Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Read online

  It’s well to remember, just as with Shakespeare’s plays, early forms of the novel were penned out of a desire to appeal to a broad, common readership. Such works as Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Moll Flanders were all originally published as “entertainments,” couched in the pretense that these were “true histories,” not fictional recreations designed to amuse as much as to inform. If the blatantly literary efforts of Samuel Richardson were the only roots of the modern novel, chances are it would never have germinated.

  The distinction between what is popular and what is literary, perhaps, defines the sort of stuff for which the word “ephemeral” was coined. Such works based on topical subjects and socially immediate themes have always been with us and always will be. We shouldn’t imagine that in Aristotle’s time, everyone sat around watching plays that had the consistent quality of Sophocles or Euripides, although by virtue of the recognition they achieved, it is assumed that they were the most popular writers of the day. Aristophanes seasons his plays with jokes about immediately prominent themes and happenings, as well as popular targets for satire, often referring directly to people who were expected to be present during a performance. Indeed, it might well be that Aristotle used their works as examples in The Poetics because he recognized their popular appeal as well as their literary (or philosophical) quality and wanted these works to become a standard for artistic excellence to fulfill his most fundamental dictum, that quality discourse both entertain and inform. Perhaps he wanted to point out that it was possible for something to be both widely appealing as well as intelligently written.

  Nor should we imagine that people lay about reading The Fairy Queen or Paradise Lost or Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides when other, less literary or artistically pretentious efforts were at hand. Johnson himself, though he outwardly despised Henry Fielding as “an ostler,” surprised his biographer Boswell by revealing that he had read at least parts of Fielding’s novels, particularly Joseph Andrews, and he enjoyed Fanny Burney’s popular works as well. Even Chaucer’s audiences had the choice of listening to his work or to the wildly popular and bawdy Lays of Marie de France, which have only been regarded as literary efforts in recent centuries, and we shouldn’t forget that Hawthorne’s complaint about “That Damned Mob of Scribbling Women” wasn’t directed toward the Brontes or—Mark Twain’s complaint aside—even Jane Austen, but was rather directed toward the antebellum equivalent of the “romance writer,” the purveyors of the “easy read.”

  But “romance” was the operative word of the time, a fine semantic hair-splitting between the tale written purely to entertain and a “novel,” which seemed designed only to titillate. But the titillation—the sentimentality, the adventure, even the sexual fantasy—in other words, the popular appeal of the novel is, after all, what sustained it and permitted it to develop as literary art.

  Making the discernment between that which is literary and that which is popular is, then, a fool’s errand. Samuel Clemens, himself, desperately wanted to be popular in his work and to be wealthy from it, as well. He was ultimately disappointed in both endeavors. He openly envied Artemus Ward and Brett Harte, whose books and journalistic pieces received popular acclaim. Mark Twain’s opus was regarded as a “boy’s book” in some quarters; in others, it was branded as “unfit for boys to read.” Thus, he allied himself with one of the most popular writers of the day in a collaborative effort. His co-author had more than a dozen books in print and was the darling of the reading circles, ladies’ clubs, and the literary societies of the 1880s. Who was this paragon of popular literary effort? He was quite as popular then as Stephen King or Tom Clancy or John Grissom or Dan Brown are now, and his name was Charles Dudley Warner. I’m sure everyone today has his collected works on a sacred place on a prominent bookshelf.

  So all this fret and bother about what people read is misplaced. The real worries should be why people read or, perhaps, if they read at all.

  My preconceptions about literary worth changed when I started writing. They have changed more since. And the recent changes in New York publishing have altered it further, as editors are only interested in that which sells well. If it aspires to and achieves artistic status, all the better, but it’s the bottom line that determines the book’s worth and, more to the point, the author’s worth as a continuing writer. I do believe it is possible to write and even to publish literary effort, but it’s no easier to sell that to the general public than it ever was. Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pyncheon may be the best-selling literary authors of our day, but they write books that most people don’t read. Even many people who buy them don’t read them. They’d rather read Caleb Carr or Mary Higgins Clark or James Michener or, God help us, Robert James Waller. The others they tend to place on their shelves, mentally filing them away under the “life’s too short” category and saving them for emergencies such as nuclear war, when they’ll be grateful for any reading matter they can get their hands on.

