It’s such a Princeton thing, and it annoys me. What is it that gives (or gave) John McPhee so much satisfaction in using his erudition as a kind of secret hand shake to the one reader in ten thousand who would get his reference?
What I am talking about?
Well, okay, so Playboy sent McPhee to Wimbledon back in 1970, right about the time my parents moved my brothers and me into a house a few miles down the road from McPhee’s home. And he did his own version of Hunter S. Thompson’s romp at the Kentucky Derby, which came out the same year in Scanlan’s Monthly. In fact, for all I know Thompson’s article may have prompted Playboy‘s editor Arthur Kretchmer to foot the bill for McPhee’s trip.
So, McPhee went over to the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club and hobnobbed with the upper crust there, which really wasn’t that much of a stretch for the Princeton and Cambridge-educated writer.
With that introduction, here you go:
The editor of the piece was the affable Arthur Kretchmer, who was soon to become Playboy’s editorial director, a position he held for thirty years. My conferences with him, always on the telephone, were light and without speed bumps as we made our way through the strawberries, the extinguishings, and the resurrections, until we came to the Members’ Enclosure.
Right.
McPhee is talking about the following excerpt from that 1970 article:
In the Members’ Enclosure, on the Members’ Lawn, members and their guests are sitting under white parasols, consuming best-end-of-lamb salad and strawberries in Devonshire cream. Around them are pools of goldfish. The goldfish are rented from Harrods. The members are rented from the uppermost upper middle class. Wimbledon is the annual convention of this stratum of English society, starboard out, starboard home.
Did you get that he’s referring to members of the Lawn Tennis and Croquet club here?
Good, because these were not the hoi polloi.
I think he got that across with the rented goldfish and Devonshire cream, don’t you?
But what’s with that “starboard out, starboard home” reference, his editor wanted to know.
Arthur Kretchmer said, “What does that mean?”
Assuming a tone of faintest surprise, I explained that when English people went out to India during the Raj, they went in unairconditioned ships. The most expensive staterooms were on the port side, away from the debilitating sun. When they sailed westward home, the most expensive staterooms were on the starboard side, for the same reason. And that is the actual or apocryphal but nonetheless commonplace etymology of the word “posh.” Those people in the All England Members’ Enclosure were one below Ascot: starboard out, starboard home.
I didn’t have a stopwatch with which to time the length of the silence on the other end of the line. I do remember what Kretchmer eventually said. He said, “Maybe one reader in ten thousand would get that.”
I said, “Look: you have bought thirteen thousand words about Wimbledon with no other complaint. I beg you to keep it as it is for that one reader.”
He said, “Sold!”
Which really brings me back to my whole “don’t hate me because I’m from Princeton thing.”
Because, you know, I was osmotically trained to view the world this way. By which I mean, who wouldn’t want to put something so esoteric in their Playboy feature that only the best-read cleverest one-in-ten-thousand reader would understand it?
But I think it’s a fucked up attitude. And I eventually very self-consciously rejected this and let the pendulum swing back quite a distance in the other direction.
So, in my writing, I quite deliberately set out never to attempt this kind of show-off business.
And it’s ironic that McPhee ends this piece talking about his vanity here without the slightest wink of apology. Because the article is about allusions and elicitation, and how ephemeral the shared experience between author and reader can be.
So, the wink is there, but it’s so deep down that you can easily miss it, which is sorta playful in an arrogant kind of way.
That’s not the only way the piece is brilliant yet inaccessible. He’s an artist well-honed in his craft.
And I doubt he cares whether or not you hate him for it.
I’m highly conscious of this phenomenon when writing song lyrics. I usually don’t like adding anything that would go over a listener’s head, even if they’re the type who cares about what the lyrics are.
I’ve had arguments with other band members about this; my brother is a classical history geek and loves making allusions to specific obscure myths or people from Greece/Rome/wherever. No one in our audience would get that (we played in rock bands).
He won the argument when he said “Dylan did shit like that all the time, and he was on speedballs. Shut up.”
So I shut up.
Only problem with that is that someone was comparing themselves to Dylan.
No, not remotely comparing. Just citing one example.
Still, if you’re teaching someone to be a playwright, you can’t really say “Well Shakespeare did it all the time,” unless, you know, they can write like Shakespeare in iambic pentameter in a way no one can match ever.
Absolutely. The goal is to write like me, not like anyone else. I never understood the mentality of (for example) guitarists who give up because they’ll never play as good as Hendrix. So what? Play like yourself and be proud of that.
However, if I listen to shit-tons of Beatles or Dylan or whomever growing up, my brain identifies that as “music” and therefore it’s the default setting for whatever comes out of me. At that point the challenge is to make it less of them and more of me.
Also, my aunt is in fact a playwright, and I learned most of my early lessons in how to be creative from her. A big one was that Hollywood in the early ’80s was uniquely insane.
He’s McPhee.
If he had only written “Basin and Range”, dayenu. If he had only written “The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed”, dayenu. If he had only written “The Curve of Binding Energy”, dayenu.
