On the Goneness of Lost Fish
In a century of fly fishing, one thing has not changed. “It is our lost
fish that I believe stay longest in memory, and seize upon our thoughts
whenever we look back on fishing days.” A paradigmatic Victorian
gentleman, Lord Grey of Fallodon, published those words in a book called
Fly Fishing in 1899. Over one hundred years later, there is still nothing
as gone, as utterly lost to us, nothing as definitely absent and
irretrievable as a lost fish.
“Seize our thoughts” is an apt phrase, for there are some lost fish that
haunt us like old love. They live forever in what Izaak Walton called “the
boxes of memory.” Yet not all lost fish are equal. Sometimes there is a
soothing completeness to the loss of a specific fish. The encounter has an
accommodating narrative arc – a beginning, a middle and a conclusion, at
which, for some reason, one does not feel robbed. These flashes of
enlightenment are rare and a blessing when they come. But fishing in the
main does not allow for such an absence of Avarice, such a deliverance
from Desire and its handmaiden Regret. That is because, once a fish is on
our line, we don’t want the imperial feeling of possession ever to end.
The governing emotion of fishing therefore is not one of attainment but
one of anxiety about incipient loss. Every moment that a fish is on the
line, we dread the sensation of being disconnected against our will, of
being evaded, escaped from, of grabbing and missing. Every fish that slips
the hook instructs us in the surgical indifference of fate. For like fate,
a fish only seems to be acting against us. It is, in fact, ignorant of us,
profoundly indifferent, incapable of being moved by our desires, by our
joy or sorrow. We regard the moment when the fish rises to a fly as a
triumph of piscatorial artistry, and when the line breaks or the hook
pulls out, we feel cheated, outfoxed, chagrined. We take it personally.
But to the fish, such an encounter is simply an interruption, unremarkable
and unremembered, in the instinctual, self-absorbed journey of fulfilling
its fishhood. What we experience as an exercise of will and hope, the fish
encounters as an accident, no more or less remarkable than meeting a
shrimp.
So, perforce, each departed fish pushes us toward a dim, momentary and
reluctant acceptance of that inescapable fact against which the mind
constantly rebels. For against all reason and evidence, we try to believe
that life is shaped by a process of acquisition. It is, in fact, a process
in which our dear things slip away, slowly and elegantly if we are lucky,
rapidly and brutally if we are not. We try to believe, in poor old Jim
Dickey’s mysterious line, that we can “die but not die out.” Lost fish
remind us that time, like an undertow or gravity itself, will pull us
down, will confound every hope of lasting, every dream of possessing
something – anything – wonderful for more than an instant. Lost fish
chasten us to the knowledge that we are all, in each and every moment,
dwindling. Imagine my surprise when I discovered well into my sixth decade
that losing fish can prepare us for a blessing as well as for pain.
Accepting the latter, the hurtful, seemingly accidental losses that life
imposes on all of us, did not come naturally to me. I remember the
resistance I felt in college when my favorite professor, a wizened,
erudite man named Richebourg Gaillard McWilliams, was making a point about
one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s doom-clouded stories. “Everyone who lives has
to accept something that may seem impossible to the young. At some point
in your life, you will come to know great sadness. You will lose something
precious. Remember this.” He did not speak another word, but we understood
that class was over.
The professor’s son, Tennant McWilliams, was my closest friend, and I knew
from him the piercing experience that lay behind the old man’s words. When
it came to sorrow, life had given him no grace period. Mr. McWilliams was
three when his mother, pregnant with what would have been her second
child, died in a fall down the hard, steep stairs of an antebellum house
in the Alabama Black Belt. A dozen years later, Richebourg McWilliams’s
father died of a heart attack when the two of them were quail hunting not
far from that fine, airy, oak-shaded house. Theirs was a plantation family
tracing its roots back to fifteenth-century French Huguenots who had gone
to the rack in Languedoc. But in the end these landed gentlefolk, who
owned cotton fields, sawmills and steamboats, were as vulnerable as the
blacks who served them or the white yeomen who scratched livings from
patchwork farms in the Alabama hills. Richebourg McWilliams, indeed, was
no luckier in respect to the wounds of mortality than my own father, who
was haunted all his life by the early death of a parent on one of those
hill country farms at about the same time.
