JOHN MCPHEE Sharon Bass John McPhee's name inevitably comes up in any discussion of literary journalism. He gets mentioned, but the focus quickly shifts to the newspapermen-novelists, a rather larger, more cacophonous group. McPhee makes a cameo appearance, and then he's gone. Although McPhee has published more books and articles than most of the literary journalists, writers and critics cannot seem to agree on how to classify him. To some he is not a journalist because he is not a newsman, and to others, he is not enough of a novelist to be literary. One reason McPhee is so hard to classify when the discussion turns to literary journalism may be that he simply does not fall along the newspaperman-novelist continuum.' Although he was not a newsman, he is a great reporter; few people so thoroughly immerse themselves in their subject. He has been writing up his reports all his life, from high school on and he has learned some lessons along the way. To make a report fascinating, the writer has to tell a story and have a good character or two to throw in. As does any good storyteller, McPhee leaves his reader with memorable characters: Bill Bradley, the basketball player; Arthur Ashe, the black tennis player; Donald Gibbie, the crofter; Floyd Dominy, the builder of mammoth dams, Ted Taylor, the nuclear scientist; and Dave grower, the archdruid of conservationists, to mention only a few. But McPhee's place in literature has been developed on a road less traveled. McPhee has spenr a lifetime in a corner of literature left for dead, the personal essay, but with a twist. The twist is that these essays are heavily reported and extensively researched, and rely on the personal in only the most unobtrusive manner imaginable. lvlcphee~s literary device as a new journalist was his own vibrant redefinition of the essay. Robert Atwan in his introduction to The Best American Essays 1987 says that the essay as literature was "permanently flattened by the one-two punch 344 The Writers John McPhee of news journalism and New Journalism" (ix-xii). More precisely, what was flattened or what died was the old-fashioned essay. McPhee has specialized in what Atwan describes as the new personal essay: tougher minded, more candid, less polite, and taking greater emotional risks. The hallmarks of McPhee's works are thorough reporting, a clear sense of vo~ce, and the ability to create memorable characters despite the limitations of nonfictton writing, all accomplished with a highly developed but nonintrus~ve sense of craftsmanship and design in the writing. These characteristics clearly place McPhee beyond the realm of the traditional essayist and squarely at the center of the emerging literary journalistic tradition. In almost everyone's book, McPhee is an artful, creative, and comprehensive reporter. Ronald Weber sees McPhee as a journalist working at a higher level of the game, although he does not consider him a hterary journalist as he defines it. In The Literature of Fact, Weber acknowledges a certain amount of fussiness in making such distinctions. He goes on, however, to discuss McPhee's Coming into the Country as one work that stands apart from his earlier work.2 It is, Weber says, a "distinguished work of literary nonfiction which nonetheless retains the broad form of the journalistic report" (1980, 116). What makes McPhee's work so rich is that it is so informed. It is clear that this writer has done the research and done it with a passion. He works to understand the subjectÑwhether it is the chain of events in a nuclear reactor or the physical history of the American West. McPhee has said that he tries to go into his subject as a blank page. It has never seemed to bother him that his subjects might think him slow or ignorant (Howarth 1976). His research has taken him all over: the Northern Cascades, the Amencan Southwest, Maine, his home state of New Jersey, Florida, Scotland, and Switzerland. No matter the place, after he has heard the same answer at least three times, he knows that the research and reporting are done. Hc heads home to type up his notes and get on with what he calls the hard work of this business: the writing itself. The thoroughness pays dividends. Every passage delivers something of interest, something new. In this passage from Encounters with the Archdruid, the reader learns the exact meridian that separates the drylands from the wetlands, the date of the Homestead Act, the size of a land grant, and the consequences of uninformed planning: East of the hundredrh meridian, there is enough rain to support agriculture, ~nd west of it there generally is not. The Homestead Act of 1862, in all ~ts promiSC, not take into account this ineluctable facr. East of the hundredth mend~an. hom~ s steaders on the hundred and sixty acres of land were usually able to furfill thc d that had been legislated for them. To rhe west, the odds agamst t ern With local exceptions, there just was not enough water. The whole regt :~ . 