I smiled. “Old Miniver.”
“And?”
“He mentioned the same thing.”
Dad handed my paper to me. “Invisible writing,” he said. “Understand?”
“No.”
“Don’t try to impress your reader with how cleverly you write. These fancy words, all these adjectives and adverbs and vocabulary words”—he pronounced the word “vocabulary” as if it meant “disgusting human waste product”—“all they do is call attention to you. You don’t want your reader aware of your writing at all. If you do your job, you’ll have them thinking about your ideas, your arguments, your characters, or whatever it is you’re trying to communicate. If someone tells you, ‘Wow , that’s great writing,’ you know you’ve failed.”
“You mean all my other teachers…?”
He shrugged. “You’ve been getting bad advice.”
“Well,” I said, “I appreciate yours.”
“You do?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a good start,” he said.
Another time he said, “Tighten it up. Find the one right word and you can get rid of a dozen wrong ones.”
“Yeah,” I said. “but then my stories’ll be too short.”
“Short,” said Dad, “is good.”
For the rest of my high school career—I got Mr. Cheever the next year, too—I shared the drafts of my papers with Dad. He always found something new to criticize. Invisible writing, I learned, demanded conciseness and clarity, along with precise, unpretentious, and hard-working verbs. It didn’t come easily to me. I labored over my stores. I tried to anticipate Dad’s criticisms.
“Writing isn’t that much fun anymore,” I said to him after one of our sessions.
“Fun?” He rolled his eyes. “Writing is hard work, if you intend to take it seriously. But a job worth doing—”
“Right,” I said.
He smiled. “It’s ironic. But with writing, the more you learn about it, the harder it gets.”
“I guess I’m beginning to see that.”
“But you’re taking it seriously, huh?”
“I want to get it right.”
“Maybe we’ll make a writer of you yet, then.”
For years I had watched Dad at his typewriter without really understanding what I was seeing. Every night after dinner he trudged down to his basement office to work (“work” was a synonym for “write” in my home). He hunched over his ancient Underwood in a gray haze of pipesmoke, his fingers poised, staring at the yellow paper he used for rough drafts. At unpredictable times his fingers—two on each hand plus his right thumb for the space bar—would suddenly begin to hammer the keys. Then, just as abruptly, he’d stop and stare at the yellow paper. His shoulders would slump for a moment before he’d rip the paper from his machine, ball it up, and toss it over his shoulder onto the floor behind him.
Then he’d roll in a clean sheet of paper and stare at it. And at the end of an evening of work, his office floor would lie buried under an ankle-deep layer of balled-up yellow paper.
Now it was beginning to make sense. Writing involved more than stringing together good vocabulary words. Writing was a job. Doing it well—making it invisible—had to be the most painfully difficult occupation known to man.
As a schoolboy I won dimes from my friends by betting them that I was in Who’s Who. Of course, my name appeared under Dad’s listing. When I was growing up, H.G. Tapply was one of the big names in outdoor writing and publishing.
Dad put himself through Northeastern University during the Depression years by working in a mincemeat factory, writing sports for the college newspaper, stringing local college sports for the Globe, and a number of other jobs. After graduating with a business degree in 1932, he and a buddy drove cross-country (“We kept the needle on thirty-five,” he remembers, “because we believed that was the most efficient gas-mileage speed and we were both virtually broke”) to visit with Dad’s cousins in Coronado, California. There he quickly picked up a job with the Coronado Journal, a semi-weekly paper. “I did whatever I was asked to do,” he recalls, “and even what I wasn’t asked to do, which latter included a silly column titled ‘And So to Press,’ mainly about unimportant doings around town.” He still maintains that small-town newspaper work offers the best possible experience for the aspiring writer.
While in California, he came across a copy of National Sportsman magazine, which was published in Boston. He wrote a letter to its editor-in-chief (and also editor of the companion magazine, Hunting & Fishing), William Harnden Foster. “I’ll be returning to Boston soon,” wrote young Tap, “and when I do I’m going to come in and ask you for a job.”
