by Graham Swift
It turned out that I was talking to a fishing prodigy, a demon angler who lived, if not quite exclusively, to fish. Beside David, my dabblings and hankerings were as nothing—as was, I’d soon learn, my skill. David was a fine writer, of fiction and occasional poetry, but there was no doubt that his first calling had been fishing; though he seemed eager to strike some productive balance between the two vocations.
The result of that meeting was that he made two proposals. First, would I like to consider joining him in compiling an anthology of literature related to fishing? It was a rich field and something he’d been keen to do for some time. I might like to think about that for a bit. But, meanwhile, would I like to go fishing?
In the next few weeks, months—years—I went fishing with David many times. In essence, he taught me to fly-fish, something I’d never done before. I couldn’t have had a better teacher or companion. For the purposes of my tuition and ongoing practice, I travelled with him to many watery places, and when I was no longer a floundering novice I found my own happy fishing ground in north Devon on the River Torridge, where, by another stroke of piscatorial luck, I met the poet Ted Hughes and occasionally fished with him.
Meanwhile, the anthologizing (to which I’d quickly agreed) had grown into a fat volume called The Magic Wheel, which Heinemann published in 1986. It’s now out of print, but it represented for its co-editors many busy and beguiling days: fishing of another kind, for books and extracts to include. This mainly occurred in the old British Museum Reading Room, but, given our subject, the scholarly and bibliographical work naturally had to be complemented by a great many of what we called field trips.
The scholarly work also included the co-writing of a lengthy introduction to the anthologized pieces, in which we surveyed the remarkably extensive history of fishing literature (‘from Ovid to Orwell’) and examined the mystery of why fishing and writing should have any affinity at all. They undoubtedly do. If our anthology wasn’t evidence enough, we were living proof.
That introduction remains the only piece of writing on which I’ve collaborated with another author. I couldn’t say for certain now which bits belong to David, which to me, and that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the thing. Such joint undertakings are often supposed to lead to quarrels and animosity, but I don’t remember any squabbling. It all came together entirely amicably, like our days by or on the water, where there was rather more rivalry and contention, in fact, about the hooking of fish.
All of this, the fishing and the anthologizing, occurred at a good time. By the end of 1983 I’d published a book a year for four years, and though the statistical facts belie my actual rate of production, I think that wishful statement about my non-writing activities was partly a recognition that I needed a change, a rest, some dependable form of refreshing escape from writing. One way or another, in the period following the appearance of Waterland, and in keeping with that novel’s title, an imaginary sign often went up on my study door: ‘Gone Fishing’.
Of many memorable days spent fishing with David one stands out, if only because it began with the normal roles being reversed. I’d fished the Torridge for some years before he and I ever fished it together. I was able to travel down to Devon, when conditions seemed promising, more or less at the drop of a hat; David, with a young family, was less flexible. But one September we made the journey together and I was placed in the untypical and nervous position of introducing him to a new bit of water and one, as I’d learned, that could be testing and unyielding at the best of times. I needn’t have worried. The roles were soon re-reversed. Within moments of his first wading in David hooked a salmon, which I netted for him. Moments later, amazingly, I hooked a salmon too, and the roles were reversed once again.
Salmon anglers will know it’s really not supposed to happen like that. Or if it does, as David noted when he recounted the episode in a fishing column he then wrote, it only happens to ‘the Other Bloke’. Well, there were two happy Other Blokes that day. As there were on many others.
David is the ‘good and patient friend’ mentioned in the piece that follows, and it was on that same trip to Devon that he and I walked, one afternoon, with Ted Hughes along a stretch of the Torridge as new to me at the time as the whole river was to David. That walk is also mentioned in the piece. Ted’s knowledge of the water was seriously impressive, though David and I retain a memory of that day that has always made us laugh. The pools on salmon rivers can have atmospheric names, sometimes with a touch of poetry, known only to fishermen. Ted had stopped by a pool, clearly holding strong associations for him, where, as he pointed out, a deep, salmon-detaining pot had been formed by the remains of a long-ago collapsed and overgrown concrete groyne. We asked him what the pool was called, expecting to hear some suitably evocative words, made all the more evocative by being uttered by Ted Hughes. He continued to stare at the water and, with his slow Yorkshire vowels, said, ‘Concrete.’
