Casting for Literature : Fish...

Writing about fishing is difficult for the same reason that writing about sex is. Most of us know the sensation of catching a fish, so there’s a certain sameness about the climax. Good for life, not so good for art.

The man who hired Henry Miller and Anais Nin to write sex stories for him was always urging them to get to the actual sex faster. He didn’t care for a larger context or meander. The editors of Field & Stream haven’t given their writers much room to meander--or maybe the writers haven’t been good enough to meander or don’t have a larger context--so half of the stories are man-meets-fish, or man-meets-grouse, or elk or bear. There may be a little shimmy to the plot--a sigh for a good old dog or a good old pal or for the snows of yesteryear--but that’s about it. I can imagine a situation in which I would be grateful for these stories--in fact I can remember one. A friend and I went to Baxter State Park in Maine to walk up Mount Katahdin. Our first day it rained buckets. We’d come on a whim--good shoes but only a quart jar of macaroni to eat and nothing to read. We wandered around the base in our ponchos, saw a small bear and admired the tall ferns. We were about to go back to our lean-to and be gloomy when we came upon a very small cabin in a glade. Nobody home. We peeked in. It was the Baxter State Park library, stocked with musty volumes--perhaps from public-library discards, perhaps from backpackers offloading already-read campfire reading. The “Best of Field & Stream” should be there, with a few mildew spots on the cover and some pencil-stub annotations in the table of contents. I imagine that the handwriting inspires literary trust.

There are 52 stories in the anthology, divided among fin, feather and fur, and these divisions are subdivided to cover fresh and saltwater fish (only trout get extra treatment), waterfowl and upland birds, and big-game--mostly North American--deer, elk, moose, several kinds of bear and one puma. It is possible that the editors had to compromise literary quality to cast a wide net. That would account for some of the numerous penciled notes saying “skip this” or “same old stuff.” My hiking buddy has lit the kerosene lamp in the Baxter-State Park library cabin. I distract him from skimming a Frank Yerby historical romance by reading a joke from the introduction. In the editorial offices of Field & Stream the men’s room was identified only by the picture of a pointer, the women’s room only by a setter: “ . . . anyone working for an outdoor magazine presumably knew bird dogs, or learned fast. But what about visitors?” The editors presumably found visitors’ mistakes hilarious.

I turn the wick up to read further pencil-stub comments. “Belongs in Reader’s Digest.” I’m about to put the book back when I see three stars and the word gem. It’s Norman Strung’s account of his misspent youth as a member of a gang of dead-end kids who made raids from New York City to poach fish from the stocked ponds of fancy suburban fishing clubs, crawling up drainage culverts to flick their bait over the wire fences. It’s OK that he’s redeemed in the end from his juvenile delinquency by a kindly club member--he and his associates have invented a half-dozen pranks as stylish as the best subway graffiti.

There are a few stories marked “rip-roarin’ yarn”--a bounty hunter killing a mountain lion with his knife, a guide and hunter wrapping themselves in the hide of a bear to survive an Alaskan blizzard, an English ne’er-do-well trekking from Capetown to Cairo in 1899 (simple but hearty Kipling fare), and a trapper cornered in a flimsy shack by a persistent grizzly. Most of the yarns are “as told to,” and perhaps for that reason have a richer and gamier flavor than the usual recipes.

Speaking of flavor, one of the articles is about eating exotic meat. The pencil comment is “swagger.” It is worth reading because you’d have to go far to find such an impenetrable density of boasting. Ate mastodon while dining with a wealthy industrialist, ate moose headcheese while hunting a murderer, drank tequila and Tabasco cocktails (“a jigger of each”), ate iguana--”These lizards are built like miniature dinosaurs but a good duck load of No. 4 shot will do the trick. Take out the innards, or leave them in it--it doesn’t much matter.” The envoi --”I’ve tried all of the dishes. Not only have I survived, I still have the main part of my digestive tract.”

Further down the table of contents there’s a story titled “On the Ivory Trail” by Bwana Cottar. My guide’s note says, “Double swagger.” To be fair, the editors themselves write in their subhead, “A braggart and con artist spins a tale of death, gore and purloined tusks.” But the story has a Teddy Roosevelt zest to it--innocent, or at least as innocent as someone carrying a big stick can be. Bwana Cottar is trumpeting himself, but he has enough outward gaze to see Africa as bigger than his own press clippings. And I find a peculiar pleasure in the out-dated prose--”in those days there was a breed of men out there I could understand. They were Englishmen, yes, but the kind of Englishmen that settled America in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds. They were dying off fast . . . but while they ran the country it was a real country.” Or “Sundown! And maybe sundown for old Bwana Cottar too, and the most devilish finish the desert could contrive.” And I can’t resist one more-- “But I had just picked up my old .405 and, firing from the hip, I shot the brute dead.” The adventures took place between 1910 and 1918, and the narrator, although speaking in 1939, can’t help but hark back to his younger style.

