“The barn is a community of rugged individualists, everybody mildly suspicious of everybody else, including me. Friendships sometimes develop, as between a goat and a horse, but there is no sense of true community or cooperation. Heaven forfend! Joy of life, yes. Tolerance of other cultures, yes. Community, no.”
—E.B. White
I doubt there is any writer who accomplished what the author of Charlotte’s Web managed to do, and no one was more surprised than E.B. White himself.
Consider that a simple story of barn creatures tolerating one another and interacting remains on shelves in every library, in many home libraries, and continues to spark joy in all ages.
When approached about turning the book of barn creatures into a film, with Gene Deitch named as possible director of the movie version of Charlotte’s Web, it has been said that White was extremely hesitant about this entire proposition. His animals had been created for the written page, for children to grasp with vivid imagination. What if turning them into moving creatures with voices took the magic away?
At this current moment in history, White would be sorely disappointed by computer digitalization of written stories. “To us literature is still a thing of letters; we are old-fashioned enough to believe that great writing should be read, not listened to perhaps inattentively. We believe in the sanctity of type, in the beauty of the muted page, in the discipline required in the following with the eye the well-punctuated, yet always imperfect expression of a writer’s thought,” White wrote in The New Yorker in 1935.
Once the film project was agreed upon, White wrote several letters to Deitch, including this one in 1971: “I want to add that there is no symbolism in ‘Charlotte’s Web.’ And there is no political meaning in the story. It is a straight report from the barn cellar, which I dearly love, having spent so many fine hours there, winter and summer, spring and fall, good times and bad times, with the garrulous geese, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats and the sameness of sheep.”
I understand White’s reticence. To this day, I prefer books over any other form of stories shared. Imagination is a powerful tool that can ignite depth of realization, turning a key to a world no one else sees quite the same way.
It is magical, mythical and wonderful. It is this experience that creates children who one day become authors, in rare cases, award-winning authors, and kindly humble, of course.
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