by John McPhee
A professional pool player prepared to demonstrate trick shots. An announcer with a small, intimate loudspeaker told the crowd that the professional would begin by sinking three balls at once. The pro chalked up and tried the shot. The cue ball rocketed into the three setups, and the balls dispersed to various cushions, but not one dropped into a pocket. He tried again. He missed again. He tried again. He missed again. “I don’t think this table is quite right,” said the announcer, who was—at least until that moment—an employee of the manufacturer of the table.
Oscar Robertson, of basketball’s Cincinnati Royals, entered the hall and was immediately surrounded by at least two thousand people, more than half of them adults. To get near him, they climbed over booths, broke down barricades, and temporarily paralyzed most of the exhibits in the show. National Shoes had engaged Robertson to make an appearance and sign autographs. Soon, Robertson was standing in a small “basketball court”—ten feet wide by twenty feet long—between a pair of backboards made of thin composition board and equipped with attached hoops of the sort that are sold in dime stores. The crowd seemed to surge like a throng in Saint Peter’s Square. A little boy, perhaps ten years old, stood beside Robertson, and Robertson handed him a basketball. The boy took a shot, and missed. Robertson retrieved the ball and handed it to him again. The boy shot again, and missed. Robertson leaned down and talked to the boy. Not just a word or two. He spoke into the boy’s ear for half a minute. The boy shot again. Swish. Robertson himself seemed reluctant to try a shot. The baskets were terrible, and—even if they had not been—a basketball player makes only about half his shots anyway. A few misses, and this crowd really would not have understood. Moreover, Robertson was wearing an ordinary business suit, so his movements would be restricted. He signed a few autographs. “Shoot, Big O!” someone called out. Others took up the cry. “Shoot, Big O!” Robertson turned aside, and signed another autograph. “Shoot, Big O!” Robertson studied one of the baskets. This might have been a mistake, because there was no retreating now. Once a basketball player, with a ball in his hand, looks up at a basket, almost nothing can make him resist the temptation to take a shot. Robertson stepped back to a point about seventeen feet from the basket and lifted the ball high, and a long set shot rolled off his fingers and began to arc toward the basket with a slow backspin. The crowd was suddenly quiet. Everybody watched the ball except Robertson, whose eyes never left the basket until the ball had dropped in. He shot again. Swish. Again. Swish. Five, six, seven in a row. There was no one else in the Coliseum now. Robertson—making set shots, jump shots, even long, graceful hook shots—had retreated from the crowd into the refuge of his talent.
THE TILT of these essentially parallel faults is to the north. In each earthquake, the lower side slipped north, the upper side moved south. In each earthquake, the north-south dimension of the basin shortened somewhat, and its adjacent mountains went up a couple of feet. This local compression began in relatively recent time, when the Pacific Lithospheric Plate, moving essentially northward, sort of shouldered into the North American Plate where the San Andreas Fault presents an awkward curve that is known in geology as a prominent restraining bend. The mountains went up. People came, and Los Angeles went up. The mountains, hills, anticlines will continue to go up, the basin will continue to be compressed, as long as the Pacific Plate keeps pushing into the restraining bend. The Pacific Plate, sliding, weighs three hundred and forty-five quadrillion tons.
Like a city planner, the plate motions have created Los Angeles. The plate motions have shaped its setting and its setting’s exceptional beauty, raising its intimate mountains ten thousand feet. The mountains are such a phalanx that air flowing in from the west cannot get over them, and a result is the inversion layer that concentrates smog. Plate motions in Los Angeles folded the anticlines that trapped the oil that rained gold and silver into the streets. Plate motions have formed a basin so dry that water must be carried to it five hundred miles. Plate motions have built the topography that has induced the weather that has brought the fire that has prepared the topography for city-wrecking flows of rock debris. Plate motions are benign, fatal, eternal, causal, beneficial, ruinous, continual, and inevitable. It’s all in the luck of the cards. Plate motions are earthquakes.