I speak of these things in the context of lost fish, because in fly
fishing as in life it is always possible to make things worse, through
clumsiness perhaps or hubris. Say, for example, you tighten the drag on a
fish that has just seen the net. Or perhaps the fish was well hooked and
you say to yourself in the tiniest mental whisper, “Oh, yes, this
wonderful creature is truly mine,” when it has not yet been taken from the
spacious, amniotic embrace of its watery home. If you conflate this kind
of carelessness with unrepeatability – with knowing that you have
blundered away a pleasing coincidence that will not come again – then, my
friends, you have a departed fish that will never desert you. Certain of
my lost fish – a largemouth bass in Alabama, a brown trout on the
Missouri River, a permit in Belize – have been with me so long as to
become icons of instruction about the importance of avoiding avoidable
mistakes. I think of the respective mishaps by which they gained their
freedom and I gained pedagogic memories – with the bass, an overtight
drag; with the trout, a strike too hard by half; with the permit, a hook
set slow as the thunder that follows lightning down a mountain.
Unlike Mr. McWilliams and my father, I knew little as a child about
unavoidable losses, those to which one responds with courage or by being
crushed. I had few occasions until comparatively late in life to consider
the hierarchy of losses, to learn about assessing them in the way of
Tennyson, who said that, while much may vanish from our lives at any given
moment, much abides. Comrades, those words seem less facile to me now than
when I first read them, for reasons I hope to illustrate. For the nonce,
however, let us return to the subject of lost fish, if for no other reason
than to prove how capacious a sentence was left to us by Lord Grey. For
example, when I think of lost fish, I often turn in memory to the falsetto
hotel keeper in Bellagio. The town is on Lake Como near the Swiss Alps.
This is Mussolini country. Nearby, irritated Italians put an entire
platoon’s supply of bullets into Benito and his foolish mistress, Clara
Petacci, and then hung them upside down, like marlin or tuna.
Unlike fish, they were dangled in a spirit of ridicule rather than
admiration.
Anyway, that was the neighborhood, and the hotel keeper of whom I speak
had a voice like a set of church bells. I knew, of course, that the age of
the castrati was three hundred years past, but his voice had that kind of
purity, a boy’s voice pushed into an artificial tingling range beyond
soprano.
The man with the wonderful voice and his mother owned a small hotel of
austere, clean rooms. I spent a night or two there before moving into the
nearby Villa Serbelloni, a writers’ colony where I was to stay for the
month of September 1991. The two of them, mother and son, radiated a kind
of contentment you used to see among Southern families in which one or
more unmarried sons or daughters remained at home and grew old with the
parents. Down in small-town Alabama, these were often the most cultivated
families. You would see them together – gardening, dining out, going to
church or to musicales or to Birmingham for the symphony, cruising in
their Buicks on Sunday afternoon – in a bond whose sweetness lay in a
devotion that would be interrupted only by the rude fact of mortality and
whose sadness lay in contemplating the terrible solitude that awaited the
one unlucky enough to outlive all the others. Sometimes, of course, you
wondered about the shadow side of such contrived domestic contentment, the
parental selfishness or childish insecurity or lamentable romantic wound
that demanded such a fortress existence.
The hotel, in any event, was a sociable place built around these two
lovely innocents, the devout and scurrying and clearly doting mother and
the trilling and unfailingly solicitous son. Perhaps because I was
undergoing the predictable upsurgings of veneration and spirituality that
casual Protestants often experience in deeply Catholic countries, I
thought they seemed holy. Indeed, the severity of the hotel made you feel
a little virtuous for staying there. It was built around a vine-shaded
garden, and every morning I would awaken to the sonance of this gentle
fellow fluting to the guests. He spoke in Italian or English, as if all he
desired in life was their comfort. Was the room all right? Was there a
need for more coffee or butter? Or for directions to the place for
catching the tour boats? The man was an extremely polite musical alarm
clock, rousing me gently, and when I went down for breakfast under the
grape arbor, where I took my latte in an encompassing, almost aqueous
green light in the incomparable Italian morning, and asked if there was a
fishing tackle store in the town, he sang me to the right place.
I found it the first day, and many a mild afternoon after finishing my
writing, I made my way down there to eye the owner’s comely daughter and
to try to wheedle local knowledge from her old man. The stock of fishing
gear was limited, as was the proprietor’s English. But in other respects,
it was the ideal tackle store. The place was a combination working man’s
bar, coffee shop and news stand. It had beer, cappuccino and almost new
British news-papers. There was supposed to be a game warden who would tell
me about getting permission on the private trout streams in the region,
but he never showed up. That was all right. By that time, my attention had
shifted to Lake Como and my discovery that the water of the swimming beach
at the Villa Serbelloni was home to a lot of fish.
