John McPhee's "The Patch"

John McPhee is a master of literary structure. Ho, hum. We all know that. But another hallmark of his style, one less remarked on, is its kinesis. His pieces aren’t static descriptions of still life; they move, enacting the action they describe – canoeing, camping, fishing, basketball, tennis, lacrosse, golf, on and on – motion, motion, the McPhee narcotic. 

His new collection, The Patch, adds to the action. Keep in mind that McPhee is now eighty-seven. He may not jounce canoes much anymore, but he still gets around. The book is divided into two parts: “The Sporting Scene” and “An Album Quilt.” “The Sporting Scene” consists of six New Yorker pieces: “The Patch” (February 8, 2010); “Phi Beta Football” (September 8, 2014); “The Orange Trapper” (July 1, 2013); “Linksland and Bottle” (September 6, 2010); “Pioneer” (March 22, 2010); and “Direct Eye Contact” (March 5, 2018). I read (and savoured) all these pieces when they originally appeared in the magazine. They’re like old friends. It’s great to see them collected between hardcovers.

 “An Album Quilt,” is an arrangement of passages (“blocks”) excerpted from various McPhee pieces that have never appeared in book form. In this post, I’ll focus solely on “The Sporting Scene” pieces. 

1. “The Patch”

The action in this brilliant personal history piece is pickerel fishing. But it’s not only about pickerel fishing; it’s also about the death of McPhee’s father. McPhee ingeniously blends the two subjects. The piece shifts back and forth between two locales: an area of Lake Winnipesaukee that McPhee and his fishing buddy, George Hackl, call “The Patch” (“Across an open channel from the New Hampshire island lay a quarter mile of sharply edged lily pads, and soon we were calling it not a patch but The Patch”); and the Baltimore hospital room in which McPhee’s father lies dying (“During our second day there, my mother, brother, and sister went off at one point, and I was alone for an hour in the room with my father”). At the end of the piece, the two scenes merge magnificently. The piece is exquisitely designed: the blending of pickerel fishing with the father’s dying; “the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space”; the motif of the father’s “bamboo rod.” “The Patch” is one of McPhee’s finest works.

Postscript: McPhee mentions in “The Patch” that his father was the medical doctor in a summer camp on the Baie de Chaleur. My mother was born and grew up in the town of Dalhousie, located at the mouth of the Restigouche River, where it flows into Baie de Chaleur. If McPhee and I ever meet (which isn’t likely), and I find myself tongue-tied (which is likely), I might mention the Baie de Chaleur as a sort of conversation-starter. 

2. “Phi Beta Football”

Another personal history piece – this one loaded with college football memories. McPhee didn’t play college football, but he was of that world, something I didn’t know until I read this absorbing essay. His father was the Princeton football team’s doctor. McPhee writes, “I was in grade school in what is now a university building, and every fall day after soccer I went down the street to university football practice and hung around my father, the trainers, the student managers, the coaches, the team.” And, of course, there’s action aplenty – reported in the present tense, no less, even though based on events that took place almost eighty years ago:

Bronco Van Lengen goes off tackle at the closed end of the horseshoe and a great cheer rises, but Bronco is lying on the grass and not getting up. It looks so serious that not only the head trainer but my father as well hurry to the scene and kneel beside Bronco’s unstirring body. Bronco opens one eye. He sees the teams collected on the one-yard line and waiting to resume play. He says, “Didn’t I score?” Actually, not that time, Bronco. Bronco leaps up off the grass, adjusts his helmet, and joins the huddle.

For me, a long-time fan of McPhee’s writing, “Phi Beta Football” ’s most interesting passage is this one: 

A year or two later, on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadium sidelines. The rain stung my eyes, and I was shivering. Looking up at the press box, where I knew there were space heaters, I saw those people sitting dry under a roof, and decided then and there to become a writer.

3. “The Orange Trapper”

Of The Patch’s six New Yorker pieces, this is my favourite. It’s a perfect example of McPhee’s late style – personal, playful, artful. “The Orange Trapper” is about McPhee’s golf ball collecting “compulsion” (“From my bicycle in New Jersey, if I am passing a golf-links batture, my head is turned that way and my gaze runs through the woods until a white dot stops it, which is not an infrequent occurrence. I get off my bike and collect the ball”). And what, you may ask, is a “golf-links batture”? McPhee explains: 

The woods that lie between public roads and private fairways remind me of the dry terrain between a river levee and the river itself. In Louisiana along the Mississippi this isolated and often wooded space is known as the river batture. If you’re in Louisiana, you pronounce it “batcher.” 

