Fishing apparel mentioned:
- A tarpon-wear shirt
- Old bib-front overalls
- Bow ties and club blazers
- Jean shorts
It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Thomas McGuane’s work that while I was speaking with him, I was moved by his kindness, his incisive insight, and, above all, his mischievous sense of fun. The craic was exceptional. We are both writers, anglers, and equestrians, and we’d both recently fished for Atlantic salmon in arctic Norway. We laughed a lot during our conversation: in helplessness, in disbelief, in despair, and at the inherent comedy of life.
Thomas McGuane was born in 1939 in Michigan. He studied at Michigan State University, pursued his graduate studies in English and drama at Yale University, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has written eleven novels and four short-story collections, including The Sporting Club , Ninety-Two in the Shade , and Cloudbursts . His nonfiction includes The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (1999; reissued with additional essays in 2019), Some Horses , and An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport . McGuane is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame, and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame. His latest short-story collection is A Wooded Shore .
I turned to McGuane’s work in earnest in 2022 to study the way he writes about fly-fishing. McGuane distills a lifetime’s study of nature and language in his writing, as in this passage in The Longest Silence:
A fish came with a slow rolling motion and started back to his lie with my Green Highlander in the corner of his mouth. I let him tighten against the reel and raised my rod. And now we were off to the races, me running over the round rocks in wading shoes while the fish cartwheeled in midriver, the thread of Dacron backing streaming after it and the reel making its sublime music… I released him without ever taking him out of the water and he flickered away into the depths of his ancestral river.
In preparation for our conversation, I spent a happy month reading his oeuvre, and I enjoyed seeing similar themes and getting autobiographical glimpses. I read his books in such a short span of time that sometimes I felt like a character in a McGuane novel: prone to serious errors in judgment but essentially sweet, and able to converse with horses.
I met McGuane at his home on the west coast of Florida, on a peninsula of a historic tarpon fishing area. The living quarters were on the second story of a wooden house, reminiscent of a tropical summer camp. Books lined the shelves and were piled on coffee tables. Fly rods were mounted on one wall. A well-thumbed bird book and binoculars were at the ready in his sunroom. As McGuane and I spoke, Jinx, his English pointer, and Cooper, his adopted Lab-and-border-collie mix, wandered in and out or snoozed contentedly.
McGuane, like his writing, was brimming with knowledge on a variety of subjects, including history, botany, and ornithology. McGuane told me about E. B. White’s son, Joel White, who was a great designer of wooden sailboats: “Joel White published a sketch for a small sloop, but I think working drawings had not been done. I contacted him about a scheme to build the boat, which we did, building a cold-molded version designed by an ice boat builder in Wisconsin. The design proved popular, and more than a hundred of these sloops, the Sakonnet 23, have been built so far and are sailing from Massachusetts to South Africa and Japan.”
Tom’s wife, Laurie, is, among many things, a rancher, an excellent horsewoman, and a pancreatic cancer survivor. Over a heavenly lunch of crab cakes, salads, iced tea, and key lime pie, we chatted about life in small towns, books they’d read recently, and their desire to keep learning.
On my final day in Florida, I fished with an exuberant guide, Sainy Taha, whom McGuane had recommended. We saw ospreys, snowy egrets, a little blue heron, bottlenose dolphins, a manatee and her calf. Taha took me to tailing redfish in backcountry flats, and spoke passionately about the pressures exerted on this population of fish: climate change, red tides, and too many motorboats.
In an exchange after our interview, McGuane mentioned the importance of taking risks in writing: “Freedom to improvise and commitment to revision are the basis of my practice.” To balance discipline with playfulness and risk-taking is sound advice for artists and anglers alike.
—Mattie C. Govan
I. “COMPETITION HAS ITS LIMITS”
THE BELIEVER: There is drama and comedy inherent in sport: For example, in The Longest Silence, in your essay “Sons,” you describe a fishing trip in Quintana Roo where your son turns up disheveled and underprepared and ends up catching a permit, one of the most challenging fish to catch. What draws you to writing about sport?
THOMAS McGUANE: There’s always an embedded narrative. Either you’re trying to win a game or you’re trying to catch a fish, so the narrative issues are almost automatic. You don’t have to dream that up. A lot of it is my general love of nature, in this particular case, and the need to have some game to play in it.
I’m not a naturalist. I wouldn’t stand in the woods all day with my binoculars. I wish I were, actually. I need to be doing something in nature that’s compatible with being an observer and a listener and all those things. For me, fishing does that. And the older I get, the more it’s about that component of it. In fact, trophy fishing and competitive fishing have come to seem juvenile.
BLVR: The qualities of an athlete serve a writer well: discipline, ambition, resilience. However, being overly competitive or being boastful in victory are not desirable qualities. In your different athletic arenas, competition exists in more or less overt forms.