IN AN OLD NEW ENGLAND HOUSE, Eric Sloane found a wood-backed, leather-bound diary written in 1805 by a fifteen-year-old boy. Its entries were terse: “June 3—Helped Father build rope hoist to move the water wheel,” or “June 26—Father and I sledded the oaks from the woodlot and put them down near the mill.” Sloane took the diary and dressed it out with verbal and graphic sketches, detailing the construction of a whole backwoods farm. Mere antiquity is not what interests him. Instead, he puts a shine and an edge on the tools of the pioneers, constantly admiring the care and skill of craftsmen who thought enough of themselves, their work, and the times they lived in to date and sign everything they made.
Sloane shows how to build a house without a nail in it that will go up and stay up for hundreds of years, how to make a bottle-glass window, a fieldstone grike, a folding ladder, a wooden tub, a cider press. Two ways to stack cordwood. A recipe for brown ink (“Boiled down walnut or butternut hulls that have been mashed first. Add vinegar and salt to boiling water to ‘set’”). From king posts to roofing, he details the construction of a covered bridge, which was an 1805 innovation. George Washington never saw one.
The mill wheel was the all-purpose appliance that could run saws, pump bellows, grind grain, keep trip hammers thumping, turn meat spits, and rock babies—all at once. Woods were selected according to capability, and when a wagon was built—oak frame, elm sides and floor, ash spokes and shafts, pine seat, hickory slats—it lasted about twelve times as long as a Cadillac does now.
Young boys, like the one whose diary Sloane follows, would get up on winter mornings, run across the road to the barn, push the cow or ox aside, then stand and dress in the warm area where the animal had been sleeping. If a house had more than ten panes of glass, the owner paid a glass tax—so most houses had ten and no more. Window glass, in fact, was so valuable that a family often took the panes with them when they moved from one house to another. If a woman died, the church bell tolled six times. A man was worth nine. Then, after a pause, the exact age of the late member of the congregation was tintinnabulated for all to note. If a family had a bridge on their land, they charged neighbors and strangers a toll to cross it. (This was a tradition that time would honor. Until 1955, for example, a suspension bridge more than a mile long, crossing part of Narragansett Bay, was the private property of Rudolf Haffenreffer, who gathered more than a million a year in tolls.)
In a time when two-car garages have phony haylofts and cocktails rest on cobblers’ benches, the ways of the early Americans are more often exploited than understood. Sloane understands them. When he closes his hand around the handle of an old wooden tool, he says, he can all but feel “the very hand that wore it smooth.” He hands the tool to his reader.
I PARKED MY FORD in lower Manhattan, locked it, went about some business, and returned to find that I had left the key inside. Damn. Every window was shut tight. The nearest duplicate key, as it happened, was a fifty-dollar cab ride away, in New Jersey. The parking space was under an elevated segment of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, in a moted half-light that swiftly lost what little magic it had had, and turned to condensed gloom. Trash barrels were spaced among the steel supports of the highway. Refuse was all over the ground. I searched the area and rummaged through one barrel after another, looking for wire. Finally, in a mass of broken Gallo bottles, I found the classic tool of the car thief—a metal coat hanger. Unfortunately, I lacked the skill to use it. I knew, in a general way, the technique. Make the coat hanger into a straight piece of wire, then bend it so that it’s like a big hairpin, then twist one end to form a hook. Work the wire in past the rubber that rims a window. Now maneuver the hook down the inside and—most adroit move of all—get a grip on the lock button. Fi
rmly, slowly, lift the wire. Sesame.
I poked around my nondescript car looking for a spot soft enough to penetrate, and did not meet with early success. I jabbed for a while at the windows on one side, then moved around the car. Finally, I got the wire in about two inches, but beyond that it was reluctant to move. While I was shoving at it, a car pulled up beside me, and I noticed from the corner of my eye the familiar green and black of a sedan of the police of the City of New York. Two policemen were inside. I pulled out the wire, waved it at them, and said, “Hello. Hi. The key is locked inside, you see, and…”
The policemen got out of the patrol car, and one of them asked for the wire. I handed it to him. He stuck it into the Ford like a baker testing a cake. In three seconds, perhaps less, he had the car door standing open. He returned the wire, and I thanked him.
