John McPhee ’49

This winter Head of School John Austin and Deerfield Magazine contributing writer Julia Elliott had an opportunity to interview Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Deerfield alumnus John McPhee. Mr. McPhee, who as of this year has written 32 books as well as numerous articles and essays, pioneered and became a master of the creative nonfiction genre. His career began at Time magazine, and he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965. Mr. McPhee also continues as a professor at his college alma mater, Princeton University. In addition to receiving the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1999 (for Annals of the Former World), Mr. McPhee has received numerous other literary awards and holds honorary doctorates from Yale University and Amherst College. He spoke with Dr. Austin and Ms. Elliott from his home in Princeton, NJ, where he was reviewing the printer’s proofs for his forthcoming book, Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, to be released on July 11, 2023.

AUSTIN: It’s a pleasure and an honor to meet you over the phone. I’ve been a huge fan of yours since I first read The Headmaster when I was a first-year teacher in 1987, so I’m so glad to have the opportunity to talk to you.

McPHEE: Thank you. I’m delighted by that, to say the least.

AUSTIN: I understand that your mom sent you to Deerfield for a post-graduate year after you graduated from Princeton High School but before you started Princeton University. I was wondering if you could just describe your year at Deerfield for us.

McPHEE: Well, there was a family that lived here in Princeton whose son went to Deerfield, and my mother wanted me to go to Deerfield from the time I was 14 years old. I wanted to stay at the high school because I was a basketball player, and so I resisted this, but she insisted, saying, “Okay, you go for a post-graduate year; you’re immature.” I was 16 for most of my senior year at Princeton High School. I’m so glad that she persisted. It was a wonderful year for me in my life: what happened, what I learned, and the people there. I continued to relate to Deerfield teachers in the years that came—The Headmaster was 17 years later, and it very much resulted from conversations with those teachers, especially Frank Conklin, who taught the first geology course I ever took.

ELLIOTT: I didn’t know that you had taken geology at Deerfield. Could you talk a little bit about how that course influenced the 20-year period when you ended up studying and writing about geology? [McPhee’s 1998 book on geology, Annals of the Former World, won the Pulitzer Prize.]

McPHEE: When I got to Deerfield, I was interested in taking more science classes. I didn’t know much about geology, but I thought it would be interesting. I got in the course and I really loved it all the way. Mr. Conklin used a text that was used in freshman geology courses in universities. When I got into geology professionally in 1978, it was the Deerfield course that I was acting upon. If I hadn’t gone to Deerfield and studied geology, Annals of the Former World would not exist. I attribute so many things to that year at Deerfield. It’s hard to sum them up.

AUSTIN: At the end of The Headmaster, you quote Mr. Boyden talking about the intimate relationships between pupils and teachers. You just mentioned your geology teacher, but were there other memorable teachers that you had while you were at Deerfield?

McPHEE: Quite a few. Most of all, Bob McGlynn, to whom The Headmaster is dedicated. Bob was an English teacher, but I didn’t take his course. My English teacher was Richard Hatch. McGlynn just—he was just interested in students. All year long, he got into conversations with me, he gave me books to read, and I wasn’t even in his class. Then after Deerfield and for the rest of his life, we were very close friends. He traveled with me and my daughters and so on.

Bobby Merriam was fresh out of Dartmouth at that point, and he was an All-American lacrosse player. He was the assistant coach, so we’re in there playing all the time with Bob Merriam.

I could keep going: Emmett Cook and John Suitor. Russ Miller was my history teacher. I mean, these were people I felt I really got to know well. I went to Deerfield a lot on visits after, while I was in college and so on. I would sit around in the evening with McGlynn and other teachers and talk.

AUSTIN: I’m curious how your experience at Deerfield compared with your experience at Princeton?

McPHEE: I had been admitted to Princeton out of Princeton High School. It was my hometown, and I was sort of surprised to be looked upon as a townie. I roomed my first two years with two Deerfield graduates. Now that I’m thinking about it, Deerfield graduates at Princeton were both roommates and friends, and had a lot to do with organizations I got into and so forth.