TM: That’s hard to live up to, especially if you find yourself with a few other anglers and you’re the only one not catching anything. You can look at somebody else’s flexing rod and feel embittered by the sight. I try to rise above that. I don’t think I’m going to succeed, but one of the things I like about fishing by myself is that if I want to stop, to not fish, I can do something else or sit and look at things. When you’re by yourself, you can do that. With other people, you’ve got to have this collective reality and fit into that somehow.
BLVR: In your essay “The Sea-Run Fish,” you mention fishing with a man who was throwing rocks into the river. The worst side of human nature was on display.
TM: That was an aggressive lawyer from Denver, and one of the guests at the camp was French. I think it was the era of the Freedom Fries and all that anti-European sentiment. Whenever the French angler was trying to fish, he’d stand on the bank and throw rocks into the water in front of him. It was awful.
BLVR: How do you think about competition in your different arenas? For example, when you are in a cutting horse competition.1 If you are fishing by yourself, you are competing against yourself, in a way. In some of these outdoor pursuits, competition is taken too far: for example, who catches the most fish.
TM: Riding cutting horses is very competitive. Almost bitterly competitive. And when I was a steer roper, that was clearer because it was not a judged contest; it was a timed contest. Cutting is comparable to dressage. “Cutting is ruled by its judges, and its judges are ruled by the fashions of cutting, or, shall we say, prevailing opinion” [a quote from Some Horses. Roping was simpler and it was less stressful in a way, because either you catch the steer or you don’t, and you catch it within a certain amount of time. Cutting is really cerebral: You have to memorize a herd; you have to memorize what’s been cut in the herd. When the cattle are being settled, you have to look at the cattle that would suit your horse and all these kinds of things. And you’ve got to memorize all that. Then, after carrying all this information in your head, which changes with every competitor, you have to ride well. It’s an exhausting endeavor. Most people who cut are obsessive.
BLVR: Everything could be aligned and one element goes awry. You’ve said you were once in a cutting horse competition, there was noise in the stands, it distracted your horse, and you lost the competition.
TM: I’m still not over that. There was a digital clock hanging over the Astrodome arena, and the next day I had to give a talk at the University of Florida in a pretty big lecture hall, and I would look out at all these faces and all I could see was the digital clock back in Houston.
BLVR: Your literary friendship with Jim Harrison is well documented, and you wrote letters for many years. Friendship is at the center of many of your stories and novels: I am thinking of “Take Half, Leave Half,” from your latest story collection; “Cowboy”; and The Sporting Club. There can be an element of competition in friendships when you are working in the same field. Do you thrive on this competition, or do you find yourself wanting to get away from it?
TM: Competition has its limits. It’s something to be avoided if it’s a real friendship. There’s always a certain amount of needling going on between friends, mostly affectionate.
BLVR: I think it’s different with female friendships and male friendships: In my experience, women can be polite to each other’s faces, but then stab each other in the back, whereas perhaps men are overtly competitive. You’ve written about having a competitive, at times adversarial, relationship with your father. You said anyone having fun annoyed him. He wanted to be a writer. Did it fuel you?
TM: Part of it was that I had high expectations when I was a little boy of what my friendship with my father would be. He introduced me to a lot of things I still love to do. But he was an alcoholic, so a lot of him, as I knew him, floated away, and we didn’t do any of the things we used to do together. As I improved at the activities he had introduced me to, he was embittered. The very rare times we would get to fish together, I probably was pretty hard on his abilities. I don’t really remember feeling particularly competitive with him—more disappointment that he didn’t want to keep doing it. When I was a boy, I read an ad for Hart Schaffner Marx suits, “For the man who would like to look like he’s made $10,000 a year by the age of 30.” I said to my father, “Why don’t you try to make $10,000 a year? When you achieve that, instead of trying to make more, why don’t you try to make it in less time, and we’ll spend that time fishing?” He said, “Anybody with that attitude would never make $10,000 in the first place.” That’s not competition. It’s disappointment.
BLVR: From my understanding, he would take himself out of the competition. Other people would take you fishing and he’d say: I have to work.
TM: That’s exactly it. When I moved to Montana in the late ’60s, he came out, looked around the magnificent area that we live in, and said, “This is the kind of place where people live after others have done all the work.”
BLVR: This makes me think of a Protestant work ethic, that self-flagellating work ethic, but he was Catholic. Maybe it’s an American work ethic?
TM: My mother was very definitely Irish and Catholic. My father was Irish Catholic, putatively. But he had taken on the mantle of New England–ism. I loved his father, my grandfather, a very hardworking Irishman. My father inherited his capacity for unstinting work, but he had lost the ability to have fun. He identified his joyless worldview with virtue.
Read the rest of the interview over at The Believer.