It wasn’t much of a beach, a rim of sand in a protected cove at the bottom
of ancient stone steps. To the left as you faced the lake was a bluff that
marched in ever higher ramparts toward a forested point of land that
commanded one of the great views of Lake Como. In classical times, Pliny
the Younger had a villa there, which he named Tragedia. To the right of
the little beach was a piazza and towering boathouse – all of the same
gray stone exposed on the flanks of Pliny’s promontory. In back of the
beach rose a sloping hill of tawny grass. It was spotted with fig trees
and olive trees that looked dusty gray in the September sun. If you
followed a winding gravel road to the crest of the hill, there, straddling
the neck of Pliny’s peninsula, was the Villa Serbelloni, a house that had
over the centuries accreted outward from a fourteenth-century Saxon tower.
What I am trying to say is that it was a damn fine place to be, and as a
Southerner, I felt at home there, since the hospitality of the place,
strangely enough, was financed by bourbon whiskey.
A little history is in order. Two noble families, the Sfrondatis and the
Serbellonis, owned the place for four hundred years, each generation
adding a wing to the house or improving the gardens with terraces,
grottoes, chapels and elaborate plantings of boxwood, yew, cypress and
bay. Over the years, the visitors included Leonardo da Vinci, various Holy
Roman emperors, Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. Flaubert, taken with
the beauty of the place, pronounced it “a truly Shakespearean landscape.”
He added, “One could live and die here.”
Ella Walker, an American heiress with a late-blooming, robber-baron hunger
for European culture, did just that. Using the money her dad had piled up
from the sale of Hiram Walker whiskey, she bought the place in 1930, and
she died there in 1959. On her deathbed, she bequeathed the estate to the
Rockefeller Foundation, stipulating that it be used as a retreat for
writers, composers, artists and scholars. Since then, many famous names
have passed through. But the only guest the staff still gossiped about was
John F. Kennedy. On a state visit to Italy on June 30, 1963, he made a
side trip to Bellagio, where he managed to arrive unencumbered by the
First Lady. There ensued certain New Frontier recreational rites that
scandalized the help.
I was first informed of JFK’s misconduct by the stern Italian widow who
supervised the household and kitchen staff during my visit. She stiffened,
however, when I raised the subject again a few days later. In the interim,
I had picked up some tantalizing details from other local gossips. Was it
true that Marella Agnelli, wife of the Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, had
journeyed from Turin to welcome the president to Villa Serbelloni in a
deeply personal way?
“This could not be,” she said. Not only was the beautiful Marella wed to
the elegant Gianni Agnelli but she was, in fact, an aristocrat in her own
right before they married. Someone from her fine Italian family would
never sleep with an Irish-American, president or not.
Years later, Marella Agnelli was interviewed by Sally Bedell Smith for her
sexual history of the Kennedys, Grace and Power. “Maybe yes, maybe no. It
is impossible to say,” Mrs. Agnelli said when asked about the rumored
dalliance. “I am an old grandmother, and Gianni and I are still very much
together.”
I’m the last one to make excuses for the Massachusetts billy goat, but
it’s clear to me that President Kennedy, a man well versed in European
traditions, can hardly be blamed for following the customs of the place in
which he was a guest. Long before Jack and Marella arrived, Bellagio and
the Villa Serbelloni had a rich history of what the guidebook calls
“romantic sojourns.” An eighteenth-century poet-priest, Giuseppe Parini,
tutored the Sfrondati children at Villa Serbelloni and apparently cut a
democratic swath through both the servant girls and the visiting noble
ladies. He was eventually fired for taking sides in a mysterious slapping
incident involving a chambermaid and a duchess.
A century later, the composer Franz Liszt took a house near the villa when
he arrived at Bellagio after borrowing, rather permanently, the wife of a
French count. The couple lived near my little beach, and their frolics
eventually produced a daughter named Cosima, who was to marry Richard
Wagner. I was not able to add to the amatory legends of the place, but so
far as I can tell I was the first guest to arrive with a fly rod.
My thought was to practice my casting in the afternoons after I finished
writing. The spacious grassy plateau behind the boathouse was an ideal
place, and alongside it there were plum and fig trees with fruit ripe for
the taking. So I practiced long, reaching casts, forward and back on the
dry, sunburned grass, trying in a relaxed way to comb the familiar tics
from my delivery. Then one day, taking a break, I ambled along the
battlements of the tall stone boathouse, and there, twenty feet below,
swimming lazily beneath the windless surface of Lake Como, were scads of
fish. The best of them were large gray fellows of two to four pounds who
loafed along in a way I came to think of as impudent.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The One that Got Away
by Howell Raines
Copyright © 2006 by Howell Raines.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Scribner
Copyright © 2006
Howell Raines
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ISBN: 0-7432-7278-1
