Of Sex and Salmon

Sixty pages of non-fiction can take you to strange places. When I first read The Spawning Run, it was in armchair comfort, coolly anticipating the prospect of a literary march across sweet spring meadows to the secret, private banks of a quietly flowing stream. A place where currents concealing the best and sleekest of fish riffle, pool and glide. A place requiring rod, reel and fly as sole equipment for a quintessential day’s sport.

I’m no fisherman, although mentally I’d been hatching this trip for a while. My fantasies, endlessly fertilized by books on man’s relationship with nature, had as their iconic activity the human struggle to locate, hook and land a creature of previously unrecorded dimensions. I wanted to locate the source of our motivation to hunt, to find deep within myself that classic dialogue between man and mythic, unseen quarry. But the slim, modestly illustrated volume in my hands had other plans:

The Itchen, the Test, the Frome, the fabled chalk streams of South England where Dame Juliana Berners and Isaak Walton fished – here I am in the middle of them, it’s Spring, the season has opened, and I might as well be in the Sahara Desert.

That’s fishing for you. And thus The Spawning Run begins, instantly setting up a babbling rhythm onomatopoeic with the places it describes, deftly delivering a punch line as drily surprising as the end it foreshadows. And thus it continues, tracking in diary form the incomparable journey (Homeric, final, fatal) of that most majestic of fish, the salmon, as it returns to its native river to spawn. Here comes the sex. With unerring precision, the author casts the protagonists and villains of an annual riverine drama: the cock salmon, bullish, travel-weary, sighting the end of a lifetime mission to release long pent-up seed from colossal internal gonads; the hen, a coquette, ready to ‘gape’ at the appropriate moment above her carefully dug nest; the parr, sprightly young upstart, four inches long, and infuriatingly possessed of a wily instinct to dart in and cuckold his elders and betters at the most crucial of moments. And among the corridors, lobbies and bars of hotels beside the salmon streams, the author bears candid witness to the mating behaviour of the salmon’s greatest foe: Porky Mitchell, the meat-pie king, Admiral Blakey, fishing bore, and ‘poor old Holloway’, the clandestine Casanova: ‘Never caught a fish in twenty years. Never knows where his fly will light. Can’t handle his rod.’ But crafty Holloway’s at it with the salmon widows while Blakey and Co. flog their stretches of riverbank none the wiser. Such is the skill of the writer that we hardly notice his aim. He informs but never bores us with the astounding natural history of a salt- and freshwater-going torpedo of a fish. And simultaneously he depicts with wry but affectionate glances the castes of angling society. ‘Fishing in Britain’, he says, ‘falls into three classes. Game, sea and coarse. Read upper, middle and lower.’ At first I was surprised to learn that the author of such adroitly handled irony about the English sporting scene should be alien to our shores. William Humphrey was a novelist from the old American South. Born in 1924 into a drought-impoverished, alcohol-blighted and infidelity-stricken family, he spent his boyhood hunting and fishing along the muddy banks of the Red River, where Texas touches Oklahoma, nudges alongside Arkansas, and then loses sight of the river as the vast Mississippi swallows it whole near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Humphrey was an only child. Late one Fourth of July night, when he was 13, his mother woke him up and dragged him across town to catch a last glimpse of his favourite person in the world, his chief hunting companion and mentor: his father, hideously and mortally wounded in a car crash. His grief sparked a taste for literature and a need to define his past through writing. Humphrey migrated, first with his mother, and when she kicked him out, with a wife and stepdaughter across America, Europe and England. He took university posts and wrote novels and short stories populated with characters from his smalltown origins. His original inspiration was Cervantes; his ambition, literary greatness. It was a goal he never attained. His predecessors and contemporaries (Steinbeck, Faulkner, Porter, McMurtry) overshadowed him. His fiction, though very readable, was too dark to ensnare the mainstream literary public; his better works are powerful, heart-rending sagas of lives pitching helplessly between happiness and destitution, between love and tragedy. A similar formula can be found in his treatise on the salmon. In a rare, dry prose, Humphrey charts its weir-leaping rise and its inevitable crashing fall. Recently I found myself in the author’s home town. My brother had pressed me to join him on a visit to Dallas. After a big night out in the city, and with heads still reeling, we decided to drive 200 miles to Clarksville, Humphrey’s birthplace, population 3,601. In a square that figures in most of his fiction, we strolled hot, empty Sunday boardwalks, and in an Italian diner we battled with our hangovers. The sheriff and deputy, polishing off cannelloni while the rest of town sat through church, had not heard of Clarksville’s only writer: he’d died in obscurity in 1997 on his apple farm in upstate New York; alcoholic, bitter and reading Les Misérables in French. While my brother recovered beside a bass lake, I set out to find a man who knew the Red River, a man I could identify with the places and beasts of Humphrey’s imagination. It took me a while, but in a poor, predominantly black neighbourhood I happened upon a one-storey slatwood shack cluttered with fur traps, nets and guns. The owner was a 70-year-old retired brush factory worker, clasping a pet chicken, name of Billy Hill. ‘Hookin’ catfish . . . huntin’ beaver, mink and raccoon . . . If you was to tell about me, that’s pretty much the story of my whole life,’ he said, and with brawny dexterity he spread the springs of his lethal traps while I kept an eye on the chicken. For Humphrey, men like Billy were crucial metaphors in his deconstruction of a Southern past and its myths – above all the myth of the Hunter; also the myths of Oil and the Outlaw. These were templates for life that carried mixed memories of nostalgia and pain. But in focusing so doggedly on the cruelty of his own experience, he failed to grasp the potential for his talent to reach a greater audience. To his biographer, Humphrey described writing The Spawning Run as the best fun he’d ever had. Humphrey’s friend Harry Grabstald told me he was a shy man, who in trusted company displayed a wicked sense of humour and who loved to tell a bawdy, offbeat story. This short memoir was the least ambitious of his works, and certainly it is the least discussed feature of an unjustly neglected oeuvre. In fact it was probably Humphrey’s finest hour. In its delightful rendering of sex and salmon, steeped in deep affection for the physicality of the British countryside, the book is a succinct and enthralling testament to a hobby dear to the author’s heart. And this was a heart that knew the difference between showing off knowledge about a champion fish and prizing truths that appeal to us all.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Patrick Evans 2007