AUSTIN: You’ve written about playing basketball and lacrosse at Deerfield, and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the experience of playing on those teams and the role of sports in your life.

McPHEE: The role of sports was big all the way because, to start with, my father was the physician of Princeton athletic teams: football, basketball, baseball; so I grew up in a kind of sports context. Then at Deerfield, sports meant everything. I mean, I was all wrapped up in the basketball team. And then Ben Haviland, who coached lacrosse, came to me after a basketball game in the gym and said he wanted me to go out for lacrosse in the spring. I said, “I never played lacrosse,” and he said, “you’ve just been playing it.” And, in fact, I didn’t know then, but learned later from my research and writing, that basketball was invented by a lacrosse player. He was a Canadian in Springfield (MA).

AUSTIN: Amazing. I didn’t know that.

McPHEE: I didn’t know anything about lacrosse when I got in there, but this was a really good team. We were undefeated. At the time, there was almost nobody to play in the secondary-school level. We played Manhasset High School, Andover, and Exeter, but we also played college freshman teams: Yale, Williams, the plebes at West Point, and so on. We beat everybody! And it was a wonderful experience. I have a good, very close friend from childhood who went to Exeter and, every once in a while, I say to him, “Deerfield seven, Exeter six.” I have a son-in-law who went to Andover, and last night, in a note to him, out of nowhere, I slipped in: “Deerfield nine, Andover six.”

AUSTIN: That’s outstanding. What other activities did you do at Deerfield?

McPHEE: I wrote a little bit for the Scroll, very little, and I was in lightweight football. I think the sports filled it all up.

AUSTIN: Over the years, we’ve spoken with alumni who were students of Frank Boyden and, of all of those alums, you may have known him, or at least studied him, most closely because you wrote The Headmaster What exactly was it that made you want to write a book about Mr. Boyden?

McPHEE: Actually, it started with a suggestion from Frank Conklin, the geology teacher. In those years, in the sixties, I was brand new at The New Yorker, and I was looking for things to write about. When he made that suggestion, I thought, “Yeah, I would like to do that.” And I don’t know if you are familiar with a thing I wrote, it was in Deerfield Magazine, called “Warming the Jump Seat?” [In “Warming the Jump Seat,” McPhee explains that, in the elongated Cadillac that drove the basketball team to away games, he and Mr. Boyden sat together on the jump seats because they were the two shortest men in the car.]

AUSTIN: Yes, I am.

McPHEE: Well, “Warming the Jump Seat” is the answer to the question you just gave me. Sitting there on that jump seat, riding all over New England with this man beside me, and he’s talking about his school— or he was asleep.

ELLIOTT: After writing that book, what did you feel was most interesting or memorable about Frank Boyden as a headmaster?

McPHEE: The experiences I had with him right after it was written. The article was in The New Yorker, [The Headmaster was first published as two consecutive articles] and John Boyden [Frank Boyden’s son] told me that Mr. Boyden was in Los Angeles and he gets this magazine sent to him out there. He read it for a while, and then he flung it into a wall, and it fell down behind a couch.

Time passed, and then he goes over and gets down behind the couch and picks up The New Yorker and reads some more, and then he throws it at another wall.

Well, now it was going to become a Farrar, Straus book. And a note comes [from Mr. Boyden]: Would I come up to Deerfield and have a little talk about it? And what was I going to do? I went to Deerfield to talk to him about it. He had The New Yorker all cut out so that no ads were present; the columns were all mounted in a kind of scrapbook-like form, just the writing, in this book. And we sat down together, and he started in, and I was nervous as can be, but as we went along, I got less nervous. He told me all his reactions, and his things that he was concerned about were 100 percent to do with other people, not one thing about himself. And this just said everything to me.

AUSTIN: Interesting.

ELLIOTT: It really speaks to his lack of ego and focus on others and their feelings. But in such a gentle way.

