Princeton Writers at Work: Why 'Scumble' Is an Important Word in John McPhee’s Vocabulary

Princeton, NJ – In recent years I have acquired the habit of searching for typographical and factual errors when I read a new book. I do this partly because I sometimes know the book’s author in some way and I want to help that writer make that book even better. But I also do it because it makes me read the book more carefully, and I find that paying more attention makes most books more enjoyable.

A year ago or so I picked up John McPhee’s "Tabula Rasa," a collection of fragments of stories that were considered but never begun, or begun but never finished – fascinating odds and ends from the literary trunk of a masterful writer who has been at it for more than 70 years. McPhee was presenting them now, in part because they are an “old-man” project, something “to do, and do, and do. It beat dying.”

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE FREE TAPINTO.NET NEWSLETTER

I knew that finding a typo or an error would be a challenge. McPhee is from the old school of writers who care about spelling and grammar and facts. And a lot of his work went through the New Yorker magazine’s vaunted proofreading department. But I like challenges. So I sharpened up a handful of No. 2 pencils -- you are not really hunting for typos unless you literally have a sharp pencil in hand as you read, ready to pounce on any suspicious word or phrase – and dug into "Tabula Rasa."

On page 22, I made a mark. A description of his Princeton High School graduation ceremony at McCarter Theater – “pomp and circumstance and the whole eight yards.” Not a typo, of course, but a deliberate play on the idiom that is practically a cliché. If it were a college graduation it might have been the whole nine yards, but this was only high school.

Fifty-eight pages later, I pounced again. This time it was a reference to the longest “beeline distance” from the east coast to west of the contiguous 48 states. Well, I know and you know and probably 100 people we might pick at random on Nassau Street know that the United States is pretty much 3,000 miles across – give or take. And if we all know that, then we can also assume that the longest cross-country beeline would be a diagonal, something obviously longer than 3,000 miles.

As I continued reading, my eyes opened wide. In "Tabula Rasa," McPhee declares that the “longest beeline distance” runs from Bellingham, Washington, to Boca Raton, Florida, “two thousand seven hundred miles and change.” Surely it should have been “three thousand seven hundred miles and change.”

DOWNLOAD THE FREE TAPINTO APP FOR MORE LOCAL NEWS. AVAILABLE IN THE APPLE STORE AND THE GOOGLE PLAY STORE .

A typo!, I gleefully thought. Not, I quickly discovered. A Google search revealed that the cross-country dimension of the United States is much less than many of us imagine. The beeline distance from New York to San Francisco, for example, is about 2,565 miles. The driving distance is about 2,900 miles – closer to that 3,000-mile mark in our imagination.

By the end of "Tabula Rasa," I had a handful of dull pencils but not a single typographic error to put in my trophy case.

I was reminded of that futile exercise earlier this summer when I discovered a wonderful addendum to "Tabula Rasa" – a collection of McPhee’s reminiscences and reflections published in the May 13 New Yorker . In one of those sections, McPhee writes about the proofreading process and makes this plea – part of a literary will that he has created -- to future editors of his work:

“My books have been proofread with exceptional care by proofreaders at FSG [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, his publisher], by proofreaders at The New Yorker magazine, by myself, and by others. In more than a million words, there are probably fewer than ten typographical errors. Please do not fix one unless textual evidence allows you to be absolutely positive that you have found one of those ten. I warmly thank you for your attention to these words.”

Throughout his life, McPhee has been judicious about writing about himself. Some writers we know will turn a knee replacement operation into a 6,000 word opus. McPhee has had plenty of adventures in his life, but the character with the pronouns “I, me, and mine” rarely appears.

In one of the recollections in last spring’s New Yorker piece, McPhee recounted some fun little exercises that he has used with the Princeton University students in his expository writing class. At the class picnic at the end of the semester, he would introduce a word game that “seemed simple and wasn’t.” The challenge: Name the 11 words in the English language that end in “umble.” As McPhee described it in the New Yorker:

Pencils flew as the students attacked this easy question. Bumble, crumble, fumble, grumble, humble, jumble, mumble, rumble, stumble, tumble . . . Ten quick words. The luck stopped there. Erasers were bitten into. Like lamps turning off, success turned into failure. Logoparalysis set in.

One year, after the picnic, I happened to get a call from my daughter Sarah, in Atlanta, and I told her about the eleven words in the English language that end in “umble.” Could she name them?

Sarah said, “Well, let’s see. There’s ‘scumble,’ and . . .”

The elusive eleventh was Sarah’s first umble. She is an architectural historian, at this writing chair of art history at Emory University. Scumble is a delicate, final layer that painters have used to give their subjects the appearance of being seen through mist. Webster’s Second International defines it as a verb, “to render less brilliant by covering with a thin coat of opaque or semiopaque color applied with a nearly dry brush,” and as a noun, “a softened effect produced by scumbling.” The technique was employed by Titian in the sixteenth century, Rubens and Rembrandt in the seventeenth, J. M. W. Turner in the nineteenth, Claude Monet on into the twentieth—Monet’s scumbled water lilies, the scumbled ambience of his Rouen Cathedral.

As it happens, scumble is what I see all day long, or something much like it. Ninety-two at this writing, I have a stent in each eyeball as a result of advanced glaucoma. My world is brushed with mist. I mentioned scumble to my eye surgeon, Sarah Kuchar. She said she is always looking for ways to describe what her patients see, and she was gratefully adding “scumble” to her vocabulary.

McPhee’s vision may now be compromised, but he continues to share his insightful prose with grateful readers. Note to TAPinto Princeton readers of a certain age: If you don’t already have an old man project, get one.

For more local news, visit TAPinto.net