Meet my friend Wilbur . . .

E. B. White’s stories have delighted Erica Wagner since her childhood

White was born in 1899, and from 1929 was one of the writers who made The New Yorker one of the best magazines there was. Just before the Second World War he moved to Maine; the setting and inspiration for Charlotte’s Web.

The story is simple, as all great stories are. Fern Arable, an eight-year-old farm girl, saves a runty baby pig from the axe and names him Wilbur. But where there’s a pig there must be pork — that is, until Charlotte, a grey spider, comes along, decides she’s Wilbur’s friend and determines to save him. Yes, this is a book with talking animals, but don’t be put off by that. Here’s why.

There’s nothing worse, in a children’s book, than “cute”. Cute is what that wise wit, Dorothy Parker — who called herself, as a critic, “Constant Reader” — rebelled against in A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner when she wrote “Tonstant Weader fwowed up”. Cute glosses over reality and elides the truth, and children don’t need any such protection from a world they understand quite well. It’ s the old sheep who tells Wilbur what’s bound to happen to him:

“ ‘You know why they’re fattening you up, don’t you?’ ‘No,’ said Wilbur.

‘Well, I don’t like to spread bad news,’ said the sheep, ‘but they’re fattening you up because they’re going to kill you, that’s why.’ ”

This is a story that looks into darkness and that, for all its joy, is never far from death. Death is what Wilbur must be saved from, but death waits, too, for the story’s unsentimental heroine, Charlotte. If you don’t want to know what happens, look away now. Charlotte knows that her race to save Wilbur is not just a race against Wilbur’s time, but her own, as well; for after she lays her eggs she will die, and she tells Wilbur this in so many words. His sobbing will not save her.

In the Narnia books, Susan and Lucy weep over the fallen body of Aslan; but Aslan will rise again. It’s not so for Charlotte because it’s not that way in life. Charlotte goes with Wilbur to the county fair and there she decisively rescues him; but the fair ends and so does Charlotte. “Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.”

White understood that life is not a gloomy business because it ends; it’s quite the other way around, and in Charlotte’s eggs her spirit lives on. Many years after Charlotte’s Web was published, he wrote: “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find that in there, if you dig around.”

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