Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays
Page 28
For one thing, there is more of it. McPhee has written more than thirty books, while some of the most notable New Journalists lapsed into silence. Truman Capote never published another substantial piece of nonfiction after In Cold Blood, nor did Michael Herr after his remarkable reporting of the Vietnam War in Dispatches. McPhee, however, has steadily averaged close to a book a year. Some of us for whom it is a struggle to get a one out every five or six years feel he should be prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
McPhee’s choice of subjects is driven by certain personal predilections. Among other things, he is drawn to geology (four books), practitioners of ancient arts (The Survival of the Bark Canoe), eccentrics (The Headmaster), the American wilderness (Coming into the Country), and people obsessed by unusual technology, as with the blimp enthusiasts of The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. He also has found wonderfully fertile terrain by simply doing things that small children dream of. For what other thread connects his flying with a bush pilot, traveling the seas on a merchant ship, crossing the country in the cab of a railway engine, and going on maneuvers with the Swiss Army? In an age besotted by celebrities, the people McPhee has chosen to bring alive on the page are not presidents, singers, or movie actors, but country doctors, pinball players, produce sellers in a farmers’ market, aid workers in Africa, a long-haul trucker, and the man responsible for grooming the grass at Wimbledon.
Like so many of the people he writes about, McPhee is a consummate craftsman. There are many aspects of his craft that a fellow writer can envy, from his keen ear for the quirks and rhythms of American speech, to his arsenal of tools for nimbly hopping about in time—including shifts of tense you only notice on the second reading. But I’m here to talk about his engineering.
A few years ago I was talking with a college student who told me she was majoring in civil engineering. “I’ve never really understood,” I asked her. “What’s the difference between an architect and an engineer?”
“An architect plans what the skyscraper is going to look like from the outside,” she said. “An engineer makes sure it doesn’t fall down.”
When we write, we often pay too much attention to the architecture and not enough to the engineering. We focus on the skyscraper’s outside—images, metaphors, bits of description, the sparkle of prose—and not enough on the framework of trusses and beams: the structure, the plot (something that applies as much to nonfiction as to fiction), the careful doling out or withholding of information to create suspense, all of which, in the long run, ultimately determines whether or not someone keeps on reading. A piece of writing can sparkle aplenty from one paragraph to the next, but if the inner engineering isn’t there, the reader’s attention wanders; the building falls down. This is all the more important when someone writes, as McPhee usually does, about unknown people, of whom, unlike celebrities, we have no knowledge to begin with. For a writer, this sets the bar higher.
Much of McPhee’s ability to make us care about his vast and improbable range of human subjects lies in his engineering. From the pilings beneath the foundations to the railing of the roof-top observation deck, he is the master builder of literary skyscrapers. Other writers may have more glittering prose or weave more elegant metaphors, but few have built such an interesting and varied array of structures. With many authors of narrative nonfiction, I often feel that structure is almost an afterthought: an array of lively scenes is arranged more or less chronologically, with one that seems to wrap things up placed at the end. But when McPhee picks up his pen, I sense a writer thinking long and shrewdly about structure before he even puts a word on paper.
Consider, for example, his portrait of the late Thomas Hoving as director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A less imaginative writer might have followed Hoving around for a time and interwoven that material with background information about his childhood and comments that others made about him. But McPhee does it differently. He assembles a dozen or so scenes from Hoving’s life: some from the present (Hoving answering the mail; talking with his wife; hunting art for the museum in Europe) and some from the past (getting into trouble in high school; working in a clothing store and realizing this was not for him). Almost all involve closely observed or reconstructed interplay and dialogue between Hoving and other people. And then McPhee arranges them, just as one might find an artist’s work on the walls of a museum, not in chronological order. The headline on the article? “A Roomful of Hovings.” (It is the title piece in one of McPhee’s many collections.)
Similarly imaginative structures underlie almost all his books. Levels of the Game, for instance, is built around a single tennis match, between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in the 1960s. It begins with the opening serve and ends with the final point. But into this one match are woven portraits of two players who differ radically by style of play, politics, background, race, and approach to life. In an article, “In Search of Marvin Gardens,” McPhee uses the Monopoly board, whose street names all come from Atlantic City, as his starting point to explore the real Atlantic City, right down to the jail. The city, of course, turns out to be a far shabbier place than the one conjured up by the landing places on the Monopoly board. The structure reinforces the impact of the piece; as McPhee put it in a Paris Review interview, “Structure is not a template. It’s not a cookie cutter. It’s something that arises organically from the material.” But I think he understates his point, for surely in the Atlantic City article, and in many others, he must have had an engineering blueprint in mind in order to decide what kind of material to gather.
Some of the structures McPhee uses are ancient ones. In “A Forager” (another piece in A Roomful of Hovings), he spends an entire week with his subject, Euell Gibbons, an expert in edible wild plants, gamely joining Gibbons in munching on dandelions, watercress, ground cherries, chicory greens, and the like along the way. A week in the life of someone or something is the oldest narrative structure there is, going back to the Book of Genesis. Layered on top of that is another classic structure, at least as old as The Odyssey, for McPhee and Gibbons spend that week on a journey, by canoe and foot, eating their way along the Susquehanna River and then a portion of the Appalachian Trail.
