15 Jul 2011 01:22:17
Michael Sims was reading White's collected letters when he found a reply to a group of schoolchildren, in which the author wrote that "I didn't like spiders at first, but then I began watching one of them, and soon saw what a wonderful creature she was and what a skilful weaver. I named her Charlotte." The comment sent Sims on a journey to discover whether there was indeed a real Charlotte, visiting White's old barn in Maine where Fern and Avery's rope still hung and finding that "there had been numerous Charlottes and Wilburs and Templetons in his life – but that there was indeed a particular clever spider who helped inspire the book".
Sims's The Story of Charlotte's Web, which has just been published, details how White spotted an elaborate spider web one morning in the autumn of 1949. Watching it over the next few weeks, he saw the spider was spinning an egg sac, and when later that autumn he realised the spider had disappeared, he decided to take the egg sac with him when he had to return to New York and his job as a contributor to the New Yorker. White "carefully cut the binding strands of web that held the egg sac to the wood of the barn", put it in an empty sweet box and punched a few holes in the lid. Weeks later, he saw that "tiny spiderlings, so small they were barely visible", were climbing through the air holes, and, delighted at their antics, he left them to it for the next two weeks until his maid complained.
Fascinated by spiders, White researched them meticulously, even portraying himself as a spider in a poem for his wife Katharine which concludes "Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, / In spider's web a truth discerning, / Attach one silken strand to you / For my returning." The shy author, who also wrote the children's books Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, often "hid behind animals", according to Sims, even writing to his wife in the voice of their pet dog Daisy.
Sims paints a picture of a timid, nature-loving man, "miserable when more than two people at a time looked at him", who was nonetheless "hugely ambitious and willing to try almost anything when no one was looking". Although he had many friends, good relationships with his colleagues and a loving family, animals were his favourite acquaintances, writes Sims, who points to White's comment as a child that "this boy felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people".
After the baby spiders were removed from his New York home, they "continued to scurry around in [White's] imagination," writes Sims, and the author went on to write Charlotte's Web, the beloved, bestselling tale of a spider who spins webs to save her piglet friend Wilbur from the axe, writing "some pig", and "terrific" in silk.
