An Outdoor Memoir, Angled Just Right: The Longest Silence by Thomas McGuane

Editorial Note: Steffan Meyric Hughes is the author of Circle Line: Around London in a Small Boat, a Biographile recommended pick back in April. Meyric Hughes, also the features editor of Classic Boat magazine, explains how in spite of a listless crop of travel writing these days, author Thomas McGuane of The Longest Silence has bucked the trend. His realism, his ceaseless passion, and his stories of "magic made up of thunder and forests and rivers and rain" all contribute to a collection of fishing tales deserved of the wildest praise.

Writing is a by-product of reading, thinks Thomas McGuane. That's a relief because reading him, I'm afraid I may have stolen a bit of his soul. But if he has stolen a bit of say, Faulkner’s, then perhaps he will regard it as a hand-me-down and forgive me. When writing Circle Line: Around London in a Small Boat, I was reading a lot of travel and outdoors literature and was lucky enough to set a hook through the lip of McGuane’s collection of fishing stories. To say it taught me how to write would not quite be right; how to think about the first-person travel narrative would be closer to the mark.

The state of much travel writing today, at least in Britain, is anemic: cheerful, empty stuff, often with a meek post-empire agenda, in which the adventurer has much to learn from the everyday folk he meets. The neutral clarity of the ageing British masters of the genre -- Raban and Thubron spring to mind -- has not been adopted by their literary progeny. So while the old lions continue with edifying masterpieces that will stand up to the scrutiny of the future, the cubs push out an endless series of tales riveted together with ‘silly me’ jokes where the protagonist capsizes, tangles his line, or takes some other sort of wrong turn on the journey to enlightenment. I should know, as I've been guilty. Publishers pressure writers into positivity, writers happily play along to get their names in print and reviewers call these drippy tales 'warm' and 'funny,' moralizing literature out of its own existence. It's an invidious state of affairs that threatens the future of that old-fashioned quality of observed reality. Or, plainly stated, truth.

After the first would-be publisher of Circle Line -- one of the biggest in the world -- went cool on the book (we felt it was a bit negative…), I wondered whether writers were still allowed to tell the truth or if we were doomed to moralize our own experiences into happy, grateful episodes in the great adventure of life in which, to quote the current mantra of apathetic acceptance, "it's all good." Around this time, The Longest Silence arrived in the post.

The world of angling is, these days, McGuane tells us at the beginning of the book, peopled by "the bum, the addict and the maniac. I’m afraid that this says much about the times we live in." He goes on to state that the best angling is a release from work -- it’s not available to layabouts and the idle rich, then.

He describes his Uncle Bill as having "a confidence and sense of moral precision that amounted to a mild form of tyranny," thereby becoming "an infinitely more palpable individual in my memory than the adaptable nullities who have replaced men like him".

Here is a writer refreshingly untainted by popular modern sentiment or the need to be considered "warm" or "charming." He likewise employs a high-mileage sensibility well attuned to the notion that there is no such thing as moral and immoral books, just good ones and bad ones. This is not, note, the same thing as an insensitivity to beauty or a propensity for dull-eyed cynicism. Far from it. McGuane is, in his own words "a chronic smeller of flowers, watcher of birds, listener to distant thunder." And as this collection of thirty-four stories continues, it rapidly becomes apparent that McGuane is tapping into his own motherlode, a story of magic made up of thunder and forests and rivers and rain. How does he write so well, you might cry, as he peels another phrase out of the English maze: "drowned leaves", "adaptable nullities", "sport's secret mothball fleets." But I know how.

In the 1970s, McGuane was hailed as 'the next Hemingway' and admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Three of his novels became films. The New York Times has called him "an important writer" and he must be counted in any list of post-war American literary heavyweights. Like most great writers though, he is driven by something other than writing itself and in his life it has been fishing -- or more generally, the outdoors. Writing was just a way of finding a job that could be done at night to keep the days free for fishing. And so it’s natural that although The Longest Silence is easy to read (much more so than his fiction which is brilliant, but difficult, at times as undisciplined as Faulkner and as dense as pumpernickel), its ambition is, in its own quiet way, quite considerable.

What McGuane has achieved on this journey through his life, most of it lived with a fly rod in hand, is a compelling portrait of joyful, healthy obsession. That is achieved through the old-fashioned journeyman's craft of good observation, intelligent analysis and occasional, side-splitting wryness, like this: "You announce it has been a trying day [on the river]. Then someone else says it is just nice to get out. Irrationally, you wonder how you can get even for that remark."

Most of us who have a deep connection to moving water ("my heart pounds for a glimpse of moving water," McGuane confesses) are always prone to taking our grand pursuit too seriously. "We bridle at hearing it described as a sport, but we're too timid to call it art," McGuane explains on our behalf. But while most of us, whitewater kayakers at least, secretly think of ourselves as Godlike compared to the man in the city, and never speak about our obsessions in settings near lawn mowers or newspapers (we'd be unable to, we'd cheapen it… they'd never understand), McGuane tries the impossible: to relate the practice of his own art to civilians, with all the enthusiasm it engenders in him. And, perhaps even more dauntingly, to fellow anglers -- the bums, addicts and maniacs.

He comes as near as anyone has to bringing his world to life -- as near as Thoreau came to defining the liberty of free-holding by a lake; as near as James Dickie came to painting the haunting power of a river; and as near as Hemingway, Dickens and Raban came to describing man as seafarer. His achievement is to paint that vivid picture -- a landscape in oil with a Dutch master sky -- without the cloying self-conscious romanticism that sometimes accompanies such endeavors. In that, McGuane rises above the status of craftsman to something higher. The Longest Silence is veined with the sort of darkly benevolent prose magic that can only come from a lifetime of wanton enthusiasm. That, and a way with words. And for that book alone, he has earned a place on my long list of the soul of people who, in some unintended, mysterious way, need to be acknowledged -- and thanked.