Reading Response to John Mcphees Travels of Georgia
Pieces of the Frame
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June 22, 1975
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And then what does one do about John McPhee? He'south 44, publishing his I lth book in 11 years, is probably the near versatile announcer in America, and ane wants to tub‐thump for him. Versatility is not ordinarily an attending‐getting virtue; nor is patience; nor encyclopedic care with particular. He doesn't write "big" books. They aren't fat and don't ride along on the opportuneness of the subject field thing. He'due south not "hateful" or "sexy," in the jargon publishers like to utilize nowadays to describe writers who know how to hit the public with any it is about probable to buy. He writes well-nigh vagrant matters that accept interested him to brainstorm with, rather than sizing up the hot properties around and greatly interesting himself in one of them.
There are no genius journalists (if one excepts a hookey‐playing novelist or two)—information technology would audio like a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, journalists do tend to ripen with age, go actually improve, unlike and so many lamentable novelists, who fall flat on their noses in middle age. Journalists, also, through their fascination with power bases, their blarneying skills and affable nationwide network of personal contacts—the elided, pleasantly noncommittal personalities most of them have, and a congenital backscratching that would put fifty-fifty the poets to shame—normally succeed in getting their worldly due.
McPhee, nonetheless, is non so equipped. Apart from backscratching, every author knows that the way to manage a career and continue one's name advertised is to requite lavish blurbs to forgettable books, but he does non do this. Nor does he write about politics at a bespeak when political journalists accept defenseless agree of Washington by the short hairs. He does not set up equally a publicist Pooh Bah in his diverse areas of expertise (whisky, tennis, citrus fruits, flight machines, the Hovings, the making of nuclear bombs, etc.) and cash in on them as a sideline. He has introduced no departures in grade or style and does not write confessions—we won't read almost his divorce—or New Journalism or personal essays in the role of novelist manqué. Though nigh nobody writes better virtually sports, he loves winners somewhat less than the world does and commits the unpardonable sin among sporting writers of failing to run where the money is: equally, for in
As a old nature writer, he doesn't endeavour to abound hair on his breast, like the long martial parade of hunterwriters. Nor does he make mountains out of every molehill—calling heaven and globe to witness this mole at work—in the manner that renders most conservationist‐naturalist writing so interminably tedious. And though occasionally he has taken the time to explore his ancestral roots, unfortunately these happen to be Scottish, and there could hardly he a less "sexy." "mean" make of ethnicity right now than Scottishness; he might only as well hark back to onetime SchleswigHolstein.
My ain favorite among McPhee's hooks is "The Pine Barrens" (1968). This is a direct loving look at the people and social and natural history of the piney belt of New Jersey, beginning with a chatty onetime bachelor cranberryman whom nosotros meet lunching on raw onions. Information technology's boyish only masterful, and there is some empirical show that this has been his all-time, considering youngish writers aren't normally nominated for a National Rook Honor for their best work just rather for the first substantial book that comes later information technology, when the volume industry has caught up with them; and sure plenty, "Encounters With the Archdruid" (1971) was so honored. The Archdruid was the conservation warrior, David Brower, and the book. besides being a more difficult project to undertake, wound up more urbane, edited and neutral in tone than his paean to the Pine Barrens. I found information technology a picayune too much and then, merely McPhee may have been trying to obviate the virtually telling complaint I have heard confronting him: that of hero‐worship.
His early study of the basketball game star, Bill Bradley, is marred in thig fashion, according to followers of the sport—Bradley existence not near the player McPhee describes, so that the book'south key presupposition betrays him. His account of Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy, "The Headmaster" (1966), records all the proficient things that might take been said for the man and the school but few of the had (I should confess that I was a scholar in that location at the same fourth dimension), with the event that although McPhee writes more gracefully than Peter S. Prescott, who wrote most Choate in "A World of Our Own," Prescott'south hook is a truer profile of a prep I didn't know McPhee at Deerfield, except that with the rest of the educatee body I was required to watch him play basketball game on Sat nights, but in considering what distinguishes him from other practiced nature writers—who are frequently poets manqué—and essayists (novelists manqué), it occurs to me that every bit a stellar athlete at that stage of his life (then, equally a clean‐cut immature fellow he went promptly to work for Time mag), he may not take gone through the familiar cycle of yearning—indeed, expecting!—to be Tolstoy: no, cut that down perhaps to Dickens: no, lower your sights to Stephen Crane: no, please just to go Erskine Caldwell would exist quite sufficient. His peculiarly cheerful, unassuming, even innocent approach to his work has different roots. For him information technology has been an upward path all the way; he hasn't that whiff about him of literary failure — old disappointments and early on wounds.
