Quote of the Day (John McPhee, Paying Tribute to His Headmaster)

“[Deerfield Academy headmaster Frank] Boyden has the gift of authority. He looks fragile, his voice is uncommanding, but people do what he says. Without this touch, he would have lost the school on the first day he worked there. Of the seven boys who were in the academy when he took over in 1902, at least four were regarded by the populace with fear, and for a couple of years it had been the habit of Deerfield to cross the street when passing the academy….The boys were, on the average, a head taller and thirty pounds heavier than the headmaster. The first day went by without a crisis. Then, as the students were getting ready to leave, Boyden said, ‘Now we’re going to play football.’ Sports had not previously been a part of the program at the academy. Scrimmaging on the village common, the boys were amused at first, and interested in the novelty, but things suddenly deteriorated in a hail of four-letter words. With a sour look, the headmaster said, ‘Cut that out!’ That was all he said, and—inexplicably—it was all he had to say.”—John McPhee, The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield (1966)

Today is the 80th birthday of prolific New Yorker contributor John McPhee (in the image accompanying this post). Far be it from me to argue with the deliberations of those who select Pulitzer Prize winners, but over the last several decades, as the Princeton, N.J. resident has concentrated increasingly—almost obsessively—on the physical world (e.g., Basin and Range), I have tended to avoid his work. 

(I blame The New Yorker, which, in the last years of the William Shawn era, became so musty that it allowed favored writers to muse, often at interminable length, on just about anything—see, for instance, E.J. Kahn Jr.’s Staffs of Life, a book that grew out of his multi-part series on grain.)

But in McPhee's early days, when he profiled real human beings, he gave an extraordinary vivid picture of their world. 

A Sense of Where You Are, for instance, remains, more than four decades after its appearance, the essential account for understanding why Bill Bradley made such a huge impression on the basketball world in college.

Likewise, The Headmaster masterfully describes, toward the end of his 66-year career at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, its benevolent despot, headmaster Frank Boyden. This piece benefits more than a little from intimate familiarity with its subject. (McPhee was a product of the school himself during Boyden’s long reign). 

If you want to know not just about the rise of one of this country’s major prep schools—more than that, what makes an institution-builder tick—then this is the book for you.

It’s astonishing to realize that, in his six decades with the school, Boyden—whose demeanor, according to McPhee, suggested “a small, grumpy Labrador”—not only kept no written rules but only expelled a half-dozen students altogether. 

Would that record be possible to maintain in today’s world of broken homes that damage young lives, the substance abuse to which teens are exposed—and litigators ready to pounce on the lack of any written record of school policies?

(By the way, film fans: the 1982 Diane Keaton-Albert Finney movie Shoot the Moon was based on a screenplay by Bo Goldman, a former Princeton classmate of McPhee’s. More than a decade after its premiere, McPhee’s ex-wife sued the filmmakers, alleging that the events onscreen depicted her marital strife as witnessed by Goldman while he was a guest of the couple. The case was settled out of court.)