He wrote two or three more letters to Foster. “Just to remind you that when I get home I’ll be asking you for a job.”
And when he did return East, he presented himself to Bill Foster at 108 Massachusetts Avenue. He was not hired.
A few weeks later Dad showed up at the office again. Sorry.
But his third or fourth visit coincided with Edmund Ware Smith’s retirement as managing editor, so Foster hired the eager young man as an “editorial assistant.” His starting salary was $18 per week. He began doing what he calls “scut work,” uninspiring jobs that he undoubtedly believed were worth doing well, and soon he found himself reviewing manuscripts, reading proof, editing copy, re-titling stories, and writing photo captions. “Anything Bill asked me to do,” he recalls.
During that time the young editorial assistant published his first story, a fox-hunting piece called “Rabbits Seem Kinda Small”—an embarrassingly bad title, he agrees. Foster made him rewrite it thirteen times, Dad remembers, “and it was a terrible story, more like a high-school composition. He published it, I’m sure, just to encourage me.”
Sometime in 1936 while visiting a friend in the hospital he met a pretty young nurse-in-training. “Actually, he wasn’t that close a friend,” Dad recalls, “but I visited him every chance I could until I got up the nerve to ask his nurse if she’d like to go fishing with me.” She proved to be a terrific sport, and in 1938 Tap married Muriel Morgridge.
They honeymooned in the wilds of Maine with Dad’s friends George and Marian Smith, who ran a sporting camp on Sysladobsis Lake. After closing the landlocked salmon season on Dobsis, the two couples motored twelve miles up the lake and portaged three miles into Fourth Lake Machias. There they lived for a week in George’s one-room cabin and caught arm-long pickerel on Dardevle spoons.
“It was a small cabin,” Dad told me. “One-holer outback, kerosene lamps, wood stove, water from the lake. The four of us slept in bunk beds. I recall one night your mother whispered ‘I love you’ to me, and from the darkness I heard Marian say to George, ‘Now what do you suppose she sees in him?’”
“Oh, Tap,” says Mum. “She did not.”
Dad shrugs, conceding that his story is apocryphal. “We ate illegal moose that George had shot, I remember that. He kept it cool in the lake.”
“It was venison,” says Mum.
They finished up their Maine honeymoon woodcock hunting in the rain. They had no dogs, so Mum and Marian were recruited to thrash through the soaking alder runs to drive out the birds to the men.
Both of my parents remember their honeymoon fondly.
MURIEL AND TAP, EARLY DAYS
H.G. Tapply was appointed managing editor of National Sportsman/Hunting & Fishing in 1935 (at the age of twenty-five), editor in 1936, and in 1940 he became editor of Outdoors magazine, which job he held until the magazine was purchased by a Chicago group in 1950. During those fifteen years he bought stories from just about every prominent outdoor writer of that generation. Many of them became his lifelong friends and sporting companions. When I was growing up, I often had to turn over my bedroom to house guests such as Lee Wulff, Ed Zern, Harold Blaisdell, Joe Bates, and Henry Davis. Dad fished with Ted Williams and Curt Gowdy. Talk around our dinner table was heady for a fanatical young hunter and fisherman. Sometimes I even got
to tag along on their hunting and fishing excursions.
Dad wrote dozens of stories during these years, mostly under pseudonyms such as H.T. Gardner, H.G. Traill, and Gardner Grant. Hy Gunn was the name he used for the “scores and scores” of articles he wrote about skeet, the new sport that Bill Foster, his first boss, co-invented.
In 1939 Dad, Ollie Rodman, and Hugh Grey (then Dad’s assistant editor) put together an eight-page newsletter they called Salt Water Sportsman. It was printed by Banker and Tradesman Press, whose owner, Gorham Cross (“Grampa Grouse,” he called himself ) became Dad’s grouse-shooting partner until Cross’s death in 1955. SWS was eventually purchased by Henry Lyman, who remains its Publisher Emeritus to this day.