345 the hundredth meridian and the Rocky Mounrains was at that time known as the rear Amencan Desert. St~ll beyond rhe imagination were the ultramontane basins where almost no rain fell at all. (197], 154) His research fills notebooks with typewritten notes. And then there are the maps. McPhee has never met a map he didn't like. He describes one map m Encounters with the Archdruid. In this book, McPhee positions his protagomst, Dave grower, the militant conservationist and archdruid, in venous settings with three antagonists, Charles Park, a mineral engineer and mmer; Charles Fraser, a resort developer; and Floyd Dominy, a builder of great dams and Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. In one encounter Dommy and Brower rafted down the Colorado River. They had We have a map that is seven inches hi~h and fifty feet long. It is rolled in a scroll ~ _ _ ~ ~;~ 1--~! 1 and is a meticulously hand-done contemporary and hisrorical portrair of rhe Colorado R~verun the Grand Canyon. River miles are measured from the point, just south of the Utah line, where the Paria River flows into the ColoradoÑthe place geolog~sts regard as the beginning of the Grand Canyon. As the map rolls by, it records who d~ed where. "Peter Hansbrough, one of the two men drowned, Mile 24, Tanner Wash Rapids, 1889. .. Bert Loper upset, not seen again, Mile 24, 1949 . . . Scour found and buried in talus, Mile 43, I gSl . . . Roemer drowned in Mile 89, His voice within the work is the soft voice of the BBC commentator at Wimbledon, or on the eighteenth green when the leader faces a difficult c ip onto the green. Just so, McPhee's voice provides the insights and background on the key players, probing the nature and history of the game or the field Itself. The relentless massing of detail, delivered in an engaging manner, without any mannered intrusion of the writer or writer-ego, leaves t e reader satlsfied and secure: this is information one can trust. The reader has spent this little time in expert company, taken along to witness vicarously great events, critical games, or serious debates. McPhee usually relies on a deceptively simple language and vocabulary even m the most technical of subjects. He makes Ted Taylor so compelling a character that the problem of controlling nuclear materials becomes quite c ear m The Curve of Binding Energy, even to the nonscientist: Because the fissioning pluronium puts out many extra neurrons and because there a ~gh proport~on of fertile U-238 in the reactor core, the breeder makes more p uton~um rhan it uses up. Theoretically, the breeder can make more than fifty times r use of uramum than present-day reactors. Moreover, ir could use as fertile enal the rwo hundred thousand tons or so of leftover U-238 that has been parated from U-235 since the milirary weapons program began. (1974, 47-48) 346 The Writers John McPhee 347 On the other hand, McPhee makes simple subjects, like oranges, more interesting, less taken for granted. "Most citrus trees consist of two parts. The upper framework, called the scion, is one kind of citrus, and the roots and trunk, called the rootstock, are another" (1967, 22). He gives the reader their history and provenance. Plain building blocks, common words have been his stock in trade. He introduces the reader to the jargon of the trade, but carefully lays the groundwork so that the reader understandsÑmore than understands, feels brought intoÑthe brotherhood of science or agriculture or military strategy. Only in his recent wcrks on geology does he seem to deviate from the plainness of speaLmg. In the geological books, he seems to have settled into the very mystery and mag~c of the dense material of geologic vocabulary. But McPhee does not simply translate the language of experts. He also gathers the kind of observed detail that yields rich, evocative scenes that establish a sense of place and immediacy. For example, here is the opening to "Giving Good Weight": You people come into the marketÑthe Greenmarket, in the open air under the downpouring sunÑand you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringheans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you areÑpeople of the cityÑand we, who are almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales. "Does every sink grow on your farm?" "Yes, Ma'am." "It's marvellous. Absolutely every sink?" "Some things we get from neighbors up the road." ¥`You don't have no avocados, do you?" "Avocados don't grow in New York State." "Butter beans?" They're a Southern crop." "Who baked this bread?" "My mother. A dollar twenty-five for the cinnamon. Ninety-five cents for rhc "I can't eat rye bread anymore. I like it very much, but it gives me a headache." Short, born abroad, and with dark hair and quick eyes, the woman who hkes rye bread comes regularly to the Brooklyn Greenmarket, at Flatbush and Atlanac. I have seen her as well at the Fifty-ninth Street Greenmarket, in Manhattan. ete is abundant evidence that she likes to