  And while I’m sure that there are those, even today, who regularly curl up with a hefty volume by Dostoevsky, Thackery, or Henry James, who can’t wait to get home every night so they can dive back into Proust or Pamela, I have to admit, that in the case of the latter, I’d prefer to spend my return to the eighteenth century in Tom Jones, a book that was unashamedly written to be popular. To evoke an anecdotal cliché, I may take a copy of War and Peace with me every summer vacation, but I probably prefer the latest Andrew Vacchs or Robert Ludlum for my actual poolside reading.

  But even if one’s taste runs to the more puerile and pulchritudinous passages of popular pulp, that’s nothing to be embarrassed about—or to apologize for. The right attitude is to keep an open mind and to laugh when some patched-sleeved, Berkinstocked pedant, such as myself, announces that this or that is “trash” or “garbage,” while busily stuffing the latest thriller, western, or horror novel under his coat. You see, we know, even if we won’t admit, that it’s possible for even a Jacqueline Smith or Nancy Taylor Rosenburg to turn a good phrase, create a memorable character, and to evoke the same muse that moved Ann Bradstreet or George Sand. But if one knows Bradstreet and Sand, then one’s ability to recognize the better efforts of the Smiths and Rosenburgs is heightened. And this is the point of reading widely and well, after all.

  TROUT FISHING IN TEXAS

  “Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.”

  —Shakespeare

  At the outset, a couple of points should be clarified: First, the whole idea of trout fishing in Texas is ridiculous. I mean, Texas has some great rivers. In general, the fishing on them can be a rewarding activity. Among those fine waterways, the Guadalupe River stands out as one of the best sporting streams in the state. It has fine scenery, exciting tubing and canoeing possibilities, and it’s just plain pretty, even when it’s a low flow. Shallow water ordinarily makes for good fishing, particularly good trout fishing. Even so, there is something wrong with angling for rainbow trout on the Guadalupe. It’s sort of like hunting moose in Georgia or caribou in New Mexico. In a way, it’s not entirely unlike hunting African antelope or bighorn sheep down around Refugio or Falfurias, something that a great many people actually do, for some reason. Even if native game is imported to a particular location and made available for sportsmen, pursuing it in the wrong place seems kind of silly. Some sports are just best left where they belong. Trout fishing is one of them.

  Most pictures of trout anglers are associated with bright covers of outdoorsmen’s magazines and beer commercials. They’re quite familiar even to people who never fish at all. The fisherman stands thigh-deep in a rushing blue stream, surrounded by the snowcaps of the High Rockies; he is clad in battered fedora, chest-waders, plaid flannel shirt; a net is attached to his fishing vest, a creel strapped to his belt. Over his head snakes out the line of his fly rod, to which is attached a carefully made, home-tied fly. Occasionally, one sees him lifting a twelve-inch beauty in his net, the white water of the nearby rapids spl
ashing about his thighs, a broad smile of accomplishment on his face. It doesn’t take much to make the picture appealing, particularly when one imagines that same angler sitting down that night beside a roaring fire over which sizzle a half-dozen freshly caught rainbow trout. As one ad always used to say, “It doesn’t get any better than this!”

  It likely doesn’t. Of course, such bucolic scenes don’t explain how the fisherman found this picturesque spot among all the streams of the Rocky Mountains; nor does it say who toted all the heavy equipment—tent, cooking utensils, ice chests, half-dozen rods, three tackle boxes, and a case or two of iced beer and side dishes up the side of that mountain. Trail guides and native bearers are kept well out of the lens of the advertising camera.