Merely by leaps and bounds he is ripening now to a writer too strong to generalize so confidently well-nigh. The tardily pieces in this collection, "Travels in Georgia" and "Ruidoso," and "The Survival of the Bark Canoe," which appeared in The New Yorker too recently to have been included here, come close to existence matchless. McPhee writes about people whose company he enjoys (over again, is something of an anomaly in this), and one has the sense ever with him of a man at a pitch of pleasance in his work, a natural at information technology, finding out on behalf of the rest of u.s.a. how some portion of the world works. He is nigh comfortable side past side with a chum rather than alone with his thoughts, but is preeminently a educatee of how people who are good at something do what they do: of adroitness, and people who in a private thrive.
Too modest to be apocalyptic, he would be put off by Muhammad Ali'due south sadism and maybe by his frenetic streak, and as a craftsman, would dislike Ali'southward antipathy for his own arts and crafts. He doesn't respond to despair and the savagery which is its obverse, apparently feeling, as they say nowadays, that "the system works." Loyal to a fault, he has stuck to one publishing firm all these years and generally inserts on the copyright page of his hooks a statement that whatever he has accomplished inside was "developed with the editorial counsel" of The New Yorker staff, equally if he were still a beardless beginner instead of a proper cynosure. As a team histrion he is leveled past the format there, non just with a very few peers, such as Jane Kramer, only many writers who cannot be equated with him.
As a mag specialist, as well, he must constantly skirt the temptation to be clever and quick, if not glib, to be nifty, not ambitious, in scale, to be understandable immediately, pat in staging his fabric, readable backwards or forwards or sideways—to be liked and to entertain. I has the feeling, in fact, that also many of his subjects accept found his pieces pleasing. (Generally speaking, the bailiwick of a profile ought to wind upwardly not mad enough to sue just too injure to say thanks.) And so one wants him, at present By John McPhee. 308 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10. in midlife, to nail out, go out the "editorial counsel" and his familiar Princeton surround behind, be less the passive photographer, and seek his fortunes on harsher ground. This is not to advise he should abandon his posture of optimism for some groupie'southward diverseness of nouveau cynicism, running with the herd—only that he should exam it further.
"Pieces of the Frame" is an acting collection of the sort that can't do much one way or another for an writer'southward career. It contains several comely potboilers almost Scotland presumably written to pay for vacations there, some trivia well-nigh basketball in the Tower of London from his Timewriter days, magazine "fact" pieces about gathering firewood and canoeing, a fine action montage about Wimbledon, and a curious roam through Atlantic Metropolis, draped on the frame of a game of Monopoly. This last, which is chosen "The Search for Marvin Gardens," is saved from beingness meretricious past its unexpected seriousness—he really does "Go To Jail."
McPhee admires men of diplomacy, and his portrait of George Hartzog, a quondam managing director of the National Park Service, is reminiscent of the 4 highpowered men he profiled in "Encounters With the Archdruid." For fans of "The Pino Barrens," at that place is "Travels in Georgia," with its joy and savvy and modest adventuring—the blonde biologist collecting fauna and cooking road kills and throwing her sleeping bag down any one-time where. Anchoring the book at the end is "Ruidoso," which is i of those essays any writer might hope to have in his hand in that separate‐second when he presents himself for judgment at St. Peter's Gate and must overbalance all of his life's little shabbinesses with a single swift piece of work. This one is about quarterhorses and racing people and is written with the special omniscience McPhee has mastered equally a technique, and of course with love, always his strong suit. Beak H. Smith from Pea Ridge, Ark., drives westward, to New United mexican states with his horse Calcutta Deck and loses the Richest Race in the World ($766,000) to the Californians also busy rooting for him to sketch in a number of the other participants as well; nor too busy even in the midst of the 22‐second race itself to find the starter leap down from his tower to cheque the divots thrown by each horse equally information technology got off and see how well he, Dean Turpitt had done his job. Love and craftsmanship. ■
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