Ted died, not so very long after that, in October 1998. Soon afterwards I wrote the memory of him, reprinted here, which appeared in Granta the following spring. I’d first met him over tea in the house, overlooking the Torridge, of two husband-and-wife fishing friends of his. It was a warm summer’s day and he mysteriously wore all the time, without seeming uncomfortable, an old thick maroon-wool cardigan of a very winter-warming kind, though he wasn’t a man, as I’d learn when I fished with him in Scotland, who much felt the cold, or minded getting wet. I mostly saw him in old, worn clothes.
Several years before, he’d written a delightful essay, ‘Taw and Torridge’, about north Devon’s two main rivers, for a book called West Country Fly Fishing which Batsford brought out in 1983. It had accompanied me when I first started to fish the Torridge myself, and though it’s probably one of his least-known productions, it’s one of the things by him that most readily evokes for me his now-missing presence. It was lovely to have been in his company now and then in a part of the country to which he was so close and which, by the time I met him, I’d begun to know fairly intimately myself.
When it came to fishing or to his fishing places, he could be quite immovably committed. Once, when I said goodbye to him to come back to London and made that glib and flimsy remark, ‘Back to the real world,’ he said, without any trace of sentimentality and almost sternly, ‘No, this is the real world.’ He could also be unbudgingly blunt. When I told him another time, on the phone, that I couldn’t get down to Devon (where the fishing was just coming right) because I had to go to a funeral, he asked, with only just sufficient irony, whether they couldn’t put the body in the freezer for a while.
As it happens, I learned about Ted’s death when I was in Iceland, a country with exceptional fishing opportunities, which Ted had sampled, but also one where his work was loved. Like many people who’d been in touch with him only months before he died, I’d never even known he was ill. It was a sheer shock. I was meeting a journalist in the offices of a Reykjavik paper and her desk was strewn with Ted’s books. ‘You must be a fan,’ I said. She said, ‘Haven’t you heard?’
I came home from Iceland and wrote the following piece.
Fishing with Ted
I first encountered Ted Hughes as many of my age must have done, when I was a young teenager in the early 1960s, being introduced in English lessons to those electric poems from Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. I still remember my English teacher reading out ‘Pike’. At that age either you get smitten by the power of words or you don’t, though I must admit that the force of that poem had something to do with my dabbling in a smalltime way with hooks and floats and lines. But I nursed even then the secret dream of one day being a writer myself. I’d never have dared tell my English teacher about it and scarcely whispered it to myself, so far-fetched and foolish did it seem.
As you get older the phrase ‘if only I’d known then’ gets ever more called upon. Sometimes it haunts you like a knell, sometimes it’s the motto for unimagined privilege. Years later, in the 1980s, when I actually was a writer an
d had published books, I took up fishing again, after a long gap, or rather I was taught by a good and patient friend to fly-fish, something I’d never done before. So I came to fish for, and sometimes catch, trout, salmon and sea trout.
This in turn took me, two or three times a year, to the beautiful, hidden River Torridge in Devon, where the fishing is now a poor shadow of what it was back in the early Sixties when I was a schoolboy and knew nothing about it, though that in a way is a blessing. It’s an unmarauded river and there are places where you can fish all day and never see a soul.
My visits to Devon led to my meeting some fishing friends of Ted, which led to my meeting Ted—an introduction almost entirely non-literary and almost exclusively piscatorial. In subsequent years I got to see him now and then and even fish with him. I’m thinking of just a scattering of days and hours, so I can’t pretend to have known him well or closely, but because those days and hours involved being by or near water, if not actually fishing, in places that Ted knew and loved, they went at once beyond the merely social and I quickly learned what good, easy, gentle company he was.
