mshawpyle's Full Review: John A. McPhee - The Founding Fish
George Washington never chopped down cherry trees, tossed perfectly good money across a river (George was, in fact, a mite tight), or figured in various morality plays shewing forth GOD’s Awefull Providence in thus bleƒsing and preserving ye Founder of Libertie in ye late Colonies, now United States, but he assuredly fished. For shad.
Benjamin Franklin too was an aficionado of what John McPhee denominates ‘the Founding Fish,’ as witness his membership in the Colony at Schuylkill, a club on the Junto model that considered itself the fourteenth colony at its founding and still rather offhandedly regards itself and its rather exclusive membership as the fifty-first state. (Qv my review of Professor Morgan’s splendid new life of Dr Franklin, at http://www.epinions.com/content_81101885060.)
And of course, as I can attest, the shad, whose firm succulent flesh and delicious roe fed my kinfolks Powhatan and his daughter Matoaca Pocahontas (or, properly, after her baptism and her marriage, Lady Rebecca Rolfe), remains the tutelary deity of Virginia politics, where even in these thin and piping times the annual shad-planking is a rite of statecraft equivalent to goat-ropings and barbecues in the Lone Star State.
New England and its psalm-singing, long-faced, Puritan cod be damned: shad is, indeed, the founding fish of the Republic.
So at least argues, delightfully and captivatingly, the incomparable John McPhee, here seen at last with rod in hand and his waders on, poaching on Steve Raymond’s usual waters. As I have long held – and with his having covered topics ranging from geology to the orange trade, sooner or later McPhee is bound to prove me right – I’d read John McPhee’s lambent, illuminating prose were he to write about compost. So far, fortunately, I have been spared that necessity, and in the work now to hand, we are as far from that earthiness as we are likely to get.
Instead, we are transported to a realm of silvered swiftness and liquid grace, to the river-world and its denizens. As I have noted before, the aridity of almost any book is relieved by having, well, a river run through it, and it is no accident that many of the books I love best have a riparian quality, from John Graves on the Brazos to Kenneth Grahame’s arcadian River Bank.* But McPhee, of course, rises well beyond this mark.
It is curious – I have noted before – that fly-fishing, and shooting, and hunting, and farming, and bee-keeping, of all human activities, should have been the subjects over the years of so much, and so disproportionately much, of the best literature we possess. Hemingway (not that I’m a huge Papa fan: this is a sop to Paul Frye) and Graves and Kilpo rub shoulders with Columella and Vergil; Havilah Babcock, Somerville & Ross, Lyons, Raymond, Pertwee, and Walton are of the company, as is Adrian Bell. Perhaps it is the lingering sunlight of Arcadia that touches these matters, and gilds all it touches. (That’s certainly my explanation for why baseball writing is so often so transcendent. If my prayers are answered, Mr McPhee will next turn his eye upon the greensward diamond.)
And as a nature writer, of course, we already know the measure of McPhee’s powers. Here, though, simply as a fishing writer, he has taken a place beside Raymond, Babcock, and Gene Hill.** But there is more meat to this book than is on even a record shad.
Like The Compleat Angler, The Founding Fish is much more than a fishing memoir, splendid though the gems of that genre are. As we have come to expect and learned to treasure, McPhee is not content merely with his sinewy, epigrammatic, pellucid prose, and does not rest only upon his gift of narrative, his unparalleled expository powers, and his eye for the telling detail. His mind is more subtle, mature, and far-ranging, as Honest Izaak’s was: he wants to know. To this end, he seeks out scientists and ‘learned-by-doing’ good ol’ boy guides, he concerns himself with spawning-cycle mechanics, salinity, and pollution, with hydrology and hydromorphology. He tracks the elusive history of the shad, and of the American affair with angling for shad, from Washington’s commercial fishing to colonial diets to John Wilkes Booth to today’s fishing fanatics on the Delaware.
His thirst for knowledge, a thirst he communicates to the reader and then satisfies in him, is barely slaked by shad anecdotes, trips to biology labs and to rivers the length and breadth of the continent, and hours upon the water. Nor, so compelling and attractive is his writing, is ours: few can take up this work without running a severe risk of becoming obsessed with shad and shad-fishing.
McPhee even dares to address, and to talk more plain sense than I have often seen in any one volume, the vexed issue of catch-and-release, and the ethics of fishing for the pot. (There is a reason, after all, why B.A.S.S., the Izaak Walton League, Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, and similar organizations have contributed more real accomplishments to the conservation regime than all the tree-huggers and arch-druids in creation put together.)
The result is a work as layered as a stretch of river, one that ranks with the best of fishing memoirs but also serves as a natural, social, and economic history, as a conservationist analysis worthy to rank with the works of Aldo Leopold (and as superbly written and readable), and as a work of rare literary power irrespective of the accident of its subject, and even for those for whom the love of angling is but ‘caviare to the generall.’ It now holds a place, with me, next to Annie Dillard and John Graves, and it were impossible to speak more highly of any work.
As always, McPhee writes brilliantly and with seeming effortlessness (which is the hardest thing of all to carry off); he is wise, poetic, solid, and compelling. In this work, though, particularly, he is at the very top of his bent, and the work is therefore one of peculiar power, irresistibly readable and re-readable. It should find a place under the tree of every lover of good prose and honest writing, anglers especially, in this holiday season, and, at any time, on the shelf of everyone who, whether or not they’ve ever heard or cared to hear the mad music of the reel as a great fish puts up a fight, cares about the language and the seeing eye and heart.
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