John McPhee: Word-Rustler

Notes of a logophile on Irons in the Fire and The John McPhee Reader.

Let’s get chatoyant!

John McPhee was high on life, especially when his interests took him out into nature.  It makes me wonder what he thinks of the iPhone/Google computer era we are suffering through. Everybody ready to look up stuff in an instant, no time to doubt or wonder; everybody asking Alexa or Hey Google-ing themselves for the quickest know.  Without doubt John Mcphee was an avid logophile, a word-smith, before that a word-fossicker.  In his essays of six decades of crafting the marvelous disquisitions, whether writing about the environment, the nature of geological formations or artifacts, or concocting portraits of individuals who practice unusual professions and occupations, he worked at sharpening his own lexicon and that of his reader.     

In these explorations, it is the writer himself who is most often the dispenser of words that the reader must ponder, consider, and, in many cases, look up when the terms or terminology stops ready cognition.  For example, in the title essay on Nevada State Brand Inspector Chris Collis, from the collection Irons in the Fire (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), McPhee describes a scene near Las Vegas at evening hour in nonchalant prose: “In the dark of evening, he [Collis] was now headed for the park himself with the impounded calves, and the heavy traffic was confusing, the noise intense,”—and then for the final phrase he throws in the enchanting final adjective that pulls one up—“the lights of the casinos chatoyant.”  Not sure whether it’s the lights or the casinos that are “chatoyant,” one certainly plans at paragraph’s end to stop and consider a curious term never before encountered in writings of cowboy life in the West.

Chatoyant: obviously French and participial, perhaps having to do with a cat (vide le chat) and—well, cut to the chase—the dictionary tells the rest of the French, “with flickering or changing luster.” Like the flickering cats’ eyes on the road median, as casino signs rotate with their changing luminescence. Hmm! Chatoyant! Why hadn’t I come across that flashy word before? No telling what a reader can learn from McPhee’s lexical gems. And it is from a gem’s flashing luminescence that gives an opalescent or glistening stone the very name, a chatoyant. Most readers will probably know of McPhee’s affection for both words and stones, from his inclination towards geological subjects.  McPhee was a true petrophile.     

Cattle Rustlers and Cattle that Rustle

Then, it is in the same essay that a brand inspector’s argot can bring John McPhee himself up short:

              “In a conversation with Shirley Robison, the brand inspector emeritus, I learned that rustlers are cattle as well as people—a terminological knot.  ‘Angus-Hereford crosses are very popular—they’re good rustlers,’ Shirley said.

              I said, ‘They are good what?’

              ‘Rustlers.  They’re good at finding feed and trailing back and forth between the water and the feed in these long distances out on these alluvial benches and stuff.  They’ll get out and rustle.  Those Angus cows will go clear back up in the hills here and then come back down to water. There is cattle that are worthless.  You’ve got to get rid of ‘em. They won’t go out.  They’ll stand and half starve to death, and they won’t rustle for food.’” (Irons, p. 28)    

Out West, every kid has been told from time to time by Mom or Pop to go “rustle up” some grub in the kitchen. Perhaps on the East Coast it’s less common as a metaphor, but it was odd for the distinguished writer to hear cattle called rustlers rather than thieving human rustlers of cattle.   

 Crib Notes from McPhee’s Observations

We don’t often know much about the informal notation that McPhee uses for later editing in his accounts of adventures or profiles of people.  There is no workbook of notes and comments to help us, as there was for Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. However, in the essay on Brand Inspector Collis, McPhee breaks style to add a paragraph of notation that he scribbled down for later inclusion in the titular essay “Irons in the Fire.”  The fast-paced actions required the scribbled notes, the speed of Chris (C-1) and his son Christopher Collis (C-2) “throwing traps,” namely “throwing loops” to lasso calves:

