The Longest Silence

...One suspects that both in the fishing and in the writing McGuane knows an ample measure of what Vladilnir Nabokov--for whom butterflies possessed the charm that steelhead and permit do for McGuane-- called "aesthetic bliss...

...yet there is something about these fish that makes McGuane think of angels, even if he cannot quite bring himself to believe in them...

...What is clear is that fishing has been for him an elementary form of the religious life...

...He put his tribulation to use, if not to especially good use...

...A woman he meets in a reinote British Columbia town tells him she moved there recently from the Yukon: "How did she like it here...

...Nasaw says Hearst was larger than life, and his splendid biography proves it...

...The pain of inevitable loss and death can be made to yield a commensurate pleasure in a splendor not made to last...

...The beguiling virile melancholy that puts one in mind of Heraclitus and that likely underlies McGuane's flaws as man and novelist does not get the final say...

...The bloodsuckers, however, made your throat constrict and were said to have a ghastly ability to exchange their own blood with yours, sending weird spores and leech eggs coursing for your brain...

...what precisely he did in this line of work is left unclear, except for the time he emerged from the fundament of a frozen elephant carcass and fought a duel in his underwear with a baseball pitching machine...

...By the 198o's he took to writing the same story over and over, about men whose work amounts to nothing and whose blighted marriages and dismal adulteries amount to even less...

...The most famous aphorism of the preSocratic philosopher Heraclitus got the matter down with peerless concision: "No man steps iu the same river twice...

...About the time McGuane was making a serious name for himself as a writer, he determined that writing was a sorry 72 Sepeernber 20o0 _9 The American Spectator substitute for living, by which he had in mind a riotous abundance of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and fishing...

...Kristallnacht disabused him of that, but even so, he still insisted peace was possible...

...Delight is plucked, with consummate tact, from death's very, maw...

...Three years later, however, he ordered his wire service chiefs and editors to always use the words "Raw Deal," and never "New Deal...

...The memory of past pleasures sometimes quiets the blood's insistent hammering in his ears...

...Panama is the most woebegone of MeGuane's books, though it does have competition...

...That he did not die was cause not so much for gratitude as for desperation...

...when that possibility of understanding one's fate is lost, and with it any hope of changing that fate, the life of a novel packs its bags, and only a down-in4he-mouth puppetry is left onstage...

...Fishing the once magnificent but now silt-laden Henry's Fork of the Snake River in Idaho provokes McGuane himself to thoughts of nightstalking with a knife between his teeth...

...His most beloved sport has proved a lasting possession, his passion for which has endured while elsewhere in his life the losses have achingly mounted...

...When I was young and in the thrall of religion, I used to imagine various bands of angels, differentiated principally by size...

...Usually this left him displeased...

...The novel Panama (1978) is Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy's account of his struggle to recover from the moral and emotional shellacking meted out by his brief but enervating career as an overnight sensation...

...indeed, it continually reminds the attentive observer that he enjoys his earthly tenure on sufferance...

...McGuane shows himself capable of doing every risible thing he wants to do with the American language...

...When you're at the drive-in movie in Key West, watching adult fare with all the other sweating neckers, the column of light from the projectionist's booth is feverish with tropical insects blurring the breasts and buttocks on their way to the screen...

...Good anglers are 'red-hots.' His solutions to the problems of deteriorating fishing habitat incline toward the clean gestures of the assassin...

...The fear arose in him that he would irrevocably miss his life if he did not grab every beckoning pleasure with both hands...

...McGuane came to see that this was not exactly the way he wanted to leave his mark...

...It was obvious that none of his characters stood the slightest chance of conceiving a plausible answer, let alone a convincing one...

...in McGuane's books, it is unhappy families that are all alike, to the reader's dismay...

...he married his college sweetheart, who happened to list Davy Crockett among her ancestors, and he published his first novel, The Sporting Club, in 1969, when he was thirty years old...

...The smallest were under a foot in height, silvery and rapid, and able to move in any plane at will...

...Just what McGuane does believe in he leaves uncertain, with an artist's studied irresolution, or perhaps just a modern man's embarrassed vagueness abont his soul and other such matters that one is not supposed to mention in polite company...

...The turtle remained unmentioned...

...Simply to stand attentively in the presence of moving water gives one a preF ty fair start at understanding nature and one's place therein...

...his first ex-wife married Peter Fonda, who played Skelton in the movie...

...The face of creation takes in everything with a level stare...

...McGuane settled for something less...

...During the making of the movie Ninetytwo in the Shade, for which McGuane wrote the screenplay, he came fatefully under the influence of actresses, and there was no saving him...

...The love/y peculiarities of less imposing creatures are noted with superb precision as well...

...In fact, three months after Hearst died, Marion Davies married for the first time, and her new husband looked just like him...

...His sense of self was destroying his judgment...

...Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves...

...McGuane learned as a boy to keep his nocturnal terrors, rea] or imagined, from overwhelming him...

...In 194o, while the Battle of Britain raged, he sent a telegram to Lloyd George, preposterously proposing that the two of them "do something to bring this whole war to a just and reasonable cessation...

