Double Bliss: John McPhee's "Draft No. 4"

Remember Warren Elmer in John McPhee’s superb “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1975)? He’s the guy in the bow of Henri Vaillancourt’s canoe who shouted, “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!” Well, it turns out that’s not exactly what Elmer said. What he really said, according to McPhee, in his fascinating new book, Draft No. 4, is “You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!” But in 1975, when the piece was written, “fucking” was still a shocker. New Yorker editor, William Shawn, wouldn’t allow it in the magazine. And, as McPhee points out,

There were no alternatives like “f---” or “f**k” or “[expletive deleted],” which sounds like so much gravel going down a chute. If the magazine had employed such devices, which it didn’t, I would have shunned them. “F-word” was not an expression in use then and the country would be better off if it had not become one. So Warren Elmer said “fucking” on Caucomgomoc Lake, but the quote in The New Yorker was “You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”

Remember McPhee’s question about the fat gob behind the caribou’s eye in his great “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977)? Removed from its context, it’s one of the most delightfully surreal lines ever to appear in The New Yorker:

To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

In Draft No. 4, McPhee describes Shawn’s queasy response to the above-noted question:

There was in those days something known as “the Shawn proof.” From fact-checkers, other editors, and usage geniuses known as “readers,” there were plenty of proofs, but this austere one stood alone and seldom had much on it, just isolated notations of gravest concern to Mr. Shawn. If he had an aversion to cold places, it was as nothing beside his squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon food. I had little experience with him in restaurants, but when I did go to a restaurant with him his choice of entrée ran to cornflakes. He seemed to look over his serving flake by flake to see if any were moving. On the Shawn proof beside the words quoted above, he had written in the wide, white margin – in the tiny letters of his fine script – “the pop tart.”

Draft No. 4 brims with such stories. “It’s McPhee on McPhee,” as Parul Sehgal says in her “The Gloom, Doom and Occasional Joy of the Writing Life” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 13, 2017). In other words, it’s double bliss – an enthralling tour of some of McPhee’s finest works, conducted by the Master himself. I’m enjoying it immensely.