eat. She must have endured some speaacu ~t hangovers from all that rye. (1979, 3-4) That concrete, specific beginning thus establishes a point of view, th8 a seller behind the counter at a farmer's market in New York Gq,~, begins an article that on one level is a highly informative and factual '~ ~. view of running such a market. But in McPhee's hands, becomes a story of contrasts and subcultures, as city and country meet and cautiously define and try to understand one another. When necessary, McPhee's prose and detail become as lush and sensual as the moment requires. Here, for instance, is his description of what he felt after working hard loading crates of onions in "Giving Good Weight": After rhirty minutes of filling boxes, my arms feel as if they have gone eighteen mmngs each. I scarcely notice, though, under the dictates of the action, the complete concentration on the shifting of the crates, the hypnotic effectÑveiling everything else in this black-surfaced hill-bordered surreally level worldÑof the cascade of golden onions. Onions. Onions. Multilayered, multilevelled, ovate, imbricated white-fleshed, orange-scaled onions. Native to Asia. Aromatic when bruised. When my turn is over and a break comes for me, I am so crazed with lust for these bulbous herbsÑthese enlarged, compressed budsÑthat I run to an unharvested row and pull from the earth a one-pound onion, rip off the membranous bulb coat, bare the flesh, and sink my teeth through leaf after leaf after savory mouth-needling sweetsharp water-bearing leaf to the flowering stalk that is the center and the secret of the onion. Yash at the end of th~y will give me three hundredpounds of onions to take home, and well past the fall they will stand in their sacks in a corner of the kitchenÑthe pluperfect preservers of sweet, fresh moistureÑholding in winter the rams of summer. (1979, 61) With so much material and with the rich characters and full, detailed descapnons that populate his works, the great strength McPhee brings to his material is an ability to find the perfect structure for the telling of the story.3 In this phase of his work McPhee operates as a designer, an architect perhaps an engineer, so that ultimately the immense amount of facts and information is transformed into a more meaningful piece of prose. Sometimes the design is apparent, as in Lez~els of the Game, which reads the way a tennis match looks and sounds. The action as the story opens moves crosscourt, from one paragraph on Arthur Ashe to the next paragraph on Clark GraeLner. Some designs are less noticeable, as in the article "Travels in Georgia." Norman Sims, in his discussion of this piece in The Literary Journalists refers to the "architecture of the piece." He calls it one that "depends on a skillfully designed looping flashback, entered through a smooth, nearly ~nvisible transition" (1984, 27). In the introduction to this book, Sims descnbes a diagram for the article seen in McPhee's book of notes. The diagram looked like a lowercase 'e.'" Sims quotes McPhee on the approach taken ~n th~s story: It ~ a simple structure, a reassembled chronology. I went there to -write about a V~onn.ln who, among other things, picks up dead animals off the road and eats them. erc s an ~mmediate problem when you begin to consider such material. The editor he New Yorker is practically a vegetarian. I knew I was going to be presenting 348 The Writers John McPhee 349 this story to William Shawn and that it would be prerty difficult to do so. That served a purpose, pondering what a general reader's reaction would be. When people think of animals killed on the road, there's an immediate putrid whiff that goes by them. The image is pretey automaticÑsmelly and repulsive. These animals we were picking up off the road were not repulsive. They had not been mangled up. They were not bloody. They'd been freshly killed. So I had to get this story off the ground without offending the sensibilities of the reader and the editor. (Sims 1984, 13) When McPhee wrote about Bill Bradley, the basketball star with extraordinary peripheral vision, the piece had a similar viewpoint, a wide-angle on Bradley. It is as if the reader sees through a fish-eye lensÑcovering the widest possible angle, probing relentlessly into one man's game and trying to freeze frames of excellence. The story and the writing give the reader a way to see clearly what would otherwise be blurred or lacking clear resolution. In 1983, McPhee revisited Bradley, but this time Senator Bradley, not basketball player Bradley. The piece, "Open Man," is a slice of life: one day with the politician in his home state of New Jersey. It is crisply writte~ but reads more like a report from the stump. The design is less complex and less compelling and therefore the work is much less memorable than A Sense of Where You Are. Nowhere is there more a sense of design than in McPhee's selection of subjects. His subjects are not the usual newsmakers, nor are they celebrities