- Introduction

Unexpurgated Texts:

coming soon: The Great Gatsby, chapter 3

INTRODUCTION

Izaak Walton is often considered the early author most influential in matters related to fly fishing. True, his dry and earthy tome deals directly with fishing and trout. But as far as the American fly fishing canon is concerned, there is another candidate for most critical impact: John Keats. This despite a complete lack of evidence that Keats ever wet a line, and the absence of any reference to fishing in any of his poems or papers. No, Keats had no intention of damaging American literature by stripping it of critical fly-fishing episodes. Keats certainly didn’t intend to remove fly fishing from the attention of American readers, consigning it to anonymity and irrelevance. Keats never meant to bestow a literary veto on an anti-fly-fishing maniac. But he did all of these things, as we shall show.

The following introduction, and the chapters to follow, are the products of an extensive process of research and investigation. The contents will be, for devotees of American literature, frankly astonishing. But they are authentic, and carefully documented.

The Fly Fishing Papers

By Ethan DesReal

Research by Keel Cullen and Linda Darling

‘Apostrophe’ is a rhetorical term; it refers to the practice of addressing remarks to an inanimate object. It’s also a literary term describing the same technique in poetry, which is also called an ‘Ode.’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is a well-known example:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

What mad sequence of hypotheticals, you ask? Alas, the point is unimportant except to students too dull for original thought. It would pass off with the rest of the arcane and unsaleable literature curriculum except for a long-forgotten legal dispute that boiled over--perhaps too active a term?--fermented, then--in London in 1828.

John Keats and William Wordsworth were the most loved poets writing in English in the first decades of the 19^th century. They were also quite profitable for their publishers, Keats most of all because of his youth and because he had not been entangled in awkward Continental republican politics. But Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821, dashing deep hopes of a long and wealthy career less a percentage for editors, agents, and publishers. Within months, four major London printing houses were enmeshed in disputes over the legal rights to Keats’ work. The suits were fueled by rumor of a trove of unpublished poetry, and they became a Jarndycian tangle that lingered and thrashed for six years. An investor named James Melshore came away from the mess with the right to publish any and all of Keats’ undiscovered poems. Melshore vanished from history almost immediately, but this right of publication, called a transferable springing interest, lived on and was later broken up and redistributed. The litigants so tore at the original concept that Keats’ putative poems--which did not exist--were actually anthologized and divided according to category. The most popular category, the Ode, came eventually into the possession of a businessman named Wrengal, a Welshman, who apparently inherited it from a bankrupt, who apparently had it from the original Melshore.

By this time the legal reality of Keats’ unpublished Odes had been hopelessly masticated by the English legal system and excreted as its literary term, Apostrophe. Furthermore, the legal opinion and the unquestioned right of possession had become, well, a bit muddied. It is hard to believe but this laughable bit of legal detritus would, in eighty years or so, inflict real wounds on some of the greatest literature of the United States.

You Cant Be Serious

The subtitle above is not an error; it’s a direct quote from a letter by George Bernard Shaw to his literary agent, Fies McClachen. It is also the first publicly circulated bit of writing in which Shaw demonstrated his well known aversion to the apostrophe. What is not well known is that Shaw’s punctuational idiosyncrasies were not stylistic or linguistic, as scholars (and Mr. Shaw himself) asserted; they were a plain old fit of pique. Shaw was engaging in a protest against the only proprietary royalty rights ever established against a punctuation mark, or any written character, in the English-speaking world.

Mr. Wrengal, a savvy businessman, parlayed his bizarre legacy from John Keats into a transmittable and exclusive right to license the apostrophe in all published writing sold in the United Kingdom and, later, in the USA, Canada, Jamaica, and the British Virgins. Australia wasn’t included, and India and Afghanistan didn’t use apostrophes.

True: for almost a hundred years, publishers had to pay to use the apostrophe. They were quite cheap; in his best year, 1866, Wrengal grossed just over 13 pounds from royalties, which figures out to about a million apostrophes the shilling. By 1870 the major printers of London were taking turns paying the estate one guinea five and six per year for an ‘unlimited license of exchecquer’--basically buying off the owner of the rights for unlimited use by anybody, anytime. Sir Edward Kendall, a director of Eades Whitcomb Printers, commented about the royalty on the record in the House of Lords in 1869:

Our solicitor was disgusted and urged us to take the matter up in chancery, but

the cost of a suit would have been double or treble the bill that he [Wrengal]

presented every year, and our turn came up every five or six years. We had it

on good authority that the leech loved litigation even more than he loved lucre,

so he would surely prolong the matter into the twentieth century. We let it go.

