Tabula Rasa: Volume 1

By: John McPhee

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

A literary legend’s engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.

Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.

In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to—people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a “reminiscent montage” from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee’s singular planet.

©2023 John McPhee (P)2023 Recorded Books

Vintage McPhee

He can engage and sustain the reader’s interest in nearly any topic under the Sun.

Great creative nonfiction, in spite of the reader

I could listen to this book all over again, but I won-t because the reader reads off every character in several web URLs. He plows through a dozen websites character by character.

Great Depth of Princeton History and s o much more!

Great prose by a master. A must read for His view of the World and so much more!

A New Yorker writer surveys his office boxes...

"With the same ulterior motive*, I could undertake to describe in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written."
- John McPhee, "Thorton Wilder at the Century," Tabula Rasa (Volume 1?)

* When McPhee was young he went to a lunch with Thorton Wilder, when asked "Wilder said he was not actually writing a new play or novel but was fully engaged in a related project. He was cataloguing the plays of Lope de Vega. Lope de Vega wrote some eighteen hundred full-length plays. Four hundred and thirty-one survive. How long would it take to read four hundred and thirty-one plays? How long would it take to summarize each in descriptive detail and fulfill the additional requirements of cataloguing?"

***

Now in his early 90s, McPhee better understands: "I know that those four hundred and thirty-one plays were serving to extend Thornton Wil­der’s life."

That is the purpose of this book. McPhee is, at the bidding of his wife, his daughter, or the inevitable tug of the eternities, going through his files: organizing, reminiscing, looking for gems, remembering adventures, friends. Bringing to light the hidden, the unpublished, the errata and errant pages and proposals.

He has been periodically adding these to the New Yorker: drip, drip, drip.

Tabula Rasa appeared 3 times from Jan 2020 to Feb 2022.

"Tabula Rasa: Vol 1" appeared in the New Yorker on Jan 12, 2020, and included the vignettes:
1. Trujillo
2. Thorton Wilder at the Century
3. The Moons of Methuselah
4. "Hitler Youth"
5. The Bridges of Christian Menn
6. The Airplane that Crashed in the Woods
7. On the Campus
8. The Guilt of the US Male
9. Extremadura

"Tabula Rasa: Vol 2" appeared in the New Yorker on Apr 19, 2021, and included the vignettes:
1. Sloop to Gibraltar
2. The Valley
3. December 19,1943
4. The Dutch Ship Tyger
5. Ray Brock
6. Writer

"Tabula Rasa: Vol 3" appeared in the New Yorker on Feb 7, 2022, and included the vignettes:
1. Not that One
2. Night Watchman
3. George Recker and Dr. Dick
4. Dinners with Henry Luce
5. Bourbon and Bing Cherries
6. Dropped Antaeus

These 21 small pieces represent a little less than 1/2: 21/50. Clearly, if you like what you read in the New Yorker, you still need to buy the book. Fair. I would hyperlink to the New Yorker articles, but unfortunately, Goodreads only allows one to link to things from inside goodreads.com. Booo!

McPhee might be my favorite nonfiction writer, but while these pieces do present an interesting structure and allow the reader to get a bigger sense of a big writer, they are also cast-offs. Some parts are amazing, others are filler, and the structure seems more like a Smörgåsbord of memories, people, reflections, and almost taken paths. I enjoyed it, but these 50 pieces can't compete with McPhee's great books. This is Michael Jordan at 60 not the GOAT at 20-30.

Excellent McPhee Miscellany

The wonderful writer John McPhee could offer us the phone book and make it interesting. These seemingly unconnected pieces revolve around his life in Princeton and his career as a writer. The narration is perfect and as precise and intelligent as the writing.