Giving Good Weight
McPhee, John
citing farm life into "dull, unvaried" factory jobs. Expansionary industrialism destroyed their spirit of opportunity-only those craftsmen willing "to obtain loans or political subsidies,...
...And those " h a r d - h e a r t e d materialists whose repression of their feelings enabled them to believe that all difficulties would be r e s o l v e d . . . through orderly industrial development" increased their efforts to deny workers the only available respite...
...It doesn't...
...Regardless of what one thinks of certain people, is it cricket to say of Khomeini that he is a "dyspeptic Holy Man," or to speak of his "ancient ruin of a brain," or to refer to the "buzz between his ears...
...But it required your summary of the idiocies of our current leaders in "America Last" to convince me that I had finally found my compatriots in your band of rebels...
...In a study of television evening news, Lefever reports that in the period 1974 to 1977 "slightly less than 5 percent of the intelligence news on network TV was devoted to Soviet-bloc agencies, while slightly more than 95 percent was focused on the CIA...
...After only a few years living and working in Iran, I cannot understand why my President's more experienced advisors have not told him that Persians regard his decency as a character flaw and fair play as weakness...
...U; How one reacts to Giving Good Weight may depend to some extent on how one feels about vegetables, not simply because vegetables are the subject of the title piece, or because an intense interest in cabbage may be needed to carry one along, but because John McPhee's writing is about as close as you can come to a literary equivalent of vegetarianism...
...Yet when capitalists encourage thrift, they are described as exploiters...
...Name Withheld State Department Washington, D.C...
...Neither is inconsequential subject matter an excuse for inconsequential writing...
...Pre-industrial life was boring and monotonous, but industrialization just made things worse...
...A good deal of Giving Good Weight is devoted to proving that except for our little eccentricities (such as an obsession with pinball), we are all really the same...
...We wait expectantly for this to materialize, but it never does...
...Mark Weber Cleveland Heights, Ohio THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 37...
...Every other moment becomes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 35 penultimate, as in this example from Pieces of the Frame: "I had never been in the presence of a red-tailed hawk, and at sight of him I was not sure whether to run or to kneel...
...Well, that is over now, thanks to some rather incautious moves by the Soviets, who can be expected to move into a dynamic phase in the 1980s...
...There is an unpleasantness about Rorabaugh's work...
...Such tactics are the product of an immature mind...
...It is writing of this kind which is sometimes found in high-school newspapers when the staff is not closely supervised...
...Godson has useful chapters on Congress and the so-called "pressure groups," the latter chapters including much interesting information on the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for National Security Studies, and other such outfits, primarily anti-American in nature, staffed for the most part by Soviet apologists and unavowed Marxists who find that in their personal lives they prefer the comforts of Washington to the potential rigors of Gorky...
...Often description will degenerate into lists...
...In 1970, he signed a joint statement in defense of persecuted Ukrainian historian Valentyn Moroz...
...My own tastes run more to the carnivorous (Mailer), the omnivorous (Wolfe), even the anorexic (Didion), than to the macrobiotic McPhee...
...as far as Joan Didion's essay "Many Mansions" in The White Album, describing California's new residence for the governor, built during the Reagan years but as y e t untenanted...
...It is simply a way of filling empty time with empty words...
...Certainly a house is a small enough subject for McPhe'e, and it's not too "sexy," but one cannot imagine him writing anything so penctrating and perceptive...
...In 1948, at age 15, he was arrested and subsequently imprisoned for the "crime" of being the son of a famous Ukrainian nationalist...
...But old Tom, he's just one of the boys: "Tom Cabot, who has been everything from a Harvard Overseer to Director of International Security Affairs in the Department of State, will walk and talk with anybody...
...Finish the book or don't...
...Expansionary industrialism destroyed their spirit of opportunity-only those craftsmen willing "to obtain loans or political subsidies, to accept capitalists as partners, or to form a corporation" could open their own shops...
...Paris Island romaine lettuce...
...In 1950, his ~father died while in the custody of the Soviet secret police...
...The individual stories in this collection, like all of McPhee's works, first made their appearance as extended articles in the New Yorker...
...His stories bring to mind every reason one never finishes those talky, flaccid articles that meander endlessly from impression to impression...
...He repeatedly refused this demand and was sentenced to a ten-year prison term for "anti-Soviet agitation among inmates...
...In 1958, on the eve of his release from prison, Shukhevych was visited by KGB officials who demanded that he renounce his father and ptrblicly condemn the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists...