“C-2, roping, misses, C-1, roping, misses, C-2 gets a bull calf in one leg, loses him, drops rope, C-1 misses.  Mom coils C-2’s rope. C-1 ropes two legs, and loses him or her. C-1 ropes a calf, yells to wife, “Get on him!”  Before Karen can get on him, the calf gets away.  C-1 misses again, C-2 misses, C-1 ropes a calf by both hind legs.  Mom is on her.  Calf bawling. Eleni crying. Mom sits on head. Eyes bulging, C-1 dismounts. Gerry, 9, gets on dad’s horse, holds rope taught to calf. C-1 gets vaccination gun, injects calf for blackleg, malignant edema, overeating disease, and red water.  Mom is kneeling on calf, holding its leg.  Mom is a surgical nurse.  She works in the OR at Willem Bee Ririe Hospital, Ely.” (Irons, p. 22-23)

Not all of the notes are included in the edited text, but it comes out partly as follows:

“Karen closes the gate. Christopher ‘throws a loop to catch a critter.” He misses. His dad throws a loop to catch a critter.  He misses. Christopher has been on horseback for seven years and has been working much of that time.”  (Irons, p. 22)

Here the quoted passage about “throwing a loop” seems to imply the way Inspector Collis explained the lassoing or else McPhee implies that such terminology is new to him.  “Roping” or “lassoing” probably being the ordinary term. The second time the throwing-a-loop expression is used, no quotes are required for the peculiarity of diction.  A careful punctuator is John McPhee.

The Love of Lists

John McPhee does love language, even to go on splurges of list-making. He loves the humor and poetry of language, too. At our discussion (December 5^th, 2019) I read the following passage from “Irons in the Fire”:

Chris Collis responds to McPhee’s admiration of the healthy cows around them gathered for auction:

              “He says, ’Fat is the prettiest color in the cattle business.’

              Out in the flats, coyotes are wailing like theft alarms.

              The cattle, silent, show no interest in the sound of coyotes.  All take another step forward.  The circle tightens.  And still another step.  It closes.  In their curiosity, they have built around two human beings a beef corral.  They occlude the falling sun and study us through twilight.  As my gaze moves among these candid faces, these guileless open non-judgmental faces—from one frank stare to the next—I see behind them future shoes.  These are the faces of big spotted owls, of snail darters, and three-spined sticklebacks.  These are, to a fare-thee-well, endangered specimens.  In their soft tanned appearance you can see the belts and briefcases.  There is chewing gum in a cow, soft cartilage for plastic surgery, floor waxes, glues, piano keys.  There are detergents, deodorants, crayons, paint, shaving cream, shoe cream, pocket combs, textiles, antifreeze, film, blood plasma, bone marrow, insulin, wallpaper, linoleum, cellophane, and Sheetrock.

              The sun is behind the mountains. We stand up to leave.  They scatter like fish.” (Irons, p. 18)

For those interested in other list-passages, you’ll find them in the John McPhee essay pieces in recent The New Yorker (January 13, 2020): “Tabula Rasa: Volume One.” (p.46-55)   For example, the air-spotter’s catalogue in “On the Campus” (p.52-53):  The first is a series of technical terms, descriptions of aircraft that might invade American airspace, for spotting which young John McPhee had been trained to observe and later report to the U.S. Army Ground Observer Corps. Middle-aged women and young boys were mainly the recruits who learned the aircraft.  Presumably young boys would have had an interest in airplane names from books and magazines.  In England in the 1940s and 1950s, as a young boy among a small street gang, I used to bike to railway lines to spot locomotive engines. The hobby was known as trainspotting, now famous from Irvine Welsh’s novel and Danny Boyle’s movie of that name.  Also among a set of books, called The Observer’s Books (London, Frederick Warne and Company), I had collected dozens of these 3”X6” color-plated gems for my library, one of which was the Observer’s Book of Aircaft, compiled by William Green and Gerald Pollinger (3^rd. ed. 1955). In this I can find many of the planes listed in McPhee’s short catalogue:

