Part IV: Florida

I wonder a bit about the connection between E. B. White and Florida. His three essays — that span three decades – seem to me to paint it as a depressing and morally derelict place. Yet here he is, and here he stays…

On a Florida Key

This essay did not thrill me, but it did one thing of note. It began with about two pages of description of the rented cabana in which White and his wife were staying. While it did sketch a good picture of the place — how could it help it after piling detail on detail on detail — I rapidly became restless and hoped that it would add up to something. But it really didn’t, not even at the end of the essay.

The bit I liked was anchored by this:

In the kitchen cabinet is a bag of oranges for morning juice. Each orange is stamped “Color Added.” The dyeing of an orange, to make it orange, is man’s most impudent gesture to date. It is really an appalling piece of effrontery, carrying the clear implica-ton that Nature doesn’t know what she is up to.
E. B. White, A Florida Key (in Essays of E. B. White, p 173

it is a funny example in and of itself. But then, White remarks disapprovingly on the segregation in the town, and envisions a parade float with bathing beauties, including a black woman, with the slogan: “Color added.” It is a funny juxtaposition, but while I appreciate the setiment, it doesn’t really seem to add up to me. More successful, I think, are his passages describing failed developments: “cities of not quite forgotten hopes, untouched by neon or by filth.“

But still, except for the occasional passage, this essay does little for me

Later:

After a discussion with Kathy, I have a much better understanding of the essay. Much of the description of the rented cabana paints a picture of a sort of dereliction of the material environment that can be seen as a critique of the culture and social milieu in which produced it — thus providing a critical shade to his observations about segregation and other forms of racism in Florida.

His discussion of the abandoned, never quite successful subdivisions, is likewise interesting. It contrasts the beauty and profusion of nature with the artificiality and failed promises of development:

I love to prowl the dead sidewalks that run off into the live jungle, under the broiling sun of noon, where the cabbage palms throw their spiny shade across the stillborn streets and the creepers bind old curbstones in a fierce sensual embrace and the mocking birds dwell in song upon the remembered grandeur of real estate’s purple hour. A boulevard which has been reclaimed by Nature is an exciting avenue; it breathes a strange prophetic perfume, as of some century still to come, when the birds will remember, and the spiders, and the little quick lizards that toast themselves on the smooth hard surfaces that once held the impossible dreams of men.
[…]
I remember the wonderful days and the tall dream of rainbow’s end; the offices with the wall charts, the pins in the charts, the orchestras playing gently to prepare the soul of the wanderer for the mysteries of subdivision, the free bus service to the rainbow’s beginning, the luncheon served on the little tables under the trees, the warm sweet air so full of the deadly contagion, the dotted line, the signature, and the premonitory qualms and the shadow of the buzzard in the wild wide Florida sky.

I love these rudimentary cities that were conceived in haste and greed and never rose to suffer the scarifying effects of human habitation, cities of not quite forgotten hopes, untouched by neon and by filth.
– E. B. White, On a Florida Key, p 175-176 (Essays of E. B. White)

The Ring of Time, 1956

This is quite a nice essay, and will, I think, repay re-reading. He describes paying a dollar to prowl around the grounds of a circus outside of show times, and spending time in a tent where a woman is putting a showhorse through its paces. At some point, her daughter, an acrobat who does tricks on the horses, shows up and practices her routine, without costume or trappings of the show:

The richness of the scene was in its plainness, its natural condition – of horse, of ring, of girl, even to the girl’s bare feet that gripped the bare back of her proud and ridiculous mount. The enchantment grew not out of anything that happened or was performed but out of something that seemed to go round and around and around with the girl, attending her, a steady gleam in the shape of a circle – a ring of ambition, of happiness, of youth.
[…]
As I watched with the others, our jaws adroop, our eves alight, I became painfully conscious of the element of time. Everything in the hideous old building seemed to take the shape of a circle, conforming to the course of the horse. The rider’s gaze, as she peered straight ahead, seemed to be circular, as though bent by force of circumstance; then time itself began running in circles, and so the beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same, and one thing ran into the next and time went round and around and got nowhere. The girl wasn’t so young that she did not know the delicious satisfaction of having a perfectly behaved body and the fun of using it to do a trick most people can’t do, but she was too young to know that time does not really move in a circle at all.
E. B. White, A Florida Key (in Essays of E. B. White, p 181

At the end of the essay, having moved on to a discussion of Florida more generally, and alluding to the “race problem” and a recent supreme court decision, he returns to the trope of the circle, where time does not seem to progress, but nevertheless still does. This may well be a larger comment on the culture of Florida, and the way in which it seems derelict and frozen in time, even as time marches on.

What do our Hearts Desire?, 1966

An account of spending Christmas in Florida, a new thing for White and his wife, and their premonitions about it, and the things they missed. “The house we had walked into had been engaged sight unseen, and this is always fun and full of jolts, like an amusement ride at a park.” He observes his wife having crying spells, and there is a sense that nothing is quite right, and the scenes he paints seem barren and deserted.

It is a fairly humble essay. After striking a tone of artificiality and loss, near the the tone reverses with the arrival of a package from a daughter in law with a branch of balsam fir, grandchild made ornaments, and photos: “Our youngest grandchild had done something odd with his mouth, in a manly attempt to defeat the photographer, and looked just like Jimmy Hoffa. ‘How marvelous!’ said my wife.“