October 16, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Under the Carpet Bag,” a fond recollection of his sixty-year friendship with Bill Bradley. Actually, McPhee doesn’t just recollect this friendship, he relives it on the page. For example:

And now, in 1964, at Camp Don Bosco, in Missouri, I was walking up a dirt road with Bill Bradley and Ed Macauley. The road consisted of deep parallel ruts with a grassy hump in the middle. Bradley was in one rut, Macauley in the other, and I was up on the hump between them. I am smaller than most people—about as small as Andrew Carnegie, James Madison, Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Actually, I was five feet seven at my zenith and have lately condensed. The hump was a good foot higher than the ruts. Nonetheless, the three of us in outline formed the letter M.

That “lately condensed” made me smile. The piece brims with humor. One of my favorite passages is a quote from McPhee’s brilliant Draft No. 4, in which he describes William Shawn’s approach to editing new writers, “breaking them in, so to speak, but not exactly like a horse, more like a baseball mitt.” 

Readers of McPhee’s 1965 profile of Bradley, titled “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1965), who find its constant adulation of Bradley a bit much (as I do), should read this new piece. It helps explain McPhee’s hagiography. McPhee and Bradley are very close. As McPhee says in “Under the Carpet Bag, “He is the younger brother I never had, and I am the brother he never had.”