The other policeman said to him, “Now give the lecture, Sam.”
Sam gave a recitation on the foolhardiness of locking a key in a car.
Then the two policemen got back into their own vehicle and prepared to drive away.
“Wait,” I said.
They had asked for no papers, no identification of any kind. They had found me trying to insert a wire into a Ford. Were they just going to assume that the car was mine?
Sam, hearing all this, looked at his partner, then back at me. He said, “Listen, mister, if you’re stealing that car, and you had the chutzpah to get us to help you, take it. It’s yours. You can have it.”
WITH HIS COLLABORATOR, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein set a new standard for the modern musical play, integrating verse with dialogue, music with plot, in a theatrical form that once demanded little more than a loose collection of songs, skits, and dances. Hammerstein’s lyrics were almost always written first, often completed after weeks of agony, walking mile upon mile on the blacktop roads near his Pennsylvania farm, using dummy tunes of his own invention to coax his words along toward a completed lyric. Hearing some of these mock-up melodies, Richard Rodgers staggered backward in amused horror. Whether Hammerstein was writing about Austrian singers, New England factory workers, or a Siamese king, there was always a steady undertone of old-fashioned optimism in his lyrics. He said, “I just can’t write anything without hope in it.” In 1943, when wartime headlines were black with death on coral beaches, Oklahoma! opened on Broadway, and Hammerstein’s words carried across the world the picture of a beautiful morning, “a bright golden haze on the meadow.” Just then, many people everywhere were grateful for the reminder that such a thing existed.
To people who grew up in the forties and fifties, humming and dancing in the glow of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it sometimes came as a surprise that Hammerstein had an earlier, equally prodigious career in the operettas of the twenties. Before he turned thirty-five, he had written the lyrics of Rose-Marie, The Desert Song, The New Moon, and Show Boat. Introducing himself with such songs as “Indian Love Call” and “Stouthearted Men,” he secured his position with “Ol’ Man River.”
He had many collaborators, and from them learned his craft. Otto Harbach, with whom Hammerstein worked on The Desert Song, taught him the basics of writing for the musical stage. Sigmund Romberg, confining his highest praise to the words “It fits, it fits,” taught him the virtues of a sixteen-hour workday. Jerome Kern, who gave him the tall captain’s table on which Hammerstein thereafter wrote standing up, taught him—ordered him, rather—never to use the word “Cupid” in a lyric. After hearing Kern’s next melody for Show Boat (the music came first with Jerome Kern; words were filled in later), Hammerstein fired back lyrics that began:
Cupid knows the way,
He’s the naked boy
Who can make you sway …
When Kern recovered, he was given an alternative:
Why do I love you?
Why do you love me?
Why should there be two
Happy as we?
From his home in Bronxville, Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, Long Island; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires. Although the Kerns and the Hammersteins were close friends, Hammerstein’s wife, Dorothy, could not abide hearing people refer to “Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River.’” She would say to them, “Oscar Hammerstein wrote ‘Ol’ Man River.’ Jerome Kern wrote Ta-ta dumdum, Ta ta-ta dumdum.”
I HAVE WORKED for twenty years in East Pyne Hall at Princeton, in a corridor dominated by the Department of Comparative Literature, where the Council of the Humanities has a small inholding. Comp Lit has had two chairmen in its history at Princeton: Robert Fagles, whose translation of Homer is a work still in progress, and Robert Hollander, a curator of Dante. As both are overly fond of saying, I am an interloper there, a fake professor, a portfolio without minister. For all that, the third floor of East Pyne is a superb place to work. By six-thirty in the evening, it is essentially vacant. Even the tenure track is quietly rusting. At seven-thirty in the morning, though, a lonely figure will be wandering the hall—the back arched, the head a little cocked, the lips in perpetual motion—mumbling about warriors armed in bronze. Fagles understands bronze. Anyone with that much brass would understand bronze. Long ago I learned that if you hear him coming and you step into the corridor and confront him with a question, he turns into an ambulatory checking department, a mine of antique material, the willing donor in an act of cerebral osmosis. For example, there came a time when my geological compositions became focused on a passage about the island of Cyprus. I heard him coming, stepped into the hall, and later went back to my machine and wrote: “In 2760 B.C., smelting began in Cyprus. Slag heaps developed in forty places. The Iliad is populated with warriors armed in bronze. Bronze is copper hardened by adding some tin, and the copper would have come from Cyprus. (Copper was mined on Cyprus for nearly two thousand years before Homer.) … The word ‘Cyprus’ means copper. Whether the island is named for the metal or the metal for the island is an etymology lost in time.”