By 1884 the matter had sunk beneath the notice of all but the owners and accountants of the major printers and publishers in the United Kingdom. The English are no strangers to curious and inconsistent laws, so they catalogued it as one more piece of legal trivia. Until Shaw found out.

Shaw always found out. His first play was a bomb: Widowers’ Houses (note the apostrophe), but it established his reputation as a critic and playwright who took on social issues. A lawyer named Kermit Rooney regaled Shaw at a dinner party with a list of English legal absurdities, including, as Shaw relates in a letter to Caitlin Armagh

The utterly preposterous contention that my editor and printer lays out for

punctuation, extra for punctuation--, that the apostrophe is

owned by a man who must be paid each time the setter takes that type. I

defy it. If it’s true (lord I owe for one!) I’ll not abide it. (there’s another!

And another!) What a joke we are.

But it was no joke. Shaw apparently got the truth from McLachen and, on the spot, began his campaign to streamline the English language. No matter that the total cost of Shaw’s own apostrophes couldn’t have been more than a few pennies a year; it was the principle of the thing. He never published an apostrophe again, though all he could have cared to use were paid for.

By 1900, however, Shaw had allowed a linguistic explanation to develop for his odd writing style. He never admitted on the record that his ‘innovation’ was a quirk of temper.

One clue comes from a letter from McLachen to his mistress, Maria Schuyder. Schuyder, who had been a very good friend of the poet Matthew Arnold, was a Dutch expatriate who lived in a quaint cliffside cottage in Dover where McLachen (and others, it was rumored) frequently visited. McLachen wrote:

That snippy bastard Shaw has finally been muzzled. Bloody primadona, going on

about the apostrophy row. Wrengal’s hyena threatened to close him down if he

nattered on it. The barmy mick is hip-up in debt so he took the dose. Dam’d if I

didn’t enjoy that a bit. Putting out it’s the language, the language. Should shut

it and sell some books.

Shaw apparently dropped his objections, though he also permanently dropped the apostrophe, and the agreeable pretense that it was a crusade to make English more efficient grew into a real idea from that point on. Shaw never acknowledged the real reason for dropping the apostrophe again.

Except. There is always an except in these tales. In 1901 Wrengal was killed--at age 90--by a falling roof-slate as he walked along Pembroke Street. His right was sold in the estate to an American named Cyran Downy. Downy was wealthy and knew everything he owned; within a fortnight he had realized the possibilities of this obscure scrap of paper and had put a team of lawyers to work to plumb the depths of its value. They plumbed with a long line, and when they made their report to Mr. Downy in his Park Avenue double brownstone he was heard to laugh until long after midnight.

A Wicked Logjam

Only that August, Downy’s son Ajax had narrowly escaped death in a fly-fishing accident.

Only his father and mother would have much mourned the drowning of Ajax. The nicest thing anyone wrote about Ajax before that summer could be found in the Andover annual, ‘the Arrow,’ which described him as ‘a contemptible bastard’ and ‘a pasty-faced weasel who only survives by bribes and threats.’ His unpleasant personality notwithstanding, Ajax had a full plate of social activities every summer, mainly due to his father’s influence in New York business circles, and his eagerness to use that influence to expand his fortune, and the willingness of the less fortunate to be influenced. That is how Ajax came to be at the Adirondack fishing camp of Richard Bigelow.

Bigelow’s was a coveted invitation among the Knickerbocker aristocracy. The moderately wealthy elder of a family engineering company, Bigelow had been pensioned off by his younger brothers to keep him out of the company projects, for which he had no aptitude and less training; his bridges fell. But Bigelow elder was a dedicated and accomplished fly-fisherman who also had an honest love of company and camaraderie around the lodge-hearth. He commanded almost thirty miles of prime Adirondack brook-trout water and a huge flagstoned and trophy-hung lodge about six miles north of the town of Paint, NY. The property and leases were fished in the warm and hunted in the cold.

Ajax Downy was no outdoorsman. He was drawn to accept the invitation by the promise of what he called ‘country girls,’ the deflowering of whom he had taken as his principal hobby. Ajax preferred an isolated situation and associates who could be bribed or intimidated into silence; he had exhausted all such locations available to him through his Andover classmates and his Manhattan running-buddies, so he thought to mine a new stratum of society for his favorite gem--a young and impressionable kitchen girl, preferably struggling.

