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PRINCETON, N.J
— There's a fault line opening in
John McPhee
. After 28 books and countless essays, he is giving us,
bit by bit, a more personal sense of who he is. In a
recent, beautiful piece for the New Yorker, he combined
an essay on pickerel with memories of his father's death
and a lasting image of his father's bamboo fishing rod.
The piece took many readers by surprise — not the
style, which was the same seamless combination of
carefully chosen details and information, but the
presence of the author, blinking in full glare.
According to McPhee, who turns 79 next month, he was as
surprised as anyone to find himself hooked by memories,
exposed.
McPhee's
new collection of essays, "Silk Parachute"
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 228 pp.,
$25
), is named for a marvelous toy his mother gave him for
his 11th or 12th birthday, and it contains more pieces
of personal history: the time he didn't finish his
sandwich and his mother ran after him and made him eat
it; the time he went to a football game with his father
and realized, looking up at the press box, that he
wanted to be a writer; the pride he feels watching his
nine grandchildren, to whom he dedicates the book.
In the
past, McPhee's strategy had been to explain a little bit
about why he is writing — about oranges, tennis,
trains, geology, fish,
Bill Bradley
,
David Brower
, you name it — and then get out of the frame. Sure,
he leaves traces: We feel we might know his voice if we
heard it in a coffee shop, and we can taste his
presence, his influence over a generation of journalists
and essayists. But we would not recognize him if he were
seated next to us.
McPhee is
very shy. He doesn't do many interviews and he has
written about his own clammy-handed nervousness
interviewing others or speaking in public. For 35 years,
he has taught a writing seminar two out of three spring
semesters at
Princeton
, the university he attended, in the town where he grew
up. That's about it for public speaking.
Princeton
is McPhee's "fixed foot." From here, he has
traveled the world writing stories about "real
people doing real things." On a winter afternoon,
snow threatening, he gives a tour of the campus. Nassau
Hall, built in 1756, served as the United States Capitol
for six months.
George Washington
presided over Congress here. Reunion Hall is where
John F. Kennedy
lived as a freshman, and here is a building where a
ghostly
John Nash
can still be seen. Then there's the personal tour: the
church where his mother took him after he was caught
playing poker all night in college;
John Henry House
, where he has taught since 1975.
McPhee's
office is in a fake medieval turret high in the geology
building. There are five vertical windows perfect for
crossbows. One climbs past globes and rock samples and
maps of the universe to arrive in the room where he
writes most days and meets with students. "Don't
forget to lock your door when you leave to go
home," reads a note one of McPhee's four daughters,
Martha, wrote in 1975. The geologist
Eldridge Moores
(about whom McPhee writes in "Assembling
California") worked on his PhD in this room in the
1950s. When McPhee first took possession, there was no
heat but that was all right — he just left the door
open and the heat was sucked up from the lower floors.
His computer, named Isobel after one of his
grandchildren, looks like it might have come with the
room.
McPhee
admits that he is writing more about his memories. The
new collection's title essay, about his mother, was
written in 1996, a year before she died at age 100. In
1984, within a few months of his father's death, he
jotted the words "bamboo rod" on a piece of
paper, which became a folder, which became the essay
that appeared in the New Yorker. McPhee, who normally
bicycles 15 to 16 miles every other day for exercise and
is rarely idle, blames recent hand surgeries, with the
attendant resting and medication required, for the fault
line that has opened up. "I just started writing. I
guess I'm not used to all that spare time," he
says, surprised. "I usually know where I'm going
with a story. A novelist can feel her way with a story,
but that's not the case in nonfiction. It's a central
theme of the course I teach: Know where you're
going."
Two of
McPhee's four daughters, Jenny and Martha, are
novelists; Laura is a photographer; and Sarah is an
architectural historian ("the real scholar,"
he says). Martha, who has written quite a bit about her
childhood, has encouraged her father to write more
autobiographical pieces, to open up and enjoy himself.
He marvels at his writing daughters. "I'll call
Jenny up and say, do you have any ideas for your next
novel? 'I finished it last week,' she'll say. She's like
me. She believes in fait accompli."
McPhee is
slender, dressed in a deep blue button-down shirt, a
fleece vest and running/hiking shoes. He can't explain
the memories. "Ideas go by by the zillions,"
he reflects. "What makes us fasten on one?"
Many of his interests were formed at a summer camp
called Keewaydin, where his father went each summer as
camp doctor; McPhee would spend his time canoeing and
swimming. He has written about Keewaydin in the past,
and returns there in this new collection, in an essay
titled "Swimming With Canoes." Here, he
remembers capsizing in fast water in a
Vermont
gorge, getting his foot stuck in the stern and riding
safely in the air pocket created by the overturned
canoe.
McPhee
has described writing as "mind-fracturing,
self-enslaved labor." Each day, he says, brings a
"new form of writer's block." He elaborates:
"You suspend the normal world to reproduce the
normal world. It is a suspension of ordinary life."
And the
writer loves language, strange words, the names of
things. McPhee spent 20 years on his geological portrait
of America, "Annals of the Former World," for
which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. He has had a
great deal of fun with the language of geology, as well
as that of sports, which infuses his first book, "A
Sense of Where You Are," about basketball player
Bill Bradley
, and his 1969 book on tennis, "Levels of the
Game."
Beyond
language, he hopes for good characters and a dramatic
climax. He also places a high priority on getting the
facts straight. "People say the line is
blurred," he says. "But a fact is either
checkable or it isn't."
McPhee
writes three or four drafts of each piece, spending
about two years on the first draft, four months on the
second, one month on the third and one week on the
fourth. He writes everything down. During a visit to
the Netherlands
with Martha's family, one of her children asked,
"Why was granddaddy writing all those notes?"
"The
creative person in this process," McPhee says,
"is the reader, by a long shot. The writer supplies
three or four words, but the reader makes the
picture." And McPhee values his readers. He will
not condescend to them. He has a horror of the obvious,
the not subtle, the over-explained.
This is
one reason McPhee was fortunate to find a home, in 1965,
at the New Yorker. He acknowledges his great luck,
having
William Shawn
as his editor, for a magazine that had just published
John Hersey's
"Hiroshima" and
Rachel Carson's
"Silent Spring." He has sympathy for today's
students who have fewer and fewer venues. As for
newspapers: "Every morning I walk down the driveway
to pick up the newspaper. I'm an older person. And I'm
still walking up the driveway."
As for
posterity, "nothing is forever," says the
chronicler of geologic time. He doesn't think about his
papers or his legacy. "If everybody saved
everything," he says of his many drafts (which he
calls "entrails"), "the world would be
cluttered up with stuff." He gets as close to
heated as one could expect to see in a quiet man.
"Preservation of the creative process," he
mutters. "Enough to sink a ship."
He
follows an elaborate warren of hallways through various
buildings — paleontology, microbiology, biology, and
passes the building where
Lewis Thomas
worked. "He once wrote me a note," McPhee
recalls, "describing a day when, as a young
student, he thought he was dying and went to see my
father, who examined him and said, 'Thomas, you are hung
over. Go back to your room.' "
McPhee
might be scornful of posterity and humble about
longevity, but he remains awed by words. When his father
lay dying in a
Baltimore
hospital, McPhee "began to talk," he wrote in
the New Yorker. "In my unplanned, unprepared way, I
wanted to fill the air around us with words, and keep on
filling it."
"The
thing that will not go away," McPhee tells his
students, when asked about the future of reading and
writing, "is books. Everything I'm doing is rooted
in the idea that there are no two writers alike; no one
will write the way you do. You are dealing with
yourself. The voice you are fighting to develop is your
own."
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