Off the page
In “Royal Wedding,” a charming MGM musical from 1951, Fred Astaire sings and tap dances up the wall, across the ceiling and down another wall of his ocean liner stateroom.
Astaire performs with an ease that belies the complex shot. The “magic” in the scene resulted from tricky, intricately timed maneuvering of the stateroom set, which was encased in a giant turning cylinder. The shot must have taken days to time and rehearse — at some risk to Astaire’s limbs. (You can see details of how the shot was achieved on YouTube.)
Graceful, effortless work resulting from meticulous, detailed and painstaking preparation is what a reader sees in John McPhee’s fascinating “Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process.”
McPhee brings decades of experience to this book on writing. Early in his career he wrote for Time magazine and then moved to the New Yorker. He wrote 32 nonfiction books on subjects as diverse as the Mississippi River, farmers markets and oranges. He is an eminent and popular teacher of writing at Princeton University.
And so he knows well of the doubts, uncertainties and myriad choices that bedevil writers. He sums up perfectly the insecurities and the blocks writers face when they begin work:
“To lack confidence at the outset seems rational to me. It doesn’t matter that something you’ve done before worked out well. Your last piece is never going to write your next one for you.”
Facing a blank page for a New Yorker piece he wanted to write on the New Jersey Pine Barrens, McPhee recalls that in the summer of 1966, he spent nearly two weeks lying on a picnic table in his back yard. He had no idea “where or how to begin.”
In “Draft No. 4,” McPhee details in a series of eight essays, which originally appeared in the New Yorker, how he progresses from blank stares into the sky to pages filled with words. To start, he illustrates how he plans the structure of his pieces with complex, sometimes abstruse diagrams.
For a piece on backpacking with wild-food expert Euell Gibbons, McPhee drew out a series of clocks representing stages of the trip. For “Travels in Georgia,” an essay chronicling a 1,100-mile journey through the state, McPhee drew a swooping line notched with markers indicating encounters with a rattlesnake, a weasel and a turtle.
The author also fills note cards, arranging them on a table in neat columns. He types sheets of ideas, cutting them into narrow strips of paper he can rearrange.
Focused on what he needs to write an essay, McPhee hits the road for material. His tales from the field comprise some of the most entertaining sections of the book. On a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, David Brower, “the high priest of Sierra Club,” sought refuge on a bank to avoid bouncing through a treacherous passage. Dam builder Floyd Dominy, a member of the expedition, remarked that “‘the great outdoorsman’ ... was ‘standing safely on dry land wearing a God-damned life jacket.’ ”
McPhee also entertains with tales from his encounters with interview subjects unknown and famous. In 1961, he pursued Jackie Gleason, effusive and accessible one moment, paranoid and closed off the next. When the rotund actor stepped into his trailer on the set of “The Hustler,” McPhee recalls, “it squished down half a foot and nearly capsized.”
McPhee also draws examples from his work with editors to indicate what writers encounter in their travails. His uncle, who headed the publishing firm of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, once advised his nephew, “Authors are a dime a dozen. The dog is immortal.”
Since McPhee spent so much of his career writing for the New Yorker, his advice to writers brims with tales of working there, landing “Draft No. 4” on the groaning shelves of books about the magazine. Add to New Yorker lore McPhee’s account of how writer Calvin Trillin persuaded a sometimes prudish William Shawn to use the words “ram it.”
Highlighting the book are liberal quotes from McPhee’s work, showing how his scattered note cards, paper slithers, encounters with eccentric editors and testy interviewees ultimately lead to simple, graceful prose. As an example of the latter, consider McPhee’s description of a grizzly he encountered in Alaska:
“The bear was about a hundred steps away, in the blueberries, grazing. The head was down, the hump high. The immensity of muscle seemed to vibrate slowly — to expand and contract, with the grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear.”
The detailed accounting of his methods, the witty sense of the writer’s life and the sincere encouragement McPhee offers in “Draft No. 4” will surely encourage able writers to believe that they, too, might follow his precepts and craft a description like this one — something so good it makes them want to dance up the side of a wall.