He found something different upon alighting from the chaise that had picked him up at the rail station in Paint. First, he was tired and sore from the jolting progress of the poorly-sprung wagon over six miles of ‘road’. He was also somewhat annoyed by the lack of respect, or even attention, paid him by the other men in the coach, who took one look at the whey-faced dandy with the supercilious air and turned to arcane conversation over leaders and wax and the new rage, the wet fly. Ajax was uninterested even in the wet fly (zippers had been invented that year--that month, in fact--but hadn’t caught on yet, so there was no pun) and confused by all else, because he had not prepared at all for his experience in the mountains.

To top it all off, Ajax found the accommodations lacking. Instead of the genteel Connecticut or Long Island spread he was used to, he found a large crude wood-beamed building and sheds wedged into black and forbidding woods with a preponderance of exposed stone, both in the architecture and the landscape. Furthermore, there were no kitchen girls at all except for a cook, about fifty and stout. There were a number of peasant-types lounging about, overfamiliar with the guests--these were guides--and they seemed openly contemptuous of Ajax from the start. Also, Ajax found that certain lies he had deployed to smooth his transition to the company had been found out. He had, as usual, calmly claimed deep experience in all the manly arts, not anticipating that he would be expected actually to produce a fish. Such trivial prevarications had always been politely ignored in the past--even considered by some hosts as natural-- but here they seemed to be the basis for some sly humor at his expense. He retired abruptly but slept poorly owing to inadequate intoxication.

The next day Ajax rose early but was astonished to find the entire estate empty--not a soul to be found, and not a particle of breakfast or a drop of coffee anywhere. An hour later a party of anglers returning for lunch found him wandering stunned and lost a furlong from the cabin in a berry patch notorious for attracting jealous black bears. Things deteriorated; at luncheon, finally given access to liquorous spirits, Ajax reiterated his claims to angling skill (which he called ‘fie-flishing’) and then entertained the company by deciding that he found the fifty-something cook (the wife of the chief guide) attractive after all. In the process of offending everyone present Ajax accepted an invitation to fish the Forest Pool the next day. With the chief guide.

The rest, of course, is fly-fishing legend. By far the most well known account of the accident was written by Ring Lardner, and the most entertaining account appeared as a youthful reminiscence of James Thurber. Perhaps the most charming and authoritative version was provided by the young poet Allan Fenimore Cullen, who was actually present at the rescue. All of the writers were discreet with Ajax’s identity; everyone knew of Downy senior’s habit of casually obliterating writers who offended him. Rumors had already been circulating that Downy had somehow even bested Bernard Shaw.

As it happened, none of the three who reported Ajax’s misadventure escaped retaliation. One of Lardner’s first manuscripts was secretly edited to make his characters’ syntax stilted and overly formal; he was forever forced into that style though his deepest ambition was to write novels in the manner of Jane Austen. Thurber, of course, was astonished to find crude drawings attached to his work, and found himself acclaimed as an artist even though the art was actually the work of a half-witted Simon and Schuster office boy named Scooter.

But of all the chroniclers of that afternoon at the Forest Pool, Cullen suffered the most. He had just received critical acclaim for his first book of Whittieresque poems, called ‘Hudsonia,’ and had become the toast of sentimental New York literary society. (Sales were helped immeasurably by reports that Whitman had read half of one poem and thrown up his breakfast.) Within a year Cullen had failed; he was reduced to teaching grammar at a technical school in Brooklyn and attending frequent afternoon baseball games. (Cullen had one more flash of fame: he was the model for the repressive teachers in Willa Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case.’ Cather met Cullen at a Greenwich soiree that winter; he had crashed the party, somewhat inebriated, filled his pockets with patè, and entered into combative spitty debates with all present over the sanctity of the music of Thurlow Lieurance.)