In 1946 Dad published his first book, Tackle Tinkering The Fly Tyer’s Handbook appeared in 1949. Both are now collectors’ items, of course, and nearly fifty years of technology have rendered much of their wisdom obsolete. The section on rod repair deals only with split bamboo, and considerable attention is given to the problem of handling and caring for gut leaders. An entire page of text is devoted to shopping for and selecting junglecock necks.
But the prose is sharp and precise—I challenge anyone to write clearer directions for tying a whip finish or spinning deerhair than those found in the Handbook.
These books are full of all kinds of tips, informational nuggets, and home-made gadgets that later became synonymous with “Tap.” Both volumes are still models of “invisible writing.”
When he left Outdoors, (declining to move his family to Chicago to continue as editor), Dad became a freelancer. During this period Hugh Grey, who by then had become editor-in-chief of Field & Stream, suggested he start a column called, naturally, “Tap’s Tips,” which, along with his “The Sportsman’s Notebook” (a 500-word column), would be monthly features in the magazine for the next thirty-five years. The Tips are still being reprinted in Field & Stream today.
In spite of the millions of words he wrote and edited in his career, in hunting and fishing circles Dad was—and remains—renowned and revered primarily as the Tap of “Tap’s Tips.”
Dad did not believe freelance writing provided enough income security to raise a young family, so after a year of it (“during which time I did an awful lot of hunting and fishing”), he joined a Boston advertising firm. But he continued to write his column for Field & Stream in the evenings. Every month for thirty-five years he composed six miniature articles, each a complete essay containing useful, original, and timely advice or information for the outdoorsman—how to select the best snowshoe design, how to prevent campfire soot from blackening cooking utensils, how to pluck porcupine quills from a bird dog’s nose, how to revive matted dry flies.
He published twenty-five hundred tips altogether, I calculate. Every one of them contained between forty and fifty words—five typed lines. No more, no less.
Writing a fifty-word tip, he maintained, was harder than writing a 500-word Notebook article. Every tip had to be a masterpiece of conciseness and clarity—a complete tale, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, in fifty words or less. He enjoyed no margin for error. Every word, literally, counted. He could afford to squander none of them. One of “Tap’s Tips” simply and efficiently did its job: It conveyed information.
People thought of Tap as an expert outdoorsman. True to his nature, Dad rejected the label “expert” out of hand. But when I learned to appreciate what he did, I found it ironic that nobody seemed to consider him an expert writer.
But it gratified him. It meant, he said, that he’d done his job well: He’d succeeded in making his writing invisible.
Dad’s advice got me a few grudging “A”s from Mr. Cheever and sustained me through college term papers. His example steered me into a career that didn’t require me to write.
I resisted the writing impulse for a long time, and when I finally gave in to it, I found myself fully prepared for those long paralyzed moments of staring at my typewriter, trying to make my writing disappear. I could rip out a sheet of paper, ball it up, and toss it over my shoulder without flinching.
I wrote to please the critic in my head, whose persistent voice kept repeating things like, “Short is good,” and, “Who’re you trying to impress?”
I believed that writing was a job worth doing well.
To this day I often ask Dad to take his red pen to my work. “You really want my opinion?” he asks.
“Sure.”
Fifteen minutes later he looks up at me, smiles, and says, “Verbs.”
BILL FISHES A MONTANA SPRING CREEK
WILD TROUT
The first fishing memory I can coax out of Dad is of a native brook trout he caught in Wells, Maine. “I ran all the way back to Gram’s with it so she could cook it for me,” he remembers. The year of Dad’s sojourn in Wells was 1918, when his father was criss-crossing the North Atlantic and his mother was nursing influenza victims in Massachusetts.
That trout, he admits, was probably not the first fish he ever caught. But it was the first memorable one.
I derricked a sunfish out of the Charles River when I was three or four. Dad verifies this as my first official fish and has a black-and-white photograph to immortalize the momentous occasion. I’m wearing what he calls “rompers.” He once embarrassed me unforgivably by showing this photo to one of my high-school girl friends, though he did have the good judgment not to open the album to the page with the pictures of baby Bill lying bareass on the bearskin rug.
