TALES OF SWORDFISH AND TUNA
By Zane Grey
Derrydale Press, 203 pages, $24.95 paper
HEMINGWAY ON FISHING
By Ernest Hemingway
Lyons Press, 242 pages, $29.95
It’s hard to believe it now, but Zane Grey was once the most popular writer in America, at least among the general reading public if not the intelligentsia. In his lifetime B.P.E. (before the paperback era), he turned out more than 60 novels and sold 13 million copies of them. Grey came out of his dental office in Zanesville, Ohio, quills blazing, and in 1912 single-handedly invented the Western adventure genre. Still in print 90 years later, more than 1 million volumes of his works are sold each year in airports, convenience stores, newsstands and supermarkets.
Grey’s true love, however, was not the lonesome cowboy. It was fishing. He adored angling in every form and variety on ocean, stream and pond. He cast artificial flies and live baits with equal skill and enthusiasm all over the world. It is said he spent more than 300 days each year fishing, mostly in the Santa Catalina Channel on his 52-foot cruiser, Gladiator.
“Tales of Swordfish and Tuna” is a new collection of Grey’s saltwater-fishing adventures. They are well worth reading for pleasure and instruction. Just as he invented the Western, Grey also pioneered sport fishing for the large ocean species of game fish. Over the first three decades of the 20th Century he held 14 world records, and he invented much of the gear and technique still used today, albeit in more modern dress and permutations.
The great attraction of Grey as an angling writer remains this: Almost no one before or since has captured the actual act of pursuing and catching a fish with such fidelity, clarity and energy. He isn’t interested in metaphor, parable or higher meaning, just the struggle and the kill. Read “Tuna at Avalon, 1919,” “Giant Nova Scotia Tuna” or “Wolves of the Sea” from this collection, and you’ll see what I mean.
Ernest Hemingway shared much the same background as Grey, although he was some 25 years younger. Hemingway grew up in a small Midwestern town (Oak Park), his father was a physician who taught him to shoot and fish (Grey’s father was a dentist), and he spent long school vacations in places where the fishin’ was easy and practically unavoidable for an active boy. The literary diction of Hemingway and Grey are remarkably akin: short, energetic, declarative sentences, long on action verbs and to heck with adjectival verbosity. Hemingway’s language, of course, is denser and far richer in image and metaphor.
It is hard to believe that Hemingway’s nascent style wasn’t strongly influenced by Grey: Almost every red-blooded 13-year-old boy in America in 1912 must have read “Riders of the Purple Sage” at least twice. Despite the one-dimensional characters, Grey’s appeal to the male psyche and his popular success would have excited the ambition and ego of young Hemingway. In any event, the similarities in kinetic energy, directness and compression of language are striking. What Hemingway did at his best was to transmute Grey’s baser metal into pure gold.
In the “Up in Michigan” stories, Hemingway really struts his stuff. Nick Adams is one of his most appealing heroes and projects the qualities, real or imagined, of the young Hemingway returned home and convalescing from war wounds. All of these stories, but most especially “Big Two-Hearted River,” written when Hemingway was only 25, are small but perfect examples of the possibilities of capturing a moment in time where art, life and the natural world intersect magically through the seamless artifice of the writer. I don’t think he wrote anything better, or perhaps even as good–at least until the miraculous novella “The Old Man and the Sea.” Every angler should read these stories once every year or so just before opening day. It would be good for the soul.
“On the Irati,” an excerpt from “The Sun Also Rises” that is in “Hemingway on Fishing,” is the story of an excursion from the bullring at Pamplona, Spain, to a trout stream in the Pyrenees. It is also Hemingway at the top of his form. After that, the virulent onset of Muscular Humanism (the he-man modernist’s version of the 19th Century Muscular Christianity of Thomas Arnold) seems to have infected Hemingway’s sensibility.
But underneath all the macho blustering, the eager little boy casting a giant fishing pole on Walloon Lake 1902 still peeked out (see the photo opposite Page 114 of “Hemingway on Fishing”). At the end, before the metaphorical sharks hit him, he did produce “The Old Man and the Sea.” When Hemingway had the quarry in sight and his cast was true, no one performed better as a fisherman or writer. In his philosophy, the possibility of redemption was an absolute, but grace, at best, was provisional. In “The Old Man and the Sea,” as an artist, he clearly achieved the former.
Nick Lyons, who edited and wrote a thoughtful introduction to this collection, deserves considerable credit for bringing together in one volume Hemingway’s best writing on fishing. It is what Hemingway loved most, wrote about best, and perhaps will be remembered for longest. At least, it is what I will think about as I cast for the elusive bonefish and tarpon on his flats in Florida and the Caribbean.
A final thought. Anyone who can afford to shell out $60 and loves fly fishing, or just cares about the prelapsarian glory of the American landscape, should buy “The Land of Little Rivers,” by Austin McK. Francis (Beaverkill Press). It is a beautifully composed paean to the piscatorial joys of the Beaverkill, a reclusive trout stream enfolded by the arms of the Catskill foothills. It was once unspotted from the world, and still largely is, although development threatens ominously at every bend and pool. The photography is magnificent, and it is as integral to the text as Michelangelo’s frescoes are to worship in the Sistine Chapel. It should be chained to your coffee table as securely as if it were the “Book of Kells.”
