I started reading The New Yorker in graduate school in Vermont. I sometimes visited my brother in New York. He had gone to the Art Students League, where he made friends with a woman in his portrait class named Jeanne Fleischmann. She was married to Peter Fleischmann, the chairman of the board of The New Yorker. His father, Raoul Fleischmann, had been the co-founder of the magazine, with Harold Ross. On one visit, I picked up a copy of the magazine. It was dated February 24, 1975. Eustace Tilley was on the cover, and the contents included a piece by E. B. White: Letter from the East. It was the anniversary issue—The New Yorker’s fiftieth anniversary.
Eventually, I met the Fleischmanns. I was doing research for my master’s thesis, on James Thurber, and while Peter was away on business he let me sit in his office and look through bound volumes of the magazine. At the Morgan Library, in an exhibit of books that had belonged to writers, I found a grammar mistake on the wall label accompanying Thurber’s copy of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, in which he had made pencil drawings of Papa and Memsahib on safari. I was given permission to examine the book. (I made freehand copies of the illustrations and appended them to my thesis. My examiners were not amused.) In Vermont, I kept two stacks of magazines on my lobster-crate coffee table, one of Hoard’s Dairyman and one of The New Yorker.
It was the summer of 1977, and there were some wonderful things in The New Yorker: Woody Allen’s story “The Kugelmass Episode” (it was also the year of Annie Hall), charming pieces by Calvin Trillin with illustrations by Edward Koren, John McPhee’s series about Alaska, “Coming into the Country.” I had never read McPhee before, and I was dumbstruck, as much by the sweep of his subject matter—Alaska—as by his precise, loving placement of words. He describes the view from the window of Jim Scott, his neighbor and landlord, in Eagle, Alaska:
In the view’s right-middle ground is Eagle Creek, where he and I once fished for grayling. It is in the United States, and if it is not God’s country, God should try to get it, a place so beautiful it beggars description—a clear, fast stream, which on that day was still covered on both sides and almost to the center with two or three feet of white and blue ice. The steep knobby hills above were pale green with new aspen leaves; there were occasional white birch, dark interspersed cones of isolate spruce, here and again patches of tundra. Overhead was a flotilla of gray-hulled, white-sailed clouds. Fresh snow was on the mountains in the distance. The Scotts have all that framed in their Thermopane—a window that could have been lifted from a wall in Paramus and driven here, to the end of the end of the road. The window is synecdoche, is Eagle itself—a lens, a monocular, framing the wild, holding the vision that draws people up the long trail to the edge of things to have a look and see.
Synecdoche: what was that? The context defined it for me—a small thing writ large—but I looked it up anyway. It’s from the Greek syn (with) + ekdoche (sense, interpretation), from ekdechesthai, to receive, understand; “to receive jointly”: “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage).” It has four syllables, with the accent on the second syllable: “sin-NECK-duh-kee.” A near rhyme with Schenectady.
I cannot explain the effect this word had on me, except to say that it made me ecstatic. I was like that cartoon dog who, when given a biscuit, hugs himself and levitates. In addition to what the word was describing—the wilds of Alaska—it was a window onto the writing itself. When McPhee uses an unfamiliar word, you can be sure that it’s the only word for what he’s trying to say, and he savors it, he rolls the syllables in his mouth as if words were food and he were licking his chops.