Interesting Emendations: John McPhee's "Season On The Chalk"

Unlike certain other New Yorker writers (e.g., John Updike), John McPhee rarely changes his magazine pieces when he later collects them into books. However, I found a slight variation in his great “Season On The Chalk,” which is included in his recent collection Silk Parachute. The original article was published in the March 12, 2007, issue of The New Yorker, and contains the following extraordinarily beautiful passage:

Near Épernay, even the cattle are white; and vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

Here is the book version:

Near Épernay, even the cattle are white. Vines like green corduroy run for miles up the hillsides in rows perpendicular to the contours, and the tops of the vines are so accordant that the vines up close look more like green fences, and the storky, long-legged tractors of Champagne straddle rows and run above the grapes.

The magazine version is one sentence, its clauses joined together by four “ands.” For the book, McPhee revised the passage by deleting an “and,” and breaking it into two sentences. It’s a subtle change. But McPhee is a master writer, and so such subtleties are significant. Why did he make the change? My guess is that it's a matter of sound. The way it’s written, the “vines” part of the passage has a rhythm all its own. So when McPhee was preparing the piece for publication in Silk Parachute, he decided to separate it from the “cattle” bit and make it a sentence. As I say, I'm only guessing. Personally, I prefer the New Yorker version. I like how it goes from Épernay cattle right into Épernay vines with only a semi-colon of a breather. Both versions are gorgeous, displaying one of McPhee’s signature moves: the juxtaposing or near-juxtaposing of precise science-based words like “perpendicular,” “contours,” “accordant” with vivid, textured constructions like “green corduroy,” “green fences,” and “storky, long-legged tractors.”