E.B. White, "The Door"

dangling ropes & unaccountable gusts of feeling

“And then, almost without warning, he would be jumping at the same old door and it wouldn’t give: they had changed it on him, making life no longer supportable under the elms in the elm shade, under the maples in the maple shade.”

My daughter can do lots of things that I can’t (stand up from the floor without using her hands, regard with insouciance the loss of front teeth) but the one that I envy the most is her ability to tolerate literary confusion. We’ll be reading something slightly beyond her reach — a story about a medical breakthrough, a book featuring obscure terminology — and when we come to an unfamiliar word or concept, I’ll watch her calmly accept the strange currency before sorting it in her inner bank. “Grievous,” pending further review, probably belongs in the pile with “serious.” “Flotsam” sounds like floating junk, but let’s keep it in The Little Mermaid file until we know more. 

I was once like this too. When I was a teenager I read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion and failed for tens of pages at at time to understand what was going on (who was talking, where they were, even whether we were at any given moment inside or outside of a parentheses) — and this bewilderment didn’t prevent the book from becoming one of my favorites. I used to actively seek out half-comprehension, that feeling of clinging to a length of dangling rope behind a boat (the S.S. Dostoyevsky, Melville’s whaling ship) while it sped through a rich and mysterious fog.

But this capacity has, along with my pelvic mobility, gone. If I can’t understand what’s going on within the first few minutes of a new show (Why in God’s name is everyone mumbling? And why won’t they turn on some lights?) I’m out. Which means that great storehouses of artistic riches are sealed off from me. Only with E.B. White’s “The Door” — a wonderful and bewildering short story from 1939 — have I started to find my way back in.

E.B. White would seem to be an improbable escort into the world of productive confusion. He is known primarily for his pellucid children’s books (Charlotte’s Web most prominent among them) and his refined and plainspoken essays. Gertrude Stein he is not. But “The Door” is well and truly baffling — after three readings I’d still struggle to tell anyone what it’s about — but it’s as good and compact an argument for the value of bafflement as you’re likely to find.  

The story starts like this (I can’t summarize it, but I can certainly retype it):

Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is always somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of things.

It goes on like this, as if someone with a high fever had crafted an incantation from stray bits of Don DeLillo, for the entirety of its five pages. I can’t tell you what it’s about, but I can tell you what it feels like: it feels like one of those fits of hopelessness so overwhelming that you wonder if you might be having an episode of hypoglycemia. 

The he of the story, whoever he is, is having a horrible time of it, and the crux of the difficulty, to the extent that it can be located, seems to have to do with the cold glossiness of his surroundings (probably best that he didn’t live to see the Apple Vision Pro).

He was in a washable house, but he wasn’t sure… He didn’t know which door (or wall) or opening in the house to jump at, to get through… He heard, in the house where he was, in the city to which he had gone (as toward a door which might, or might not, give way) a noise…

If the story were only this, I would have read it and been affected by it — it might have been the literary equivalent of those instrumental Radiohead tracks that leave me unreasonably anxious — but I probably wouldn’t love it. 

But it contains, within its murk, a mention of a highly disturbed man in New Jersey.

… that man out in Jersey, the one who started to chop his trees down, one by one, the man who began talking about how he would take his house to pieces, brick by brick, because he faced a problem incapable of solution… 

Is that man out in Jersey our man, the narrator of this story? I have no idea. But the news of his existence — with its proper-noun location and its visualizable activities — arrives like the first tickle of the rope that might save us. And it does. 

Because a page or two later White gives us the Jersey man’s story in more detail — how, before he decided to take everything apart, he took such loving care in building his house and tending to his garden, how he fussed over every tree sapling and square inch of carpet. Here, at last, is a person we can leave alone with sharp objects. 

But no.

And then, almost without warning, he would be jumping at the same old door and it wouldn’t give; they had changed it on him, making life no longer supportable under the elms in the elm shade, under the maples in the maple shade.  

This, for me, is the sentence that makes the story — and that allows me to begin to make sense of the story. 

Those incomprehensible doors that were always sliding and disappearing in the first pages are now condensed into a single stubborn door (I imagine a nice weighty wooden door with a brass knob) in the suburbs of New Jersey. The words they had changed it on him affect me like the sound a door makes when you rattle it, realizing that you’ve locked yourself inside.

But the heart of the sentence is in that gruesomely clinical phrase, no longer supportable. How better to describe the luster-less look that life has when the sun, because of bad luck or bad chemistry, has dipped behind the clouds? The deliciousness of the refuge described in the sentence’s last words (under the elms in the elm shade, under the maples in the maple shade) becomes a taunt. There is hope, as Kafka said, but not for us.

And we couldn’t have arrived at this heartbreakingly clear account of the sudden, unaccountable gusts of despair to which we’re all subject without bouncing, for a while, through the sea of confusion. We don’t get it at all, until we get it much better than we’d like.