A Profile of John McPhee
September 28, 2017 11:01 AM   Subscribe

 
I would take a bullet for John McPhee, like without even thinking about it throw myself in front of an assassin and I cry just thinking about how much he means to me and my career, good golly I'm sniffling right now. There's more than a few geologists I know who got interested in the science because they picked up something from Annals of the Former World or The Control of Nature. A friend likes to say McPhee should win the Nobel Prize for Curiosity and/or Scientists Inspired.

What a beautiful profile, thanks OmieWise!

And that software program - those index cards! I'm not surprised, but wow, that's. . . that's a process. What a mind.
posted by barchan at 11:29 AM on September 28, 2017 [14 favorites]


He was interviewed on Studio 360 recently too, worth a listen.
posted by Keith Talent at 11:30 AM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


This is lovely, but I was really hoping the first section would be the story of how a peculiar 19th century engineer from Norway solved a crucial problem that later enabled McPhee's favorite mechanical pencils to function.

That said, I like this passage because it conforms entirely to my mental image of McPhee:
John McPhee lives, and has almost always lived, in Princeton. I met him there in a large parking lot on the edge of campus, next to a lacrosse field, where he stood waiting next to his blue minivan. He wore an L.L. Bean button-down shirt with khaki pants and New Balance sneakers.
posted by Caxton1476 at 11:31 AM on September 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


Twice a year, he goes fishing with three of his New Yorker colleagues: Ian Frazier, Mark Singer and Remnick.

Can you imagine?! I would kill just to be able to sit downstream a little and overhear those conversations.
posted by not_the_water at 11:45 AM on September 28, 2017 [6 favorites]


It's a shame this piece was not written by someone with McPhee's talent.
I think a lot of non-fiction writers try to write like him, but he's pretty special.
Nice pictures, though.

A friend of mine was interviewed by McPhee, and appeared as a minor character in The Ransom of Russian Art. He was most impressed with McPhee's persistence as an interviewer.
"I'd hate to have to try to keep some information from him."

I would kill just to be able to sit downstream a little and overhear those conversations.
I think you get some of that in The Founding Fish, IIRC.

Oh, and I highly recommend Jeremy Irons' reading of Lolita.
posted by MtDewd at 12:07 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


He is my hero.
posted by Bee'sWing at 12:34 PM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I finished Annals of the Former World on a cold night in early spring in Chicago. I was in college, in an old dorm built out of Devonian limestone from Indiana. Stepping stones made of other strata ran from the doorway to the dining hall, and some of those stones had wave marks on them from vanished oceans. I remember walking outside, fresh from the experience of touring the continent's basement with John McPhee, and standing on that fragment of beach to look up at the sky.

These days, I live not far from the low hills near Dixon, California, that -- in the Assembling California -- McPhee told me are rising faster than the Himalaya. I find that I cannot see landscapes without seeing them, in part, through his eyes, and I'm glad of that.
posted by SandCounty at 12:56 PM on September 28, 2017 [15 favorites]


I had that same experience, SandCounty. On a coast-to-coast road trip and reading the basin & range section while passing through that part of Nevada. Friggin love John McPhee.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 1:06 PM on September 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Unfortunately, the book for our time (again) is The Curve of Binding Energy. It is scary as fuck.
posted by chavenet at 1:08 PM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


Stonestock, I love that bit in Basin and Range where he calmly asks Nevada ranchers if they're looking forward to being in a desert archipelago, as in the Aegean, after the Sea of Cortez comes north following the sinking land. I've been tempted to ask the same at the Winnemucca Chevron.
posted by SandCounty at 1:14 PM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


My undergraduate advisor suggested that I read Annals of the Former World while I was sitting in our camp in Kenya, learning the rudiments of fossil collection. On the same trip, he impressed upon me the importance of bird watching, colder-than-ambient-temperature beer, and being interested in everything. He passed away a few years ago, which was shocking and very sad, but it's comforting to be able to go back and reread the parts of Annals of the Former World about the places in the US he particularly loved, or check a new bird off my list, or learn something mindblowing about some unassuming biological thing. I really appreciate John McPhee's books in part because I read them in Tab's voice, but also just because they're wonderful.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:16 PM on September 28, 2017 [9 favorites]


I think I've mentioned it before, but John McPhee changed my life. When I was 13, I was stuck in my brother's friend's apartment. They were gone for hours and while I waited, I browsed the friend's bookshelves. He had the first John McPhee reader. I just cracked it open to check it out and when they finally got back I was halfway through. I then read everything he had published to date and have read everything he's written since.

