March 9, 2015 Issue

Of the nine mustaches mentioned in John McPhee’s delightful "Frame of Reference," in this week’s issue, my favorite is Norton Townshend Dodge’s “grand odobene mustache,” from McPhee’s great "The Ransom of Russian Art" (The New Yorker, October 17, 1994). I looked it up - “odobene” means walrus-like. This description makes me smile because it conveys the exact look of Dodge’s memorable visage, as shown in the Dudley Reed photo of him that illustrates McPhee’s piece. “Frame of Reference” is the sixth in a series of McPhee pieces called “The Writing Life.” In addition to providing valuable advice on composition (e.g., “You will never land smoothly on borrowed vividness”), this series is a powerful mnemonic, triggering pleasurable memories of many of McPhee’s finest works. For example, the mention of Dodge’s “odobene mustache,” in “Frame of Reference,” took me back to “The Ransom of Russian Art,” which I’d first read over twenty years ago, when it appeared in The New Yorker. Paging through the lovely 1994 book version of the same name, with its numerous color plates showing selections from Dodge’s massive Russian art collection, I noted several passages that I’d previously underlined in pencil, including this: “Larger works, he says – his thick eyebrows merging with his mustache – ‘had to go through channels.’ ”