January 13, 2020 Issue

John McPhee’s "Tabula Rasa," in this week’s issue, is a wonderful collage-like assemblage, combining a variety of subjects in a highly flexible frame. The frame is McPhee’s decision “to describe saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project … the purpose of which is to keep the old writer alive by never coming to an end.” The piece is structured in nine sections, beginning and ending in Extremadura, a place that McPhee long considered writing about:

I kept thinking of the storks in the church towers of almost every Extremaduran town. I kept thinking of the cork of those oaks—six inches thick. I kept thinking of the dehesa, the vast dry woodlands with fighting bulls in them and jamón ibérico hogs, and trees spread out like checkers on a board. I proposed the idea to William Shawn, and he said, “Oh. Oh, yes.” But I went to Alaska. I went to Wyoming. And although I had been obsessed with the subject since 1954, I never took my notebooks to Extremadura.

In between the “Extremadura” parts, there are sections on, among other things, Outward Bound, bridges designed by Christian Menn, a plane crash that occurred near McPhee’s home, and an air-spotter course that he took when he was ten years old. 

"Tabula Rasa" brims with inspired passages. Examples:

Fahrenheit, the temperatures were in three digits. Only the oaks were cool in their insulating cork. Rubber flanges surrounded each of the many windows in the VW bus, and the cement that held the rubber flanges melted in the heat, causing the flanges to hang down from all the windows like fettuccine.

Sinuous, up in the sky between one mountainside and another, the most beautiful bridge I had ever seen was in Simplon Pass, on the Swiss side. It fairly swam through the air, now bending right, now left, its deck held up by piers and towers, one of which was very nearly five hundred feet high.

This is what happens when you die: In the immediate afterlife, you are confronted by every macroscopic creature you killed in your earthbound lifetime. They have an afterlife, too. They come at you as a massive crowd, which, in my case, would consist of ants, mosquitoes, yellow jackets, houseflies, fruit flies, horseflies, spiders, centipedes, cockroaches, moles, mice, shrews, snakes, trout, catfish, sand sharks, walleyes, wasps, rabbits, ticks, lampreys, leeches, ladybugs, beetles, centrarchids, annelids, American shad, Atlantic salmon, honeybees, hornets, Arctic char, Pacific salmon, pike, pickerel, porcupines, caterpillars, butter­flies, bluefish, moths, mullet, perch, suckers, fallfish, and bats, not to mention road-killed squirrels, raccoons, pheasants, and deer. They envelop you like a cloud, a fog that bites.

And, if you relish long, elegantly textured, formally controlled sentences, as I do, you’ll likely enjoy this 126-word beauty:

More often than not, as I go up and down its curves, I am reminded not only that this wee bridge—along with the Ganter Bridge, at Simplon, and the Felsenau, in Bern, and the Sunniberg, in Graubünden, and the Bunker Hill Memorial, in Boston—is one of the bridges of Christian Menn but also that I have never written a lick about him, or about David Billington, or a profile of Bil­lington containing a long set piece on Menn, or a profile of Menn containing a long set piece on Billington, or a fifty-fifty profile of them together, which I intended from my Swiss days in the Section de Renseigne­ments through the decades that have followed. David Billington died in 2018, as did Christian Menn.

And here’s a line that made me laugh out loud:

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. 

“Tabula Rasa” is the verbal equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine. I enjoyed it immensely.