This was all the doing of Cyran Downy, who responded to the Forest Pool story with an orderly and implacable demolition of Cullen’s reputation in New York, followed by careful obstruction of his career as a poet. The sordid details of this sabotage are unimportant except that Downy, for the first time, employed his newest weapon: withholding of apostrophe rights. Cullen was counting on second and third editions of Hudsonia; orders were placed, mortgages signed, agreements made. But the editions were delayed, and delayed again, over negotiations that his publisher, Greenwich, didn’t expect and could hardly credit: the right to include apostrophes in the text. The process seemed ludicrous, but the lawsuits had to be heard. Altogether Downy spent over eighty thousand dollars establishing his claim to control possessives and contractions. By the time an agreement was reached--Greenwich paid Downy $26 for rights to every apostrophe in its catalogue that year--Cullen had cracked. He was bankrupt, divorced, and had been jailed for threats made against Edgar Lee Masters, perhaps the first conviction for stalking in the history of American popular culture.

It may be that Cullen never knew why he was being persecuted. His unpublished memoir, a sauce-stained bale of newsprint overwritten in a hand so heavy that it left rents, never mentions Cyran Downy or recalls the frivolous little sketch on the events at Bigelow’s. It’s not that Cullen was being discreet. In his memoir he blamed among others Ambrose Bierce, Confederate General James Longstreet, John Peter Zenger, Benjamin Disraeli, the Yellow Kid, and Pope Clement IX. In fact, the only person mentioned in a positive tone in the thousand-page screed was Thurlow Lieurance.

The Outsider

a picaresque sketch by AF Cullen

We were amused that afternoon by the appearance of one MR. SMITH, a well-known personage of New York social fame. The company was stirred by MR. SMITH’s appearance first--he was glazed with perspiration and bespeckled with the calling cards of moskitoes and black-flies, at which he scratched distractedly. His dress was overly dandified, and in considerable disarray from dust and the agitation of the local roads. He had lost his hat, and his silk Ascot--all the rage in Manhattan this summer--had taken a murky tint from clay dust and road ordure.

Underneath, this creature seemed to be a pale and effete young man of 16 or 17 years, with thin dark hair and an aggressive jut of chin and brow. He was tall but conveyed dissipation and arrogance at the same time, I know not how. Not a man among us failed to despise him instantly, and I’m proud to report that he justified that conclusion almost immediately.

MR. SMITH proved a most disagreeable angling companion. Manly outdoorsmen know that the main purpose of lodges and troutstreams and hunting dogs is the camaraderie of the hearth and experiments in the binding power of good whiskey from unmatched cups. MR. SMITH had none of it. His purpose in coming, and indeed his connexion to the guests there, was never revealed before his drowning. Be sure that, though many of us labored long and sharply to recover this person from the clutches of Neptune, not a one of us did it without mixed feelings. Perhaps the host said it best when he worried that MR. SMITH’s demise would disrupt the fishing for a day or even two, if the corpse were not quickly recovered.

So let me assure the gentle reader that MR. SMITH did not in fact drown completely; a group of us were able to hale him from the creek before the bargain was completed. How that all occurred will be my tale.

Half a mile from the lodge is the Meeting Pool, where the Black River receives the flow of one of its largest tributaries, Otter Creek. Here a pair of footbridges provide access up and downstream to all three flows, and here parties of anglers often gather for luncheon or to talk over their day’s adventures. The host prefers to fish the confluence area of the Black only one day in five or six to reduce the stress on the rivers there, though he has recently introduced a novel new practice known as ‘release fishing’ in which fairly caught trout are not killed but released into the stream again. It’s a charming fad, begun I’m told in Connecticut, but not likely to catch on in these streams which are aswarm with vigorous trout.

This day was one of the appointed days for plying the Black, so the company was much excited. The Black has a reputation as one of the most productive streams in the region for larger trout, called hereabouts as Squaretails, and being upwards of two pounds on occasion. The Black is also a formidable stream to fish. It is deep and swift and courses through impenetrable bogs and overgrown alder forests. Thus under clear and deep blue skies the party arrived that morning at the Meeting Pool in high spirits.

With one exception, of course: MR. SMITH was in a foul temper, though so little acquaintance had we of him it is possible that he was in a normal temper; suffice it that he was in an even more disagreeable mood than we had seen him heretofore. He dragged along the path, careless of his borrowed equipment, complaining stridently of insects and the heat though at an hour past dawn at that elevation and in a shady forest it was delightfully cool and comfortable. The man also had a pasty complexion--more pasty, that is, than usual, as nearly as we could determine--due to his overuse of spirits the evening before when he had become uproarious and even abusive about the main lodge, then fell unconscious in one of the settees after spilling into his lap a tumbler of whisky. The chief guide, Mr. Spinney, to whom MR. SMITH had done some serious but unknown injustice, was all for depositing the unconscious cad in a heap out-of-doors, but the gentlemen prevailed on him to desist and simply covered him with a quilt and left him where he lay, and where he lay still throughout breakfast and up until moments before the day’s angling party was to depart for the Meeting Pool.