“. . . the course was fun, like some precursive television show, as the black silhouette of an aircraft came up on a large screen and was gone two seconds later while you were writing down its name.  Messerschmitt ME-109.  Next slide, two seconds: Mitsubishi Zero.  Next slide, two seconds: Grumman Avenger.  Next slide, two seconds: Vought-Sikoursky Corsair. Yes, the American planes were the only planes we would never report to regional headquarters, in New York, or somewhere, in a cryptic sequence from a filled-in, columned sheet: “one, bi, low” and so forth—one twin engine, flying low, often a DC-3 descending to Newark.  We saw Piper Cubs, Stinson Reliants, and more DC-3s.  We saw Martin Marauders, Curtiss-Wright Warhawks, Republic Thunderbolts, Bell Airacobras, Lockheed Lightnings, Consolidated Liberators.  It would have been treason to say that we were eager to see Heinkel HE-111s or Dornier-17s.  We did not really know what was going on. We were ten, eleven years old and not regarded as precocious.” (“On the Campus” in “Tabula Rasa,” The New Yorker, p. 52)

Just how name-magic this activity conjured up for young McPhee is indicated by the continuation of his list: 

“Next slide, two seconds: Supermarine Seafire. Next slide, two seconds: Supermarine Spitfire. What a name—the aircraft that won the Battle of Britain. Bristol Beaufort, Bristol Beaufighter, Hawker Hurricane, Hawker Typhoon, de Havilland Mosquito, Gloster Gladiator, Vickers Wellington.But we were there because we knew them from Fokker, and Fokker from Focke-Wolf.  Ilyushin, Tupolev, Lavochkin, Mikoyan-Gurevich.  Next. . .” (OTC, p. 52-53)

Here he shows his fascination for learning words, sorting and classifying splashy terms and foreign ones, and for naming and nomenclature (notice the alliteration).  McPhee had a talent for encompassing the whole subject.  His readers could detect his inclination for technical studies and naming names accurately in all manner of things.  Not many today would be familiar with the names in the lists above.  They have perhaps to be taken for their sounds, their music.     

Not finished yet!  The following is the kind of McPhee list that attracts me.  As a young naturalist, I studied birds, fish, mammals and insects.  When he was fourteen, McPhee had the job of biology lab assistant, cleaning up old formaldehyde in jars and refilling the contents with new preservative liquids and resealing the jar with fresh beeswax:

“When I was fourteen, a recurrent vision would enter my mind as I drowned fruit flies in the Guyot basement.  This is what happens when you die:  In the immediate afterlife, you are confronted by every macroscopic creature you killed in your earthbound lifetime.  They came at you as a massive crowd, which, in my case, would consist of ants, mosquitoes, yellow jackets, houseflies, fruit flies, horseflies, spiders, centipedes, cockroaches, moles, mice, shrews, snakes, trout, catfish, sand sharks, walleyes, wasps, rabbits, ticks, lampreys, leeches, ladybugs, beetles, centrarchids, annalids, American shad, Atlantic salmon, honeybees, hornets, Arctic char, Pacific salmon, pike, pickerel, porcupines, caterpillars, butterflies, bluefish, moths, mullet, perch, suckers, fallfish and bats, not to mention roadkill squirrels, raccoons, pheasant and deer.  They envelop you like a cloud, a fog that bites.” (OTC, p. 53)

What exactly is it that makes one compile a list in such a sequence of living things? How did this “massive crowd” come swarming in?  Is there a rhyme or reason to McPhee’s list-making?  Crowded images: “Moles, mice, shrews, snakes…”; houseflies, fruit flies, horseflies…”; “lampreys, leeches, ladybugs…”; caterpillars, butterflies, bluefish, moths, mullet…”; pike, pickerel, porcupines… .” How would you have made one up?  These days we might be haunted by all the creatures that have become extinct because of human mismanagement of the earth’s ecosystems.  The many birds that have vanished, the species of fish fished out or unable to thrive in acidic waters, the bees and other insects eradicated by pesticides.  What fogs do we know that bite?   