There are two other pretty good pieces that show their age in interesting ways--”A Woman Through Husky-Land” (the only piece by a woman), and “The XIVth of John” (“ ‘De best way to git dar,’ evolved Horace, colored factotum of our duck club and companion on many a trip. . . .”) However, most of the articles are curiously timeless--hard to tell 1948 from 1988. I mean this both as praise and as blame. There is a timeless pleasure in being in a timeless place, and perhaps these brief articles and anecdotes mark that, but the majority of them come alive only in small ways--the odd details of animal behavior or woods lore. When they reach for more, they too often bump into the confining walls of formula and cliche. With a few exceptions, gratitude for quaint diversion on a rainy afternoon is all I can muster.

“A Different Angle” is another kettle of fish altogether. The only part to skim lightly in this book is the introduction by the editor, who strains at a gnat to make fishing a hot gender issue. Otherwise she has done a terrific job picking her team of writers. Seventeen stories by women who fly fish--mostly for varieties of trout, but a couple of them go after salmon, striped bass and bluefish. Most of these women writers know as well as Henry Miller or Anais Nin (or for that matter Hemingway or Faulkner) that the catch is not the climax. Their angle is different not because they’re women, but because they know that the point of a good story usually isn’t one of the elements in it. It’s not the person or the fish or the river. It’s the part that doesn’t have a place in the story when you start. It’s the part that is conjured. Its presence depends on the writer having the sense to make room for the spirit.

For a while I used to think this extra dimension was always connected to mortality. There are indeed three stories in this anthology that have the death of a parent as a central element. At first, going fishing--going into a stream or salt water--seems like anesthetic for a loss about which the writer can do so little. But in fact what the three women do is to heighten their senses. Going fishing makes them so alert to what they see and organize in the bright turmoil of water that they are prepared to sense farther into the dark. But even that explanation is both too explicit and too approximate.

Le Anne Schreiber is the most conscious that she is deliberately constructing a ritual. “Often on clear days, I’ll see a cardinal fly across the stream ahead of me, a streak of red against the blue sky . . . before he’s lost again in the green world. . . .” She is reminded of a Dark Ages remark about life being as short as a sparrow’s flight through a mead hall. She finds the presence of her mother not “in photographs or anecdotes” but in the signs of life that brush against her. “I am not talking about belief but the experience of consolation. . . . I am thankful that my discovery of death coincided with my discovery of a new setting . . . midstream, where the play of light on water makes me feel blessed.”

The other stories are not elegies or consolations--quite a few are broad comedy. I liked Sally Stoner’s “Women in the Stream,” which is frankly full of murderous rage against men and menopause, but also irritation against some of her women companions on her float trip. Here they are sorting out camping gear:

“Look, Effie, it’s bad enough you’ve got this fancy damn luggage, but the hot curlers are definitely out.”

“Well, what about Cindy? She still has her pager on, and she’s reading ‘Re-Engineering the Corporation’ in hardback.”

“I know. I just caught her trying to call her secretary on her cell-phone. . . .”

E. Annie Proulx and Pam Houston, fiction writers whose work I have loved in other forms, both write beautifully, comically and generously about their exasperating friendships with male fishing buddies. Elizabeth Arnold (now the congressional correspondent for National Public Radio) and Jessica Maxwell both have an attraction to extreme situations (in Alaska and Mongolia respectively), which they describe with precision and wit. They are in that admirable school of adventurers who are dumb enough to fall for it, tough enough to take it.

The longest piece, “Fishergirl” by Gretchen Legler, while having a lot of trout in it, is also a shrewd family story of late emergence. “It was my father who taught me how to fly fish. And it was I who eagerly learned, never imagining that later, as a grown woman, the teaching would begin to feel like a molding. Never imagining that Fishergirl would grow to eclipse me, throwing a shadow over the many selves I wanted to become.”

I loved the psychological dividends and the literary pleasures of this anthology, but I should add that I enjoyed it as a fisherman (intermediate at inshore salt water, persistent novice at fly fishing). There are helpful hints for every level of competence. Some of the writers write sympathetically and helpfully about the first frustrations and first pleasures, while others are professional guides. Take it either way--17 good fishing trips, 17 good stories for the common reader.