Excerpts from a conversation with John McPhee on oranges
Sent on Deutschlandfunk, Buchenmarkt editorial office: John McPHEE: Florida's orange industry is so big because it does gigantic business with orange juice concentrate. When scientists figured out how to preserve at least some of the natural flavors in frozen orange concentrate, the industry took off. Certainly, the orange industry played an important role even before this innovation, but the invention of this concentrate resulted in a drastic expansion of the fresh fruit trade. However, that was not the aspect that attracted me to this project. I'm not interested in writing about big business. Nor am I interested in describing the social contexts in which something amazing is happening to these people. I want to sketch people against the background in which they work. All of my books are about real people in real places. I know that doesn't say much. But ultimately that's what attracts me: sketching people. Just like in the book about the oranges, in my last book about Russian art I describe the most diverse characters. For me, it is not so much the art or the oranges that are important, but rather the people who have something to do with oranges and art. GÖLDENBOOG: John McPhee has published 23 books so far, and with each of these books he presented characters that could not have been more different: For example, "The Ransom of Russian Art", McPhee's most recently published treatise on Russian art, is about a quirky university professor of economics in Maryland; an academic who had over 10,000 works of "unofficial" art smuggled out of Russia between 1960 and 1988, becoming the world's foremost collector of underground Soviet art. In "Oranges" too, the author writes about the most amazing characters. And so McPhee shows us that Florida is more than a sunny conglomeration of vacationers on beaches, multi-millionaires in marinas and retirees in condominiums: In the interior of Florida live orange barons, orange pickers, orange exporters, Orange academics, orange queens, orange thieves, orange types of all calibres, complex and angular, which don't fit into any stereotypes In addition to the precise description of its main characters, the book, although written in 1967, has another typical McPhee trademark: A wealth of information is brilliantly structured , short and compact on less than 200 pages. McPhee writes about the history of citrus fruits in just as much detail as he does about research with oranges or about German princes in the 18th century, who grew almost all oranges in their castles. Those are also revealed to the reader last wisdom and Ne Odds about orange crates, about pips in seedless oranges, and about the sex life of oranges. McPhee writes about water in small rivers as clear as a trout stream in the Swiss Alps; Water that was still in the flesh of oranges until a few minutes ago - before they were pressed into concentrate in an evaporator. With modern concentrators crushing four million oranges in half a day, Florida's upstate must have plenty of clean water flowing through it. McPhee quotes historical recipes as well as Arabic books on medicine. The latter claim that a dried orange stirred in hot water can stop any colic on the spot. McPhee presents detail after detail, and one gets the impression that the author has been waiting for years to put his extensive knowledge of oranges into a book. In fact, as in so many other cases later, McPhee's work on this project began rather accidentally. McPHEE: I wanted to write an article for The New Yorker and was looking for a topic. I came across the oranges because I was commuting regularly from Princeton to New York at the time. At the Pennsylvania Station there was a machine that cut and squeezed oranges. And because I drank a glass there every morning, I eventually noticed that the color of the orange juice changed over the course of the winter. Then I saw a newspaper ad with five oranges that all looked the same. But each of these oranges had a different name - like Parson Brown or Hamlin. This piqued my curiosity, and I suggested a short article about oranges to the editor of The New Yorker. I then traveled to Florida to talk to people in the nurseries and industry locally. I got the tip to go to the University of Florida Citrus Research Center at Lake Alfred. And I left. There were 140 people doing PhDs on oranges. There were people in white coats who all looked like doctors. There was a heart-lung machine - or something like that - that oranges had to breathe into. I learned that an orange breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide, so an orange lives on after it's been picked. A library with 44,000 scientific papers and books on oranges existed in the research center. I then went into the growing regions and started reading some of these articles. When I read about the westward migration of oranges as civilization spread, my intentions for the scope of the project changed from a short article to a small book. Oranges come from China, spread to Africa with the advent of Islam, made a stopover in Tangier as tangerines and then reached Spain with the invasion of the Moors. Columbus brought the first oranges to America. It was Spanish law, you had to take the anti-scurvy stuff with you. I found this all very interesting. Oranges were also plentiful in Italy during the Renaissance. But in the Holy Land, in the time of Christ, there were no oranges. Still, all these Renaissance painters painted oranges on the table for the last supper. They were there. I mean, the oranges were in Italy but not in the eastern Mediterranean at the time of Christ. Anyway, the only criteria I have when writing is that I use something for my story if it's interesting. I just leave out the not-so-interesting stuff. GÖLDENBOOG: With McPhee, the line between what is interesting and what is not so interesting is very narrow. He doesn't tolerate repetition, platitudes, long-windedness or even boredom. Other authors would probably craft reports that were twice as long from his researched material. And that's why "Oranges" isn't one of those cultural-historical all sorts of books along the lines of "The Myth of Oranges in the Age of Moon Travel" or "The Essence of Citrus Fruits As Such". Even though McPhee says he's primarily interested in people, yet one gets the feeling that he is driven by another motive in writing, the motive to deprive the mundane things of life of their seeming triviality, that is, to present what we take for granted in a broader cultural context? McPHEE: I wouldn't say I approach my work that way. It might come out like that, but it's not my intention to consciously do it. I go somewhere and collect material on a certain subject. Then I have to see what I do with this material My goal is always to develop a well-structured, thematically independent article, whatever happens during the writing ed - it can already have the effect you describe. But when I start a topic, I don't have any precise ideas about what kind of article or book it will become. For example, when I went to Florida, I had no idea what I was getting into. I found it interesting to look around and write about it. The way the project then took shape was largely determined by what actually happened on site. I don't have very many preconceived notions during my work. GÖLDENBOOG: As unpretentious as that sounds, McPhee is unpretentious. He rarely gives interviews, Hollywood requests to have his stories filmed are politely declined, and his photo is not on any book cover. McPhee isn't one of those new journalists who primarily write about their own neuroses or trips to somewhere. As a reporter, McPhee collects facts primarily with a notebook, sometimes also with a cassette recorder, which he then puts into the appropriate form for the topic at his desk in Princeton. "Look around somewhere and write about it if it's interesting" was McPhee's motto in Florida almost thirty years ago and has remained so to this day. After reading "Oranges," one gets the feeling that McPhee can also deliver spirited lyrics about vegetables, canoes, car tires, the geology of California, the arrival of telephones in a village near the North Pole, and lighter-than-air aircraft Which of course he can and has already done. The only question that remains is where booksellers should put such books or where potential buyers can find such books at all. MCPHEE: The booksellers do not group non-fiction authors alphabetically by author name, but by subject one book of mine in the agriculture section, others in the arts or nature sections. Some bookstores in the US classify all my books under "nature" because a lot of these books have a theme that people understand as "nature." "My books are hard to categorize. It's a bit daunting. But that's the way it is: non-fiction by subject, fiction by author. I'd like to be e grouped as author. GÖLDENBOOG: One can only hope that the booksellers in Germany are so clever and don't stow away "oranges" somewhere in the agricultural section behind cucumber and potato cultivation. Because otherwise it could take another 28 years before the book about Russian art is in German Then we would have the year 2022, but maybe then the Russian underground would be up to date again.
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