An Ecology Archdruid Revealed by John McPhee’s Inquiry and Artistry

Thoughts on Topic

A key factor in the groundbreaking status and relevance of John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid is his adept choice of a topic. In 1977, when the book was first published, environmentalism had just begun to break into the American consciousness in a profound way. Headlines and battling advertisements, replete with overstatements and select claims on both sides, loudly decried (or defended) mankind’s abuse/use of the earth’s resources: a copper mine pit visible from the moon; Alaska pipeline; population control; logging, pro and con, man controlling nature… (37, 145). It was a world soon to face the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the eruption of Mount St. Helens—a dichotomy of man’s impact on nature and nature’s supremacy over man. The conversations of the book were destined to become of a piece with the will for ecological progress in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, just ahead of the national wake-up call provided by the Love Canal contamination scandal and the establishment of a national energy policy that was both conservation and price control focused.

McPhee’s conception of the book is brilliant a—the “high priest” of ecology, in the wilderness, serially engaged in face to face encounters with each of what are possibly his three greatest opponents. The resulting chronicles show the adversaries mixing-it-up, with each other and with the forces of nature. Geologic complexities are made fascinating by both the antagonistic and surprisingly aligned points of view McPhee uncovers as well as in Brower’s zeal and childlike wonder alongside Park and Dominy’s scientific expertise. 

McPhee does not shy away from the fact that both sides of the argument are essentially religious in fervor, whether it is Frasier talking about children on a beach or Brower counting on them to decide well the fate of the natural world when their time arrives (39, 108, 127, 227), or Park preaching resources for lifestyle maintenance, or Brower desiring to “enter the earth or spend his “next life” in the tall grasses, or using comparisons of the desecration of religious icons to flooding a canyon (166, 240, 241), or Dominy’s “calling” to manage water resources as a survivor of devastating Wyoming droughts.

Daring Structure Moves and Narrative Arc Storytelling

Two men provide the essential adhesive of a storyteller’s scaffolding in McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid: Brower, the constant in most of the book’s human dichotomies, and McPhee, the intrepid, trustworthy reporter. Nature, the third constant, in all her raging power and splendor, is simultaneously a vulnerable, ravaged maiden and the overriding presence, humbling and seducing each character.

McPhee’s opening scene—the snow cabin, pole and a snow shovel spiked into the air—is strategically placed to set the tone of the book. It stands as a vivid portrayal of the terrifying might of weather over puny man. Brower’s story could have been told as a single running piece, using flashbacks to sprinkle the conflicts and consonant moments of the three pairings, but McPhee’s choice to tell each wilderness trek as a separate adventure narrative allows for character development and relationship building that blended stories or a profile of Brower simply would not have done justice. The privileging of each journey draws the reader into a narrative arc, and at times a plot line—especially in male bravado, like Park’s raw feet, Frasier’s speeding tour of the plantation, Dominy’s whistling arrival on the narrow ledge and his cigar lighting before each of the two trips through the rapids, and, finally, in Brower taking Dominy’s challenge to make the final ride.

Almost as an aside, within the essentially chronological framework, McPhee addresses Brower’s hubris and fall from grace with the Sierra Club (210-15). He identifies, essentially in list format, Brower’s loyal supporters and detractors, keeping it simple, uncluttered. Coupling it with Brower’s tender mourning for the fallen Sequoia (219-20), McPhee provides a complex background to the Colorado River escapade.

McPhee shows his protagonist down, but never out.

Writerly Curiosity Unquenchable

The language of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Mister Lytle: An Essay” could have been a response to Wednesday night’s  prompt. “…with rags cut from an undershirt [I] worked coats of wax into the cedar until its ashen whorls glowed purple, as if with remembered life…[the old man’s] fevers drew together into what seemed an unbearable clarity, like a blue flame behind the eyes.” These are gorgeous sentences and imagery, violently so, words of passionate worship. And, in confessing, “The South . . . I loved it as only one who will always be outside it can.” Sullivan is not unlike Joan Didion, the west- coast-girl in “Goodbye to All That” debarking the plane, violently drawn by the glamor of New York City. The draw of the agrarian southern writer Andrew Lytle on Sullivan is more complex, though.
 