At that point of course it was the opinion of all that he be left to his own devices, despite his misadventure of the previous day, when he had been found wandering delirious, lost in a briar patch within sight and sound of the lodge kitchen. At a sporting lodge the freedom of all is paramount; no man is compelled to do that which he does not want to do. But at that time one of the guides--it may have been Mr. Spinney again--recalled with great clarity and force MR. SMITH’s plans to fish the Forest Pool on the morrow, stated firmly the night before. Mr. Spinney--for it was indeed he--also recalled MR. SMITH’s saying that he was to be awakened regardless of his condition.

So to much grousing and ungentlemanly language MR. SMITH was roused and outfitted in borrowed gear (for he had forgot his own, he said) and cajoled into coming. And come he did, though not before Mr. Spinney whispered some words of encouragement into his ear, and not without a fair amount of coughing and cursing and some abandoning of the heavier items in his rucksack, though as events will reveal he bore the freight of at least one full bottle of brandy.

Once at the Meeting Pool some discussion ensued about where MR. SMITH was to be settled. Beats on the Black are quite extensive, and the size and flow of the streams there afford a great deal of beautiful river to fish, but several anglers were of the opinion that MR. SMITH should be reassigned from the Forest Pool because of its difficulty and danger, and of the fact that the Forest Pool beat was at the end of the property and so afforded little opportunity for the support of a guide or even the companionship of another angler. MR. SMITH seemed quite happy with this arrangement, showing the first hint of manly spark; many of us were roused to a stirring of respect for the virile energy of his insistence that he take that lonely beat. He also had shown a surprising enthusiasm for the modern idea of ‘release fishing,’ declaring that, although it was his habit to bring home creels full of enormous trout he was persuaded and would immediately adopt a policy of releasing all fish unless they might challenge any of the world’s records that he already held. He even went so far as to warn us that he would probably not bring home a single fish that day. We were beginning to reconsider our opinion of MR. SMITH.

Mr. Spinney volunteered to escort MR. SMITH to his beat, and the rest of us scattered to our own destinations. Mr. Gerald Cowley, an old friend of my father’s, decided to share the Meeting Pool beat with me and we set immediately to our task.

By lunch I had caught four handsome trout, including one unquestioned Square Tail, though Mr. Cowley had bested me sharply with three grand fish including one of over four pounds. We had elected to fish downstream, and were approaching the limit of the Meeting Pool beat, when we saw a strange sight in the path: a rucksack, in disarray, with articles of clothing, boxes of flies, and food wrappings scattered about.

We feared the worst immediately. It being berry season, we had been warned to be alert for sow black bears with young. We both presumed that MR. SMITH had fallen afoul of one of those great predators and might even now be crouching, wounded, in some brushy arbor. Mr Cowley dashed off for help and I began to creep warily down the path.

I had covered a few furlongs downstream when I saw a most astonishing sight: it was MR. SMITH, unclothed, sitting on a large log that lay across the river. He was swinging a brandy bottle by the neck and dangling his feet in the water, singing licentious songs. His flyrod--a beautiful bamboo Fiche lent to him by Mr. Ring Lardner--stood propped carelessly on the log behind him.

Most astonishing was his precarious choice of perch. The Black, and all of the forest rivers of the Adirondack, are subject to sharp floods which dislodge great numbers of the local cedar, laurel, and hemlock trees. These deadfalls accumulate into massive interwoven logjams that are ten times as deadly as any bear; they are subject to sudden shifts and collapses as the friable old trees rot, and they create impassable barriers to the river so often the addition of one more log or branch makes the whole structure give way or shift. They often build up at the narrower, swifter portions of the stream so that a person unfortunate enough to be swept into one will seldom survive the experience.

MR. SMITH sat on a large log that crowned such a hazard, which by its advanced state of decay and ominous cracking sounds was only moments from collapsing into the stream. Completely unperturbed, MR. SMITH sat his woody steed and drank sloppily from the bottle, then suddenly, while I watched, slung it forty or fifty feet upstream into the center of the Forest Pool.