McPhee’s descriptions of his golf ball hunting adventures generate delectable quasi-surreal passages. For example:

You get off your bike, pick up a ball, and sometimes are able to identify the species it hit. Pine pitch makes a clear impression. Tulip poplars tend to smear. An oak or hickory leaves a signature writ small and simple. A maple does not leave maple syrup.

Tulip poplars tend to smear– pure McPhee. I devour it. Why? Why do I relish that sentence? It’s only five words – but what a combination! There’s something surreal about it. Only in the obscure context of golf ball collecting would you think of tulip poplars “smearing.” Tulip poplars tend to smear– it chimes. There’s poetry in it. 

And how about this beauty:

This is not on one of my biking routes, but on solo rides I have been there, and returned there, inspired by curiosity and a longing for variety and, not least, the observation that in the thickets and copses and wild thorny roses on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence are golf balls—Big Bank golf balls, Big Pharma golf balls, C-level golf balls (C.E.O., C.O.O., C.F.O. golf balls), lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.

That “in the thickets and copses and wild thorny bushes on the inside of Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence” is wonderful. But what makes the construction a true McPhee is that inspired last bit – “lying there abandoned forever by people who are snorkeling in Caneel Bay.” I’m willing to bet that in all of literature, no writer has ever before combined “biking routes,” “solo rides,” “thickets and copses and wild thorny roses,” “Jasna Polana’s chain-link fence,” “golf balls,” “Big Pharma,” “abandoned,” “snorkeling in Caneel Bay” in one line. It’s a gorgeous, cabinet-of-wonders sentence, one among many, in this marvellous light-hearted piece.

4.  “Linksland and Bottle”

In this superb piece, an account of the 2010 British Open, at St. Andrews, Scotland, McPhee puts us squarely there with him as he walks the Old Course (“St. Andrews’ pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth—four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater”), watches the action from the gallery (“Woods and Darren Clarke come around the shed with an entourage two and a half times the usual size, starting with extra marshals. Clarke is out of bounds by the hotel. Woods is in the hay. He blasts out, goes into more hay. His third shot ignores the green. It crosses the cinder path, crosses the asphalt road, and stops a club length from the stone wall. Woods conjures a high parabola that sits down close to the hole”), visits the Media Centre (“The atmosphere is less bookish than bookie-ish. Along one side is a full-field scoreboard that resembles a tote board in an off-track betting parlor. It is not electronic, though. Its many numbers are changed by hand by women on sliding ladders. At either end is the BBC—golfers in action on silent screens about the size of sheets of plywood. Heavy rain on the tent roof can be so loud that nobody would hear the audio anyway”).

“Linksland and Bottle” brims with gorgeous sentences. For example:

After Angel Cabrera hits his second shot to some other destination, hay is hanging from his follow-through like Spanish moss.

From this same grandstand perch, the eighteenth tee and the great home fairway are right in front of us as well, where the Swilken Burn, straight-sided and in cross section no less engineered than the Los Angeles River, leaves town in ampersand fashion on its leisurely way across the eighteenth and first to the sea. 

If you are in the top row and the wind is coming over your back, seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face. It’s a Bruegelian scene against the North Sea, with golfers everywhere across the canvas—putting here, driving there, chipping and blasting in syncopation, but being too smart to loft a wedge lest the ball be blown to the streets of St. Andrews a mile and a half away. 

How I love that “seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face.” McPhee is The New Yorker’s greatest virtuoso stylist. 

5. “Pioneer”

In this piece, McPhee covers a 2010 lacrosse game that pitted the two winningest active lacrosse coaches, Bill Tierney (University of Denver) and John Desko (Syracuse University), against each other. But he does it in a novel way. Instead of reporting the game as it unfolds, he presents two “montages” – one of Denver’s goals, the other of Syracuse’s goals. He runs the Denver montage first:

Ninety-three seconds into the action, Alex Demopoulos scored for Denver. Trevor Tierney was pacing the sideline as much as his father was. If their relationship in Trevor’s undergraduate years was Shakespearean, so was this. At 8:39 of the first quarter, John Dickenson, one of the identical twins, out of Highland Park High School, in Dallas, scored for Denver. Early in the second quarter, Bill Tierney was screaming at a referee, “Hey, Mike! Up in the face! They can’t do that.” Trevor put an arm on his father. Evidently the team’s shrink, Trevor was equally mindful of the head coach, ready to do what he could to calm him when necessary, which is not a part-time job. At Princeton, Bryce Chase, a volunteer assistant coach who was also a trial lawyer, hovered close to Tierney during every game, to muffle what he could muffle, and help avoid technicals. A year or two ago, Tierney, shouting, laid a string of slanderous words on a passing referee, and that very referee was one of the three officials before him now, working this game in the Carrier Dome. (Tierney: “It’s not a problem. He’s used to it.”) At 2:53 of the second quarter, Todd Baxter, out of Eden Prairie High School, in Minnesota, scored for Denver. Four minutes into the third, Denver’s Alex Demopoulos scored again (Avon Old Farms School, Connecticut). He would score twice more. And Andrew Lay (Denver East High School) would intercept a Syracuse pass and drill a goal from thirty feet. Unfortunately (for Denver), this montage of Denver goals was insufficient.