To discover such amazing writing at a young age was a mixed blessing. I did get into non-fiction a lot earlier than most of my peers and I developed a life long love of science and technology writing, which has changed how I think about the world. On the other hand, being exposed to such great writing at such a young age also killed my aspirations to become a writer myself. I didn't understand that you had to learn the craft, I thought it was a talent with which one was born. I figured there was no point in writing when I could never be that good and gave it up.

Anyway, it's safe to say that I would not be the person I am without McPhee.
posted by qldaddy at 1:20 PM on September 28, 2017 [4 favorites]


Trying to remember which McPhee I read first and I cannot recall, but Heirs of General Practice always felt like the most personal. Perhaps that comes from a general similarity with the variety of things that come up in sports medicine...

Loren Eiseley and John McPhee are two of my favorite writers and I've always felt they were "of a type" (both often writing about long-view time, both communicating vast scales in ways that were both awe and wonder inducing), but they are both so singular in a very understated way, it's hard to associate either with anyone.
posted by Golem XIV at 2:16 PM on September 28, 2017


I love everything he's written, but Coming into the Country is the one for me. I read it during an epic trip to Gates of the Arctic NP (my first trip to alaska, no less) and I can't separate the experience of canoeing the Koyokuk River from reading McPhee along the way. Survival of the Bark Canoe is similarly inspiring.
He's one of those people I'd just love to sit around a fire with and trade stories.
posted by OHenryPacey at 4:18 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


I think I first read something from the Reader, followed by Giving Good Weight. I still think about that description of sea urchin roe, and make my first year writing students read him.

I have been collecting scraps of information about his custom word processor since reading this snippet in Wired in 1999:

John McPhee: I don't use WordPerfect or Word. I have Howard. Howard Strauss. He wrote a program - an editor, created for IBM mainframe programmers to use at home on their PCs - to imitate what I do when organizing my work. And if Howard Strauss leaves Princeton, I do too. I used to type up my notes, and I'd have 150 pages of notes and the only organization they'd have is the order through time in which I scribbled them. I would make a Xerox of the whole set, code them all, then assign each note to one or more sections in the structure of my story. I would then literally cut the notes apart with scissors and put the whole thing in 36 separate manila folders. Then when I'd pick up envelope number one, I could forget the other 35. The purpose of all this mechanistic monkeying around was that it freed me to write. Now, I still type up my notes myself. But what Howard did was write a program where the machine chews it all up and reassembles it automatically. One file becomes 36 files, each with its own new name.
54 years of McPhee at the New Yorker.

addendum: I was late to helping my wife with her videoconference job interview because of this thread!
posted by mecran01 at 4:34 PM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


I have previously extolled The Curve of Binding Energy as the perfect book title.
posted by Bruce H. at 5:02 PM on September 28, 2017


What sort of person, when John McPhee gives them directions, follows their GPS instead!?
posted by enn at 5:28 PM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


Heirs Of General Practice was essentially the reason I went into medicine and became a family practice doctor. And when I was farmed out to desolate rural hospitals and roomed in squalid cinderblock dorms the color of oatmeal and diarrhea, reading the rest of his canon was what kept me sane, imagining his voice like an avuncular ghost keeping me company through those awful months of training. My granddad worshipped him and after he died we found letters that he had exchanged with McPhee.
posted by docpops at 6:22 PM on September 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm currently in the middle of the Iceland lava-everywhere-who-can-stop-it? chapter of The Control of Nature and it's so weird and amazing! I hadn't read any of McPhee's stuff before or really had even heard of him until a friend recommended picking up his work on the Mississippi River in Louisiana (the first chapter of The Control of Nature covers this quite well)
posted by mostly vowels at 7:05 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


As I think I've said before here on MetaFilter, I have pretty much no interest in sports, and yet "A Sense of Where You Are" and "Levels of the Game" are two of my favorite books.