When I bring Fagles fish from the Delaware River, as I sometimes do, he asks that they be gutted, finned, and scaled, and wrapped in my work.
I HAVE A FRIEND in Washington who knows the city from the inside in. H. M. Remeor is not his name, but it will do. He is of the category of people who have put in time feeding pens to Presidents and have long since melded into the panelling of D.C. law firms, where, although they have no specific connection with the government, they operate within a distinct aurora of clout. Remeor’s Washington is not the Washington of Capital City Tours. For example, he once showed me through the cassette library in the Washington telephone exchange. He lives in the hills of suburban Maryland. In that general area, one autumn day, I was riding with him in his car when he turned into what appeared to be someone’s long driveway. Wide lawns reached away from the drive, which ran between rows of deciduous trees and led to a large stone house. The day was cold but sunlit, and windy. Behind the house were a couple of dozen cars, parked in an ovate ring. Remeor drove into the middle of this circle, stopped, and said, “This is the parking lot at Burning Tree. That is the clubhouse. The golf course is over there. The course is hardly noticeable unless you get right on it. This place is so anonymous you’d never know it was here, but it precedes the Pentagon on Brezhnev’s list of pinpoint targets in the Washington area. There are big men here, with big handicaps. More power goes off the tees of Burning Tree—for less distance—than at any other golf club on earth. Look who’s here even on a day as cold as this.”
I looked around and saw no one.
Remeor said, “Take a good look at the cars.”
Directly in front of us was a Mercedes-Benz with an Arkansas license plate—MS 2.
“Member of the Senate, two,” explained Remeor. “James William Fulbright, the junior senator from Arkansas. Naturally, he has a foreign car. He’s the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.”
Our eyes began to move from automobile to automobile, plate to plate: Thu
nderbird. Missouri—8.
“Now, who do you suppose that is?” Mr. Remeor said. “Who would you say is the eighth-most-important person in Missouri?”
I counted down my own list—the chairman of the board of Ralston Purina, Harry Truman, Governor Hearnes, Warren Bradley, Busch, Anheuser … “Symington,” I said, finally. “Stuart Symington. Missouri 8.”
“You’ve got it,” Remeor said. “Now have a look at that one.” He nodded toward a big Chrysler with a Maine license plate that had no numerals at all—just the word “SENATE,” in large block letters.
“Muskie,” I said.
“There can be no doubt of it. One thing for dead certain is that Margaret Chase Smith is not out here on this golf course today. Women are forbidden at Burning Tree. No woman ever sets foot in that clubhouse. A long time ago, Joe Davies offered to build and pay for a swimming pool here, and the offer was indignantly refused, on the ground that a pool would increase pressure from women and children. The members take considerable pride in the fact that they can walk around nude in any part of the building.”
I wondered how well everyone was doing on the golf course on such a cold afternoon, and from my home in New Jersey some days later I would call up the cars’ owners to find out. Senator Symington, for example, said that the temperature had discouraged him, so he had just hit some balls from the practice tee. Senator Muskie’s office told me that Muskie had played and then had gone off to Moscow. “The Senator is very modest about his golf game, with good reason,” said a member of his staff, who went on to say that three years ago, in Kennebunk, Muskie had made a hole in one, and that he breaks 90 with about the same frequency.