Andrew Nelson Lytle

Lytle’s bigotry, could be blamed on a terrible age of racism, anti-Semitism, like Susan Griffin writing of her grandfather’s similarly wicked tongue, an old man unknowingly the likely descendent of a Jew, and yet, Griffin speaks of loving the smell of his cigar. Both writers seem to be saying that we can’t help but own these affections, in spite of our moral selves. Does the insular culture of southern white men writing to and for one another excuse a cruel and bitter tongue? Maybe not excuse, Sullivan suggests, but simply allow that it’s beyond the time to change—beyond regret—except when a beloved sister is injured in the struggle. So, no, it’s not too late; the old man is changed, remorseful for at least some of his hardheartedness, if only for that one moment.

The “perfect” sentence that Sullivan discovered beneath the typewriter dust cover suggests that what makes a writer of literature, rather than a reporter of bare fact, is an almost psychotic love of language, of syntax and rhythm.

Sullivan’s account of bathing the ninety-two year old man, his skin “translucent” in the face, “doughy” on the body, and its hairlessness; exudes authenticity. It takes me to the place where I store the sweet spirit of my grandmother, who rose above her state of abject dependence, lifting her granddaughters through the experience of her bathing with a rescued dignity. It is, after all, Sullivan’s journey that I’m interested in, not the old confederate, except for the innate horror of growing that old and vulnerable, no matter how brilliant or gifted one is. (Surely, when I was young the thought of a long life sounded comforting, but the closer I get, the more daunting the prospect.) I am, instead, compelled by the young writer’s choices, by his admission of inadequacy as he looked on those perfectly interlaced words tapped out by a man whose mind often slipped in an out of lucidity.

   

The same connection isn’t available in Joan Schenkar’s piece on Theodora Roosevelt Keogh, because we barely meet the writer in the telling. While it is fun to read rumor corrections (nibbled earlobe, not bit-off ear) and get a taste of Keogh’s fascinating characters, plot lines, and sensual subject matter, it reads like a promotional write-up designed to accompany and encourage a renewed interest in the novels. “I loved Theodora dearly, admired her tremendously, and could never bring myself to record her.” Perhaps the withholding of Schenkar’s reason behind this choice is illustrative enough. An opportunity to preserve Keogh and an opportunity to share—how the six year phone relationship changed Schenkar as a person, a woman, a writer—is missed.

Katie Roiphe’s piece on Janet Malcolm comes to life in the iconic New Yorker writer’s emailed retorts and dodges. “If I had said these things about my living room (“somehow perfect and comfortable”) I would have sounded conceited and complacent. The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.” Malcolm is the master humbling the supplicant, who sits in the guise of an interviewer. But it is also the very road I walk that Malcolm is referring to: autobiographical writing, memoir, which the extended history of my project, I hope, deflates of its pretension. And I, too, grew up in a family of interrupters; stories had to be told efficiently in the public arena. In fact, that helps to explain why it drove me crazy when my then husband would begin at the very beginning (almost the dawn of creation) to tell simple funny story, and I’m not sure how gracefully I interrupted him, at times. Our children, on the other hand, when asked to relate an experience, tend to tell an abbreviated tale.

I was struck by how Roiphe's inquiries into the “brutal frankness” of a male fiction professor and the chauvinistic academic environment yielded an almost candid response from Malcolm. “Showing off to straight men remained a delight and necessity to women of my generation. Those of us who wrote, wrote for men and showed off to them. Our writing had a certain note. I’m not sure I can describe it, but I can hear it.”  I am reminded of an earlier moment in our class this semester—the “male brain” writing and reading preferences “murky” water that we waded into and then quickly swam for shore. Malcolm is getting at that here and it makes me wonder why it is such a taboo topic. I mean, if a certain way of thinking, most often associated with men (perhaps explained by the biology of the most commonly male brain type, which is limited in its connections, dendrite and corpus callosum, right brain to left brain as compared with the complex mesh of connections in what is most often the female brain type), is stark and unfiltered by inconvenient contradiction—god-like in its self-assurance. I find it fascinating that Malcolm added with regard to female writers of her era who achieved respected status, “The aggression [in their writing] is coupled with flirtation.” And then she closed down the topic. Honestly, I find the failure to talk about male and female dynamics and differences to be a new form of victimization in which select subjects dare not be broached.

Janet Malcolm book signing 12/12/07: Two Lives a biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

When Malcolm writes that it didn’t matter how subtle a reporter’s approach to an interview was, because the same truths emerged, my response was immediate: it is not the facts but the insightful interpretation of the facts that provides an interesting read and mastery of the beauty of language that makes for great writing.

Finally, all of this profiling of prominent writers is, I suspect, really only deeply intriguing to me because I crave the title “writer” before, after, above, or under my name (or my pseudonym). Writers are an industry unto ourselves, it seems.