We mostly met in Ted’s north Devon, though once I fished with him at the opposite end of the country, on the wind-furrowed lochs of the Isle of Harris. As quite often happens when writers meet writers, especially off the literary tracks, we hardly ever talked about writing of any kind. Once, in a Devon pub, we got tentatively close, though our talk in fact was more about that additional, tricky work writers have to do simply to protect their writing time and space from all that, increasingly in a writer’s career, can invade it. Ted was perhaps more beset-tingly involved in this work than many, but he never appeared to me as anything other than steady and calm, sure of his inner ground. I think he had an admirably unwavering sense of what was properly private and what was properly public.
We mostly talked about fishing and rivers, local things, things before our eyes. I walked with him one afternoon down a stretch of the Torridge new to me while he explained the intricacies and history of almost every pool, run, bend and lie. This was not Ted the poet but a Ted who, for all one knew, might have spent his years being a vigilant, devoted river-keeper. It was almost impossible to imagine him sitting at a desk.
However they stand in his complete work, my favourite poems of his will always be those in the collection River, not just because I have, in some cases, waded the very water, seen the very boulders and overhanging branches Ted must have had in mind, but because I have, at least occasionally, experienced the fisherman’s state of special attunement to atmosphere—a heightened alertness to particularly charged, expectant conditions of water, weather and light—so I can attest to how hushingly close he gets to the feeling in words. ‘Salmon-taking Times’ and ‘Night Arrival of Seatrout’ distil for me not just the essence of fishing for both species of fish but the whole seasonal, riverine harvest of associations each owns. ‘After Moonless Midnight’, in which the normal fishing premise is turned around and it’s the river that whispers of the angler, ‘We’ve got him,’ could hardly convey better the breath-holding, almost dreading excitement of wading down a pool alone at night after sea trout.
Ted himself famously wrote about fishing and its similarities to the creative act of poetry. Analogies for how writing gets written can be stretched, but there is some basis in the piscatorial one, in that concentrated dealing with surface and depth, never knowing from one moment to the next what might, if anything, be there, sometimes having a guess, always a hope, sometimes an entirely irrational but palpable anticipation, and sometimes being taken totally by surprise.
With salmon and sea-trout fishing the analogy gets closer, if only because it enters realms of greater mystery. Unlike the permanent residents, the migratory fish which move up a river only at certain times and in certain conditions feed hardly at all, so to fish for them lacks even the fragile logic of presenting the quarry with something imitating its food. No one really knows why salmon and sea trout ever take a fly, though they’re more likely to be there and do so at certain times and a whole body of fishing lore has tried to reduce this to a precise science—or art—and failed.
It’s the enigma of the ‘take’ rather than the general confrontation of mind and water which most parallels—without in the least explaining—the creative process. And in salmon and sea-trout fishing it’s the take, not the capture, which is the essential, heart-stopping thing. Sometimes it comes with a long, powerful, unmistakably connective pull, sometimes there’s a boil and a white slash of spray, but when it happens it’s always a sheer amazement. And it’s not at all unlike how an idea—that limp word we use for want of a better one—bursts, without recognizable correlation to design, effort or receptivity, upon a writer’s mind. In both cases exultation can be immediately mixed with high anxiety as to whether fish and angler, idea and writer, will part company.
Thanks to the generosity of a friend of his, I once fished with Ted another Devon river, the Exe, on a stretch where it briefly divides into some deep, narrow streams. I’ve fished some pools on the Torridge for years without success, but under the eye of Ted Hughes—which wasn’t an ‘eagle eye’, it was a soft eye—I hooked, within half an hour and on a strange river, a good-sized salmon, which in that narrow water put up a thrilling up-and-downstream fight. Then, when all was over and the beaten fish was being drawn in, the hook, as sometimes miserably happens, simply lost its hold and there was that awful, absolute separation.