I might mention that the Forest Pool is a spot of terrific beauty. It resembles a long, deep tarn, some fifty yards in scope, with dark undercut banks and a profusion of overhanging branches and swirling bank-eddies that promise--and deliver--large, feisty trout. The path-side of the stream is a shallow shelving beach for much of the length of the pool but the water is deep and swift beyond the welcoming edges of the bar, and to the far end of the pool, up against the forbidding edge of the tangled log-jam, there is clearly no area safe enough to negotiate without risking a one-way trip into the reaching jaws of the deadly entangling branches.

And on this mass the young man sat before my astonished eyes. I vainly tried to imagine some exigency that might have driven him there--a marauding bear? A massive old Square Tail, inches out of reach? but could think of nothing to encompass his ridiculous picture.

Still he didn’t perceive me. His eyes seemed to be fixed on the discarded brandy bottle, which now was floating serenely down the center of the river toward his throne. As it approached he followed it with his eyes until it fetched up against a bough that held the current back, where it bobbed, trapped in place by the pressing current. As MR. SMITH began to move I conceived an idea immediately of what he intended but could scarcely believe it; it had already entered my mind that this odd man was a kind of moron but what he aimed to do at this point was beyond belief--he meant to retrieve the bottle.

And he nearly succeeded. Stepping lightly down from the highest perch, a relatively secure heavy log that lay across the full width of the stream, MR. SMITH unhesitatingly placed his weight on two or three successively older and slimmer boughs as he marched down toward the water’s surface. Miraculously these held; before I could call out, he found the position he wanted and began to reach down toward his object. Finding it a bit too far, he extended his leg one fatal step further.

In the same moment I heard shouts and calls from the path behind me, MR. SMITH pressed the last branch beyond its strength. With a sharp crack it gave way, and he was precipitated head-first into a tangle of light branches immediately upstream of the main mass of the obstruction. At this point a strong swimmer might have bested the current here, for it was pillowed up against the logs and offered little resistance, but the fool did nothing like; he simply swashed and sputtered a moment until the current pressed him with implacable force against the leading edge of the wood.

Here a thoughtful woodsman also would have known what to do: brace his feet against the wood and keep the head upstream, and swim away from the obstruction. Avoid at all costs coming full-length to the current and against the trees, for the force of the water would not let you move and would invariably drag you underneath the jam, to be entangled there and drowned; and if that were to occur, the only salvation comes in pressing down under the mass to the lowest point, where the current usually creates a space or channel through to the other side. But that course requires courage and forethought and strong lungs, and it was becoming clear that MR. SMITH had none of these at his disposal.

So, struggling feebly, he was born bleating and clutching at twigs under the front of the logjam; furthermore, his coming up against it had proved the last straw to the entire structure and with a chorus of cracking, groaning, and squealing the entire center of the tangle gave way and collapsed into the water. By now eight or nine of us stood astonished on the bank (though not, thankfully, Mr. Lardner; he would have had to endure the double blow of the grief over losing one of his finest rods and the inconvenience of watching a silly lout drown himself.)

But luck is the province of fools. In the movement of the wood a space was created in its center, and in that central space MR. SMITH appeared, gasping for breath. The logjam shifted six or eight feet downstream then came to rest again with much creaking and crunching; it now pressed almost completely against the large fallen tree that had been his original vantage. Within the dripping and rotten mass, festooned with weed and scraps of bark and last winter’s decaying leaves, the man’s face pressed into a few square inches of precious air. Below the water’s surface was an enmeshing cage of limbs and logs, ever shifting and just itching to tear loose completely and drop down out of sight, bearing its human cargo. Despite our contempt for the man it was a horrible prospect and we set to work immediately.

Mr. Spinney was nowhere to be found but one of the junior guides was dispatched for axes and ropes. Another angler, Mr. Corey Washburn, waded the upper end of the pool and fought his way through the tangled underbrush to a point opposite the logjam on the bank. The rest of us gathered grimly on the path-side of the pool, expecting to be in the front row for a tragedy.

But it was not to be, at least not in the short term. The enmeshing mass seemed to stabilize, allowing MR. SMITH continued resort to sustaining oxygen. With a few minutes of grace we might be able to cut him out before the cold water suppressed his life functions or the trees had their revenge.

Presently the guides returned with tools, as well as Mr. Spinney, whom I must say did not seem particularly perturbed or surprised at MR.SMITH’s predicament, and who walked the path with a surprisingly light, almost amused gait. Then we set about the rescue.