...yesterday's river, like the man one used to be, is gone for good...

...He does his best judiciously to weigh the needs of farmers against those offisherman, but cannot help himself from launching into an anti-spud philippic: "I had the feeling that the Henry's Fork was managed with a sharp eye on potato production, the modern equivalent of killing buffalo for their tongues...

...How far do you get with the question...

...As he writes in The Longest Silence, "Mortality being what it is, any new river can be your last...

...The youthful exuberance of his style was planed down to an aeerbic spareness: one irony fits all...

...Ninety-two in the Shade (t973), his best novel to date, brings together the madcap touch of a born comedian with the tragic sense of life...

...Ashley set down the memorable particulars of her couplings with MeGuane in a tell-all autobiography...

...A brown trout zooming in to take a fly appears as % beam of butter-colored light...

...Hedda Hopper is on his arm, and he looks a bit foolish, or perhaps out of touch...

...There's a yearling buck dead by the first spring, nearly devoured by coyotes who have seized intestines and backed several yards from the carcass...

...When I was young these manifestations of life's fury were comfortably free of premonition...

...N Of Time and the River The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing Thomas McGuane gnopf / 28o pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas ~ fa serious man is going to devote a significant part of his brief spell on earth to sport, the sport of choice almost has to be fishing, which modulates more readily than any other from action to contemplation...

...we were presumed asleep in our beds...

...He was enough of an ingenue himself to marry Kidder, for a time...

...This last piece, "Wading the Hazards," is of such a winning singularity that it cannot be allowed to pass without quotation...

...Nowhere...

...This elegiac turn of mind, activated by waters racing past never to return, goes back a long way...

...This confluence of awe and levity--man-eating sharks are always good for a laugh--is the imaginative preserve that McGuane has staked out as his own...

...A winsome pointer bitch is % lithe, speckled ballerina of a bird dog...

...At the opposite corner of the continent, off Key West, what had been prime fishing territory a few years before has turned into the stomping ground of youthful dopers: "O~1 weekends, a trawler yacht anchored inside Ballast Key and sold drugs to the kids in the 'Save the Bales' and 'Key Wasted' T-shirts who roared up in personal watercraft for what amounted to curb service...

...Pleasures beckoned soon enough...

...In its fury the left never forgave him...

...I'm thinking now of a middle of the night when Pete Waldeck, Mike Starling, and I were wading the water hazards...

...Fishermen of the right sort constitute an aristocratic confraternity...

...Only the previous week, Francis Kootsillas's neighbor had gotten a 60pound snapping turtle out of the same water hole...

...He was never a fascist or anti-Semite, but he seemed to believe moral persuasion would work with Hitler...

...vN 74 September 2 0 0 0 _9 The American Spectator...

...McGuane has always been aware that life, like the rivers he fishes, flows strictly one way and shows no mercy to those who dawdle when they should seize the day...

...Although McGuane was now happily married to his third wife and thriving on his Montana ranch, he treated unhappiness as the only serious subject for fiction-in particular, what he called in Nobody's Angel "sadness-for-no-reason...

...Yet primordial nature does not go down without a fight...

...As Thomas McGuane puts it in The Longest Silence, his bewitching collection of thirty-four essays on fishing written over the past thirty years, "Things that pass ns, go somewhere else, and don't come back seem to communicate directly with the soul...

...as a man he finds himself assailed by mortal terrors in broad daylight, and has to devise some means offending them off...

...This is merely a boon to the coyotes, who have come by this meal as honestly as did the Pennsylvania wolves who devoured the bodies of Braddock's soldiers after the battle of Monongahela...

...What really set him offwas a near miss with death, when his Porsche hit a patch of ice at 13o miles per hour and spun down the road like a pinwheel...

...B ut if McGuane has yet to deliver on his early promise as a novelist, 'he has proved himself consistently one of the best essayists going, with sport as his preferred subject...

...His collection An Outside Chance (198o) featured essays about fishing, hunting, motorcycling, sailing, manly deeds on horseback, and sneaking onto the local golf course at night as a boy in search of lost halls...

...In the novels Nobody's Angel (1982), Something to Be Desired (1984), Keep the Change (1989) , and Nothing but Blue Skies 0992), McGuane continued to pose the question of what we are doing here, but he did so in a perfunctory fashion...

...Early on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world...

...Hearst praised Roosevelt when he was elected president in 1932...

...Of one notably demanding companion McGuane writes, "He admits few fishermen into his angling pantheon and, without mercy, dMdes the duffers into 'bait soakers,' 'yucks,' and other categories of opprobrium...

...Meanwhile he and Marion were becoming fire new king and queen of Hollywood...

...Even in the bush, where one would not expect civilization to make its imperial presence felt, the infection is well advanced: "In two or three places on the walls of this wilderness school [in British Columbia] were dabbed the letters LSD, which did not stand for League of Spiritual Discovery...

...This profession of faith, guarded by thickets of jocular irony, distinguishes between the real creatures that are what McGuane knows of the sacred and the phantasms that his childish self imagined to be real...

...But cold-blooded trout and cold-blooded mayflies are indications of the world's retained heat, as is the angler, wading upstream in a cold spring wind in search of delight...