McPHEE: Another thing that reminds me to comment on is his wife [Helen Boyden]. I fortunately had her as a teacher, too, in my year at Deerfield. She was extremely influential on the book. I remember her once saying, “All reviewers are contemptible.” She was so remarkable; I mean, her influence can’t be underestimated.

AUSTIN: So, as the author of The Headmaster, which I’ve read probably 10 or 15 times now, do you have any advice for me as Deerfield’s current head of school?

McPHEE: Oh my goodness.

AUSTIN: The world has changed, of course, but I’m still curious.

McPHEE: Things have changed. Well, I have, uh, I have—no. That’s the answer: No. I haven’t got anything to say about that.

AUSTIN: That’s a good answer! When did you first decide to become a writer?

McPHEE: Way back, as long as I can remember, when I was little—one digit old—I had two ideas: to be a teacher or a writer. And I ended up doing both. It happened several years before Deerfield that my ambition was to be a professional writer, but I had no idea how to go about it.

AUSTIN: You’ve been teaching at Princeton for a long time. I’m wondering, how do you see the relationship between your writing on the one hand and your teaching on the other? How do they inform one another?

McPHEE: That’s a great question. A lot of people assume that because you’re teaching it’s getting in the way of your writing. While I have no way to measure this, I think that I have written more in the past four decades as a teacher than I would without being a teacher. [As a writer], you just go from one piece to the next; you get a little jaded. But from the get-go, from 1975, when I taught my first class at Princeton, I have taught a spring semester course, and during those three months, I have never written one line of my New Yorker work or whatever. It’s a period when you’re fallow. Teaching the students, looking at their work, going over it with them a semicolon at a time, it is highly related to what I do, but it isn’t me doing it. When I come off the teaching in June, I’m really refreshed as a writer, and off I go. So there’s a symbiosis there that’s considerable —or has been for me anyway.

AUSTIN: What is it that you enjoy most about teaching?

McPHEE: What I never imagined when I started teaching was that I would be in touch for the rest of my life with a large portion of my students. And it’s just been wonderful with endless stories that I could tell you about different alumni and my relationship with them. Many of them are writers; a whole lot of them are doctors.

AUSTIN: Amazing. What writers have influenced you throughout your life?

McPHEE: Almost every writer I’ve read; because—and I’m thinking back to college years and Deerfield years and everything else—when you read a book or a story, you react to it. And if you react positively, it’s going to influence you in a positive way. If you react negatively, it’s going to move you away from certain things. So, I think almost everything is influential in that way.

AUSTIN: How did you get your first article published at The New Yorker, and what was the topic?

McPHEE: I spent a year at the University of Cambridge after Princeton because a close friend from Deerfield was there, and we had arranged at Deerfield that I would do this. And when I was at Cambridge, I played on the university basketball team and traveled all over Great Britain playing basketball. On Christmas vacation, I was in the Tower of London listening to a guide, and I noticed that in the central courtyard there were the outlines of a basketball court. I asked, “Who plays here?” And the guide said, “The Royal Fusiliers play here.”

So, I went back to Cambridge, and I got the secretary of the basketball team to write the Royal Fusiliers and get a game in the Tower of London. And we did; we got one. So that was the subject of my first New Yorker piece, which they bought in 1963. I actually became a staff writer two years later, after writing a profile of [Princeton graduate, professional basketball player, and New Jersey Senator] Bill Bradley. But this first piece was just a nice thing. I was no spring chicken. I was 32, so it was a long time after college when I sold my first piece to The New Yorker

AUSTIN: You’ve now written 32 books on an amazingly diverse array of subjects: college basketball, Alaska, Swiss Army, oranges— I could keep going—geology and geologists, nuclear technology, the Merchant Marine, shad. I’m wondering, how do you choose your subject?