If I ever get a nice big place with plenty of room for my books, I'm treating myself to a complete collection of everything he's written.
posted by kristi at 10:10 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


I count myself as a fan, although I've read only a fraction of his output. The Control of Nature (the piece) was amazing enough that while on a NOLA trip, I dragged my friend out to Morganza and beyond in order to see those control structures for myself.
posted by Standard Orange at 11:51 PM on September 28, 2017


I'm only a little embarassed to say I've never heard of John McPhee and know nothing about any of his books. They look interesting! Is there one book that's considered the best, most McPhee-ish book? The one I should read? "Coming into the Country" has the most ratings on GoodReads, "Annals of the Former World" is the highest rated book of the books with lots of ratings.
posted by Nelson at 12:17 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Thanks for this post, OmieWise. Greatest Of All Time, at what he does? Truly a living legend, in any case, to those of us who also have worked at writing nonfiction. I have little interest in geology, or fish, not even Alaska really, but I’ve read everything McPhee has published in book form . (As I’ve said here before, my three favorites: Encounters with the Archdruid, The Curve of Binding Energy, and Oranges.)

It’s interesting to pull out a letter he wrote me in 1974, after seeing an article I’d written about his collected work to that point, and read again that even way back then he felt that “It becomes harder to [write] with each passing year. It seems unfair that that is so, but most writers seem to agree that it’s a fact of the trade.” Fortunately for us, he’s kept going anyway. And it's wonderful to learn, from that NYT article, that even in his mid-80s McPhee has at least one more book TK.

p.s. I finished reading Draft No. 4 just last night, and as I put it down I was struck that – after 50 years as a fan – I’d never seen McPhee interviewed anywhere, or even heard his voice. In the PRI interview Keith Talent linked, he sounded, of course, nothing like what I imagined.
posted by LeLiLo at 1:03 AM on September 29, 2017 [3 favorites]


Much of his work appeared in the New Yorker 20 or 30 years ago, so if you are younger, there no shame in not having heard of him. I'd say the best book to start with is one about a subject you are interested in. His Wikipedia page has a list of his books and what they are about. The control of nature, Assembling California, La Place de la Concorde Suisse are a few I particularly liked.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:17 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Is there one book that's considered the best, most McPhee-ish book? The one I should read?

There are two types of McPhee books, those that are a collection of essays and those that tackle a single subject. Many of the latter are quite short.

I think Giving Good Weight is the best of his essay collections. Every one in there is a gem. Coming into the Country is the best of his bigger books. His series of geology books are not where I would start unless you are a geology fan. They are great, and worth reading, but I don't think they are the best introduction.
posted by OmieWise at 10:33 AM on September 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


I love his nature writing best, but the only subject that I don't like McPhee on is surprisingly, writing. For whatever reason, that particular solipsism ends up boring me.
posted by tavella at 11:10 AM on September 29, 2017


I love McPhee (started with Coming into the Country, probably love The Control of Nature best), but I keep bouncing off of the geology books. I also have never read A Sense of Where You Are, which I should do. Actually, I'm way behind: I never read The Ransom of Russian Art either.

I'm also very fond of The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, possibly just for the name. He does great titles. Waiting for a Ship, The Curve of Binding Energy, Coming into the Country: they're just so evocative.
posted by suelac at 12:14 PM on September 29, 2017


This thread warms my heart. I am so glad to be reading tributes to John McPhee instead of Hugh Hefner. I am also so glad he's alive and writing and thinking.
posted by tully_monster at 7:25 PM on September 29, 2017 [4 favorites]


I love McPhee and took time to write a comment on the NYT site. I also think the people (most of the commenters, here) who follow him have a special bond. I'd be happy to sit with any of you and re-live and talk about our favorite works.
posted by Michael_H at 4:48 PM on September 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


Uncommon Carriers is a good recent McPhee.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:08 PM on October 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


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