Sometimes McPhee devises a framework of columns and beams entirely his own, as in one of his most anthologized pieces, about another journey, “Travels in Georgia.” Here he follows a man and a woman on a strange trek across that state, telling us in great detail how they poke about in streams, swamps, and roadside ditches, make notes on clipboards, and collect an odd variety of stuff, including the carcasses of small animals that have been struck by cars. Who are these people, we wonder, and why on earth are they doing this? That’s what keeps us reading. We’re nearly half way through the piece before we learn that the pair work for an obscure state agency that designates protected areas for endangered plants and animals. All good narrative writers purposely withhold some information for a while, but I’ve never seen one bold enough to withhold the very profession of the people he is profiling.
• • •
To my mind, McPhee’s engineering masterpiece is his Encounters with the Archdruid, the text of which, like almost all of his books, first appeared in the New Yorker. A portrait of the environmental activist David Brower (1912–2000), it is structured like no other biography or profile. Brower was a militant, not a deal-maker, and his passionate, lifelong defense of the American wilderness against any threat left his enemies enraged. And so the book is arranged around three prolonged encounters between the “evangelical” Brower, as McPhee calls him, and people who detest everything he believes.
The first is a prominent mining geologist named Charles Park, whose entire life has been devoted to targeting deposits of valuable minerals, wherever they are found. He was a man who believed, McPhee says, “that if copper were to be found under the White House, the White House should be moved.” How does McPhee bring him together with Brower? He takes the two of them camping and hiking for a week in Wa
shington State’s Glacier Peak Wilderness. The setting is shrewdly chosen: Glacier Peak is a federally designated wilderness area, “not to receive even the use given a national park, not to be entered by a machine of any kind except in extreme emergency, not to be developed or lumbered—forevermore.” But there’s a key exception: mining claims, including a huge one held by Kennecott Copper, remain valid, and new claims could still be made. To display two political enemies in combat, McPhee could not have picked a better battleground. Park chips away at rocks with his geologist’s tools, curious about what metals here could feed the American economy; Brower praises the beauty of the mountains, still unravaged by men like Park. Almost any other writer, doing a story like this, would have elicited these rival points of view by interviewing the two men separately. McPhee, however, brings them together, where, with spectacular scenery in the background, their fierce arguments provide him with writer’s gold: dialogue.
The second encounter McPhee sets up, again for what appears to be a week or so, is between Brower and a businessman who wants to build a vast housing development on a wild island off the coast of Georgia, complete with an airport suitable for private jets. Compared to the first encounter, the conversation between the two antagonists is much more polite. However, the businessman, Charles Fraser, has great contempt for environmentalists, calling them “druids.” He tells Brower, “I call anyone a druid who prefers trees to people” (hence the book’s title).
The third encounter is the most dramatic, and threaded through it, providing its narrative backbone, is one of the more spectacular journeys anywhere: going down the Grand Canyon by raft. In the 1950s and ’60s some of the fiercest American environmental battles were over the building of dams. As McPhee puts it, to environmentalists, at
the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth . . . stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam. . . . the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers.
David Brower regarded failing to stop the Glen Canyon Dam, which blocked the Colorado River to form Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, as “the greatest failure of his life,” McPhee says. But after losing that battle, he went on to furiously wage and win several others, stopping Bureau of Reclamation plans to build two more large dams in the Grand Canyon itself. His arch-enemy in this prolonged warfare, the proud builder of the Glen Canyon Dam, defeated in the later struggles, was Floyd Dominy, longtime commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation. Dominy, in effect, was chief dam-builder for the U.S. government.
McPhee’s swift brush strokes etch him: “He appears to have been lifted off a horse with block and tackle. He wears blue jeans, a white-and-black striped shirt, and leather boots with heels two inches high. His belt buckle is silver and could not be covered over with a playing card. He wears a string tie that is secured with a piece of petrified dinosaur bone. On his head is a white Stetson.”
“Dave Brower hates my guts,” he tells McPhee, who goes to see Dominy in his office.
“I can’t talk to preservationists. I can’t talk to Brower because he’s so Gad-damned ridiculous. . . . I had a steer out on my farm in the Shenandoah reminded me of Dave Brower. Two years running, we couldn’t get him into the truck to go to market. He was an independent bastard that nobody could corral. That son of a bitch got into that truck, busted that chute, and away he went. So I just fattened him up and butchered him right there on the farm. I shot him right in the head and butchered him myself. That’s the only way I could get rid of the bastard.”
“Commissioner,” I said, “if Dave Brower gets into a rubber raft going down the Colorado River, will you get in it, too?”
“Hell, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes.”
In the very next paragraph, in one of McPhee’s adroit leaps in time and space, all three men are on the river, approaching a set of rapids at Mile 130.
In this section of the book, as in the first panel of the triptych, the heart of the story is verbal combat. The repartee has all the more drama because it takes place in front of an audience—a boatload of tourists who had no idea that these two longtime enemies would be aboard when they signed up for a few days of rafting down the Grand Canyon. At Mile 144.8, triumphantly brandishing a map,
“We are entering the reservoir,” Brower announces. “We are now floating on Lake Dominy.”
