Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

But the best came last. John, a New York merchant banker, told a ghost story meant to be heightened at its denouement by the sudden rise of flames in the fireplace behind him. Achieved by covertly tossing a snifter of Calvados into the glowing coals, this had the unfortunate effect of introducing real terror into both staff and cynical anglers when the chimney caught fire. Fearing the worst, we all ran outside into the Labrador night. The chimney was blowing sparks and fire fifteen feet into the night sky. Fascinated, I watched John detach himself from these events and take a purely objective interest in what threatened to destroy our housing in the arctic. But gradually the fire subsided and as our evening wound down I heard our architect friend inquire of the Benevolent One, once the chief financial officer of a large movie company, as to the prospects of a film sale of the Skyborg project. While the B.O. refrained from throwing cold water on his hopes, he later confided to me that he thought an experienced studio executive like Sherry Lansing would find Skyborg “thin.”

NAT’S FISH was going berserk, not so much jumping as bouncing angrily off the water as though it were stone. Nat ran down the river past me, reel squalling, and said rather calmly, “Number ten light wire Icelandic shrimp. I’ll never land this fish.” But I saw him a while later, bending to make his release. I photographed Nat with his fish but again the pictures came back with the high-latitude hoodoo, and Nat was transformed into an incubus holding a glowing reptile.

At the end of the day we picked up Dr. Hobie, who recited a rather morose saga. He had waded out to a thin spit of bottom where one could barely stand up and hooked the biggest fish he had ever seen on the Whale. After a long battle, the fish was within a rod’s length but would not accompany Dr. Hobie ashore, nor could he bring it to hand. At this stalemate, the man and fish faced off for a long time, the latter making no further bid for escape and the former unable to cross the deep trough to the beach. A prolonged acquaintanceship ensued, at the end of which the hook pulled and the fish went on to its next appointment. If there was a philosophical overview to grant this moment of closure, it was lost on Dr. Hobie. Fate had dealt him a heavy blow.

“Fook, wot spawt.”

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER owes much of its interest to cycles of turbulence, starting with the one within which Walton wrote. In the years shortly before the Restoration, social discord, especially among the literate classes, rose to a genuinely dangerous level. The austerities of Cromwell were undertones of an ominously gathering future. Quietist dreaming, gentleness and contemplation, rusticity and the ceremonies of country life, including fishing, beckoned compellingly. From the Restoration until now, The Compleat Angler has been renewed by turmoil, none more conspicuous than the Industrial Revolution, which produced an explosion in the popularity of angling and an idealization of the pastoral life. Its cousins, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne and Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , profited similarly. Armchair anglers and the various harried people of the western world have elevated these books to scripture.

Today’s faithless reader will be somewhat baffled by the long shelf-life of this unreliable fishing manual, until he realizes that it’s not about how to fish but how to be. Of this fact even Walton was unaware; thus its inescapable persuasiveness and the bright, objective picture the author has left of himself, without which all quickly deteriorates into the quaint or, worse, the picturesque.

Anglers, above all, have given this book a long life. Its lore and advice are largely obsolete. Its spiritual origins, drawn contradictorily from pagan and Christian sources, may well appeal to the instinctive pantheism of bucolic dreamers, but anglers tend to be more persistently interested in methods. The greater number of them are less about capturing a truth than capturing a fish and eating it. Still, the sport demands immersion, from air to water, from warm blood to cold, to a view of the racing universe and all its stars through a river’s flowing lens.

Two things from Walton seem contemporary: the flies and the recipes. The first, hooks wrapped in bits of silk and songbird wings, reveal a poetic intuition for breaking down the watery walls. The recipes seem the product of avid reflection as to what a predator ought to do with his prey in a manner complimentary to the destiny of each. The sense of a holy sacrifice, benign and undoubted, subtends the making of these innocent meals in honest alehouses where the angler could expect to find “a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.”

Walton is one of our principal literary sojourners, with White and Thoreau. By comparison with White, he is unscientific; and by comparison with Thoreau, discursive and confident about his world, less challenging of his fellow man but also less wintry and intolerant.

Walton is the leading player in his own book and is helpless to be otherwise. Unlike the rather alpine, punctilious, and detached Thoreau, or the hyperkinetic White, Walton’s persona is one of equitability and such serenity of faith that his journey, in the view of one contemporary, from sepulcher of the Holy Ghost to pinch of Christian dust, spoke of an amiable mortality and rightness on the earth that has been envied by his readers for three-hundred years. But the three do share a conviction that the elements of the natural world are Platonic shadows to be studied in search of eternity, a medium in which man was presumed to float as opposed to sink, as in the present when eternity has been replaced by the abyss.

All three make note of the vast share of their fellows, getting, spending, and laying waste their powers, “men that are condemned to be rich,” in Walton’s words. He observes, “there be as many miseries beyond riches, as on this side of them.” The rich man, he thinks, is like the silkworm which, while seeming to play, is spinning her own bowels and consuming them. One thinks of Thoreau “owning” the farms by knowing them better than their tenants; it is less that the meek shall possess the earth than that “they enjoy what others possess and enjoy not.” The subject of The Compleat Angler is, really, everyday miracles, friends, a dry, warm house, remembered verse, hope. Walton reserves but one spot for envy and invidious comparison: “I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.” I think of gentle, forgiving Anton Chekhov, who could not bear the slightest criticism of his angling.

It is not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether hunting, bird-watching, angling, or sailing, and each create superb opportunities to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water. In Walton’s century, man went from one of God’s creations to being an actor who might undertake the management of nature, whose “activism” has grown catastrophically worse ever since. This was part of the seventeenth century uproar, and part of the wedge Puritanism was driving between man and nature. Walton, with his many resonances in Roman literature, is often most serene when he is most medieval. The angler preparing his wiles for the capture of fish is closer to the fish themselves than that husbandman cited by Walton who manages fish ponds as though they were extensions of his farm. The angler’s skies are wilder, his cycles as deeply circadian as the migratory birds he encounters during the seasons of the river, his perils on earth less those of a few pinches of Christian dust than a ray of fortuitous light in the heart of creation itself.