Thomas McGuane: The Longest Silence

I think I was headed for the River Maigue, probably because I liked the name when I passed through Kilmallock, a small market town in County Limerick on the road to Rathluirc, a town which after numerous sackings by fun-loving Oliver Cromwell became “an abode of wolves.” Four hundred years later, things had quieted down. There I spotted an establishment called Tom McGuane’s Dry Goods. I stopped the car and went in. The store was of the marginal type then common in southern Ireland, where no light was turned on until it was firmly established that a customer was present. A man walked past me, pulled the string. I introduced myself. Without any special reaction, he replied, “How do you do, Tom. I’m Tom McGuane.” I met Mrs. McGuane and her two beautiful daughters. All lived in the back of the store in immaculate austerity and that air of an impending joke that is many people’s favorite part of Irish life. I explained to my hosts that I was looking for a place to fish. We had already decided that we were unrelated.

“Get a room at Mrs. D’Arcy’s pub across the way. We’ll send someone round for you after supper.”

I got a white, breezy, comfortable room on the second story for about the price of an American hamburger. I spread out my books and tackle while watching the street below, anxious about the vagueness of my arrangements. There was a high overcast sky and the ancient street below me and the sight of the ruins of a medieval abbey in an empty pasture added to the sense, critical to fishing, that time no longer mattered. I was at that blissful stage in my life when my services were sought by no one. I didn’t know how good I had it.

A man appeared below, Ned Noonan was his name, already in his hip boots, carrying a long-handled net and a trout rod. He had been sent to see me by the other Tom McGuane. He wore an old tweed cap and a gray suitcoat with a shoulder that bore the permanent scar of his creel strap and with pockets slung open at the top from years of duty. I went downstairs and we met.

“Shall we start at the Morning Star?” he inquired politely, “or the Loobagh?”

“I am afraid I don’t know one from another.”

“Morning Star it is then. I understand you have an automobile?”

“I do.”

Ned gazed around the inside of my Morris with enormous approval. To an Irish dairyman who liked to fish, it was a very tangible luxury. Later, I could reconstruct the glee with which Ned imagined new territories. He’d had a fly rod in his hand all his life and a matchbox of homemade flies: sedges, rusty spinners, Bloody Butchers, grouse-and-orange, grouse and anything you could name. I remember first noticing his high straight backcast as he knelt before a wall of hawthorns to present his fly to a feeding fish. He fished to eat and for the love of it. He had made the rod, made the net, made the flies and his wife had woven the creel. He was a blood-and-bone trout fisherman with a Pioneer’s pin in his lapel, declaring that he abjured spiritous drink.

We fished that first evening, paralyzed by reciprocal politeness, on a small stream that wandered lazily through cow pastures. We would have better things to do once Ned absorbed the full power and implications of the 1951 Morris, parked like a black gumdrop beside the hedge.

It was very pleasant under the great clouds of swallows and mayflies, despite the thin population of fish. The scattering of ancient ruins, the long, mysterious Irish summer evening, the small trout whose ancestors swam this water when the ruins were full of people — all lent a gravity to our proceedings that I was to feel throughout my stay. Too, it was the company of anglers like Ned Noonan who could never recall when they began fishing, so undivided was it from the thread of their lives.

When I came in that evening, I returned the wave of an ardent and heavily made-up young woman with unnatural blond hair, rather a beauty but profoundly influenced by the latest Carnaby Street fashions. From time to time, she appeared in a burst of enthusiasm and ill-concealed carnality while her neighbors either stared at their shoes or moved off a short way to bless themselves. I saw her waving from the tops of buildings, from various windows and from the nave of the thirteenth-century church of Saints Peter and Paul, in ruins but the final resting place of Gaelic poets. Finally, I saw her cavorting with an entire hurley team in Blossom’s Gate, the last remaining of four medieval gates. These strong, raucous men from Cork City made me realize I was more in my own depth with my shelf of books and tin box of flies upstairs at Mrs. D’Arcy’s.

Blessing themselves was something the local people did many times a day. When we drove out past the parish church, Ned and my other companions would elevate the thumb and first two fingers in front of themselves and in a space smaller than a dime, make a sign of the cross, a rakish bit of muscle memory that I found myself imitating. It seemed to help before a difficult presentation to a large fish such as the listless slob of a brown trout, curd fattened at the outlet of a small creamery on the Loobagh River, where it took my grouse-and-orange.

In the water meadows whose edges I strolled awaiting the evening fishing, cranes stood alongside the half-submerged and ruined bits of fence or shot out of the hedge like arrows. Strangers wandered from other towns in black rubber boots, waterproofs, and tweed caps. Some were stockmen, driving a handful of cattle by the road, “farming the long mile.” When the sky cleared, the great traveling clouds seemed to belong to the ocean. I often thought of the wild girl who turned every cornice into a parapet from which to display her international plumage — learned from magazines — directed at me, at the drifting farm men and tinkers of the road, at the hurley team from Cork. I abashedly made mention of her to Ned, who shyly informed me that the “poor thing was mad.” This latter is less condemning than one might first suppose. When I wanted a sweater, we sent for the wool which arrived by train in a week, a lovely greenish-gray I had selected. Then we took it to a woman whose grown daughter was also “mad.” The mother took my measurements while the haunted, tall daughter stood in the shadows. In a week the mad daughter made me a beautiful sweater. At Sunday Mass, I sat and watched a priest genuflecting against the stone flags, cracking one knee over and over until my pew-mate turned to me and said, “The poor thing’s mad.” That only made my bottle blonde more interesting, though a sudden image of myself riding a madwoman through the moonlit streets of a tiny, poor, devoutly Catholic town where I had neither credit nor credibility (the townspeople had arbitrarily decided that I was from New Zealand) seemed frightening. Better to remain a quiet-spoken mock Kiwi with a fly rod and a Morris than risk it with someone who more and more often crooked a finger at me in demented invitation as I slipped back to my room above Mrs. D’Arcy’s.

One night I read a copy of the Dublin Times about a month old. The Beatles had seized the English-speaking world and would soon have the rest. There was an upstart band from London, the Rolling Stones, who would soon play Dublin. A large advertisement suggested this band was going places. I looked at their pictures in astonishment. Only the English cities, I thought, could come up with these drooling imbeciles whose stippled and wolfish jaws and pusspocket eyes indicated a genetic impasse. A decade later, I tried and failed to get tickets to their concert at Altamont, where with their retinue of Hell’s Angels, a rock ’n’ roll ceremony of murder was performed for our guitar-ridden new world. I didn’t even see it coming.

In my room, I had set out my books — my onionskin Keats, Borrow’s The Bible in Spain and Lavengro , my Thoreau and Walton, my battered Yeats — and my notebook with its hopeful scratchings and imitations, my pencils, and my knife. Downstairs in the pub I ate what I was given, and it was remarkably good with a bottle of black stout to see it on its way. A black-and-white photograph I took at the time has a notation that indicates that I was going native: “A brace of fine trout taken in the gloaming” (!). Another photograph shows me lugubriously standing beside Yeats’s grave, not revealing that my attitude is much the product of being stared at by local Protestants on their way to church, indignant at my tourism. I recall gazing at an eighth-century high cross in the town from which my mother’s family originated, staring at the stone monks, headless corpses, Daniel in the lion’s den, the peculiarly repeated faces and Celtic spirals.