April 19, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s delightful “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2,” a continuation of what he calls, in Volume 1 (January 13, 2020), his “old man project.” It’s purpose? “To keep the old writer alive by never coming to an end.” Volume 2 consists of six individually configured segments: “Sloop to Gibraltar”; “December 19, 1943”; “The Dutch Ship Tyger”; “Ray Brock”; and “Writer.” Each is a miniature story, a shard chipped from McPhee’s long life. For example, “December 19, 1943” tells about a tragic incident that occurred when he was twelve. His friend Julian Boyd, age thirteen, asked him to go skating with him on the Millstone River. McPhee’s mother wouldn’t let him go, insisting he attend the church Christmas pageant. He “howled and moaned and griped and begged.” But his mother was adamant. In the end, McPhee obeyed his mom, and went to the pageant. Meanwhile, Julian and another friend, Charlie Howard, skated the river, broke through the ice, and drowned. McPhee writes, 

I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing.

Reading this touching piece, I thought of the philosopher Galen Strawson’s observation: “In the end, luck swallows everything” (Things That Bother Me, 2018).

My favorite section of “Tabula Rasa: Volume 2” is “The Dutch Ship Tyger.” I like its branching effect – the way it starts out in one place (the Dutch merchant vessel Tyger anchored in the Hudson River, Manhattan, 1613) and ends up in a completely different time and space (the office of Leo Hofeller, executive editor of The New Yorker, 25 West Forty-third Street, Manhattan, 1964). How do you connect those dots? Well, the line runs through McPhee, through his aspiration to be a New Yorker writer. McPhee says,

In short, I was in high school when I decided that what I wanted to do in life was write for The New Yorker, in college when I first sent a manuscript to the magazine, and in college when I filed away that first rejection slip and the second and the sixteenth, then on through my twenties and into my thirties, when the whole of that collection of rejection slips could have papered a wall.

The piece is really about how McPhee at long last realized his goal. I found it fascinating. One of the turning points was the magazine’s acceptance of his “Basketball and Beefeaters” (March 16, 1963; included in his great 1975 collection Pieces of the Frame). McPhee describes the moment:

Depressed, thirty-one years old, I recklessly sent it to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker simultaneously. A few weeks went by, another freelanced book review, and then my phone rang at Time. The New Yorker was buying the piece. Oh, my God.

That “Oh, my God” made me laugh. It’s an interesting form of indirect speech – McPhee inflecting his present-day recollection with the actual reaction he had sixty years ago. There’s more to the story. It involves a grouchy Sports Illustrated editor named Jack Tibby; it involves basketball great Bill Bradley; it involves McPhee’s brilliant profile of Bradley, “A Sense of Where You Are” (The New Yorker, January 23, 1965). The publication of that piece marks the beginning of McPhee’s amazing run of extraordinary New Yorker work, including “The Pine Barrens,” “Travels in Georgia,” “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” “The Encircled River,” “Rising from the Plains,” “Atchafalaya,” “Coal Train,” “Season on the Chalk,” “The Orange Trapper,” right up to the appearance of this wonderful second installment of his ongoing “Tabula Rasa.” McPhee without end, amen!