  Trout fishing in Texas, though, is a somewhat different enterprise. The rivers are generally green or brown, for one thing, and you can pull your vehicle right up to the bank of most of them. There are no snowy peaks; rather, the sides of limestone bluffs and hardscrabble hills are overgrown with scrub cedar, juniper, and prickly pear. Instead of picturesque aspen, birch, and blue spruce lining the banks, Texas rivers are flanked with cypress and sycamore, the latter of which will spot anything parked beneath it with ugly, indelible brown drippings. The banks themselves are rarely grassy. More often they’re covered with sharp gravelly rock. The average angler arrives in a rusty pickup truck and fishes in jeans, a gimme cap, and a sweatshirt with the logo of some NFL or NBA team emblazoned between its whacked off sleeves, although multiple stains from tobacco and spilled barbeque sauce more than likely have rendered the individual’s loyalty illegible.

  Also, the trout cooking in margarine on Teflon at the end of a day’s fishing will look somewhat different from the advertised Colorado cuisine. One will be lucky, in fact, if he has two or three that are half the length of his forearm; and, because they will have come from fish farms, most of them will have been caught on corn or worms, not on the carefully created, multi-colored flies which are placed carefully on the end of an angler’s line, only to be spirited away when they snag some flotsam discarded by a careless camper upstream.

  A second point requiring clarification, although it should be obvious by now, is that I am no serious fisherman. A serious fisherman is a guy who rises before dawn and has landed two or three “keepers” before the sun breaks the horizon. A serious fisherman is outfitted in at least five-hundred dollars’ worth of mostly useless equipment, not counting a boat or canoe. A serious fisherman knows the difference between a Bassmaster and a Bassbuster, an Evenrude and a Mercury. A serious fisherman has sonar, radar, depth finders, trolling motors, wet wells, dry wells, CB radios, and his wife’s name on the stern (to prevent him from forgetting it, I assume). A serious fisherman spends hours reorganizing his tackle box, reads fishing magazines, has topographical maps of every lake in five hundred miles, and watches all the fishing shows on television. A serious fisherman has a calendar on the wall with the days when this fish or that fish are “running,” “spawning,” or doing whatever else fish do to make them seem more catchable than otherwise. A serious fisherman is a consummate liar and an eternal optimist. If he’s dedicated at all, he’s probably on his way to alcoholism or bankruptcy or both. A serious fisherman doesn’t even have to like fish as a food, but he talks about nothing else, dreams about nothing else. A serious fisherman would rather fish than make money or make love. A serious fisherman is, in sum, quixotic, obsessed, insane.

  Now, a serious trout fisherman is all that, and more. He ties his own flies, strings his own reels. He dons absurd clothing, and can stand in a freezing stream with water up to his shriveled manhood for hours on end and cheerfully lose hook after hook, lure after lure in pursuit of the elusive and diminutive slippery prey that slide indifferently between his legs. A serious trout fisherman not only enjoys this particular brand of madness, he actually looks forward to it for months, weeks, and days until the trout are doing whatever they do to make themselves catchable. No matter how often he comes up with no fish at all—even if he never catches a single one—he can’t wait to come back and do it all over again. Life, for him, never becomes more perfect than when he’s fishing.

  My idea of fishing is somewhat different. It recalls childhood memories of sitting on a bank with a cane pole and occasionally landing a perch or carp, which I usually threw back, not because I was concerned about being humane or ecologically sensitive, but because those particular fish were too small, too bony too make good eating, not that I would have had the first idea of how to clean or cook one, anyway. Occasionally, I might land a channel cat, which scared the bejesus out of me, so I didn’t keep them, either. It’s always summer in my recollections, and I recall it sort of a lazy, indolent activity, upset only by the labor of having to dig up some worms. I never had any real luck, though. I only recall one fishing expedition which saw me come home with anything like a catch. That day, a friend of mine and I stole a jon boat off the bank and used old boards to paddle out to the middle of a small man-made lake. For some reason, we got into a “hot spot” and landed thirty-six bass on grasshoppers. We would have had thirty-seven, but a snake attached himself to one of our fish while it was on the stringer, and we were so terrified, we cut it loose. Still, we stayed out there till we ran out of bait, and we returned in triumph to provide our families with a huge fish fry, complete with hush puppies. (Our mothers, of course, cleaned and cooked them; this is why real fishermen need to remember their wives’ names, so someone will clean and cook whatever they catch.)

