Friday, June 26, 2009

E. B. White fan


E.B. White's house. Photo by Nancy Woods
“It’s another E.B. White fan!” Mary Gallant called out to her husband.

The fan she was referring to was me. I’d shown up, unannounced, at White’s 19th-century Maine farmhouse with its barn and boathouse to see for myself where one of my favorite writers had penned everything from Charlotte’s Web and newsbreaks for The New Yorker to essays for Harper’s Magazine.

I’d arrived at White’s place in a rental car. White had died several years before; his home (where he lived for many years with his wife Katharine, who also had died), was now owned by Mary Gallant and her husband Robert.

It was all part of an East Coast trip I made that included stops at the homes of several other writers and artists, including the homes of Louisa May Alcott, Andrew Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth, L. M. Montgomery, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (well, in Thoreau’s case, I visited a replica of his cabin at Walden Pond).

But, for me, seeing White’s house and attached barn (where it was easy to imagine Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig hanging out) was the highlight of my trip.

After pulling my car into the driveway, I got out and walked up to the front door. Dark-green lilac bushes grew on either side. There was no doorbell, so I knocked and then stepped back.

“Hello!” someone shouted.

“Hello!” I shouted back, following the voice around to the side of the house just as Mary Gallant, an auburn-haired woman, stepped out.

When I told her I was an E.B. White fan, she smiled and said “Come on,” before leading me to the water side of the property and pointing out where I could stand to get a good shot of Allen Cove.
“You have to see the barn” she said next, explaining that that's where White kept his chicks. The interior of the building was high, wide and clean and conveyed a sense of safety. As Gallant showed me the corner where she potted her plants, her husband walked in.

“It’s another E.B. White fan!” she told him, before turning back to me and saying, “When people say, ‘I don’t know how you put up with it (visiting fans),’ I tell them, ‘Well, I don’t know if I could if I were living in Stephen King’s house, but I figure E.B. White was fairly benevolent.’”

I think E.B. White would be pleased to know that a woman with a sense of humor is living in his house.

2 comments:

dgc said...

Thank you for this glimpse of the White house. He's my favorite author, and I wondered if his house was a "destination" or just someone's home now. I'll be visiting Boston this summer and would have gone to see it if it had been the former. Instead, thanks to your research, I curl up with my collected White essays instead -- and my imagination -- and leave the hospitable Gallants in peace. DG Caskey, Lula, GA

Daniel Eaton said...

It's a beautiful home, my family lives about a mile away. We always used to drive my when i was young as i was in love with architecture!