...As well as 70 pages on vegetables, this new collection includes "The Atlantic Generating Station," about a plan to float a nuclear power plant off the New Jersey coast, a piece of reporting that in the aftermath of Three Mile Island (if that was really necessary to clue you in) seems depressingly simple-minded...
...20] is the 78th day of captivity for my friend--he is less a prisoner of the Persians than of a President and government who have ceased to believe in America...
...With detente, there is no adversary...
...the idea of nationalism--many of them bravely wielding pens inside editorial offices and almost daily quoting Dr.-Johnson to the effect that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel--therefore welcomed detente, rushed to embrace the Soviets, and soon enough found themselves denouncing a variety of "injustices" in America...
...Americans responded by drinking...
...This is of course a comforting thing to believe...
...While reviewers consistently applaud McPhee for shunning the "sexy" topics that, it is suggested, are such easy game for those other journalistnovelists, the reader may fred his prose a very bland diet...
...Though reviewers have commended McPhee's ear for dialogue, in truth it all sounds like McPhee, whether it's blacks in Harlem buying vegetables or conservationists canoeing in Alaska...
...With detente behind us, and our old enemy back, America should reunite...
...and the famous (if you follow these things) "Brigade de Cuisine," the author's paean to the mysterious chef and culinary artiste, Otto, who, when finally tracked down by the New York Times food critic, turned out to serve "inedible" artichokes...
...That's it...
...Expansionary industrialism wrecked custom and traditional social ties...
...His meticulous descriptions of people always fail to characterize...
...The trivial is given equal time with the important, with no suggestion that there might be a hierarchy of issues and ideas...
...Put Up or Shut Up The editorial, "America Last" (January 1980), by R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r . , is an example of the kind of journalism I have come to expect since reading The American SpectaCAPITOL IDEAS (continued from page 6) tente was that Americans were encouraged to believe that they were no longer confronted by an external threat, or enemy...
...I have seen the misery visited on him and on his family by the Persians and by my President...
...It was a villainous Don Quixote tilting at vaporous windmills...
...Then, to emphasize your inane rhetoric, you offer not one thing "Wonderboy" could do to respond decisively and punitively...
...punctuated with occasional tidbits of c o r McPhee is f~ll of impressions...
...Official acceptance of communal drinking had waned--" men who chased dollars naturally disffpproved of liquor"--so more drinking had to be done on the sly...
...Born in 1933, Yuriy Shukhevych has experienced persecution at the hands of Soviet authorities for almost his entire life...
...Likewise, you referred to Ramsey Clark, Richard Falk, and Don Luce as "these three meatheads...
...Carter's Hostages I thank you, R. Emmett Tyrrell, J r . , for showing me the way to go home in your January editorial, "America L a s t " . . . . I have tramped through America and many foreign parts embarrassed by my President and government--who believe America should walk humbly in the world, ashamed of our great wealth, power, and imagination--and I found few friends...
...There is nothing memorable in his work, but neither is there anything troubling or disturbing, and this must explain his popularity...
...I seem to have strayed rather far from the Lefever/Godson volume, but not really, because it is, in part, a report on this dismal period...
...Reformers were morally flawed manipulators seeking to enhance their own authority...
...It is all very depressing, and books about booze should not be depressing...
...They will "walk and talk" with anybody because they all walk and talk the same...
...they reappeared in the form of "Watergate," Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Helms, and others...
...In depicting its style and furnishings, she gives a brilliant dissection of class and its particular Californian manifestations...
...After you have thoroughly squelched those responsible for our foreign policy with such sophisticated jargon as "idiot," "one has to be an idiot and a drunk," and "Wonderboy," you finally treat your readers to your profound and learned conclusion: "Our government must cease rendering itself contemptible to the world and must respond decisively and punitively to those who violate our rights...
...They drank a little more, and they drank it differently: They drank alone or surreptitiously...
...Here is a small sample from the title essay, "Giving Good Weight": " . . . B u r p - less cucumbers...
...I have a good friend among the Tehran hostages...
...It moves on out of sight and vanishes as easily from the mind...
...Reviewers speak of the triviality of McPhee's subject matter (oranges, canoes, blimps, tennis games) as if it conferred on him some special virtue...
...Herbert E. Steingass Chesterland, Ohio Free Yuriy Shukhevych The life of Yuriy Shukhevych, son of the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, is in grave danger...
...When the external enemies disappear, they "reappear" internally: In the U.S...
...All to the good, of course, but it is rather depressing to consider that the gullible peanut farmer from Georgia should be the fortuitous beneficiary of this tidal change...
