The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

Ann Boyd, MT 759

The story is serene imbued with the author’s sense of the precious instinctual heritage of nature. The story persuasively offers children a parable of growth, in simplicity that never condescends, telling straightforwardly the events with humor. The Trumpeter Swan learns to play the trumpet, and is daringly called Louis. He has a human friend, Sam Beaver. Louis has a handicap which is a problem droitly transformed into an opportunity through the loving security of his family and human friend.

White’s transparent love of nature is evident as the father and mother swan begin to talk to each other with surprising animation, while the reader settles into a joyride through this gentle terrain of the unlikely. Louis discovers himself to be mute, an inconvenience during childhood but pure agony during the mating season. Louis’s father, a bombastic old cob, gets him a trumpet and to pay for it Louis turns professional. How does the old cob get the trumpet? By diving through the display window of a music store in Billings, Montana and carrying the instrument off through a hail of shards and buckshot. How does Louis pact his trumpet and slate upon which he learns to write, the life-saving medal he wins, and the purse of money he makes? All these are attached by strings around his neck, flapping and clanking together whenever he flies. How does he carve out his career? First as a bugler in a boy’s camp; next as accompanist, swimming one-footed, to the swan-boats in the Boston Public Garden; last, as a nightclub performer in Philadelphia, operating out of a pond in the city zoo. From the mythic charm of this story, we are invited to examine the purpose of life afresh.

When the cob realizes there is something wrong with Louis, the fifth cygnet, who never makes a sound, he openly discusses the matter with his mate. While the cob is distressed at the thought of a defective child, Louis’s mother knows that the real problem will come when Louis is unable to court a female swan without being able to trumpet. The old cob tells his son that he is dumb; naturally, this troubles him, but his father reassures him that it may even be an advantage. “It compels you to be a good listener. The world is full of talkers, but it is rare to find anyone who listens. And I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking” (42). A solution to the problem is promised. The cob will get Louis a trumpet so that he can live a full life. The human response to a “defective child” is fear and estrangement, but here the catastrophic is taken in stride, as a lesson that nature has an order in its creation that is not random and hopeless. All problems are opportunities!

After the fall migration into Montana, Louis decides to learn to read and write. “If I’m defective in one respect, I should try and develop myself along other lines. I will learn to read and write. Then I will hang a small slate around my neck and carry a chalk pencil. In that way I will be able to communicate with anybody who can read” (53). For 18 months, Louis and Sam go to school, and the teacher, Mrs. Hammerbotham, is won over by Louis’ intelligence and diligence. The children “liked the look of the new pupil and were eager to see what he could do.” Louis grabs a piece of chalk in his bill and draws a perfect A. Children often accept the fragility of difference without prejudice. Perhaps this prompted Jesus to equate child-like faith with the Kingdom of God, where there is a preferential concern for the poor.

If the author winks during this series of preposterous particulars, it would ruin the effect. White, however, never forgets he is telling about a serious subject: the overcoming of a handicap, the joys of music, and the need for a mate. When Louis realizes that he must graduate from bugle to trumpet with its three finger-operated valves, he unflinchingly asks Sam Beaver to slit the webbing of his right foot. Sam does, not omitting to point out that henceforth the swan will tend to swim in circles. Compensation costs in all areas of life here made clear by the coping mechanism to play the trumpet rather than the bugle. A commitment to follow Christian moral teaching also requires sacrifices. Virtues require practice and separate the practitioner from secular popularity. Steady adherence to faith requires a circular pattern, like the metaphoric eagle of St. John who keeps Jesus in the center of his focus. Devotion to the center is the anchor of faith.

Nature serves as a reservoir of common sense. Nobody panics, and catastrophes are taken in stride. When Mr. Brickle, the director of Camp Kookooskoos, is sprayed by a skunk, he does not do the fast burn of a meaner comic character, but announces that the camp has been given a “delicious dash of wild perfume” and that “a swim will clear the air.” The lessons of nature are profound, in the stench there is water for cleansing, as baptism removes the stain and odor of sin from our lives.

Near the end of “The Trumpet of the Swan” Louis’s father faces death with a grandiloquent soliloquy. “Man, in his folly, has given me a mortal wound. The red blood flows in a steady trickle from my veins. My strength fails . . . Good-bye, life! Good-bye, beautiful world! Good-bye little lakes in the north! Farewell, springtimes I have known, with their passion and ardor!” (188). Death where is thy sting? The cop faces death but does not actually die. He is rescued by medical treatment and released to fly back to his wife and family. In this metaphor of death and resurrection, we renew hope that reunion is the reality of our finite futures.

The natural order is evident throughout enhanced by the comic rhetoric. Primal ecstasies of space and flight, of night and day, of nurturing and maturing, of courtship and art. In the end, Louis the one with the handicap, proclaims how “lucky he was to inhabit such a beautiful earth, how lucky has had been to solve his problems with music.” Music is a medium to transcend the ordinary time and place of our lives and enter into the realm beyond. The handicapped are frequently endowed with the ability to transcend the ordinary. Down’s Syndrome children have an extraordinary ability to love and graciousness of spirit that exposes the hypocrisy of human success and competition. The Trumpet of the Swan opens the sensitive reader to a new appreciation for the goodness of fragility. It reminds us that our lives are not for our pleasure alone, but for relationships human and divine, finite with hope for the infinite.