I went on to catch thousands of sunfish (we kids called them “kivvers” or “kibbies”)—and horned pout and yellow perch, and lesser numbers of crappies (which we called “calico bass”) and pond shiners and bluegills and even a few stunted large-mouth bass, skinny pickerel, and twisting eels—from the tepid little ponds within bicycle range of my neighborhood. I fished exclusively with worms and fly rod. I became adept at roll-casting firmly enough to lob my worm out to the mysterious depths where I could not see the bottom, and yet gently enough to prevent the worm from flying off my hook. I never tired of waiting for that delicious moment when the leader began to vibrate and twitch and then the line jerked and slithered through the guides. Even a sunfish the size of a Ritz cracker had enough strength to tug out line, so until I tightened and reared back on the rod, I could—and always did—hope that some kind of monster had taken my worm. It never was a monster, of course, but no sunfish, however stunted, disappointed me. It could have been a monster, and the next one might be, and that was enough.
Time, back then, was an infinite commodity, and I spent most of mine fishing, or dreaming about fishing.
Actually, I still do, and I still love that moment when the leader begins to twitch, and I still can believe that this time a monster has bitten. If it’s true that “Allah does not deduct from the allotted time of man those hours spent in fishing,” then I am still a child.
But of all those countless thousands of local panfish I caught, not a single one was memorable, and were it not for a yellowed old photograph, not a single one would be remembered.
Trout were—and still are—memorable. I can remember my first trout, my first dry-fly trout, and my first nymph-caught trout, my first big trout, my first western trout, and many particularly difficult trout. I have no such vivid recollections of other species.
Dad learned trout fishing from Ray Morse, with whom he boarded after his mother’s death. They prowled local water such as Hobbs Brook and Stony Brook armed with fly rods and worms, and they caught little native brookies.
I started the same way, although by then the only brook we knew of in our part of eastern Massachusetts that still held natives was a little rill two towns away. It was too small and remote even to have a name. Its anonymity, of course, only heightened its appeal. If it had no name, I could believe that Dad, who could keep a secret, had discovered it.
I could walk or pedal my bike to a nearby panfish pond anytime. But trout fishing was an Occasion precisely because it was not local. Trout were speci
al because I fished for them only with Dad, and because they were scarce and wild and hard to catch and beautiful.
We visited our secret little brook only two or three times a season, in April, before the larger rivers that Dad liked to fish cleared up and mayflies began to hatch. We dug worms in the morning—a ceremony of its own. Dad said we only needed a dozen or so. He was right, of course, because we only expected to get a few bites, but I insisted that we gather a hundred, on the theory that you never knew when you’d hit it just right, and you certainly didn’t want to run out of bait.
Our brook meandered slow and inscrutable through a vast boggy meadow. Dad nosed the car into a barway and we had to walk through the pine woods for fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the brook. On those early days of spring we sometimes still found dirty patches of old snow in shadowy places under the evergreens. The swampy April breezes carried the faint mingled aromas of pine needles and thawing earth and rotting vegetation. The willows and alders and young hardwoods were just beginning to bud, but the trees showed no leaves, and it was a dark black-and-white place hidden from the sun by the hills and the pines. We usually heard a grouse drumming in the distance. It sounded like a balky old engine trying to get started. Sometimes we flushed a migrating woodcock. We studied the mud for tracks of raccoons, mink, muskrat, and deer.
I knew even back then that trout places could be as alluring as trout fishing.
A half-grown boy could jump across our brook in most places. Its currents were barely noticeable. For so narrow a little rill, it ran deep against the undercut banks and under blowdown. Its stained tea-colored water obscured its mysteries. You had to interpret its surface to figure out what lay underneath. Trout, Dad said, lurked in deep protected places. They survived because predators such as mink and herons and king fishers could not catch them.
Most trout, of course, did not survive. Those that managed it were the smartest and wariest and swiftest, and those were the ones that lived long enough to reproduce and pass along their smart and wary and swift genes. That’s why trout were hard to catch.
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