So surprising is that last sentence, I laughed out loud when I read it.

Then McPhee runs the Syracuse montage:

So let’s roll back the clock and start again: Forty-one seconds after the opening face-off, Jovan Miller (Christian Brothers Academy, Syracuse, New York) scored for Syracuse. Twelve seconds later, Kevin Drew (John Jay High School, Cross River, New York) scored for Syracuse. The game was not yet one minute old. A minute and a half later, Max Bartig (Northport High School, Northport, New York) scored for Syracuse. Jeremy Thompson, out of Lafayette High School, in Lafayette, New York, was doing face-offs for Syracuse, with his braided ponytail hanging Iroquois style down his back all the way across his number to his waist. And why not? He’s an Onondaga. This was north-central New York, where the Iroquois developed this form of this game, and where they have lived for at least a thousand years. Onondaga, Mohawk—on Syracuse’s 2010 men’s and women’s lacrosse teams, two of the Six Nations of the Iroquois are represented by one or more athletes.

This montage continues for another two paragraphs. Syracuse wins the game 15-9. The point of the first montage is to give the Denver team its due. They were the underdogs. Syracuse was “the No. 1 team in the college world.” Denver didn’t win, but their defeat was honourable. As McPhee says near the end of his piece, “No one heckled the Denver coach.”

6. “Direct Eye Contact”

In this delightful piece, McPhee tells about his yearning to see a bear in his Princeton backyard (“While I flossed in the morning, looking north through an upstairs bathroom window, I hoped to see a bear come out of the trees”). McPhee is a bear writer extraordinaire: see, for example, his classic “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977) and his superb “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982). Compared to these masterpieces, “Direct Eye Contact” is slight, only twenty-three hundred words long. But it contains many of McPhee’s signature moves: vivid imagery [“In Manchester Township (Ocean County), a wild black bear went up a back-yard tree in a neighborhood called Holly Oaks, where it tried to look like a black burl weighing two hundred and fifty pounds”]; geological description (“Kittatinny is actually a component of one very long mountain that runs, under various names, from Alabama to Newfoundland as the easternmost expression of the folded-and-faulted, deformed Appalachians”); interesting facts (“In the past three years, twenty-one bears have entered New Jersey homes, with no human fatalities”). My favourite passage in the piece is a description of a fallen oak:

In a storm, a big oak in mast, up a slope from my cabin there, fell not long ago. Its trunk broke freakishly—about twenty feet up—and the crown bent all the way over and spread the upper branches like a broom upon the ground. In the branches were a number of thousands of acorns. The next morning, there was enough bear shit around that oak to fertilize the Philadelphia Flower Show. 

That last line made me smile. “Direct Eye Contact” is an excellent addition to McPhee’s bear oeuvre. 

Each of the above pieces illustrates the kinetic nature of McPhee’s writing. As an action writer, he's in a league with Ernest Hemingway. Harry Levin said of Hemingway that he presents “the sequence of motion and fact” (“Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway,” in Levin’s Memories of the Modern, 1980). The same applies to McPhee.  

McPhee, Hemingway and the Sequence of Motion and Fact

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

Harry Levin, in his classic “Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway” (included in Levin’s 1980 essay collection Memories of the Moderns), says “When Nick Adams goes fishing, the temperature is very tangibly indicated: ‘It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of my neck.’” The same can be said about the way John McPhee palpably conveys temperature in “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 & 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s great Coming into the Country, 1977): “My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head, and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.”

Levin, in his essay, notes how Hemingway’s writing often “moves from the external plane into the range of a character’s senses, proceeding serially from the visual to the tactile, as it does when the “Wine of Wyoming” is sampled: ‘It was very light and clear and good and still tasted of the grapes.’” In “The Encircled River,” McPhee follows a similar progression: “The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good.”

