Quote of the Day (John McPhee, on ‘Elusive’ Typographical Errors)

“Typographical errors are more elusive than cougars. One of my sons-in-law, the poet Mark Svenvold, wrote a nonfiction book called ‘Big Weather,’ about tornadoes and people who chase them, from meteorologists to simple gawkers. Mark went to Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, and rode around with both categories. When ‘Big Weather’ appeared in hardcover, a sentence in the opening paragraph mentioned ‘the Gulf of New Mexico.’ Where did that mutinous ‘New’ come from, a typo right up there with ‘pretty’ for ‘petty’? Mark said it was unaccountable. For a starter, I suggested that he look in his computer, if the original manuscript was still there. It was, and in that first paragraph was the Gulf of New Mexico…. It had been read by a literary agent, an acquisitions editor, an editorial assistant, a copy editor, a professional proofreader, at least one publicity editor—and not one of these people had noticed the … Gulf of New Mexico.” Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction writer John McPhee, “Tabula Rosa: Volume 4,” The New Yorker, May 20, 2024

As a first-time author, I derive comfort in knowing that even an accomplished veteran like John McPhee and his son-in-law feel bedeviled by typos.

While the longtime New Yorker mainstay likens them to cougars, I regard them as gremlins—mysterious, mischievous forces that torment anyone who wants to communicate their ideas to a wider world.

In the first company I worked for after college, all printed materials had to be proofread not just by the original copywriter, but by another one in the department—and, at each successive stage, preferably by a copywriter who hadn’t seen this before.

The thinking—and it was very wise—was that with each reading, a proofreader’s eyes would glaze over. Someone coming to it fresh would be more likely to spot a mistake.

Nevertheless, as with McPhee’s son-in-law, an error would still sometimes slip into the finished product.

At one point during my time at that company, I came across a cartoon showing a melancholy homeless man, carrying a sign reading, FORMER POOFREADER. Once I finished chuckling, I thought, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” I’m sure many of my co-workers felt likewise.

Quote of the Day (John McPhee, on How ‘Writing is Selection’)

“Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language.”—Nonfiction writer John McPhee, “Writing by Omission,” The New Yorker, Sept 14, 2015

Quote of the Day (John Lindsay, on the Man Born to ‘Make the Mummies Dance’)

“Tom has a natural, unstudied political talent. There's nothing he can't do....He is a thoroughly civilized man. He understands the dynamics of institutional life. In the [Metropolitan] Museum [of Art], he’ll make the mummies dance.”—New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay on Thomas Hoving, quoted in John McPhee, “A Roomful of Hovings,” in The John McPhee Reader (1976)

Longtime supporters of some institutions might praise them as “stable,” but other “s” words would spring to the lips of detractors, such as “staid,” “starchy” and “stultifying.” Thomas Hoving—born on this day in 1931 in New York City—belonged to this latter group.

John Lindsay, who campaigned into Gracie Mansion on the strength of the juicy Murray Kempton quote, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired,” saw a kindred disrupter in Hoving, who left his job as the mayor’s Parks Commissioner after only a year to take over the Met. Hoving lasted in his new post for a decade, but in many ways his controversial leadership there shaped him even to his death in 2009.

Like many a born plutocrat (his father, Walter, was the formidable head of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s), Hoving harbored populist aspirations. At the Parks Department, he sponsored “Happenings” where people could fly kites, paint on canvases, and build castles of plastic foam, and he spearheaded the building of vest-pocket parks throughout the city, including its most poverty-stricken areas. At the Met, he organized crowd-drawing blockbuster exhibits, including the one that absorbed much of his energy toward the end of his tenure, on King Tut.

One of Hoving’s most controversial practices was deaccessioning, or removing an item from the museum, usually through a sale to raise money for new acquisitions or for closing budget gaps. As Hilton Kramer wrote in 2005 for The New Criterion, the practice is not illegal and can even be justified if the item lies outside the mission of the institution, but is often ethically shady because it results in the loss of a property given in good faith. Hoving’s resort to this, involving the sale of important impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, seemed particularly questionable.

Eventually, the Met board, tiring of Hoving’s high-flying ways and unorthodox manner, forced his ouster. In 1981, he took over Connoisseur, shaking things up there as thoroughly—and, perhaps, more catastrophically—than he had at the Met. Under his leadership, the publication switched its focus to examine the inside world of museums, giving full vent, for instance, to Hoving’s beefs about the Getty. Connoisseur went under in 1991.

His memoirs written after his Met stewardship, King of the Confessors and Making the Mummies Dance (the latter drawn, of course, from Lindsay’s colorful remark), told great stories but at the expense of Hoving’s reputation for probity. The man who could write, “I had always been able to lie convincingly,” did little to persuade longtime critics that his departure from the Met was an awful thing. At the same time, they demonstrated why he felt that leading the Met not only required “a gifted connoisseur, a well-trained scholar, an aesthete, a patient diplomat, a deft fundraiser, an executive, and a conciliator,” but also “part gunslinger, ward heeler, legal fixer, accomplice smuggler, anarchist, and toady.”

McPhee’s profile, written for The New Yorker only a few months after Hoving took over at the Met, is, like another early piece on Bill Bradley, an affectionate look at a fellow Princetonian. It does not overlook its subject’s wild youth (including expulsion from Exeter for slugging a Latin teacher for only giving him an A-). But it also captures his lack of snobbishness and his longstanding cultivation of his powers of observations—honed at first in an unhappy stint at a clothing shop in his youth, where he sized up quickly the apparel and footwear tastes of prostitutes and gays, then later as a low-level curator for the Met in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Hoving was a curious figure who practiced his curiosity to the utmost, especially in his abiding interest in forgeries. His remarks to McPhee on the subject say much about the primary instrument for anyone involved in the study of art:

“Your eye is king. Get in touch with other scholars - everybody you think is expert . . . Learn the history of the piece - where it is from, what collections it has belonged to, all the information surrounding its discovery. Then get the work of art with you and live with it as long as you possibly can. You have to watch it. Watch it…. A work of art will grow the more it is with you. It will grow in stature, and fascinate you more and more. If it is a fake, it will eventually fall apart before your eyes like a piece of plaster."

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.)