February 7, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is John McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa: Volume Three.” It’s another one of the Master’s “reminiscent montages.” This one consists of six segments. They flash back and forth in time. The first is set in 1972; McPhee takes nature writer Edward Abbey on a walking tour of Princeton. The second section travels back to 1948; McPhee is a night watchman at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In the third segment, it’s June 21, 2006; McPhee is on the McKenzie River with one of America’s great fly fishermen, Dr. Lenox Dick. In the fourth, it’s 1960; McPhee has dinner with Henry Luce. The fifth is a double; one part describing a weekend in 2004 that McPhee spent driving around Kentucky looking at distilleries; the other telling about a 1982 trip he and his wife, Yolanda, took to the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, to visit a Bing cherry orchard. In the final segment, McPhee goes way back to when he was ten, and tells about the time he broke into Joe Brown’s sculpture studio in Princeton to steal some clay. 

The piece is quite a mash-up of images – the literary equivalent of a Rauschenberg combine or a Cornell box. I devoured it. The pleasure of it, for me, flows from its wonderful sentences. This one for example: 

Sitting back in the armchair with his legs at full stretch, one boot across the other, he seemed to be aiming through a kind of gun sight formed by his toes. 

And this:

With its haystacks and standing waves and boulder-field eddies below pools of fast flat water, its rhythmic curves, it has the shape of a downhill ski run. 

And this:

In Speyside, on Isla, on Skye, I later interviewed the distillers, including Captain Smith Grant, whose artesian spring, called Josie’s Well, was out in the middle of a field of oats near Ballindalloch, Banffshire, and was providing thirty-five hundred gallons an hour to the stills of The Glenlivet.

“Tabula Rasa 3” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa” series. I enjoyed it immensely.