My Igloolik "New Yorker"

One of the most memorable days of my life began with The New Yorker. September 14, 2003, 6:30 a.m., I was lying in bed in my room at the Igloolik Hotel in Igloolik, Nunavut, reading Robert Gottlieb’s absorbing “The Years With Thurber” (The New Yorker, September 8, 2003). Near the end of the piece, Gottlieb quotes Thurber: “People are not funny; they are vicious and horrible—and so is life.” On that cheery note, I rose, dressed, and headed for the dining room for coffee. Shortly afterwards, my friend George Qulaut appeared and invited me to go seal hunting with him. We went out in George’s big freighter canoe. Foxe Basin brimmed with ice floes. During the course of the day, George shot and skinned a harp seal, a ring seal, and a bearded seal – the Inuit equivalent of hitting for the cycle. Late in the afternoon, we stopped at an ice pan – multiyear ice, George called it. It contained an aqua-colored pool. George scooped water from it and made tea on his Coleman stove. While we were there, we heard what sounded like an air hose - psssssssss. George said it was a bowhead. We looked and looked. Suddenly, about twenty feet away, the glistening black back of a bowhead calf emerged from the water. It was visible for only a few seconds, and then it disappeared. George said its mother was likely nearby. We thought we could hear her breathing. We looked for her, but didn’t see her. We headed back to Igloolik. “This is the sad part of the journey,” George said. But I didn’t feel sad. I was elated. It had been a wonderful day. Thurber was wrong. 

July 2, 2012 Issue

This week’s issue contains a curio – John McPhee’s “Editors & Publisher." It connects McPhee’s memories of three key people in his writing life (Robert Gottlieb, William Shawn, and Roger Strauss) through the use of “fuck” or variations thereof (e.g., “fucking,” “motherfucker”). McPhee writes: “Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word – with its silent ‘c’ and its quartzite ‘k’ – more shocking than a thunderclap.” Of the various “fuck”-themed anecdotes that McPhee relates in his piece, the one I most enjoyed was Roger Strauss saying “Fuck you” to McPhee when McPhee asked him for an advance. What I like about it is the way McPhee reveals, in the aftermath of the shock of hearing what Strauss said, that he (McPhee) may have teasingly provoked it (“Truth be told, though, the book was an amalgam of fragments of other books, for which he had long since paid advances”). “Editors and Publisher” raised a question in my mind: when it came time to publish “The Survival of the Bark Canoe” in book form, why didn’t McPhee change it to reflect what Warren Elmer actually said (“You fucking lunatic, head for the shore!”)? Why did he keep the bowdlerized New Yorker version (“You God-damned lunatic, head for the shore!”)?

“Editors and Publisher” provides valuable insight into The New Yorker’s evolving usage of “fuck.” But there’s another word I’m even more curious about. In my opinion, no expletive packs more punch than the blunt, concussive “cunt.” According to Erin Overbey’s “Bonfire of the Profanities” (“Back Issues,” newyorker.com, June 2, 2011), it first appeared in the magazine in Philip Roth’s short story “The Ultimatum” (June 26, 1995). I notice that John Updike uses it in the version of his great short story “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer,” included in his 2003 collection The Early Stories (“The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind on her cunt”). “Love Song, for a Moog Synthesizer” was originally published in The New Yorker, June 14, 1976. Checking it now, I’m not surprised to see that “cunt” has been airbrushed (so to speak); the line reads, “The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind now.”