The Agony of Writing

Although McPhee has never been a stranger to the first-person singular, his writing is best known for its sublimation, its sly gift for approximating authorial anonymity. McPhee tends to blend into the background of his subjects, which are typically expansive enough to comfortably hide him within their shadows. In “Progression,” the opening essay of Draft No. 4, McPhee calls himself “shy to the point of dread,” a description often echoed by those who’ve met him.

“McPhee has sharp blue eyes, thinning gray hair, and the full beard of a shy man,” the Paris Review noted in 2010. “He seldom grants interviews, and his photograph has never appeared on a book jacket.”

If it’s true that many shy people become actors as a form of compensation, it’s perhaps equally true that a lot of the world’s wallflowers become journalists and teachers, two professions that also allow reticent souls to project themselves beyond their insecurities. In addition to his work at the New Yorker, McPhee has taught writing for many years at Princeton.

He’s probably most famous for Oranges, his 1967 book that grew from an epically long New Yorker article about the cultivation and processing of the world’s best-known citrus fruit. Excerpts of Oranges have appeared in college writing textbooks to illustrate the principle that there are no boring subjects, only boring writers. McPhee is widely revered among professors and practitioners of what’s known as “creative nonfiction” for his elaborately conceived and scrupulously reported books on ostensibly prosaic topics such as geology, fisheries, and freight transportation.

Annals of the Former World, McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning geological survey of the North American continent, is almost 700 pages. Nonfiction writers aggrieved by their genre’s second-class status behind the novel point to McPhee as proof that a strictly factual writer can be a literary giant, too.

Not everyone is a fan. Essayist Phillip Lopate, a nonfiction guru himself, has lamented McPhee’s “scrupulously fair, sporting, impersonal, fact-gathering style,” grousing that it reminds him “of nothing so much as a colony of industrious termites capable of patiently reducing any subject matter to a sawdust of detail.”

Lopate belongs to the confessional wing of creative nonfiction, a literary school that includes figures such as Edward Hoagland and Joan Didion for whom personal disclosure is a primary technique. McPhee’s writerly reticence continues to stand as a kind of corrective against his more exhibitionist contemporaries.

Yet one sometimes wonders if McPhee’s protracted accounts of such subjects as the Brown Seven Hundred industrial juicing machine are their own form of conceit. Whatever McPhee’s virtues as a storyteller, not all or even most readers who turn the pages of Oranges will be riveted by passages such as this one on the mega-juicer’s production: “Seven hundred oranges a minute go into it and are split and reamed on the same kind of rosettes that are in the centers of ordinary kitchen reamers. The rinds that come pelting out the bottom are integral halves, just like the rinds of oranges squeezed in a kitchen.”

In a recent defense of Oranges in the Oxford American, writer Wyatt Williams put his finger on part of McPhee’s appeal: “He is sometimes accused of being a boring writer or one who writes about boring subjects .  .  . but the accusations miss the point. Maybe you get bored, but John McPhee does not. The unifying subject of McPhee’s work is his sometimes overwhelmed, occasionally zig-zagging, but always endless desire for knowledge of the world.”

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There is, in fact, much to like in the earnestness of McPhee’s curiosity, a quality that seems to endear him to readers and interview subjects alike. Some of his readers, we learn in Draft No. 4, suggest themselves as subjects, apparently assured, after seeing his work, that he’ll write about them without irony or condescension. It’s how he ended up writing Looking for a Ship, a book on the Merchant Marine, then Uncommon Carriers, which chronicled, among other things, the operators of big trucks, towboats, and coal trains.

McPhee essentially grew up on the campus of Princeton, the son of a physician who often treated the university’s athletes. His father also worked summers as resident physician at a Vermont boys’ camp, and McPhee tagged along. His childhood inculcated a deep love of the outdoors, as well as science.

McPhee often writes about science, and he seems to think like a scientist, too, driven by the impulse to reduce the mechanics of writing to universal principles. It’s not surprising that the subtitle of Draft No. 4 refers not merely to writing, but “the writing process,” suggesting that McPhee regards the production of prose as an enterprise that might be calibrated as efficiently as the production of orange juice.

In “Structure,” the driest chapter of the book, McPhee includes elaborate diagrams, with circles, arrows, and loop-the-loops, that show how some of his articles and books were constructed. “Readers are not supposed to notice the structure,” he concedes after introducing a series of schematics that look lifted from a VCR manual. He also acknowledges that his literary designs might work for his projects, though not for other writers. McPhee’s best advice after this Talmudic deconstruction is also the simplest—when he cites Aristotle’s dictum that all stories should have a beginning, middle, and end.

Reading McPhee’s point-by-point analysis of the act of composition recalls what another New Yorker writer, E. B. White, once observed about the study of humor. It “can be dissected, as a frog can,” he wrote, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

As a principal voice of The Elements of Style, White popularized basic writing advice that a broad mass of aspiring scribes, from students to executives to novelists, have taken to heart. McPhee’s counsel, on the other hand, sometimes seems to defy general application. He notes with satisfaction that he once wrote of a man who had a “sincere mustache,” which mystified a New Yorker editor who nevertheless allowed the description to be published. “Writing has to be fun at least once in a pale blue moon,” McPhee offers by way of weak defense. The story recalls an equally head-scratching phrase—one not mentioned in Draft No. 4 but that appeared in Annals of the Former World—in which McPhee writes of a waterway as a “vitally ignorant river.”

Such runic references remind one that shy souls such as McPhee sometimes lapse into interior monologue more than most, speaking a language only they can understand.

The indulgence of eccentricities like McPhee’s has a long tradition at the New Yorker, as other reminiscences in Draft No. 4 make clear. McPhee mentions matter-of-factly the magazine’s lack of absolute deadlines and notes approvingly longtime editor William Shawn’s defense of the glacial pace of his editing: “It takes as long as it takes.”

McPhee celebrates Shawn’s pseudo-Confucian pronouncement as useful advice for writers, too, although it’s not likely that “It takes as long as it takes” will resonate much among the mere mortals charged with bringing other magazines to press.

How encouraging, though, that McPhee manages to mention fun and writing in the same breath. As the title of Draft No. 4 suggests, McPhee is more prone to stress the agony of composition, frequently highlighting the demands of revision, the struggle for just the right word. That writing can be hard work will be evident to anyone who’s consistently tried to do it well. But in generally downplaying the pleasures of his craft, McPhee can make the writing of his books—and, for us, the reading of them—seem like an exercise in duty rather than delight.

What can’t be denied, though it’s frequently overlooked, is McPhee’s gift as a prose stylist. He’s written so much—more than 30 books in all—that admirers tend to focus on the quantity of his work rather than its quality.

What he does best-—which is surprising given the typically large canvas of his narratives—is distill a character or scene into a compact and compelling passage. Despite his occasional lapses into metaphorical overreach, he often writes beautifully and concisely about people and places. McPhee started his magazine career at Time, where he endured an entry-level job writing small news bits for a column called “Miscellany.” Although he mentions his “Miscellany” phase glancingly, one wonders if it helped him hone his economy of expression. Here, in the opening chapter of Annals, he neatly limns a principal character, a scientist who takes samples along the highway:

“The last thing I would ever suggest to young writers,” McPhee writes in Draft No. 4, “is that they consciously try to write for the ages. Oh, yik, disgusting. Nobody should ever be trying that. We should just be hoping that our pieces aren’t obsolete before the editor sees them.”

In an age of Twitter and widespread indifference to the demands of the truth, whether John McPhee’s long-form journalism and its fidelity to fact will last beyond his career is anybody’s guess. But it should.

Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.