Since only readers with eidetic memories remember “Learned Meander, Part I”. . . .
A “cartoon history,” grossly, but necessarily short on specifics, aiming to support the idea that until the early twentieth century, the fly-fishing literature we recognize today was written mostly by privileged English authors, except for Sawyer on the Avon, and then, over here, by American and Canadian writers with day jobs, excluding Theodore Gordon, perhaps, who wrote for periodicals, suffered from tuberculosis, had almost no job, and had an income to match. Along with that, a handful of observations: among these, that fly fishers have long learned a lot from the writing of others and remarkably often have written about what they learned from waters and fish.
Part II would have been many thousand words, bringing us to the middle 1980s — the starting point I hoped to reach when I began the present essay as a small boy. And just so you know, I’ve written a lot of those words over the last several weeks — too many, as it turned out.
But here’s the rub — and the reason you won’t find those words here or hereafter: For me it’s all research. I used half a dozen sources, ultimately relying far too much on what I found by combing through Paul Schullery’s American Fly Fishing: A History (Lyons Press, 1999). It’s rich stuff. I recommend you read it. When you do, call his chapter 20 “Learned Meander, Part II.”
You think that’s cheating? Ah — welcome to one of the subjects here in Part III. For the moment, consider this: What should we call one author’s rephrased or regurgitated version of somebody else’s material? In what follows, Steve Raymond, author of Rivers of the Heart and six other books, also for several decades editor of The Flyfisher, will speak to that. But first: On page 214 of Part II (aka Schullery’s chapter 20, titled “The Well-Published Angler”), that author succinctly sums up a point I made in Part I. Keep in mind that this was how Schullery saw the world circa 1987: “Traditionally, at least up until the twentieth century, British flyfishing history was dominated by brilliant amateurs. Now American fishing writing is more strongly dominated by professionals.” He identifies a few exceptions before continuing:
Now, in an accelerated and much larger market, there is at least a useful portion of a living to be made for the enterprising professional angler. That is not necessarily bad, though it can be, just as amateurism has its pitfalls . . . [But] it was not necessary for Halford to write any of his books, or promote any ideas, in order to eat. When ideas and innovation become matters of personal urgency, more of them will appear. Volume can replace quality. Something like that, many observers have complained, happened to fly-fishing writing between 1970 and 1980. Volume increased tremendously, and quality, many now agree, declined.
And yet the 1970s are certainly the most exciting and event-packed decade in American fishing publication. (Emphasis added)
Until now, I’d say.
I didn’t see the 1970s the way Schullery did, because I didn’t see fly-fishing books at all — not for a decade or more. Though I was casting the long rod, I knew exactly one other person who did so, sometimes, and he knew only me. Never mind that I was attending many colleges and wandering four countries and four states and that the latter included California, which everyone knows is a state of mind. The simple fact was that I had no entrée into fly fishing society, didn’t know it existed, though I spent parts of the middle and end of the decade living in the Bay Area, by then one of fly fishing’s epicenters. So . . . a score of seminal works simply passed me by. The increased volume missed me. Consequently, I failed to notice a decline in quality, which, save maybe for the arrangement of words, I would not have recognized if it clubbed me.
If I missed the books of that decade, I did notice fly fishing’s more frequent appearances in magazines. It had always been there: Periodicals played a major role early in the century and continued to do so, mostly back East. In the larger nationals, however, interest that had faded when spinning eclipsed fly fishing, though kept alive in pieces by the brilliant Gene Hill and Charlie Brooks, and even in humor, by Ed Zern and Patrick Macmanus, began to revive. Even better, the sport was growing organs of its own: The Flyfisher, first produced by the Federation of Fly Fishers in 1968, Fly Fisherman, in 1969, soon to become the industry behemoth, proof positive, per Schullery, that the sport could carry (barely, he suggests) its own dedicated magazine, and sometime thereafter, Frank Amato’s Salmon-Trout-Steelheader and Flyfishing, introduced as Flyfishing the West, then American Angler, Fly Tyer, Rod & Reel, soon to be Fly Rod & Reel, written for “the thinking angler,” Gray’s Sporting Journal, which I “discovered” in 1979 . . . forgive me the many I’ve missed. By the middle of the 1980s, even regional hook-and-bullet rags were paying attention: Western Outdoors was where I first found the gorgeous illustrations of John McKim, who drew a regular column. I can’t remember when or where I started reading Dan Blanton about striped bass and the Delta. Ditto Russ Chatham, also on steelhead, Art Lidner, steelhead major, Dave Hughes on everything, then an article from the late Gary LaFontaine that sent me staggering out into the midwinter Mammoth night, looking for spirits. . . .
