The sheer volume of literature about fishing is astounding: Harvard’s Fearing Collection contains some twelve thousand books on the subject – a branch of writing known as ‘halieutics’. It can roughly be divided between works by fishermen who like writing, and works by writers who like fishing (Hemingway, Orwell, Ted Hughes, Thomas McGuane, for example), and much of it is agreeably idiosyncratic, embracing as it can topics as diverse as meteorology and magic. In the right hands, this admixture gives it strength, like ancient mortar fortified with oxblood and crushed shells. Quite a lot of what I call pisc. lit., however, is overblown, derivative and barnacled with clichés.
Back in the 1980s, the novelist Graham Swift and I researched the subject for our anthology The Magic Wheel (1985), and it was then that I first came upon Negley Farson’s magnificent book Going Fishing (1942). Of the thousand or so items of pisc. lit. in my own library, this is one of my absolute favourites. It easily passes the re-readability test, chiefly because it is not just about going fishing: it explores people and places, and exemplifies the transformative experience of being on the water. Many consider it a classic. Born in Fairfield, New Jersey, in 1890, Farson was named after his grandfather, the impoverished maverick Civil War veteran General James Negley (‘he made other men look like mongrel dogs’), who raised him. His unconventional upbringing taught him independence and a degree of insubordination that were to inform his entire life, and gave him an introduction to the great outdoors in the company of assorted backwoods characters, from whom he learned the skills of trapping and hunting (he also became a lifelong sailing enthusiast). He was expelled from school for fomenting rebellion, dropped out of college, headed for the New York low life, shipped to England (he became a
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Subscribe now or Sign inThe sheer volume of literature about fishing is astounding: Harvard’s Fearing Collection contains some twelve thousand books on the subject – a branch of writing known as ‘halieutics’. It can roughly be divided between works by fishermen who like writing, and works by writers who like fishing (Hemingway, Orwell, Ted Hughes, Thomas McGuane, for example), and much of it is agreeably idiosyncratic, embracing as it can topics as diverse as meteorology and magic. In the right hands, this admixture gives it strength, like ancient mortar fortified with oxblood and crushed shells. Quite a lot of what I call pisc. lit., however, is overblown, derivative and barnacled with clichés.
Back in the 1980s, the novelist Graham Swift and I researched the subject for our anthology The Magic Wheel (1985), and it was then that I first came upon Negley Farson’s magnificent book Going Fishing (1942). Of the thousand or so items of pisc. lit. in my own library, this is one of my absolute favourites. It easily passes the re-readability test, chiefly because it is not just about going fishing: it explores people and places, and exemplifies the transformative experience of being on the water. Many consider it a classic. Born in Fairfield, New Jersey, in 1890, Farson was named after his grandfather, the impoverished maverick Civil War veteran General James Negley (‘he made other men look like mongrel dogs’), who raised him. His unconventional upbringing taught him independence and a degree of insubordination that were to inform his entire life, and gave him an introduction to the great outdoors in the company of assorted backwoods characters, from whom he learned the skills of trapping and hunting (he also became a lifelong sailing enthusiast). He was expelled from school for fomenting rebellion, dropped out of college, headed for the New York low life, shipped to England (he became an inveterate Anglophile), peddled arms in pre-Revolutionary Russia, shouldered his way into journalism (eventually becoming a widely syndicated foreign correspondent), enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps (by pretending to be Canadian), crashed horribly in Egypt and suffered ever after from a troublesome ‘gimpy leg’. Back in England in 1920 he married a long-suffering nurse, Eve (Bram Stoker’s niece), and they had a son – later the talented Soho chronicler Dan Farson. Negley Farson’s life was fuelled by wanderlust, and many of his twelve books, published between 1926 and 1956 – travelogues, novels, memoirs – enjoy the heady vigour of a picaresque novel. He witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd, met Hitler (who called Dan ‘a good Aryan boy’), sat under a mango tree with Gandhi, and crossed the Caucasus on horseback. Intrepid, restless, hard-bitten, headstrong, womanizing, and with a bohemian streak, Neg (as his pals called him) was tall, powerfully built, handsome and violet-eyed, a heroic smoker and a drinker of formidable commitment. Yet he rigorously typed an impressive ten pages each day, sinking four double whiskies after filing a piece, which seems only reasonable. Although for much of his life he was practically broke and living off his wits, he did have literary success with, inter alia, his long, hard-hitting autobiography The Way of a Transgressor (1935, much reprinted), and Behind God’s Back (1940), an account of his drive across Africa, which appeared in the New York Times bestseller list alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls. Indeed, Farson’s achievements have long been overshadowed by Hemingway, his direct, similarly pugnacious, contemporary. It seems they never met, though Papa had two copies of Going Fishing in his library. Neg did, however, once party with F. Scott Fitzgerald, noting, ‘I don’t remember much of that evening.’ So when Going Fishing appeared in 1942, Farson was already a celebrated author. It was published by Country Life (the magazine to which he frequently contributed) and featured sixteen striking illustrations by the renowned artist C. F. Tunnicliffe, who had also collaborated with Henry Williamson. At just 144 quarto pages, it is quite concise for a sporting memoir, and Farson’s skill as a roving journalist distinguishes it from so many other works on the subject because he really knows how to shape a story. As a result, it is that rara avis in the Bibliotheca Piscatoria – a book you could happily read even if you had no interest in angling. As its minimalist title suggests, this is as much about the going as the fishing (though Eve, mindful of his alcoholism and swashbuckling lifestyle, suggested he call it With Rod and Gun Down the Alimentary Canal). The book hits the ground running, with a description of his early sorties along the New Jersey shoreline – ‘Surf Casting is not a duffer’s sport’ runs the caption to the illustration here, depicting our author in the same musclebound, heroic stance as any propagandized Soviet worker. His geographical range is quite extraordinary for its time – Chile, Argentina, Yugoslavia, Norway, Russia. One minute he’s poaching the Regent’s river in Slovenia, the next he’s in Killarney with McGillicuddy of the Reeks. Panache, reportage and perpetual brink manship inform his prose, for back then such travel was often an authentic adventure. In Bessarabia he sniggles sturgeon and savours the communal soup (‘it was considered good manners to lick the spoon clean before you passed it on’); in the Caucasus he catches lustrous little snow trout, their backs ‘a vivid apple green’; on a whistlestop tour of four different countries in 1937, his highlight is a trophy Andean rainbow trout, served cold for breakfast with a bottle of hock. Farson’s style is often flinty and sardonic, con cojones, and he avoids the common halieutical pitfalls of braggadocio, threadbare tropes and downright piffle. Fishing is not some game to him. At times he fished to live, as during his ‘farouche’ apprentice years as a writer living in a far-flung British Columbian shack, catching steelhead, cutthroat trout and Dolly Varden charr on which he and Eve survived. Here’s an example of the immediacy of his prose – and the way it gleams – observing some Indians harpooning salmon: It ended with one of those sunsets when all the world is dusted with a golden powder, and the salmon passing up the river, slow-flowing down here at the seacoast, passing, passing, passing . . . like the very legends the Siwash had built around them. You could understand mythology, and animal worship, when you stood on that raw riverbank. As a travel writer, Farson had that knack of attracting a motley cast of characters, and he was a master of the thumbnail sketch. We meet ‘Spieler’ Welsh who gives him his first taste of rot-gut (‘Here, Kid – have some bait’); M. Croisier the fascist tackle-shop owner, shot through the spine on the Somme; and, off Shetland, master-gunner Olsen ‘who had shot 2,600 whales’ but is still thrilled by the capture of a modest tom cod – ‘Py Golly! How’s dat for a big von!’ He also loved the Scottish islands, as do I: on Uist, he drops his whisky flask when taking a pot shot at a duck, and the gillie remarks, ‘That was an awfu’ thing to do!’ Farson is especially good at describing waterscapes and bird life, as well as fish – including the eating of them. He relishes a childhood salad of cold moulded bass, Finnish stickleback in aspic, a plate of milk oyster fritters ‘that would have made M. Boulestin weep’, and sterlets with slivovitz in the company of some Serbian police. His travels are awash with various drinks, but he cautions against alcohol before fishing. It might prove dangerous, and anyway it dulls the piscatorial experience – one thinks of Papa’s Cuban exploits aboard the Pilar, with John Dos Passos mixing their morning cocktails in a zinc pail. Going Fishing concludes with a chapter about the Savica river in what is now Slovenia, and its rare golden grayling. The war intervenes, and he dreams of going back, ending the book regretfully: ‘I never did.’ Despite the brawling hurly-burly of his globetrotting expeditions, he later comes to seek tranquillity – particularly in the streams of England’s West Country, where he eventually settled, using the proceeds of the book to buy the Grey House in Georgeham, North Devon, a village where Henry Williamson had lived. There are manifold theories about what drives some people to devote themselves to fishing – recapturing the innocence of childhood, repairing one’s soul – but there’s no doubt that for Farson the love of this pursuit seemed to promise some sort of saving grace, and he evoked it beautifully. Dogged with self-disgust, growing halt and deaf and devastated by booze, Negley Farson had a dismal last decade. Despite his philandering, Eve had stayed with him (‘She loved him with all her heart,’ wrote their son Dan), but his heyday was over. Visiting in 1957, Ludovic Kennedy described him as ‘like some huge old lion’. On 13 December 1960, having hopefully written luggage labels for his next trip to Portugal, the great adventurer died in his armchair, with his dog at his feet. I wish I had shared one day with him searching for the things in the water.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © David Profumo 2026
About the contributor
David Profumo is the longstanding fishing correspondent for Country Life magazine, and author of The Lightning Thread: Fishological Moments and the Pursuit of Paradise.
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