Levin also observes that for what Hemingway “lacks in structure he makes up in sequence, carefully ordering visual impressions as he sets them down and ironically juxtaposing the various items on his lists and inventories.” It could never be said of McPhee that his writing lacks structure. He’s one of the great structuralists of all time. But, like Hemingway, he’s also expert at juxtaposing different registers. For example, in the following passage from “The Encircled River,” note the alternation of action and description: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river. His shirt is old and red. There are holes in his felt hat and strips of spare rawhide around its crown. He agitates the settled fly.”

In analyzing Hemingway’s style, Levin quotes Hemingway as saying that he always sought “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which [sic] made the emotion…” That “sequence of motion and fact” is a key aspect of McPhee’s technique, too. McPhee’s descriptions, consisting entirely of fact, are never static. Reading them, you never get the feeling you’re looking at a photo or a still life. McPhee animates his facts. People in his stories are always doing, going, working, moving. He’s a brilliant describer of action. There’s someone or something on the go in almost every one of his sentences. Consider, for example, the following sequence – one of my favorites – from “The Encircled River”:

He borrows Fedeler’s rod and sends the lure on its way. He reels. Nothing. He casts again. He reels. Nothing. Out in the river, there may be less water than salmon, but that is no guarantee that one will strike. Salmon do not feed on the spawning run. They apparently bite only by instinctive reflex if something flashes close before them. Pourchot casts again. Nothing. He casts again. The lure this time stops in the river as if it were encased in cement. Could be a boulder. Could be a submerged log. The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts. Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard. He is well over six feet. Blonde hair tumbles across his shoulders. The muscles in his arms are strong from many hundreds of miles of paddling. This salmon, nonetheless, is dragging him up the beach. The fish leaps into the air, thrashes at the river surface, and makes charging runs of such thrust that Pourchot has no choice but to follow or break the line. He follows – fifty, seventy-five yards down the river with the salmon. The fish now changes plan and goes upstream. Pourchot follows. The struggle lasts thirty minutes, and the energy drawn away is almost half Pourchot’s. He wins, though, because he is bigger. The fish is scarcely larger than his leg. When, finally, it moves out of the water and onto the gravel, it has no hook in its mouth. It has been snagged, inadvertently, in the dorsal fin. Alaska law forbids keeping any sport fish caught in that way. The salmon must take the lure in its mouth. Pourchot extracts the hook, gently lifts the big fish in his arms, and walks into the river. He will hold the salmon right side up in the water until he is certain that its shock has passed and that it has regained its faculties. Otherwise, it might turn bottom up and drown.

How wonderfully precise, rhythmic, and vivid that passage is! I particularly like the change in register from “The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts” to “Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard.”

Hemingway equated writing with making. In A Moveable Feast (1964), he says, “Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.” McPhee, too, is a maker. In his Paris Review interview (Spring 2010), he stresses the importance of structure in his writing: “If your structure really makes sense, you can make some jumps and your reader is going to go right with you.” McPhee is a master craftsman. His pieces are like the handmade bark canoes he describes in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975): “Turn them over – their ribs, thwarts, and planking suggested cabinetwork. Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable.”

In the Paris Review interview, when asked which writers he’s liked, McPhee answers, “I was drunk on Hemingway.” I detect traces of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River" in "The Encircled River." Both begin with vivid descriptions of fish seen from a downward looking angle through a river’s surface. In “The Encircled River,” McPhee looks down over the side of a canoe:

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

In “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” Nick looks down into the river from his position on a railway bridge:

Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them along time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

In both passages, the river is clear, the “gravel” bottom is visible, “shoot” and “shot” are used to indicate fish movement, fish break the water’s surface (“the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air,” “a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water”). McPhee writes, “noses north, into the current”; Hemingway writes, “noses into the current.”

Granted, there are major differences between the pieces, too. For one thing, “The Encircled River” is a fact piece; it’s about real people on a real river encountering a real bear. For another, three sections of it are written in a glorious, streaming present tense. “Big Two-Hearted River,” like most of Hemingway’s stories, is narrated in the past tense. Also, McPhee’s syntax is richer than Hemingway’s, and his sentences are more complex. And his verbs and adjectives are more evocative. His similes are more striking. (Note, for instance, that wonderful “Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins” in the above-quoted passage.) Maybe Hemingway has a keener ear for dialogue. But I’m not sure about that. In “The Encircled River,” John Kauffmann has a line – it consists of only two words (“Good God!”) – that cracks me up every time I read it.

Suffice it to say that “The Encircled River” and “Big Two-Hearted River” are both remarkable achievements. In order to understand how they were achieved, I suggest a good starting point is "the sequence of motion and fact.”