Reporting from Princeton, N.J. — There's a fault line opening in John McPhee. After 28 books and countless essays, he is giving us, bit by bit, a more personal sense of who he is. In a recent, beautiful piece for the New Yorker, he combined an essay on pickerel with memories of his father's death and a lasting image of his father's bamboo fishing rod. The piece took many readers by surprise -- not the style, which was the same seamless combination of carefully chosen details and information, but the presence of the author, blinking in full glare. According to McPhee, who turns 79 next month, he was as surprised as anyone to find himself hooked by memories, exposed.
John McPhee's new book gets personal
THE WRITER'S LIFE
His new collection of essays, 'Silk Parachute,' contains pieces of his own history for a change.
Writer John McPhee, who turns 79 in March, has a new collection of essays… (Jennifer S. Altman / For…)
McPhee's new collection of essays, "Silk Parachute" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 228 pp., $25), is named for a marvelous toy his mother gave him for his 11th or 12th birthday, and it contains more pieces of personal history: the time he didn't finish his sandwich and his mother ran after him and made him eat it; the time he went to a football game with his father and realized, looking up at the press box, that he wanted to be a writer; the pride he feels watching his nine grandchildren, to whom he dedicates the book.
In the past, McPhee's strategy had been to explain a little bit about why he is writing -- about oranges, tennis, trains, geology, fish, Bill Bradley, David Brower, you name it -- and then get out of the frame. Sure, he leaves traces: We feel we might know his voice if we heard it in a coffee shop, and we can taste his presence, his influence over a generation of journalists and essayists. But we would not recognize him if he were seated next to us.
McPhee is very shy. He doesn't do many interviews and he has written about his own clammy-handed nervousness interviewing others or speaking in public. For 35 years, he has taught a writing seminar two out of three spring semesters at Princeton, the university he attended, in the town where he grew up. That's about it for public speaking.
Centered in Princeton
Princeton is McPhee's "fixed foot." From here, he has traveled the world writing stories about "real people doing real things." On a winter afternoon, snow threatening, he gives a tour of the campus. Nassau Hall, built in 1756, served as the United States Capitol for six months. George Washington presided over Congress here. Reunion Hall is where John F. Kennedy lived as a freshman, and here is a building where a ghostly John Nash can still be seen. Then there's the personal tour: the church where his mother took him after he was caught playing poker all night in college; John Henry House, where he has taught since 1975.
McPhee's office is in a fake medieval turret high in the geology building. There are five vertical windows perfect for crossbows. One climbs past globes and rock samples and maps of the universe to arrive in the room where he writes most days and meets with students. "Don't forget to lock your door when you leave to go home," reads a note one of McPhee's four daughters, Martha, wrote in 1975. The geologist Eldridge Moores (about whom McPhee writes in "Assembling California") worked on his PhD in this room in the 1950s. When McPhee first took possession, there was no heat but that was all right -- he just left the door open and the heat was sucked up from the lower floors. His computer, named Isobel after one of his grandchildren, looks like it might have come with the room.
McPhee admits that he is writing more about his memories. The new collection's title essay, about his mother, was written in 1996, a year before she died at age 100. In 1984, within a few months of his father's death, he jotted the words "bamboo rod" on a piece of paper, which became a folder, which became the essay that appeared in the New Yorker. McPhee, who normally bicycles 15 to 16 miles every other day for exercise and is rarely idle, blames recent hand surgeries, with the attendant resting and medication required, for the fault line that has opened up. "I just started writing. I guess I'm not used to all that spare time," he says, surprised. "I usually know where I'm going with a story. A novelist can feel her way with a story, but that's not the case in nonfiction. It's a central theme of the course I teach: Know where you're going."
Two of McPhee's four daughters, Jenny and Martha, are novelists; Laura is a photographer; and Sarah is an architectural historian ("the real scholar," he says). Martha, who has written quite a bit about her childhood, has encouraged her father to write more autobiographical pieces, to open up and enjoy himself. He marvels at his writing daughters. "I'll call Jenny up and say, do you have any ideas for your next novel? 'I finished it last week,' she'll say. She's like me. She believes in fait accompli."
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