Little Aristocracy

A ROOMFUL OF HOVINGS by John McPhee. 250 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.

Composing a New Yorker profile is a little like squeezing toothpaste from a half empty tube. Fighting all normal impulses, the writer begins at the wrong end. With infinite patience, he applies limp but meticulous pressure. After what seems like hours of low-level suspense, out oozes the substance. The only appropriate applause is a subdued "Hear, hear."

New Yorker Staffer John McPhee, a man who can write--and has written--a whole book about oranges, obviously has the qualifications of mind and temperament for the job. He combines the fastidious appetite for detail of a Sherlock Holmes with the snail's-pace anecdotal style of a Dr. Watson. Though the pulsebeat may be dangerously low, a quiet, almost shy affection comes through for the subjects he is writing about: Thomas P. F. Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Euell Theophilus Gibbons, an authority on wild food (Stalking the Wild Asparagus); Robert Twynam, groundsman for the hallowed center grass court at Wimbledon; Temple Hornaday Fielding, author of Fielding's Travel Guide to Europe: and Carroll W. Brewster, an M.I.T. Fellow in Africa, who helped systematize the judicial system of the Sudan by collating five years of court cases.

Egyptian Tomb. What in the world can these people have in common? Mainly a sense of style--of marked, almost baroque individuality operating within a discipline. A classicist in technique, McPhee is nonetheless a romantic in his tastes. He relishes dash and flair: Hoving decorating the hallway of his apartment like an Egyptian tomb; Fielding traveling with Epernay mustard and a pepper grinder in his custom-made briefcase; Twynam looking like a mustachioed Member of Parliament as he moves on court to replace a divot.

The members of McPhee's little aristocracy are all professionals who perform their work with total competence and, in addition, some kind of noblesse oblige. Hoving escorts McPhee to his museum's Flemish collection with the zest of a "floorwalker on his way to the Hickey-Freeman suits" in a men's store. On a November foraging expedition in Pennsylvania, Gibbons and McPhee not only live pretty much off the land for six days but also gain weight in the process as they wash down nuts and mushrooms with natural beverages: pine-needle tea, wintergreen tea, witch-hazel tea, pennyroyal tea, and, of all things, sumacade.

At a modest, unassuming level, McPhee has Fellow Princetonian Scott Fitzgerald's feeling for personality as a series of successful gestures. An M.I.T. Fellow diplomatically downs a half a gallon of camel's milk and five pounds of raw liver at a Sudanese feast--and the gesture serves a purpose beyond the merely dramatic. Often the gestures have to justify themselves: a jeweler's showcase of charming and ornamental human graces. Even then, the reader senses McPhee's unspoken assumption that gestures add up not only to personality but to character, just as these pieces themselves implicitly add up to the code of a hip George Apley.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.