...McPhee seems distinctly uncomfortable with the idea of class, as if he wished the whole subject would just go away...
...For 15 dollars you can buy this book and read about other people drinking: for the same amount you can buy two fifths of bourbon and do it yourself...
...Read it backward, forward, or upside down, it makes no difference...
...Not only would McPhee give us their personal histories, the shaping influences on their lives, but the drama as these were revealed in their play (Ashe had remarked that Graebner's middle-class background determined the kind of game he plays...
...To put the matter in perspective, one need only look...
...McPhee's writing slips by like a skillfully paddled canoe on a placid lake--silently, hardly causing a ripple on the water's surface...
...McPhee's failure to explore below the surface is most apparent in his inability to deal with the subject of class: the social forces, the economic and cultural histories, that to a great extent determine who we become...
...He makes no claim on the reader, asks nothing of his intelligence, and in no way affects his feelings...
...John Joshua Gilder is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Farmers really like New York City, blacks in Harlem are really nice guys, just like you and me, except perhaps a little less stingy...
...I suggest, Tyrrell, that you either put up or shut up...
...It crunches its way through experience--through a world that, after all, must bear some re36 THt- AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 semblance to the one you and I live in (the one in which not everybody is nice)--chews it up, digests it, and it all comes out innocuous and remarkable in its sameness...
...Those antagonistic to...
...River during which he scores some valuable points for conservation...
...Ithaca iceberg . . . . " " From Coming into the Country...
...Boston salad lettuce...
...This may partly explain his fondness for canoe trips in remote wildernesses, though in "The Keel of Lake Dickey" we find Tom Cabot among the company...
...The result was a distorted view...
...Levels of the Game--a blow-byblow account of the championship tennis match between Arthur Ashe, who grew up black, poor, and Southern, and Clark Graebner, a middle-class d e n t i s t ' s son from Cleveland--seemed more hopeful in this respect...
...that a 13th-century mullah cannot he treated as a 20th-century liberal...
...To compensate for a lack of substance, McPhee bloats his chronicle of the mundane with a false poeticization...
...Sweet Sue bicolor corn, with its concise tight kernels, its well-filled tips and butts...
...Who needs a book...
...America Last" has shown me why today [Jan...
...In 1944, his mother was sent to a Siberian camp...
...In 1972, he was sentenced to a tenyear term of confinement in a concentration camp...
...Cranberry beans...
...The Keel of Lake Dickey," about a canoe trip (a McPhee staple) down the St...
...that Persians will ignore any power that is not violent, overwhelming, and absolute...
...It is, ultimately, the subject of his colleagues, the New Journalists, certainly a matter Wolfe and Mailer attack with gusto...
...This is the stuff of journalism, the touchstone of social observation...
...The Pinball Philosophy," a piece so slight it is almost invisible...
...point is something I am not used to seeing in the other publications I read...
...Even Joan Didion contemplates the vagaries of privilege, seen as she lounges behind dark glasses on a beach chair at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel...
...Please write to President Carter and urge him to intercede with Soviet authorities for the release of Yuriy Shukhevych...
...Unfortunately, the whole concept of nation probably depends on an externally directed mistrust...
...Missing in his work is any s e n s e o f a mediating intelligence behind the chatter...
...That's Tom Cabot, we are told, of the Cabots and Lowells and Boston and Old Money...
...McPhee's affinity with the magazine, for which he works as a staff writer, is evident...
...Initially he writes that "enthusiasm for distilling had shown a lack of economic imagination" that prevented businessmen from developing capital...
...A passive observer, he floats through his stories on a continual stream of facts and anecdotes that ultimately contrive to say nothing...
...The enemy is us, in the banal and oftrepeated judgment of a cartoon character whose name escapes me...
...Silver Queen corn...
...I have read the Spectator for over a year, each month growing more satisfied with its expression of a neoconservative philosophy...
...He suffers from an intestinal ulcer and is denied medical attention...
...It is important that citizens of all persuasions protest this gross violation of human rights by the Soviet Union...
...The CIA appeared to be operating in a political and moral vacuum devoid of threats and adversaries...
...He scratches his cheek, which is under a mat of russet beard . . . . He would resemble Sigmund Freud, if Sigmund Freud had been a prospector...
...McPhee's writing is a great leveling machine...
...Sometimes he's tiresomely cute: "Fedeler shrugs...
...Today, Yuriy Shukhevych continues to languish in a concentration camp...
...In 1968, Shukhevych was set free but was denied the right to live in the Ukraine...
...and that if my President would free the hostages soon he had better act more like the Shah...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