“Jesus,” mutters Dominy.
“What reservoir?” someone asks. Brower explains. A dam that Dominy would like to build, ninety-three miles downstream, would back still water to this exact point in the river.
“Is that right, Commissioner?”
“That’s right.”
. . . The other passengers are silent, absorbed by what Brower has told them.
“Do you mean the reservoir would cover the Upset Rapid? Havasu Creek? Lava Falls? All the places we are coming to?” one man asks Dominy.
Dominy reaches for the visor of his Lake Powell hat and pulls it down more firmly on his head. “Yes,” he says.
Their argument continues when McPhee takes the two of them for a boat ride on Lake Powell—which covers much of what had once been Glen Canyon:
Brower pointed to strange striations in jagged shapes on the opposite canyon wall. “That is hieroglyphic, written centuries ago by God Himself,” he said.
“Yeah? What does it say?” said Dominy.
“It says, ‘Don’t flood it.’”
A few additional little touches—the kind of thing that too hasty a reader might let pass by—make McPhee’s tripartite structure more sturdy, like rebar hidden in concrete. In each of the three sections, for example, a bulldozer appears. McPhee and his subjects encounter one as they walk out of the Cascades: “Half submerged, its purpose obscure, it heaved, belched, backed, shoved, and lurched around on the bottom of the Suiattle [River] as if the water were not there. The bulldozer was stronger than the river.” In the middle section, the developer Charles Fraser talks cheerfully about moving sand dunes out of the way with a bulldozer. And in the final section, “on a shelf behind Dominy’s desk, in the sort of central and eye-catching position that might be reserved for a shining trophy, was a scale model of a bulldozer.”
Encounters with the Archdruid is not a perfect work: the middle panel of the triptych is weaker than the other two, and McPhee skims too lightly over Brower’s darker side, which included, but was by no means limited to, his tendency to tangle with friends as well as enemies. But as an imaginative feat of structure—and as a case where a writer has deliberately brought his characters together on a succession of brilliantly chosen stages—it is unmatched.
After being awed by this engineering, I found it a revelation to learn that in McPhee’s mind the idea for this book’s structure preceded his choice of subject matter. In that same interview, he describes how, many years ago, he got bored with doing profiles of a single person and wanted to write pieces about people in relationships: “A dancer and a choreographer. . . . A baseball manager and a pitcher.” Out of this came Levels of the Game. Then “I got ambitious. I decided to escalate, and I had the idea of writing a triple profile—a three-part piece in which three people would be separately profiled as they related to a fourth person. . . . So I wrote on my wall: ABC over D. I stuck it on a three-by-five card, in big letters. ABC over D. That’s all I knew.”
Eventually, McPhee settled on Brower as D. “Now, who were going to be the three others?” He knew only that they had to be people who hated everything Brower stood for. After Brower agreed to the idea, McPhee and a friend “and various other people in Washington got together a list of seventeen possibilities.” They were scattered around the country and the world, and after many months of negotiations, the list was finally narrowed down to three.
An alert reader will notice one small graphic survival of McPhee’s three-by-five card, ABC over D, in the finished book. On the tit
le page—and repeated on the title pages of each of the three parts—is a black line with three small black triangles above it and one beneath it. This was truly a case where the engineering of a skyscraper came before the decision about what the building was to contain. But like the beams in a brick-and-mortar skyscraper, and the structural bones in all good pieces of writing, that engineering is invisible to the casual reader. The line through the cluster of little black triangles is its only remaining symbol; like an artist’s name in the lower right-hand corner of a canvas, it is the signature of a literary engineer extraordinaire.
2012
TWENTY-TWO
A Nation of Guns
“WELCOME, PATRIOTS! GUN SHOW TODAY,” says a big sign outside the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, just south of San Francisco, the building where the Republican National Convention nominated Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. Inside the Palace, past the National Rifle Association table at the door, a vast room, longer than a football field, is completely filled with rows of tables and display cases. They show every conceivable kind of rifle and pistol, gun barrels, triggers, stocks, bullet key chain charms, Japanese swords, telescopic sights, night-vision binoculars, bayonets, a handgun carrier designed to look like a briefcase, and enough ammunition of every caliber to equip the D-Day landing force. Antique guns on sale range from an ancient musket that uses black powder to a Japanese behemoth that fires a bullet 1.2 inches in diameter.
Also arrayed on tables are window signs, bumper stickers, and cloth patches you can sew onto your jacket: 9–11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB; THE WALL: IF YOU BUILD IT THEY CANT COME; and HUNTING PERMIT UNLIMITED LIMIT [sic] FOR ISIS. Perhaps 90 percent of those strolling the aisles are men, and at least 98 percent are white. They wear enough beards and bushy mustaches to stuff a good-sized mattress. At one table a man with a gray crew cut is selling black T-shirts that show a map of California, in red, with a gold star and hammer and sickle. Which means? “This state’s gone Communist. And I hate to say it, but it was Reagan that gave it to them. The 1986 amnesty program.” (This granted legal status to some 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.)