Rivers of Print

I've been enjoying the book on fly fishing in literature. (Haunted By Waters: Fly Fishing in North American Literature. Mark Browning, Ohio UP, 1998. ). As he explicates the significance attributed to fishing by various writers, I see many of the ideas about the sport that I've come to on my own. It's a bit like reading one's own psychohistory, though not unsettling in the least.

An idea that is new to me concerns the relation between the world of the river and the world of print, which represent respectively my vocation and my livelihood. I've said here before that I often feel as if a wide gap seperates them, that they are strong and irreconcilable attractions in my life. As he discusses the relationship between writing and fishing, Browning tosses in this quote from Ted Leeson which suggests a way of harmonizing them:

The craft of angling is the catching of fish. But the art of angling is a receptiveness to... connections, the art of letting one small thing lead to another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realize some small completeness. By no coincidence, this is the art of writing essays, as it is, I think, the art of living, for among these three occupations there seems to be no essential difference in degree or kind.

Sounds right to me, and it sounds rather like the art of teaching, too. I don't feel I'm on the way to living seamlessly yet, but there is definitely something here to explore, both on the stream and at my keyboard.

And I'll probably find more provisions for that exploration eventually. There is a god-awful lot of books about fly fishing published, but despite my interest in literature and my mania for fishing, I've read few of them. Most I have read haven't been that impressive--in the main, fishing books seem to get written by fishermen who write instead of writers who fish. I have enjoyed very much some non-fiction by the latter group, particularly essays by Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane, memoirs by Harry Middleton and Gretchen Legler, as well as an odd piece in a magazine or two whose author I can't remember offhand. David James Duncan's The River Why is probably the best fishing novel I've seen, with A River Runs Through It a close second. I can still remember reading Hemingway's story "Big Two Hearted River" reprinted in Field and Stream (the sacred text of my childhood) when I was about 10. It captivated me like nothing else I had read to that point, the first, second, the fiftieth time I read it. That issue of Field and Stream stayed on my nightstand for years afterward. Haunted by Waters has turned up a few new names that I want to check out. Maybe there's a project in that for me. While Browning articulates many important insights about the genre, his work also begs a number of questions about it, which someone in the know really ought to engage.