Fishing, if you think about it in a certain way, is a fairly silly, childish activity, absurdly pursued by some till their dying day, a thing of no virtue or importance. This doesn’t stop it offering up to fishermen moments of ineffable triumph that imprint every flash of their glory permanently on the brain, or moments of abysmal disaster that will never, ever be forgotten or exorcised. Such dramatic highs and lows life itself doesn’t necessarily or so reliably or so intensely provide.
I’ve known real grief at losing fish—it usually comes mingled with bleak self-reproach, when you know you’ve done something wrong, lost your head, forgotten to check a knot. Hooking a salmon is, for me at least, such a rare event that any loss is grievous, but with that salmon on the Exe I think I honestly achieved that precarious angler’s equanimity of relishing every second of an encounter I might never have had and of not mourning the loss, since, as Walton unanswerably puts it, you cannot lose what was never yours.
Fishing would be a poor thing if it were only about capture and loss, only about fish. While fishing the Torridge I’ve seen things, known things—you have to use a tired phrase like ‘getting close to nature’—which have nothing directly to do with fishing but which I couldn’t have seen or known, I think, if I’d sought them deliberately in another way. Standing up to my waist in water, I’ve watched an otter (a creature which in England most people rarely, if ever, glimpse) occupy a stone barely a yard from me, as untroubled by my presence as a cat. I’ve watched a weasel do two things weasels are seldom seen to do, let alone in the space of the same minute: dive into water and come up again, then climb a good twenty feet up the nearest tree. I’ve watched a young deer trot along the bank till abreast of where I stood midstream, then decide to swim cross-river, so close to me that I had to lift my rod and trailing fly-line for it to pass beneath, as a guard of honour arches swords for a bride and groom. Such privileged moments have the magic of making you feel as a human being—it’s a paradoxical privilege—secondary, if not superfluous, to the general animal world. Ted’s ‘animal poems’ have the salutary human effect of reminding us that we are just one component in a throng.
The same afternoon I lost that salmon something rather wonderful occurred. First, I hooked another salmon, a much smaller one, which Ted netted. Salmon fishing rarely gives you a consolation prize, even one that makes you churlishly wish fortune had been the other way round, but that wasn’t the point. As the fish lay on the bank we both noticed something white and bony among the shingle. Ted picked it up and said I should keep it as a mement
o. It was the skull of a pike.
I put it in a pocket and then maybe transferred it later to somewhere else. But at some point during that trip to Devon I lost it. Fishermen carry around with them masses of jumble, on their person, in their cars, and they are good at losing things, not just fish. And of course, it was only at the point of realizing I’d lost it that the other realization came fully to me. That I’d lost a pike’s skull presented to me by Ted Hughes after the catching of a salmon; by Ted Hughes the poet, whom I could never once have imagined meeting, but whom I’d first known, like many who’d never meet him, through that poem ‘Pike’.
There’s never a moment in life, perhaps, when we should underestimate the latent repercussions. All this was a few years ago when Ted himself seemed as indestructible as his work, a big, broad, solid man. He died in October, the month after the fishing season ends on the Torridge. No more fishing there before the spring.
What a keepsake that pike’s skull would have been, combining a set of chances and associations infinitely more amazing even than the take of a salmon—the loss of that fish that afternoon as nothing really to the loss of that skull. But then the loss of that skull is as nothing to the loss of Ted. He left in a poetic blaze: Birthday Letters, the Tales from Ovid. The keepsake for us all, of course, is the poetry. Poets, above all mortals, are supposed to offer recompense for their decease by what they leave behind. But not, perhaps, if you’ve met them, spent time with them, even walked, waded into the very stuff of some of the poems. Then those trade-offs between life and art, nature and art, seem not so simply negotiable after all.