  We returned to the spot and re-stole the boat several times, but we never got another bite. I must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, but I never forgot it. Unfortunately, the experience spoiled me for any angling that didn’t live up to that particular day. As a result, I sort of let fishing sleep in my memory. I just never could take it seriously after that.

  ###

  Some years ago, though, my good friend, The Poet, rediscovered fishing as a hobby. His enthusiasm was deeply engrained and had slumbered for many years, but suddenly, he made fishing a priority in his life. Still, his early efforts were perfunctory; I recall finding him outside his office, flipping rods and casting weights down the hallway, comparing notes on rods and reels and fishing spots with other occasional anglers who happened by. His next step was to purchase a used RV, a mini-pickup with camper shell, which he financed by delivering the local newspaper. I presume his wife was less than enthusiastic about the rediscovered hobby.

  After a few years of dedicated bank and dock fishing, including one adventure where he used a fly rod in the Gulf of Mexico surf and astonishingly landed a flounder, he increased his level of dedication a few notches by buying a used jon boat. This soon was replaced by a fairly nice fiberglass-hulled rig, which he proceeded to outfit with every accessory, toy, and other item of angling paraphernalia he could fit onto and still keep it afloat. Ultimately, he moved up in class to ocean-going vessels. Then one day, I drove by his house; he had a somewhat ostentatious Boston whaler jammed under his carport. His wife’s car was stuck out in the rain.

  Her name was not on the boat, I noticed. I heard directly from her that she intended to clean no fish.

  Even so, it was clear to me that he had become that most intrepid of sportsmen, the inveterate fisherman. It was and is safe to say that he would rather fish than work; he would rather fish than eat. He would rather fish, it appeared, than breathe. By virtue of this newfound dedication to angling and boating, he secured a gubernatorial commission as a captain in the Texas Navy.

  Pressed more by friendship and a willingness to provide camaraderie on various outings than by any desire actually to fish, I joined him on several fishing junkets. I was a loyal companion through the fiberglass boat period. For that while, we fished many of the waterways of southeast Texas, fresh and salt water. Often we pulled in one or two decent-sized fish, and we enjoyed more than a few good meals from our efforts. I reckoned that each dining experience cost us only about $570 in tackle, time, ba
it, to say nothing of licenses and beer and damage to our vehicles, clothes, equipment and egos. But it was the experience that counted; he assured me that it never got any better than that.

  Trout fishing was never in our plans, though. We talked about it in the same dreamy way hunters talk about stalking big game such as bear or rhinoceroses. Trout fishing was something that belonged to other climes, to the sporting fairylands of the Northwest; it was not a sport for Texans, at least not for poor academic types who can’t afford trail guides and native bearers. Still, the covers of Field and Stream and like publications along with assorted beer commercials made trout fishing seem terribly appealing.

  Thus, when The Poet called me some years after I’d relocated to points north and west, it was a surprise to me to learn that trout fishing was his motivation. He announced that the State of Texas was about to release thousands of rainbow trout on the Guadalupe River. He wanted me to rendezvous with him near New Braunfels to wade in that pretty green water and catch our limits. We would camp out on the bank, he posited, and he would provide all necessary gear. He asserted that another friend of his had limited for several days using only spinners, but if worse came to worse, we could fish with corn for bait. “They’re dumb hatchery trout,” he said, enthusiasm swimming in his voice. “They’ll bite on anything.”