Or “Encounters with the Archdruid”. Or “Looking for a Ship…”
Indeed. I don’t care if some of what he’s written goes over my head; what I grok is magnificent enough for me.
Yet your title references an advertisement from long ago that must seem obscure to your younger readers. 😉
Got me!
Went right over my head, and I don’t believe I’m one of the younger ones (Dr. Google says Kelly LeBrock speaking for Pantene shampoo, 1980s). Incidentally McPhee wasn’t yet 30 when he wrote that, so maybe we could give him a break. I got the reference to the POSH etymology, but couldn’t understand the joke (did it mean the passengers owned their own cabins, like those bars where you have your own bottle, and were therefore the most upper class of all?)
And he’s 84 now. You’d think he’d know how it sounds, maybe he’ll get around to laughing at himself before the book’s over.
Kretchmer was under 30 too, having gotten his degree from CCNY (I think that was before they started charging tuition) in 1963. Those were the great days of Playboy when people really did read it for the articles (we looked at the pictures too, I’m not denying). It was for men, mostly, from a less moneyed background who wanted to feel cool and culturally informed without the Ivy background; fancy writing was part of it along with jazz reviews and adventurous politics.
I doubt the “one in 10,000” figure was accurate even then, though, that was a little gap in Kretchmer’s education.
Having read the article, it’s clear that McPhee is poking some gentle fun at his youth. Since he spends a lot of space talking about how to make your arcane or pop references accessible to a reader, by filling them in:
And he actually illustrates how you do it it in the POSH anecdote at the end, where he explains what he was too jejune to explain in 1970.
Having read the articleNow that I’ve read the articleRight, you discovered it.
I believe it means that they couldn’t afford the most luxurious cabin suites. They got the second from the top. So, starboard only in one direction.
I see I fucked that up.
Starboard in both directions.
I love me some McPhee but his 1 in 10000 is old hat. The Internet has provided everyone with the arcane knowledge needed to grasp this kind of precious allusion. A quick google search on starboard in Starboard out and suddenly I’m as knowing as the hoitiest toity in the club.
Afraid my first thought had a chip on its shoulder: some people manage to get an education in state schools, don’t feel you need to talk down to us. But I know that’s not what you mean.
I didn’t go to Princeton University, although, like McPhee, I did go to Princeton High School.
I don’t attribute his instincts to his college education but to the cultural milieu he was raised in.
I read this last night and it made no sense to me:
there is no such expression as “starboard out, starboard home.” McPhee uses it as a joke to mean slightly below the top tier of English wealth, but the joke doesn’t work.
McPhee is making a play on the phony etymology of the word “posh” meaning top-tier, luxurious, swanky. People will tell you that “posh” an acronym from “Port Out, Starboard Home.” The idea is that the letters P.O.S.H. were stamped on the tickets of travelers from England to India who had the best staterooms. These were the rooms on the shady side of the ship – the port side going out, and the starboard side coming home – which would be cooler.
So McPhee’s joke is that the people at Wimbledon were like travelers who could afford the best staterooms going one way, but economized on the return.
This is not a very funny joke and it’s hardly worth the effort to explain it.
And it’s even less funny because “posh” does NOT come from Port Out, Starboard Home. There’s literally no evidence that it was ever stamped on any ticket or paper, or even that the full expression in words was ever used to describe travel to India.
Not that you care, but the best modern guess is that “posh” is from a Romani (gypsy) word meaning “money, cash” and that it came into English as a bit of what used to be called “thieves’ cant.”
But on the whole I did like the article.
Keep in mind that McPhee is 84 years old. A lot of what you may be reading as elitism is merely his recognition that much of what he thinks of as common knowledge is passing into history.
One big difference between his generation and later ones is that well-educated people of his time were expected to know almost as much about England as they did about America. That’s all gone.
Well, there is a very specific thing I am reacting to, and it’s not his effort to cleverly describe the upper upper middle class denizens of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
It’s his evident satisfaction with getting this esoteric reference to posh into the article despite the editor’s reservations, for the very reason that it would only be understood by so few.
This is the kind of skewed value that I absorbed growing up in Princeton, as McPhee did. That what matters is the opinion of that one-in-ten-thousand reader who is as clever as you are, and not the other 9,999 people who will be like “WTF?”
It’s arrogant. And it’s selfish. And it’s the wrong way to get self-validation.
To me this is mere human folly. When one strips away the thinnedt vanier of self assurance, all of us are deeply insecure. People hang their hats on different nails in terms of subtly and subconsciously convincing themselves that they’re alright. But everyone does it in one form or another.
Right. And if port out is the preferred suite, then they economized on the way out and splurged on the way back.
The thing isn’t just an inside joke, it’s a strain to make it work at all even if you get the reference.
Well, my copy is at home (posting from the office <shhh>) but as I recall, most of that article was pointing out instances where other writers had used references which were too obscure or too quickly outdated, in the vein of “…but in his demeanor he was a real Irving Benotz.” Who?
I read the 1 in 10,000 reference cited above as more of a nod to self-awareness and an admission that he too was guilty.
I think that’s right. But funny how he did it again and used the secret hand shake to make that point.