McPHEE: Various things happen. The timing has to be right. For example, if I’m in the middle of something, I’m not going to be very responsive to a new idea. But there’s always a little story about why this book and why that one. Basically, my goal was to write miscellaneously, tabula rasa. I didn’t want to be just writing about one subject over and over again. I wanted to write about new subjects and learn about them, and then pass on what I learned to readers. That was my goal, and that’s why it’s so miscellaneous. One time, I’d finished a piece, I had to find something new to do, and I got into a tennis match in Rhode Island with my Deerfield roommate and I playing against two other people, whom I didn’t know at all. After we finished playing, one of these people starts talking about a project he’s working on for the Ford Foundation, about weapons-grade nuclear material in the hands of private industry. The next week I was at the University of Virginia, interviewing him about that subject, and that’s where The Curve of Binding Energy began. Every piece has a story like that with it.

AUSTIN: Amazing. Of all your books and all the subjects, is it possible for you to name a favorite or two?

McPHEE: My answer to that question has always been the thing I’m working on now. Or, I have four daughters. You want me to choose among them?

AUSTIN: That’s a good answer. Tell me a little bit about your research and writing process. How does it work, and how do you move to a finished manuscript?

McPHEE: The research is just whatever the thing requires. I mean, traveling on a merchant ship down the west coast of South America, or to Wyoming for whatever it is, and then making a huge number of notes and recordings. When I get back to Princeton, I type up all the notes that are scribbled in little four-by-six notebooks. So, I have one matrix of material, and then I study that material until it’s broken down into a structure. That takes much longer than the traveling did, and then it takes, of course, a lot longer to do the writing. It takes the longest to do the first draft and a little less long to do the second; the third and the fourth are diminished in time. And when I get to the far end of it, I go play tennis in Rhode Island with my Deerfield roommate and start on another one.

AUSTIN: What does your day-to-day writing life look like? Do you have a routine?

McPHEE: Well, yes and no. I have a terrible time getting anything done on each day. In my view, it’s a form of writer’s block that is like a membrane, and you’ve got to get through it to get anything done. I just can’t tell you how much time I have spent doing nothing, sharpening pencils, walking around, going out for a run. I show up at nine o’clock in the morning, I’m there until six, and I don’t get anything done until about five when I panic and somehow squeeze out a few words, say 300, and that’s the day. I walk out on the campus, and people say, “you’re so prolific,” and I’m dumbstruck. But the thing is, if you take 300 [words] times 300 days, that’s a lot of words. You get a little drip of stuff each day. I learned long ago that if I got going in some kind of zone until midnight or something, then I don’t do anything for the next week. So I quit at about six, no matter what, even in the middle of a sentence.

ELLIOTT: I can’t tell you how comforting I find that, because it takes me four or five hours to get going, and I always thought it was just some flaw of mine. So, I’m very comforted by knowing that you have the same kind of process.

McPHEE: You are not the first writer who’s ever said that to me. I’m so glad that that confession of mine, whatever it was, helped other people; so thanks for telling me that.

AUSTIN: I’m wondering: You must leave out a lot of research from your books, am I correct in that?

McPHEE: Absolutely. I mean, most of what you experience, you leave out. One of the pieces I wrote about the writing process is called “Omission,” and it is the last chapter in Draft Number Four. That’s the subject of it, that what you leave out is, in many ways, more important than what you put in.

AUSTIN: I just have one more question for you, Mr. McPhee, I was wondering what advice you might have for Deerfield students who are interested in pursuing a career in writing?

McPHEE: The best teacher of writing is writing itself. Writers grow slowly. They don’t spring like something out of the ear of Zeus. They do it one sentence after another, through time. What develops a writer is writing—not a course at some college or anything like that. [As a teacher] I look upon myself as a coach. I used to teach swimming at a summer camp to people who knew how to swim. What I was trying to do for them was to help their efficiency in the water so that they could get along more smoothly and rapidly. And I always thought of my work as a teacher of writing as being like that— teaching swimming. I was teaching people who knew what they were doing, and I was trying to help them get better at it.

AUSTIN: Mr. McPhee, thank you so much.

McPHEE: You’re more than welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I love Deerfield, and I’m just delighted to be doing this today. //

Please enjoy the “object lesson” in the closing spread of this issue: Mr. McPhee’s actual writing notes for The Headmaster! >>>>