Ben Crair's introduction to John McPhee at the Kelly Writers House
February 12, 2007

It is with some embarrassment as an aspiring journalist that I must admit that I had not read any of John McPhee's writing before I heard last semester that he would be a Writers House Fellow. After the announcement, I walked to a nearby used bookstore and found a copy of Mr. McPhee's collection, Pieces of the Frame, which contained three essays on Scotland.

It had not yet been a year since I had returned from a semester abroad in Edinburgh, so I was particularly interested in these essays. The title piece was about Loch Ness, a lake in whose depths I had sought the elusive monster but caught only my own reflection. In this essay, Mr. McPhee also mentions how, as a youth, he had canoed at Lake George, a popular summer resort for people from my hometown in upstate New York This was enough to excite my overeager imagination, which liberally withdrew from these geographical coincidences a reassurance that my life was similar to Mr. McPhee's and might continue to be so. This was admittedly a juvenile comparison, but one that I could not occasionally resist repeating as I read more McPhee. One of the consequences of my semester abroad was a new dissatisfaction with my own voice. It seemed to me one of life's great tragedies that I did not speak with a natural Scottish accent. Sometimes, on companionless walks home from class, I would refine my brogue by muttering obvious sentiments about the weather into the raised hood of my jacket. My accent, as you hear it now, is as derivative of upstate New York as it is of most other American suburbs and in contrast to my Scottish friends it seemed tawdry and bland.

So it was comforting to read Coming into the Country and discover Mr. McPhee admitting a similar displeasure with the sound of his own voice: conversing with a man named Michael John David, he writes, "His voice is soft too - fluid and melodic, like nearly all the voices in the Village. The contrast with my own is embarrassing. No matter how I try to modulate it, to experiment with his example, my voice in dialogue with Michael's sounds to me strident, edgy, and harsh."

I was encouraged by this passage, not just because I learned that Mr. McPhee shared my insecurity, but also because his writing suggests a way of overcoming it. I might be stuck with my flavorless suburban accent but on the written page, the boundaries that divide my voice from the voices of others become permeable. John McPhee has been penetrating these boundaries now for forty years. By folding the unique vernaculars of his subjects in with his own writing he creates pieces that are not just sequences of his own observations but also treatises between outsider and insider, writer and subject.

It is common for Mr. McPhee, whether he be writing about truckers, geologists, Alaskans, cattle ranchers, or train conductors, to not only translate his subjects' unique voices but also to try them on for himself. After defining an idiom, Mr. McPhee might use it again pages later, unquoted, as if it were a particle of his ordinary vocabulary.

After four weeks of intense study and debate, my fellow seminarians and I have concluded that John McPhee's value as a writer is not only journalistic, but also linguistic and anthropologic. Mr. McPhee preserves the languages and the legacies of increasingly rare kinds of people. In the essay "Coal Train" he records the words and habits of two coal train workers, whose jobs are threatened by complete mechanization; in The Pine Barrens, we find listed the local mythologies of men like Fred Brown, whose forested home seems doomed for development; Heirs of General Practice touts the value of family practitioners, a marginalized minority in the increasingly compartmentalized medical field; "Out in the Sort" surveys the automated dystopia of the UPS headquarters, where "de-skilled" laborers cannot find their way around. Most dramatically, in Coming into the Country, he meets the Gelvins, a father and son mining team destroying an Alaskan stream in search of gold. "Am I disgusted?" Mr. McPhee asks. "Manifestly not. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing…the relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska." He then meditates on the conflict between preservationists and developers, and concludes that "I am closer to the preserving side - that is, the side that would preserve the Gelvins."

I imagine that men like the Gelvins are harder to find today than they were when Mr. McPhee wrote those words thirty years ago. If this is the case, we cannot claim ignorance of what we have lost because John McPhee reminds us. He has preserved not only their names but also the technical minutia of their daily routines and the nuances of their speech. Each of Mr. McPhee's texts is a material realization of his subjects' quiet voices, and in recording them he has solidified the importance of his own.

It is only right, given the themes of this introduction, that I acknowledge its content not as my own but rather a shared conclusion that I have reached over the past four weeks with my classmates. I invite them to join me in thanking Mr. McPhee for showing us that it is not the sounds of our own voices that distinguish us as writers, but rather the acuteness and patience with which we listen to the voices of others. In listening to him now, I hope you can hear not just the voice of a single man, but also the chorus of his subjects, whose words are continually renewed through his writing.

It is my honor to welcome with you the first Writers House Fellow of 2007, John McPhee.