That’s as far as I’ll go with that, lest I put too much distance between Schullery’s assertion and the attitude I remember from that time: Back then, I considered these authors experts. I still do today. While I don’t recall defining the word, I presumed they were “professionals,” partly for the simple reason that their articles appeared in print, in magazines.
In print, in magazines. That’s worth repeating. And it brings me to a second insight, this one offered by Steve Raymond, who I hope will forgive me for quoting from Rivers of Heart at such length (Lyons Press, 1998):
Much of what now appears in print on the subject of fly-fishing is published in magazines. As Editor of two such magazines, spaced two decades apart, it has been my opportunity — and occasionally my anguish — to deal with the unedited work of most of the so-called “great” fly fishing writers of the late twentieth century . . . people whose work I had read, respected, and often admired for many years. So, perhaps you can imagine my disillusionment when I saw their raw copy for the first time and discovered that many of these “great” writers were so deficient in the basic mechanics of the English language they would have had trouble drafting a short grocery list. Legions of anonymous editors had cleaned up their published work, sometimes completely rewriting it. There were exceptions, of course, but the reality was that many of these “writers” did not know how to write at all.
. . . This does not mean they had nothing worthwhile to say: they did. The problem was, they did not know how to say it. This should not be too surprising when you think about it, because while the typical fly-fishing writer spends many years learning to become an expert in some aspect of the sport, he or she rarely spends any time at all learning how to write about it. (Emphasis added.)
That says it. You’ve made the connection, but let me amplify, connect dots, and advance:
Per Schullery, by the 1980s, fly-fishing literature — certainly at the how-to end — was mostly written by professionals. Per Raymond, many of these were not professional writers, however expert they were as anglers. So editors were helping professionals establish (or maintain) reputations that began to create real careers, or at least avocations, with incomes derived less from the (still) seriously modest book royalties and magazine payments than from presentations at increasingly popular retail trade shows, fly-fishing club meetings, in “guest” or host roles in various media, and also from product endorsements.
Call it commercialization, because it is. Those involved consider themselves lucky to be making a (usually modest) living doing what they love. Call it whatever you like: If Schullery has doubts about this evolution, Raymond makes plain this is too often devolution, directly addressing the predatory practices sometimes encouraged by need or ambition. (Plagiarism, for one, though there’s also the kind of article in which an author simply rephrases another writer’s work, taking the idea of “derivative” all the way to “cannibalized.” My metaphors — don’t blame Raymond.) For both authors, it’s fair to say, there’s regret, maybe resentment, aimed at the kinds of self-promotion that succeeds when skills, experience, innovation, and insight do not. Especially if those skills, insights, et cetera are not couched in commercially viable prose . . . or if, alas, there’s no editor like Raymond around to bring nonprofessional writers along. “Even the relatively few people who do have a natural talent for expressing themselves must have training and experience to write well,” he insists. Then he remarks on a college writing professor’s assertion that “nobody could consider himself a writer until he had written at least 800,000 words. At the time I thought the professor was crazy; now I wonder why he set the figure so low.”
Big ifs, those two. I ran into these — their consequences and corollaries — when I started writing for fishing magazines in the mid-1980s. By then, I had put in my 800,000 words several times over, in a variety of venues, including several dozen published pieces and an unpublished novel or three, one of which I’d rewritten entire, five times, at 600 pages a pop. That shouldn’t suggest I was ready for prime time, but I was trying.