in the usual sense of the word. All of them, however, are experts. And all of them are archetypes of excellence. It is no accident that in Levels of the Game Arthur Ashe faces Clark Gracbner. Grachner is the epitome of the privileged middle-class, country club set. He grew up in a WASP world, supported by his family and his society. He is strong and steady in his approach to the game. Ashe is the opposite. He is black, a product of an America where country club tennis courts are not available. Ashe is unpredictable, even flashy in his risk taking. While it is clear that McPhee values and admires the excellence in h~s subjects' expertise, he is unsentimental in his introduction of his characters to his readers. He does not hype their heroics or hide their blemishes. In Encounters with the Archdruid, Charles Park, the mining expert, gets blistcr5 on his feet as a result of wearing brand new boots on a backcountry tnp. Dave Brower bails out of the raft just before ' ~~ treacherous runs on the Colorado. Upset Rapids, one of the more We got back on the rafe and moved out into the river. The raft turned slie,htlY 3 began to move toward the rapid. "Hey," Dominy said. "Where's Dave? Hey! We left behind one of our parq. We~re separated now. Isn't he going to ride?" Brower has stayed on shore. We were forey feet out. "Well, I swear, I swear, I swear,'' Dominy coneinued slowly. "He isn t Com - 3 .] wirh us....The "rear outdoorsman!" Dominy said in a low voice..."The Great outdoorsman standing safely on dry land wearing a God-damned life jacket!" ( 1971, Through it all, McPhee brings his reader characters that last, that impress that inspire. They are whole and vivid and complex. But unlike the novelist McPhee cannot "imagine" his characters. He has to take them as they come. And unlike the journalist, he does not reduce his characters to a categorical entry: male/female, title/occupation, age, and piace of residence. And unlike many literary journalists, he does not make them interchangeable cultural types. McPhee fully shapes them. His characters come alive on paper. Consider this memorable description of Floyd Dominy, the builder of the Hoover Dam: Floyd Elgin Dominy raises beef catele in the Shenandoah Valley. Observed there hand on a fence, his eyes surveying his paseures, he does noe look particularly Virginian. Of middle height, thicksee, somewhae bandy-legged, he appears to have been lifted off a horse with a block and cackle. He wears bluejeans, a whiee-andblack seriped shire, and learher booes wieh heels two inches high. His bele buckle is silver and could noe be covered over wieh a playing card. He wears a string tie thee is secured with a piece of petrified dinosaur bone. On his head is a white Stetson. (1971, 153) A few readers might even recall the John Steinbeck piece, "How to Tell Good Guys from Bad Guys." Among other things, the good guys, says Steinbeck, always wore a white hat (1958). Thus, McPhee nicely suggests either that it is no longer so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or that the bad guys are not as bad as they seem. McPhee's characters do not all wear white hats, but he treats all of them with respect. His Encounters with the Archdruid reveals as well as any of his works just how character and design work together to produce an original work, a fresh perspective. Archdruid seems to have a deceptively simple, straightforward construction. To some observers it is merely a package of profiles bound together in book form: David grower, the environmentalist, and his enemies, Charles Park the mining geologist, Charles Fraser the real estate developer, and Floyd Dominy, the Commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. But like all McPhee's work, Archdruid is carefully plotted and conceived. McPhee~s use of the very word "archdruid" and his names for the book's three distinct parts reveal a grander design: "A Mountain," "An Island," "A River." And Brower is not merely a personality in a journalistic feature. Rather he is the warp thread of the book, a powerful and complicated protagonist who is thoroughly human and a great American individualist, but somewhat of a visionary as well. McPhee presents him as a high priest of environmental conservation pitted against each of the other characters - - 350 The Writers but also fighting his very human self. Through McPhee's organic design, the reader is presented with a tale of two forces clashing in American culture, development and conservation, a variation of the theme of the machine in the garden.4 The tensions and conflicts that arise from these forces and the book's characters cannot be easily reconciled. As with good fiction, the reader sees and understands, but some ambiguity remains. No matter which side they might identify with at the outset, the readers come away, like the characters in Encounters with the Arekdruid, perhaps not agreeing one bit, but genuinely liking and respecting one another. It may be McPhee's ability