Fishing for War

In Our Time (1925) by Ernest Hemingway

While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. (67)

The books we love are just as much about timing as taste. It’s no use stumbling across the perfect book until you’re the person you need to be to read it.

For a moment, I thought I was saying something profound and original, but I realized that I’m just paraphrasing the movie 2046 by Wong Kar Wai. Love is all a matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. It doesn’t matter if you meet the right person at the wrong time in your life; it won’t work out. The person you fall in love with not only has to be right for you across dimensions of personality and physical attributes, but they also have to be in the right place at the right time to even meet you, and (ideally) single at the same time as you. On top of that, you both need to be in the right place in your lives and personal growth journeys to allow for a connection. If even one of those things is off, the love affair is either doomed from the start, or will never ignite in the first place. 

I find it’s the same way with books. I’m a horrific offender when it comes to forcefully recommending lots of books and hardly ever taking anybody’s recommendation. Maybe it’s a leftover contrarian attitude from my long years as a hipster, but you can’t tell me [to read] nothin’. Much to my husband’s dismay, it’s not unusual for me to take years to get around to reading books that he buys for me. Meanwhile, I’m still mad that he hasn’t read Seveneves or finished the Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy even though I’ve told him many times that he would really really like it!

I have to be in the right mindset to approach a book or to stick with it. I am an extremely inefficient reader. I regularly read the first 50-200 pages of a book and then, for no apparent reason, will set the book down and eventually have to re-read those pages when I get back around to it months or years later. I’ve always had this tendency, but the pandemic made it worse. 

In this respect, I have a mixed track record with Ernest Hemingway. When I was 14, I read The Sun Also Rises (1926) and was totally bowled over. It seemed to be a perfect book, an astonishing feat for a debut novel. I remember exactly where I was sitting when I finished it, and how I felt when I read those closing lines: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” I sat quietly with the closed book in my lap, buzzing with the power and clarity of those words, watching the shadows lengthen in the living room, until eventually my mom called me for dinner. At the dinner table, I struggled and failed to articulate what moved me so deeply.

But when I tried to move on to A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls the next year, I hit a wall. I fell asleep. I could not be bothered. For a long time, I blamed the books. But more recently, as I’ve grown into myself and gained some humility the hard way, I’ve realized that I just encountered them at the wrong time in my life. Some day, I’ll try again.

Meanwhile, I was delighted to discover that the timing was right for In Our Time. I feel certain that if I’d opened Hemingway’s debut short story collection at 14 or 15, it would’ve been utterly lost on me. Published when he was just 26, these stories juxtapose bucolic/melancholic sequences of American boy- and manhood with violent, jarring interludes of war and bullfights. It reminded me of a very American, very masculine version of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, a brilliant modernist jaunt through the day of a middle-aged, London high-society woman as she prepares for a party, haunted by the specter of World War I and the ghost of her forbidden sexuality. 

I read Mrs. Dalloway at the right time, too. In 2018, right after I listened to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast series on WWI, I picked it up by chance, not knowing my recent listening would be so terribly relevant. I highly recommend doing things in that order, so you’re prepared with all the heavy, horrifying context. One must try to really taste the mud of the trenches before one can allow oneself to enjoy Clarissa Dalloway’s festivities. 

Unlike the lush personal history presented in Mrs. Dalloway, the stories of In Our Time offer only scattered snapshots of life, mostly (but not entirely) belonging to Nick Adams, a Hemingway stand-in. We find Nick encountering death for the first time as a boy, going to fight a senseless war, breaking up with a first love, rambling across Europe and America, and fishing. Mostly, he’s fishing. It’s not just Nick doing the fishing, but other assorted characters in unconnected stories, too.  

I grew up on the urban side of the suburban spectrum, just outside of Chicago. I could hear the rumbling of the El from my bedroom window, even if it was only the Purple Line. Moreover, I was an indoor kid. I read books and watched Animal Planet for fun. I was aware of things like hunting, fishing, and camping only in the abstract, something I’d seen on TV and read about in my favorite wilderness kids’ books, Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain. Those outdoor activities seemed like hobbies for Republicans; we were good liberals. Something about fishing for sport struck me as unseemly. Once, when I was 6 or 7, I watched my older cousin fish on a family vacation. He caught one and struggled to release it from the hook. The fish died, gasping, on the dock as he shrieked and cried over it. My cousin was inconsolable.  He was a city kid, too. 

Two years ago, my then-boyfriend, our dog Ramses, and I went on a road trip to central British Columbia, where he spent his childhood summers in a roughly mid-19th Century standard of living. We spent long afternoons trolling in leaky motorboats and he taught me how to fish. He untangled my line repeatedly. The lakes were teeming with rainbow trout. The woods were full of moose and bear. With the sun at our backs, the wind in our faces, and a dog in my lap, I started to get it. He proposed on the dock at sunset, the loons racing across the lake in front of us. We ate trout fried in butter that night. 

The very first fish I ever caught.

That joyous first encounter with fishing is what anchored my reading of In Our Time. Even the moody breakup story, “The End of Something,” was imbued with a kind of ecstasy for me. Nick, a young man, perhaps just home from the War, goes night fishing with his sweetheart, Marjorie, who was “intent on the rod all the time they trolled, even when she talked. She loved to fish. She loved to fish with Nick.” But in a clumsy, boyish way, he breaks things off with her because “it isn’t fun any more.” With only a passing awareness of his own inner turmoil (“I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside of me”), he lets her go. 

Even more than “The End of Something,” the book’s final story,“Big Two-Hearted River,” is a slow, stately ode to a solo fishing trip that Nick embarks on as a way to recover from the chaos and injury of city life, rambling, and the war. The care and attention Hemingway shows to each small act—boiling coffee, heating beans and spaghetti, gathering grasshoppers for bait—lend the story a meditative quality. Nick’s emotions are treated as natural phenomenon, as observable as the feeding habits of trout. The satisfaction of being fully loaded up with gear and lunch; the thrill and then disappointment of losing a huge trout to a broken line: these are feelings dispassionately catalogued. Nick, as we find him here, is more self-aware and composed than at any earlier moment. Rather than seeking a thrill, he pursues self-regulation through the practice of fly fishing.

What stuck with me about this collection was the joining of simple, serene, lovely descriptions of fishing and other bucolic scenes with undercurrents of loss, grief, and horror. Much of this work is done by the violent, jarring scenes painted by the interludes between stories. These scenes, from the Great War, bullfights, or executions, explode like firecrackers between the pages. In the slow-paced stories themselves, you can catch the occasional jolt of darkness and horror reflecting off of the interludes, like the flash of bright scales in a dark stream. In Our Time didn’t give me the same full-body contact high that The Sun Also Rises gave me at 14, but maybe it wasn’t meant to. From a certain angle, every life is tragic. From another angle, sometimes you can catch a fish.