Word: mcphee
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THERE is a place in John McPhee's new collection of magazine articles, Pieces of the Frame, where two photographers from New York City go up in the country to cut some firewood. They stop on the way to rent a chainsaw at a place called Paden Rental and, they being artists from New York City, it takes the store's owner a while to get his bearings. "Paden, if that was his name," McPhee writes, "looked from one customer to another with an expression that seemed to suggest that this energy crisis had started some extremely novel trends...
Pieces of the Frame is a book that is somehow out of synch with the body of American magazine journalism, and the phrase about Paden is typical of its differentness. McPhee could easily enough have asked the man renting chain saws what his name was, and avoided having to say "Paden, if that was his name." It's certainly one of the prevailing canons of all levels of journalism that writers shouldn't leave out facts, or that if for some reason they are forced to they should at least make a better effort to cover their tracks...
...McPhee is nothing if not professional, though, and it's doubtful his slip was accidental. Instead. he seems--heresy of heresies--to have left out a fact on purpose, apparently because he is more interested at that particular moment in conveying things through the eyes of the New York photographers. They don't know the rental agent's name so neither will McPhee's readers. By concerning himself with things like point of view and particularly with achieving a certain kind of narrative tone, McPhee sacrifices the kind of reportorial strictness and tone that readers of journalism are used...
...tone is the key to it all; it lets McPhee write in an unusually personal way. He begins an article about Loch Ness, home of the monster, by telling his readers that he and his wife and four daughters were sitting next to the Loch picnicking on "milk, potato sticks, lambs' tongues, shortbread, white chocolate, Mini-Dunlop cheese." Another article is about a basketball game McPhee played in some time ago. Another, about a white-water canoeing championship, spends much of its time talking about the kinds of canoes McPhee paddled in as a child and how he went about...
...McPhee notes that one of these Government pamphlets, detailing problems that arose during the making of the first A-bombs, carries a thoughtful dis claimer: "Neither the United States, nor the [Atomic Energy] Commission . . . assumes any liabilities with respect to the use of, or for damages resulting from the use of, any information, ap paratus, method, or process disclosed in this report...