend’s at an end
[…]
A vision’s just a vision
If it’s only in your head.
If no one gets to see it
It’s as good as dead.
This shared belief that sustained quality writing can only derive from internal fulfillment laid the foundation for both men’s specific success over the years.
Early into their careers, White and Sondheim were cutting through the conventions of their day with bite and humor. They explored the complexities of romantic relationships, such as in White’s 1929 book of parodic essays written with friend and colleague James Thurber Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel the Way You Do and Sondheim’s 1970 Company. In Is Sex Necessary? White noted:
Marriage, as an instrument, is a well-nigh perfect thing. The trouble is that it cannot be successfully applied to the present-day emotional relationships of men and women. It could much more easily be applied to something else, possibly professional tennis.
White also wrote skeptically of marriage from the perspective of a newly married canary in a 1928 essay for The New Yorker called “Bye Low Baby”:
‘Sometimes I get thinking about the old days, when there was nothing to keep me company but the cuckoo clock’…‘I have observed,’ Baby went on, ‘another unfortunate condition in marriage. A woman is always trying to find out things...Do I sound cynical? I don’t mean to be…Of course, marriage has its compensations. I won’t pretend I don’t like the little sleepy noise she makes late in the afternoon when she’s on the nest.’
These sentiments on marriage align with much of Company, including “Sorry-Grateful” and its unpacking of various husbands’ mixed feelings on the institution they participate in: