The Longest Silence

Izaak Walton

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER owes much of its interest to cycles of turbulence, starting with the one within which Walton wrote. In the years shortly before the Restoration, social discord, especially among the literate classes, rose to a genuinely dangerous level. The austerities of Cromwell were undertones of an ominously gathering future. Quietist dreaming, gentleness and contemplation, rusticity and the ceremonies of country life, including fishing, beckoned compellingly. From the Restoration until now, The Compleat Angler has been renewed by turmoil, none more conspicuous than the Industrial Revolution, which produced an explosion in the popularity of angling and an idealization of the pastoral life. Its cousins, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne and Thoreau’s Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, profited similarly. Armchair anglers and the various harried people of the western world have elevated these books to scripture.

Today’s faithless reader will be somewhat baffled by the long shelf-life of this unreliable fishing manual, until he realizes that it’s not about how to fish but how to be. Of this fact even Walton was unaware; thus its inescapable persuasiveness and the bright, objective picture the author has left of himself, without which all quickly deteriorates into the quaint or, worse, the picturesque.

Anglers, above all, have given this book a long life. Its lore and advice are largely obsolete. Its spiritual origins, drawn contradictorily from pagan and Christian sources, may well appeal to the instinctive pantheism of bucolic dreamers, but anglers tend to be more persistently interested in methods. The greater number of them are less about capturing a truth than capturing a fish and eating it. Still, the sport demands immersion, from air to water, from warm blood to cold, to a view of the racing universe and all its stars through a river’s flowing lens.

Two things from Walton seem contemporary: the flies and the recipes. The first, hooks wrapped in bits of silk and songbird wings, reveal a poetic intuition for breaking down the watery walls. The recipes seem the product of avid reflection as to what a predator ought to do with his prey in a manner complimentary to the destiny of each. The sense of a holy sacrifice, benign and undoubted, subtends the making of these innocent meals in honest alehouses where the angler could expect to find “a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.”

Walton is one of our principal literary sojourners, with White and Thoreau. By comparison with White, he is unscientific; and by comparison with Thoreau, discursive and confident about his world, less challenging of his fellow man but also less wintry and intolerant.

Walton is the leading player in his own book and is helpless to be otherwise. Unlike the rather alpine, punctilious, and detached Thoreau, or the hyperkinetic White, Walton’s persona is one of equitability and such serenity of faith that his journey, in the view of one contemporary, from sepulcher of the Holy Ghost to pinch of Christian dust, spoke of an amiable mortality and rightness on the earth that has been envied by his readers for three-hundred years. But the three do share a conviction that the elements of the natural world are Platonic shadows to be studied in search of eternity, a medium in which man was presumed to float as opposed to sink, as in the present when eternity has been replaced by the abyss.

All three make note of the vast share of their fellows, getting, spending, and laying waste their powers, “men that are condemned to be rich,” in Walton’s words. He observes, “there be as many miseries beyond riches, as on this side of them.” The rich man, he thinks, is like the silkworm which, while seeming to play, is spinning her own bowels and consuming them. One thinks of Thoreau “owning” the farms by knowing them better than their tenants; it is less that the meek shall possess the earth than that “they enjoy what others possess and enjoy not.” The subject of The Compleat Angler is, really, everyday miracles, friends, a dry, warm house, remembered verse, hope. Walton reserves but one spot for envy and invidious comparison: “I envy not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more fish than I do.” I think of gentle, forgiving Anton Chekhov, who could not bear the slightest criticism of his angling.

It is not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether hunting, bird-watching, angling, or sailing, and each create superb opportunities to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water. In Walton’s century, man went from one of God’s creations to being an actor who might undertake the management of nature, whose “activism” has grown catastrophically worse ever since. This was part of the seventeenth century uproar, and part of the wedge Puritanism was driving between man and nature. Walton, with his many resonances in Roman literature, is often most serene when he is most medieval. The angler preparing his wiles for the capture of fish is closer to the fish themselves than that husbandman cited by Walton who manages fish ponds as though they were extensions of his farm. The angler’s skies are wilder, his cycles as deeply circadian as the migratory birds he encounters during the seasons of the river, his perils on earth less those of a few pinches of Christian dust than a ray of fortuitous light in the heart of creation itself.

Walton tells us that “angling is an art” that, like “mathematics, can never be fully learnt.” However, “as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.” Therefore, some instruction is in order. In general, fishermen should conduct themselves as “primitive Christians, who were, as most anglers are, quiet men and followers of peace.” He excuses his contemporaries slightly by adding that primitive Christians were “such simple men as lived in those times when there were fewer lawyers.”

Today’s reader, who is himself three-fourths river water, can accept that the world of fish is the “eldest daughter of the creation, the element upon which the Spirit of God did first move,” and from whose abundance all living creatures originally proceed. We can live with this. It is close to factual as we currently understand the world. The angler deep in a river intuits his nearness to the primary things of the earth. And Walton tells us that while God spoke to a fish, He never spoke to a beast, and that when He wished to prepare man for a revelation, He first removed him from the hurly-burly of cities so that his mind might be made fit through repose. A learned Spaniard is quoted as saying that “rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate and fools to pass by.” There are rivers of every kind on earth, he says, even one which runs six days and rests on the Sabbath. And of course, four of the Apostles were fishermen. Walton adds with some prescience that if we would live on herbs, salads, and fish we would be saved from “putrid, shaking, intermittent agues.” Indeed, he who has the urge to angle would do well to set out both physically and spiritually, not just with rod and creel but with “wit … hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself.” The angler has everything to gain. He cannot even lose a fish, “for no man can lose what he never had.” But by skill and observation he might still hope for success — first by becoming enough of a naturalist to make a dozen imitation insects to see him through the seasons of the year. And if he is sufficiently skillful and observant, he will own “a jury of flies, likely to betray and condemn all the trouts in the river.” He may also carry with him a bag containing the hooks and silks and feathers to imitate unforeseen insects, or to pass time of a “smoking shower” under the nearest sycamore. He is after all seeking a fish “so wholesome that physicians allow him to be eaten by wounded men, or by men in fevers, or by women in childbed.” In fact, Walton’s fish regularly pass in and out of mythology with their enameled spots and colors, “march together in troops” like the perch; pike hunt like wolves and tench minister to other fish which are ailing. Some are driven by hatred of frogs, others, like the old trout, possess a mournful intelligence and acute sense of mortality. The angler who understands such things may betake himself to steepletops and, with his rod and line, angle for swallows.

Walton reminds us, as we daily remind ourselves, that it is terrible to resolve whether happiness consists in contemplation or in action. But he contents himself in telling the reader “that both of these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenious, quiet and harmless act of angling.” Walton anticipates modern riparian conservation in recognizing the need for controlling weirs and illegal nets by public policy with the forceful reservation that “that which is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” This is, of course, the tragedy of the commons, which deprives us daily of our window on nature.

As modern naturalists have come to do, Walton relates the lives of various fish to all the things around them: weather, insects, worms, the seasonal habits of townspeople, the tides of the sea, the budding and blossoming of plants, the dispersion of cities during plagues or religious wars, the follies of anglers themselves. Most of all, angling, to Walton, is about being fully alive: “I was for that time lifted above earth, and possess’d joys not promised in my birth.” Beside rivers, we seldom fill our minds with “fears of many things that will never be.” Here, “honest, civil, quiet men” are free from dread.

The angler’s day begins humbly, wherein he differentiates between the various dung — cow’s, hog’s, horse’s — as he searches for “a lively, quick, stirring worm,” perhaps in old bark from a tanner’s yard. Or, competing with crows, he may follow the plough through heaths and greenswards. Finally, he may cultivate a dead cat or raid a wasp nest for its grubs. But his day becomes a soaring event in the mysteries of sea and stream, milkmaids reciting Christopher Marlowe, hours among the “little living creatures with which the sun and summer adorn and beautify the river banks and meadows.” At times, The Compleat Angler resembles Pliny, or a medieval bestiary, so ravishing and inexplicable does our author find his microcosm. What is this grand beast? “His lips and mouth somewhat yellow; his eyes black as jet; his forehead purple, his feet and hinder parts green, his tail two-forked and black; the whole body stained with a kind of red spots, which run along the neck and shoulder blade, not unlike the form of St. Andrew’s cross, or the letter X made thus crosswise, and a white line drawn down his back to his tail; all of which add much beauty to his whole body.” Answer: caterpillar.

The technocracy of modern angling has not been conducive to the actual reading of Walton. Today’s fisherman may own The Compleat Angler as an adornment, but turns to his burgeoning gadgets for real twentieth-century consolation, staring at the forms of fish on the gas plasma screen of his fathometer or applying his micrometer to the nearly invisible copolymers of his leader. In Walton’s words, his heart is no longer fitted for quietness and contemplation. Even in the seventeenth century there was need of a handbook for those who would overcome their alienation from nature. In our day, when this condition is almost endemic, it requires a Silent Spring or The End of Nature to penetrate our stupefaction. The evolution of angling has reached a precipice beyond which the solace, exuberance, and absorption that has sustained fishermen from the beginning will have to come from the way the art is perceived. And here, learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and awe may be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us; that is, less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch fish. He tells us how to live.