And I hit it almost by accident, not in fly-fishing, but with one of the sporting world’s big three — a humor bit, nothing expert, but its path to the page says something about the way the worm turned — a story I used to think useful to tell to writing hopefuls, though now I’m less sure.
It’s 1986: I send the piece on paper, along with the SASE required in those days — a “self-addressed stamp envelope,” for those innocent of the codes of the snail-mail era. The mag returned this with a standard form insertion saying it “doesn’t meet our needs.” I dropped the rejection onto a pile.
Comes the accident: two months later, I move to new apartment. While unpacking, I found the SASE, which felt . . . too fat.
I opened it again, this time to discover a photocopy of my story included along with the original. Sandwiched between these two was a single page with two entries. The first was handwritten: “Humor,” it read. “It all works except the last line.” Beside that, initials. Below, a typewritten entry: “Agreed. Everything but the last line.” More initials.
I did that forehead slap routine favored by stooges. Here they were, expecting my change . . . .
I wrote four new endings before concluding that all I needed to do was toss out the extra laugh I’d tried to tack on. Sent this, waited.
A month later, an associate editor called, asked for my Social Security number, then promised to send a check 16 times larger than any I’d earned for any other print piece. She did.
That’s not important. What is, is this: I got to know that associate while working on another essay for the magazine. She called after an earthquake to see how I’d held up. A few minutes into the conversation, she blurted out. “I’ve got to tell you this . . . you remember that first piece you sent us? Those comments you got back?”
“Sure.”
“You weren’t supposed to get them.”
Say what? It turned out the magazine had hired a summer intern who, for reasons of her own, included the in-house-use-only comment pages along with rejected manuscripts — scores, maybe hundreds — before anybody caught on. “It was just a disaster,” said my junior editor pal. “Except for you.”
I had to wrap my mind around this, still tender from all that forehead slapping. “You mean that . . . because of one line . . . one line, you would have sent a form-letter rejection? Just left it at that?”
Absolutely. According to her, because the magazine got so many submissions every month, and because new writers can be “so difficult, even hostile” about making changes, “It’s just not worth it to us. Now that we know we can work with you, that’s different.”
Sure enough, after that, their door was open. It turns out that the network of “good old boys” that people com-plained about when the same authors were published over and over wasn’t, as far as I could see, anyway, composed of best buddies, but of professionals that the editors knew could take a critical punch and, sans squeal, turn it into a punch line. Odds are, they’d proceed more delicately when dealing with a writer who readers recognized as expert, but for an unknown quantity, a potential prima donna? One bad line.
And I’ll tell you what: Twenty-odd years later, I’ve yet to write an article perfect in every line. Come to think of it, I’ve yet to read one.
Five years later, I first approached fly-fishing publications, with a piece of short fiction story this time — a story told here not long ago (“Throwing Dace,” May/June 2009). By then, fly fishing was set to explode — as a sport, an industry, and a field for which to write. By the end of the decade, we’d have millions more fly fishers, buyers, and readers — fantastic! Incredible! Expensive! New rods and rod makers, flies, fly tyers, materials, reels and reel manufacturers coming on, lodges leaping onto rivers and lakes to accommodate crusades of fishing travelers. . . .
And, in publishing, eight or ten more magazines — that list in flux — and more books coming out, I bet, than in the previous hundred years in America — sometimes with less editing than laundry lists. In these, an old guard of experts demanded the recognition they deserved, now that it was finally worth something, and some actually got it. Meanwhile, ten or a hundred times as many unrecognized innovators — guides, teachers, and tyers — couldn’t beg or buy exposure unless they could punctuate and paragraph, while overwhelmed, still-anonymous editors — facilitators, gatekeepers, the people who carried authors on their backs — scoured submission stacks for “new voices” that might represent this new generation and the old ones — ready-made writers with something important say or, failing that (as we did so often), an engaging way of saying something, presented in Microsoft Word and spell-checked. . . .
Or . . .
If you lived in California . . . were, indeed, a California fly fisher who knew what you were about, were workable as an author — however marginally — and eager enough to pen your piece that you’d initially work for the financial equivalent of chips and beer. . . .
Part IV to come. Or maybe it’s III.5.