to respect his reader that keeps the readers coming back for more reports. McPhee was quoted in Fame magazine: The writer stands somewhere behind the book, not the other way around. The reader is the more creative partner in the writer- reader relationship. The reader creates many things, including the author figure. When a writer steps into the foreground, he denies the reader an important part of his experience. (Streitfeld 1989, 26-30) t With a writer so determined to stay in the background, with a writer whose books are scattered so widely by topic throughout the libraries, it is no wonder the critics have had a hard time identifying his place in literature or journalism. In part because of the trend toward professionalization,5 and in part because of the new journalism controversy, McPhee's form of writing is discouraged in contemporary journalism. It may be that it is only because a publication like the New Yorker exists that a writer like John McPhee has been able to thrive. NOTES 1. Literary journalists in this century have their roots primarily in magazines, but Wolfe and Talese, two of the principal architects and practitioners of the ncw journalism, started in newspapers. Capote and Mailer, two of the other central figures in new journalism, came to new journalism from writing novels and shorr stories. Thus the newspaperman-novelist continuum. In addition, much of the dis cussion over the impact of the new journalism tended eo come from defenders of the novel or defenders of newspaper journalism's objective approach. 2. Lounsberry specifically disagrees with Weber's view and calls all of McPhec't works "highly ambitiousÑand artful" (1990, n.8, 194-95). 3. It would be difficult to discuss McPhee's writing \vithout discussing hovv he structures his work. For a detailed account of how McPhee determines an ovet3U design for a work, see Roundy (1989). Roundy analyzes the devices McPhcc u~a to organize his material, playing off the ideas of Kenneth Burke in Counter-statem~d (1931). Lounsberry is also concerned with structure in McPhee, with his ux d geometric figures and abstract forms and specifically his use of circles and le~ Lounsberry provides more of a traditional literary analYsis than Roundy, prcxn~ McPhee as a son of Thoreau and Emerson. John McPhee 351 4. Lounsberry goes so far as to demonstrate how Brower can be viewed as somewhat of a Chnst hgure, while Dominy can be seen as a false god (1990, 94). >. James Fallows ("The Case Against Credentialism," Atlantic, Dec. 1985) re[erred to the rise to professional status as 'one of the most familiar and cherished parts of the American achievement ideal." Joseph McKerns, Arthur Kaul, and John Pauly d~scussed various concerns about the professionalism of journalism at the 1984 meeting of the American Journalism Historians Association. McKerns outlined the pathways to professionalism in American journalism, stating that professional Journahsm ~s a twentieth-century institution born of the Progressive Era and resting on a set of shared values. Professional journalists, according to McKerns, "like other professionals, seek to enhance their social prestige and status while serving the social order w~th the~r acquired skills and expertise." Arthur Kaul concluded that profess~onalism was a cover for the exploitation of journalists and the public to protect the property interests of capitalist mass media. John Pauly discussed the news itself as havmg become professionalized, a "privileged form of knowledge." He has argued that lournalists since the 1920s have not only joined the professional ranks, but have "proposed to teach citizens how to read the news more carefully." Th~e significance of these efforts, according to Pauly, is that they have established in newspaper readmg "a new conception of citizenship, democraq and public discourse." PRIMARY SOURCES McPhee, John. 1965. A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 1967. Oranges. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ñ. 1968. A Roomful of Hovings. New York: Farrar Srrl~,~ ~nA ~ ir^ ,: i,s . .: -~- 1 Ñ. 1969a. The Crofter and the Laird. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ñ. 1969b. Levels of the Game. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 1971. Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 1974. The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor. New York: Farrar, Straus and G~roux. 1976. The John McPhee Reader. Ed. William L. Howarth. New York: Random House. . 1979. Giving Good Weight. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. . 1985. "Open Man." In Table of Contents. New York: Farrar, Straus and G'roux. SECONDARY SOURCES Atwan, Robert. 1987. The Best American Essays 1987. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Howarth, William L. 1976. Introduction to The John McPhee Reader. Ed. William L. Howarth. New York: Random House. Lemann, Nicolas. 1983, Mar. "Today's Best Journalism: Better Than Fiction." Washington Monthly.