February 7, 2011 Issue

In this week’s issue, John McPhee pays eloquent tribute to one of his “principal editors,” Pat Crow, who died last week. McPhee’s piece ("Postscript: Pat Crow") contains several inspired descriptions (e.g., “Pat was an easy and supple, drape-fold flycaster”), but it’s the way it ends that stays with me. Having vividly described Crow fishing from Table Rock (“With heavy currents high up his chest, he would make his way there with without the aid of a wading staff, climb up, stand in water scarcely covering his ankles, and walk around on the rock’s remarkably flat top, where he could be king of the universe, or at least of a river two hundred feet from bank to bank”), McPhee says in conclusion, “And that is where I want to leave him – standing on an erratic boulder halfway across a deep fast river with three thousand cubic feet of water going past him every second.” I like that “And that is where I want to leave him.” McPhee's approach to eulogy - memory of good times rather than mourning of loss - resonates with me.

I was moved by McPhee’s “Pat Crow” piece to reread his 1984 La Place de la Concorde Suisse, which says on the publisher’s page, “The text of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker and was developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and C. P. Crow.” Many of the McPhee books that Crow had a hand in editing say, “developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and Robert Bingham, and C. P. Crow.” But it appears that in the case of La Place de la Concorde Suisse, Shawn was the over-arching editor and Crow was the sole principal editor. What a brilliant book! There should be a word for this form of beautifully crafted, compact, concrete writing. “Fact piece” seems totally insufficient. If you ask me, it’s a form of poetry. The piece is about the Swiss Army. There’s a wonderful, irreverent character in it, Luc Massy. The descriptions of alpine angles of vision are ravishing. Consider this beauty:

The view is now panoptic – over the deep-set river to the white summits, the long front line of the Pennines leading the eye west. Twenty miles downstream, the valley bends slightly and cuts the view. Above the river, avalanche tracks stripe the mountainsides between dark gorges no machine could pass. The floor of the valley is groomed and industrial. There are rows of Lombardy poplars along airstrips that serve no city. This centerland of the Valais, with its vegetable fields and orchards, too – its apples and asparagus, tomatoes and pears – would appear to be the ultimate citadel for the democracy, where the nation could attempt an impregnable stand. As if the mountains were not barrier enough, ancient landslides have left their natural barricades at intervals down the valley.

How fine that “Above the river, avalanche tracks stripe the mountainsides between dark gorges no machine could pass.” I could quote endlessly from this delicious work. Here’s one more:

A narrow red train appears far below. Coming out of a tunnel, it crosses a bridge, whistling – three cars in all, the Furka-Oberalp. The train will go up the Rhone until there is no more Rhone, and then climb on cogs to the Furka Pass, and the Oberalp Pass, to finish its journey descending the nascent Rhine, pool to cascade pool, pastel green with glacial flour.

McPhee makes poetry of Swiss place names, e.g., “The Rigi and the Rossberg are subalpine mountains that flank the Valley of Arth and Goldau, south of the Zuger See – in Schwyz, the forest canton for which the Confederation was named.” La Place de la Concorde Suisse, with its complex geographic descriptions and large cast of characters, would not have been an easy piece to edit. Indeed, in a fascinating article titled “Checkpoints” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2009; included in McPhee’s 2010 collection Silk Parachute), McPhee says about the fact-checking of The New Yorker version of La Place de la Concorde Suisse, which appeared in the October 31, 1983 issue of the magazine, that “I have never turned in to The New Yorker a more combed-over piece than that one.”

In his tribute to Crow, McPhee says:

He once remarked of a dish I was preparing in advance that by afternoon it would be “dirty bacterial soup.” I still wondered if he felt that way about some of my pieces of writing, but one day – out of nowhere, twenty-five years after editing something of mine about who knows what – he told me that he had just finished rereading it from a book on his shelf at home, and he went on to make remarks about it too positive to appear in a sophisticated publication.

I wonder if the piece that Crow was referring to was La Place de la Concorde Suisse. I have a feeling it might’ve been. It’s definitely a masterpiece. Crow assisted in its creation, its "development." In the world of editing, it doesn’t get much better than that.