What John McPhee Had To Do With Champagne (1998).
At the time, Klett-Cotta was trying to establish John McPhee as an author in Germany. Looking for a Ship was released as Cargo in 1993, followed by Levels of the Game in 1994 as Slugfest: the levels of the game. Oranges appeared in 1995. editor dr. Killer explained to me that, with the reference to Oranges, she would place my champagne book at Klett-Cotta. It worked. And so McPhee is a subject in itself. In fact, I learned a lot from him. McPhee is a specialist in off-the-beaten-track subjects and a master of structure: each of his books has a structure appropriate to the topic. In a review of Levels of the Game for Deutschlandfunk, there are some comments on McPhee's ideas about story building and structure. In general, McPhee develops his stories through a distinctive lead character, whom he frequently interviews, and around whom the other characters and locations are grouped. Of course, I could have done the same with champagne. Daniel Thibault alone, an oenological jack of all trades and Chef de Cave of Champagne Charles Heidsieck and Piper-Heidseick, was illustrious enough to fill three chapters. Nevertheless, to do justice to the diversity of the Assemblage world, I decided to portray a number of very different characters in the chapter on cellar masters. In addition to Oranges, McPhee has now written over 30 books based on his articles in the New Yorker: The Swiss Army, Hermits in New Jersey, The Geology of California, the Appalachian and the Rocky Mountains, The Straightening of the Mississippi River. And so on, and so on: About a fellow in Small Town New Hampshire who can still make canoes out of birch bark, about the environmentalist David Brower - Encounters with the Archdruid, about the porpoise fish Alosa sapidissima, prized by George for its delicate aroma Washington and Henry David Thoreau. A collection of his essays includes one on tires. Also in McPhee's Infinite Supply a reportage book about Andy Chase, Dirty Shirt and Terrible Terry. Guys who have legs like beer kegs, smile once a month, don't have any friendships and therefore work on one of the last remaining US merchant ships for relatively good money. In this book you learn nice things about how the world on the high seas can work like this: "Not every (ship) sinks because of collisions or navigation errors. Crews were brought out of lifeboats who had packed suitcases and packed lunches with them. Suppose South Africa is in dire need of oil because of an embargo and is willing to pay freight rates at any rate. You disguise the supertanker by painting a false name on the bow, send it to a South African port, unload the Persian crude oil, you leave South Africa, open the external valves to replace the oil with water, pack your bags, get ready some sandwiches and leaves the valves open until the ship sinks. If you follow this scenario, nobody will give you the prize for an original idea. You might collect the insurance money for the ship and maybe also for the 'oil' that went down with it. Maybe it will have to be explained why there was no oil stain.” More on this in a book review of Looking for a Ship, German: Cargo, written for Deutschlandfunk at the time. So it's no wonder that a tennis match between Arthur Ash and Clark Graebner made it into a book - Levels of the Game. McPhee's five reports on the geology of North America alone fill a 700-page work, Annals of the Former World. None of this, and I know quite well what I'm talking about, was nothing to the liking of German columnists in the 1980s and 1990s. Klett-Cotta only published one book by McPhee, although several rights had been acquired. It tells the story of the smuggler Norton T. Dodge, who in his official life worked as a professor of economics, specializing in the Soviet Union, in Maryland. Dodge has been interested in underground art since his first visit to the USSR in 1955 to inspect tractors for his PhD at Harvard University. On his later research trips, too, he encountered a large number of tractors, his dissertation is 600 pages long, but at night he focused on artists who were critical of the regime. He smuggled their works home. Or he had it smuggled. Between 1956-1986, 9,000 works accumulated on his farm in Maryland. More about the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art on this website. McPhee stands for a literature of the factual. The Literature of Fact is a course taught by the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. This has little to do with the Like a Novel conception by Tom Wolfe and others. I discussed it with McPhee. He explained, at least something like that, if you see someone at 2:00 p.m. in the middle of a hill with a Procter & Gamble umbrella, then you have to write it down like that. And not: just before sunset on the hill with a submachine gun from Kalashnikov USA. Then it was closing time for McPhee publications in Germany. At the time, fast-paced journalism in Germany in the 1990s tended towards the Kalashnikov on the hill. At least in the Hanseatic lowlands. Like a novel - that one referred to Tom Wolf, well, at least Wolfe's The New Journalism: A la Recherche des Whichy Thickets was published in February 1972. As so often long line, that is in German journalism. And the line is still there, the bar is still on the hill before sunset next to the Kalashnikov. Therefore, the so-called processing of the "single perpetrator" with the associated analysis of "reportage as a vulnerable style form", to put it kindly, seems somewhat mendacious. After all, top stylist Resolutious, honored with the award, only did what the management allowed. Just like a novel - yes yes, I remember very well how at some point, it must have been the beginning or middle of the nineties of the last century, I addressed Claudio Isani to a Spiegel report by his ex-colleague Matthias with the words that obviously the imagination was galloping. Isani just smiled tiredly. It should also not be forgotten that at times the troupe was cheered on by the fact that Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, the realistic reportage about the hero of the dancing working class that John Travolta so virtuously represented, was purest, best imagination acted. However one categorizes John McPhee's Literature of Fact, I personally have always felt that there is another motive that drives him to write; the motive to rob the everyday things in life of their apparent insignificance. What we take for granted is presented in McPhee's broader cultural context. McPhee wasn't very impressed by that thought. McPhee wasn't very impressed by that thought. More on this in a conversation with the author about his book Oranges. I personally consider The Pine Barrens from 1968 to be one of his best books. Not necessarily because of McPhee, but because of the main characters: a bunch of hermits, the Pineys, who live cooped up in an impenetrable pine forest in New Jersey, one of the most densely populated areas in the USA. Anyone who has ever driven from the New Jersey Turnpike to Atlantic City or Long Beach Island knows what we're talking about. "McPhee sees the pines as a focus classicus," wrote William Howarth, "where northern and southern cultural traditions meet, where history before the Revolution was recorded and where post-Bicentennial struggles are fought between developers and ecologists." will. This region is both an archetype and a different country; a place that deviates so much from modern norms that it produces perfect descendants of Native American stock.” We're talking about the Pineys here, people like Jim Leek who know where no one will disturb them: “You can be alone . I'm just a boy from the woods. I wouldn't want to live in a city.” John McPhee has also written a book on writing, compiled from New Yorker articles. Draft no. 4: On the Writing Process. Fortunately, this book never made it into the drawers of the Hanseatic journalism schools. As an introduction to the draft, I therefore recommend the Omissions chapter, nice also the passages about the checkpoints: Fact-checkers do it a tick at a time. Draft no. 4 is now a standard alongside William Strunks, Jr. and EB White's The Elements Of Style and On Writing: Advice for Those Who Write to Publish (Or Would Like to) by the "My typewriter runs on beer" lawyer George V. Higgins . Complemented, of course, by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing with the note Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle and, for the amusing telepathy fans, Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft ). And for those who, unlike Leonard and Higgins, don't really like dialogue: Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction is also called Suspense or How to Write a Thriller. By the way: McPhee's report on the geology of Champagne is called Seasons on the Chalk, can be found in the Silk Parachute reportage collection or on the New Yorker's website. Also in my book there is a chapter about the Chalk of Champagne.
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