He Reads . . : Sports.

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:46:27 GMT

Wright, David (author).
FEATURE. First published September 1, 2009 (Booklist).

The Sport of Philosopher Kings

Most sports have produced good writing, but I doubt any have produced so many good writers as fishing. Spending hours of quiet reflection in running water tends to winnow thought and polish prose to river-rock smoothness. I’m no fisherman myself, but I do like relaxing on the shore with a fishing book. Many readers will have enjoyed David James Duncan’s The River Why or may have strayed from Thomas McGuane’s fiction to his fishing essays (if you haven’t, try The Longest Silence). Still, it’s sad to think of all those other fine, thoughtful writers who are missed by readers who don’t fish.

Unlike many hyperbole-prone sportswriters, fishermen often seem reduced to Zen shrugs. Take Robert Haig-Brown in A River Never Sleeps, written in 1946: “I still don’t know why I fish or why other men fish, except we like it and it makes us think and feel.” Michael Checchio titled one of his fishing memoirs Being, Nothingness, and Fly Fishing with self-deprecating irony, and yet the title winds up apt in spite of itself. For so many of its practitioners, fishing is utterly spiritual, transcendental, philosophical, or all three.

That strained cliché of sports as metaphor for life—ubiquitous in the literature of baseball and golf—seems more at home in fishing memoirs, many of which are deeply personal. In Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis, New York Times editor Howell Raines took up rod and reel to ease his anxieties and found his growing maturity mirrored by his changing views on the purpose and art of fly-fishing—from conquest and consumption to something more respectful of life and the passage of time. In Streams of Consciousness, Jeff Hull delves deeper, discovering in the wake of his brother’s death and his own bout with mental illness that he will always find equilibrium staring back at him from the surface of a pond or river.

Nick Lyons perfectly captures the lure of angling in My Secret Fishing Life, his days full of family and multiple careers punctuated by idyllic episodes and furtive escapes, such as fishing in the East River between meetings. As a publisher, Lyons has been responsible for reviving some great fishing titles, including Bill Barich’s perfect little Crazy for Rivers, a beautifully rendered meditation on the catch-and-release nature of life. It is interesting to compare Barich with his stylistic forebear, Hemingway, whose lifelong zeal for rod and reel is well represented in Hemingway on Fishing, edited by Nick Lyons. I can’t help but wonder how much mellower Hemingway would have been had he stuck to angling for trout rather than battling marlin in his aqueous rendition of the bullfight.

The fishing author I’m the most sorry that nobody knows about is Harry Middleton. In the last few years of his life, leading up to his untimely death in 1993, Middleton wrote four books that are, to coin a phrase, as much about fishing as Moby Dick. Start with The Earth Is Enough, which tells of his coming-of-age in the care of a grandfather and uncle in the Ozarks who farmed badly, fished well, enjoyed books, and had a love for nature that extended all the way to not despoiling it. Inspiring and elegiac, this is simply one of the best memoirs ever written.

Titles Discussed:

Being, Nothingness, and Fly Fishing. By Michael Checchio. 2001. OP.

Crazy for Rivers. By Bill Barich. 1999. Globe Pequot, $12.95 (9781585742233).

The Earth Is Enough. By Harry Middleton. 1989. Pruett, $18 (9780871088741).

Fly Fishing through the Midlife Crisis. By Howell Raines. 1993. HarperCollins, $13.95 (9780060834647).

Hemingway on Fishing. By Ernest Hemingway. 1999. Globe Pequot, $24.95 (9781599211084).

The Longest Silence. By Thomas McGuane. 1999. Knopf, $15 (9780679777571).

My Secret Fishing Life. By Nick Lyons. 2001. OP.

A River Never Sleeps. By Robert Haig-Brown. 1946. Globe Pequot, $18.95 (9781558211162).

The River Why. By David James Duncan. 1984. Sierra Club, $24.95 (9780871563217).

Streams of Consciousness. By Jeff Hull. 2007. Globe Pequot, $19.95 (9781592289882).

David Wright is Readers’ Services Librarian, Seattle (WA) Public Library. For a woman’s point of view, see what Kaite Mediatore Stover thinks.

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He Reads . . : Sports.