...As a young man he displayed a chivalric devotion to the literary calling, so that his more easily distracted contemporaries dubbed him "The White Knight...

...The Bible tells us to watch and to listen...

...L ong ago good, now no good: The sort of wildness that McGuane is ever in search of gets harder and harder to come by...

...ALGIS VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...

...Yesterday's river, like the man one used to be, is gone for good...

...On the other hand, he said millions were starving to death under Stalin, while the American left was, and unconscionably would remain, beguiled by Communism...

...This charmless notion runs very deep in us and can produce, besides the tightening around the mouth, a sweet and consoling inventory of all the previous rivers in your life...

...When McGuane spooks four young raccoons, which seek refuge by trying to climb some streamside aspen trees, only to lose traction on the slick bark and slide back down to the ground, he feels "a sense of real glee at the originality of things...

...they share an understanding, and those who do not understand are held up to scorn...

...His schooling at Michigan State, Yale, and Stanford did him no more than the usual harm...

...Once again a young man at the end of his tether-Thomas Skelton, a serious drug user-finds himself in need of earthly salvation, and he decides to become a Key West fishing guide...

...Hearst had constructed a world of his own, but the larger world all around that was changing...

...I was waiting...

...Skelton does persist, and he ends up a dead man...

...The American Spectator _9 September 2000 73 For McGuane, his favorite sport is not a diversion-which Pascal said men need because they cannot face the truth - b u t a way of approaching the heart of the matter with due reverence...

...witness the following exchange between Pomeroy and Marcelline, a former whore and drug addict who is the lover of the woman Pomeroy thinks he might still love: "Ever ask yourself what you are doing here...

...In doing so, he overtumed the Tolstoyan dictum that happy families are all alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...

...The sphere of genuine wonder seems to be the natural world rather than the supernatural...

...Nowhere else in McGuane's writings is his self--indeed, his soul--more triumphantly resonant than in this book...

...Very well, she said, but the shopping plaza in the Yukon was better...

...All the time...

...It had been living on water snakes and mallards and had the head of a malign regulation football and could hiss like a Belgian goose...

...A photograph in The Chief shows Hearst at his 75th birthday party, dressed as James Madison...

...McGuane's second novel, The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), recounts tile misadventures of a young man picking his way through vast expanses of cultural rubble--love, art, war, money lie in fragments all around him--in search of something, anything, worth doing...

...The waters are ever on the move, and so is the man...

...One does not expect that a novelist provide the definitive answer to that question, but one does want him to pose it over the course of his career in a variety of bemusing ways, and to give it a compelling flesh-andblood reality...

...Nasaw says Hearst's "spending and entertaining became more frantic, more spectacular, more lavish as the Depression worsened, as if to signal that he was too strong, self-reliant and self-confident to be swayed by temporary economic dislocation...

...I'm always saying, though it's hardly my idea, that the natural state of the universe is cold...

...That place belongs to his devotion: lifelong fidelity to a sport that he is tempted to call an art, that he might welt have been lost without, and that stirs the depths in him as much as anything else in his life...

...McGuane has more in mind than fishing when he writes about fishing...

...these three trout fitted neatly among those imaginary beings...

...Two of us hunted for golf balls in our bare feet, feeling in the muck and filling our pockets, while the third sat on the bank with the flashlight, pulling twenty or thirty humongous leeches off his legs...

...And perhaps he knows something more profound, although he is not always willing to come right out and say so: "...for the next forty, yards, tile clear water trembled deep and steady over a mottled bottom, and I took three hearty browns that flung themselves upon the bright surface of the run...

...Now they bear a gravity that dignifies the one-day lives of insects, the terrible slaughterhouse journey of livestock, and, of course, ourselves and our double handful of borrowed minerals...

...It is a work of sterling hilarity, as funny as Mark Twain or Evelyn Waugh...

...In his essay on Izaak Walton, author of the 17th-century classic The CompIeat Angler, McGuane observes that Walton's book has lasted as long as it has because "it's not about how to fish but how to be 7 The subtitle of McGuane's own book, A Life in Fishing, suggests that one can divine the essentials of how a man lives from the way he pursues his appointed sport...

...One would like to know whether the real glee McGuane enjoys in the presence of nature exceeds the pleasure of transmuting his sensations into delicious words...

...At low tide you smell the mangroves and exposed tidal flats nearby, and you're within a mile of sharks that could eat you like a juiube...

...Elegant, deft, and funny, it is the tale of a fabulously rich young reprobate hellbent with boredom, who ropes a not altogether eager accomplice into an assault on the woodland pieties of a tony Michigan rodand-gun dub --which is to say, they declare war on civilization itself...

...Those uninterested in the sport need not fear...

...The fears of boyhood, some of which seem laughable when one looks back on them, make way for the fears of manhood, which tend to be not so funny...

...Another guide with a violent past takes an immediate dislike to Skelton, and assures him that if he persists in his intention to guide he ~ } will end up a dead man...

...His marriage splintered as he consorted with the bourbon-voiced siren Elizabeth Ashley, then with the marble-limbed ingenue Margot Kidder...