Reticent McPhee offers personal glimpses in new book

  • By Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times
  • Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:49pm
  • Life

John McPhee, “Silk Parachute,” $25

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.

McPhee’s new collection of essays, “Silk Parachute,” 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. Princeton University is McPhee’s “fixed foot.” From here, he has traveled the world writing stories about “real people doing real things.”

On a rare “personal” tour of the campus, he shows us 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 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 said, 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.”

McPhee has described writing as “mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor.” Each day, he said, brings a “new form of writer’s block.” He elaborates: “You suspend the normal world to reproduce the normal world. It is a suspension of ordinary life.”

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