Mark Twain and Fishing

Abstract

From have equate Herman fostered fishing Melville a with grand spiritual tradition to Ernest quest, of Hemingway fishing as in stories. Hemingway's and Norman Often these Maclean, tales Old Man are American allegorical and writers Sea and , have fostered a grand tradition of fishing stories. Often these tales are allegorical and equate fishing with spir tual quest, as in Hemingway's Old Man and Sea , Maclean's A River Runs Through It , and even Melville's Moby-Dick , ultimate fishing story, very definition of a whopper. Sinclair Lewis declared in his 1930 Nobel Prize acceptance speech that he had learned as a boy that there is something very important and spiritual about catching fish.1 In a sense, fishing is nothing less than act of faith and a fisherman very type of stubborn optimist. Henry David Thoreau mused in Waiden that fishing is the true industry for poets and pondered whether he should go to heaven or a-fishing.2 Similarly, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in Country of Pointed Firs that If there is one way above another of getting so close to nature that one simply is a piece of nature, following a primeval instinct with perfect self-forgetfulness and forgetting everything except dreamy consciousness of pleasant freedom, it is to take course of a shady trout brook.3 On other hand, unlike such sports as hunting, hiking, and swimming, fishing is literally a passive activity. It is not productive but a parody of work. Ben Franklin reminisced in his autobiography, for example, that as a young printer he seen at no Places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting.4 On his part, Van Winkle, consummate loafer, suffered an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor and would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar's lance, and all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble.5 Mark Twain later drew a crude picture of actor Joe Jefferson best known as star of a popular stage production of Rip Van Winkle while fishing.6 As usual, Twain was one of skeptics. He never described fishing as spiritually uplifting, and he never wrote a piece that contains word fish in its title. In Twain's stories, there are only two reasons to fish: fun or food. Put another way, fishing in Mark Twain's writings is either a form of play, sport, or leisure, suitable to old men and young boys, or a form of subsistence, suitable for those who cannot otherwise earn a living. In Pudd'nhead Wilson , Judge Driscoll and Pembroke Howard, elderly sons of First Families of Virginia, spend entire day on water: The day's fishing finished, they came floating down stream in their skiff, talking national politics and other high matters.7 Or in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, Twain remembered that half soldiers in his Confederate militia, like boys in Tom Sawyer's Gang, went