Notes on John McPhee's Wonderful "Tabula Rasa"

1. This new work surprised me. I expected it to be a collection of the “Tabula Rasa” pieces that appeared in The New Yorker: see “Tabula Rasa I” (January 13, 2020); “Tabula Rasa II” (April 19, 2021); and “Tabula Rasa III” (February 7, 2022). All those pieces are in the book – twenty-one of them. It’s great to see them preserved between hardcovers. But here’s the surprise: in addition to the previously published items, there are twenty-nine new ones on such variegated subjects as McPhee’s experience teaching his Princeton writing class during Covid (“students became sixteen pictures in varied levels of light”), the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, sports time-outs (“Time-outs in superabundance violate the spirit of the game”), the outcrops of Princeton’s Washington Road, New Jersey’s Province Line Road, Princeton University’s Joseph Henry House, fish he’s caught on the Upper Delaware River, Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, his mother, the length of time it takes to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (“Roughly one minute and four seconds”), and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I particularly liked the piece on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Titled “The Delta Islands of the Great Valley,” it contains this wonderful passage:

Small roads ran along the tops of the levees. From them, you looked down on the tops of pear trees in the inverted islands, looked down into the countersunk asparagus, the winter wheat. Now look up. Left. Right, near, or far, you saw ships. They were crossing the delta on the rivers, which flowed between levees and were imperceptibly descending from thirteen feet above sea level (Stockton) and thirty feet above sea level (Sacramento). If you happened to be down in one of the polders among the crops, you might look up and see across a levee the wheelhouse of an oceangoing ship, inbound or outbound, sliding along against the sky. They were really up there. You had to crane your neck.

That “you looked down on the tops of pear trees in the inverted islands, looked down into the countersunk asparagus, the winter wheat” is very fine. I wish McPhee had been able to complete the project. Unfortunately, as he explains, the shipping company that owned the ship on which he planned to travel reneged on its permission. He says, “The disappointment diverted me into other projects. I wasn’t going to do the piece without riding through the delta on the bridge wing of a merchant ship, looking down across the tops of blossoming fruit trees.”

2. One notable aspect of McPhee’s late style is his frequent use of sentence fragments. Tabula Rasa contains dozens of them. For example:

Her blondness. His white beard. Her compactness. His heft. Her smile, and his. Their photogenic faces.

AFC divisional playoff, Raiders 7, Steelers 6, twenty-two seconds to go, no time-outs. Fourth and ten, Steelers on their own forty.

Wood frame. Fish-scale clapboard around the front entrance. Lancet windows down the sides, two stories tall. Cupola. Belfry. Gothic Revival spirelets at the high front corners.

Holyoke Dam. Hooksett Dam. The dam sites of Dickey-Lincoln. The many nameless dams on rural streams in upstate New York.

McKenzie River, in McKenzie boats, in Oregon with Dr. Dick.

Faculty housing. Row housing. Gwyneth King in the parlor with Joe.

Oh, my. Malcolm Forbes. His yacht. A party favor. Party of a-hundred-and-thirty-odd on the yacht to watch the Fourth of July fireworks on the East River. Mick Jagger. People like that. People from all over the news, the media, the world, the city. Lobsters. Smoked salmon. Caviar by the kilo.

Older writers tend to ramble. Their sentences get longer and baggier. Think Henry James. What a windbag! McPhee went the opposite way. He’s shortened up. His sentences are light, speedy. No long lines (or not many), just quick Cézanne-like touches: “In the church. Passing the plate. Mad as hell. Obedient”; “Starfish. Octopuses. Vicious-looking eels”; “And wait. And wait forever, it seemed. More rain.” 

3. Another tool in McPhee’s vast literary toolkit is the catalog. Recall his wonderful cargo lists in Looking for a Ship (1990). Tabula Rasa contains at least two memorable lists – one in “On the Campus,” and the other in “Bourbon and Bing Cherries.” The “On the Campus” list is part of a passage that brilliantly re-creates a slide show of WWII airplanes that McPhee remembers viewing when he was a kid. Here’s an excerpt:

But the course was fun, like some precursive television show, as the black silhouette of an aircraft came up on a large screen and was gone two seconds later while you were writing down its name. Messerschmitt ME-109. Next slide, two seconds: Mitsubishi Zero. Next slide, two seconds: Grumman Avenger. Next slide, two seconds: Vought-Sikorsky Corsair. Yes, the American planes were the only planes we would ever report to regional headquarters, in New York or somewhere, in a cryptic sequence from a filled-in, columned sheet: “one, bi, low,” and so forth—one twin-¬engine plane flying low, often a DC-3 descending to Newark. We saw Piper Cubs, Stinson Reliants, and more DC-3s. We saw Martin Marauders, Curtiss-Wright Warhawks, Republic Thunderbolts, Bell Airacobras, Lockheed Lightnings, Consolidated Liberators. It would be treason to say that we were eager to see Heinkel HE-111s and Dornier DO-17s. We didn’t really know what was going on. We were ten, eleven years old and not regarded as precocious.

“On the Campus” also contains one of my favorite lines in Tabula Rasa: “I don’t mean to downsize the women or their role in all this, but—Mrs. Hall, Mrs. Hambling—they didn’t know a Focke-Wulf 200 from a white-throated sparrow.”

Here's the “Bourbon and Bing Cherries” list:

Driving on, this is what I also learned: Jim Beam, of Clermont, Kentucky, made Knob Creek, Old Grand-Dad, Booker’s, Baker’s, Basil Hayden, and I. W. Harper. Brown-Forman, of Louisville, Kentucky, made Early Times, Old Forester, and Woodford Reserve. Buffalo Trace, of Frankfort, Kentucky, made many other not-well-known brands, including Pappy Van Winkle. Bernheim Distillery, of Louisville, Kentucky, made Rebel Yell. Maker’s Mark, of Loretto, Kentucky, made Maker’s Mark.

This piece also contains an inspired line: “Driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries is a good way of getting to know the state, and it beats the hell out of horses.”

By the way, the first part of “Bourbon and Bing Cherries” differs from the version that appeared in The New Yorker. It incorporates eight paragraphs from the Preface that McPhee wrote in 2000 for a paperback edition of his Oranges (1967), including this delightful sentence: “It was late March and the Valencias, in their overlapping cycle, were in fruit and in bloom, a phenomenon of this tree, which blossoms fourteen months before the fruit is picked, with the beautiful result that a Valencia tree in spring is under a snowy veil punctuated by spots of bright orange against an evergreen field of dark leaves.”