Plumbing Writing Materials: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral

Interesting words show up without explanation.  The animal is the word-hunter.  Presumably the McPhee reader has had such a term as plumbago explained in previous essays, or else the author wishes the reader to research, to fossick this lexical peculiarity.  The term appears without explanation in “Survival of the Bark Canoe,” the final essay in The [first] John McPhee Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976):

Henry David Thoreau went up into the Maine woods where McPhee and Henri Vaillancourt, the Bark Canoe cutter of the essay, went to try out the boat.  “He [Thoreau] made two bark-canoe trips here, in 1853 and 1857, each time with an Indian guide.  He went down this [West Branch of the Penobscot] river.  He went to the lake where Henri Vaillancourt—a hundred and twenty years later—would hide the felled cedar. Looking for moose in the night, he went up Moosehorn Stream.  No moose.  He had in his pack some pencils and an oilskin pouch full of scratch paper–actually letters that customers had written to his family business, ordering plumbago and other printing supplies.” (TJPR, p. 358)

Plants have been a major interest of mine these past years. For plumbago, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4^th ed.) helps to name the botanical plumbago, more commonly known as “lead-wort.” Initially, however, one finds: “1. see graphite.” Even so, that botanical term looks worth a look.  The plumb +ago is indicative of the “lead-“part of the plant word, from Latin plumbum.  Microsoft has created an app with the same name: Plumbago, a writing, drawing and coloring program.  In the YouTube image for the use of the Microsoft Garage toolkit, plumbago is described as: “1. Old-fashioned term for graphite. 2. An evergreen flowering schrub [sic] or climber which is widely distributed in warm regions. Also called leadwort.—Oxford Dictionary.”   Not to be ambiguous, the Microsoft picture shows a hand painting blue petals of a type of plumbaginous plant. Although I had guessed it might have been an ink-like substance for sketching or such, I never had come across the graphic nature of the word until now. 

In a further search for “ink and plumbago,” I was offered an unusual list from a publication entitled INKS: THEIR COMPOSITION AND MANUFACTURE (by Charles Ainsworth Mitchell and Thomas Craddock Hepworth, 1904). Among other references, a chronological table helped to get at the nature of the plumbago printer’s use, which included dates and names followed by a subject-matter description.  Thoreau does not appear in it for the mid-nineteenth century but the name Melville (whether Herman Melville I’m not sure)does, and appropriately dated 1860, and the description of the ink recipe states: “Indelible Ink.  Plumbago with resin, gum, &c., alum and a suitable colouring-matter.” Other substance descriptions for that mid-century time span do not include plumbago in the ink recipe, but it would indicate in New England of that time, ink manufacturers were using black lead to make writing, drawing and printing inks.  Why did John McPhee not just say that Thoreau had scratch paper, actually letters, paper ones, rather than, say, linen or vellum, on which were orders for a patented ink, called plumbago,  made not from the juices of the lead-wort plant, but from graphite?  Well, not exactly so prolix as I’ve just stated it, but just as “graphite and other printing supplies”?  McPhee probably wanted to send the reader on a plumbago hunt among plants and minerals for meanings, just as I have performed.  And the exploration helps to explode the subject, much like the blue links that scatter the computer researcher’s mind about the world-wide-web.  It seems the word graphite was once a plain synonym of plumbago.    Along the way, I discovered in the same antiquarian INK book, that plumbago was an ink that resisted fire. Just the thing for those writing by campfire light and candlelight. 

A heavy subject, getting used to plumbago.  Now, do you want to know the –ago part? Well, have a go at that suffix yourself. 

(For further study, see “Between Paint and Print: Plumbago Portraits in Britain and the Netherlands”by Marjorie E. Wieseman in Perfect Likeness: European and American Portrait Miniatures from the Cincinnati Art Museum (Yale University Press, 2006).

David Gilmour

January 18, 2020.