One of the smaller of our party, the hale and resolute Carter Stabler, crept out on the larger log and lowered himself gingerly into a position to lash up the larger members of the main tangle of wood. Those ropes secured, we fastened them to limbs and treetrunks about the pool in an attempt to hold the wood in its position. Then Stabler, at risk to his own life, hung upside down and fed MR. SMITH a line which he, with much sobbing and complaining, finally managed to secure about his chest under his arms as a last resort, and to keep him at the surface if the cold water should sap his strength to float.

Then we began with axes, gently as possible, to cut away the main limbs and create an escape hatch for the unfortunate boob. It took us the best part of half an hour, with several sudden evacuations as the mass shifted, but we eventually created enough of a space to drag him out. At that time the most pathetic and ridiculous chapter of the drama unfolded. Once he realized that he was nearly saved, the poor fool began to blame all in earshot for his misadventure, even including his saviors in the indictment; he roundly condemned Bigelow and even threatened Mr. Spinney with some legal action or another, claiming that Spinney had lured him out there with some sort of lewd promise. It was all rather ridiculous. As he began to slither free of his enclosure, his slender pathetic body bluish with cold and plastered with flotsam and ordure from the bottom of the river, he continued to rail at us all in a quivering tone.

And the abuse continued well into the evening, even after a special trip had been made to send him to the railhead; instead of his prized old flyrod or a note of apology for its loss, Lardner found that the cad had left him a snide note of condemnation in which he implied that some mysterious flaw in the rod had led him into the disastrous situation. I of course hastened to describe what I had seen, first to Lardner himself (who laughed uproariously and declared the image worth a dozen English flyrods) and later, at Lardner’s insistence, to the company as a whole--and now, dear reader, to you.

I have since been warned that the family of this miscreant loon is a powerful and vindictive clan of men, the new so-called ‘cutthroat businessman,’ and that I should be careful and discreet. Well, you know me well, dear reader, and a truthful and inoffensive man is all I claim to be. Should some umbrage attach itself to me through this simple epigram, I shall receive it humbly as a natural experience of life--a lesson that MR. SMITH should consider taking as his own. After he has concluded his swimming-lessons, of course.

Stuyvesant, NY

Outcomes and Residues

For the modern effect of this cascade of legal trivia and bad behavior, we have few reliable sources and only the thinnest conjecture--and a recent trove of lucky discovery. For Ajax Downy lived to a ripe old age and died intestate, in the grand tradition of the conniving plutocrat, hoping perhaps for a last minute discovery of some way indeed to take it with him. And in his voluminous and unorganized personal effects, haggled over by a new generation of ungrateful Downy heirs, there were many valuable and exotic things to find, which prolonged their litigious emergence into the light by decades. Under it all were vast unappreciated drifts of paper; and in those papers. . .well, the circle becomes complete.

In August of 1945 a twice-wounded veteran was finally discharged from the United States Army and entered service with the OSS, later to become the CIA. Edward Keel Cullen had distinguished himself in covert operations in the Balkans during the partisan wars in the most remote and difficult theater of the European war, and had spent eighteen months at the side of Josip Broz--Tito--before being wounded severely in an attack in Croatia that hastened the Nazi withdrawal from the region and essentially won the war for the Yugoslavs. Cullen had exfiltrated through Greece six times, and had returned each time in air-drops with critical supplies and a bottle of Drambuie, Tito’s favorite.

After the war Cullen became an essential resource to the CIA and was a tireless cold-war campaigner and the principal architect of the American preference for the rebellious Tito over his brutal Soviet keepers. Cullen retired in 1960 and set about realizing his greatest civilian ambition: the rehabilitation of the reputation of his grandfather, the minor poet who figured so dramatically in the earlier chapters of this narrative.

Oddly enough, a CIA background was useful in this pursuit. Mention of Cullen and several other American literary figures was common in the files of Ajax Downy, who had attracted the attention of American intelligence as early as 1914. Downy had proved himself willing to profit in any manner, and his various business holdings by that time allowed himself to play both sides in the escalating arms races in Europe. In particular Downy was a common correspondent with Kaiser Wilhelm and had dealings with the German arms giant Krupp, to whom he supplied a number of strategic materials from mine holdings in Africa. Downy also filled many supply contracts to the Crown and was instrumental in creating an American policy of shipping cargo to Britain as secret lading on passenger vessels.

Into his eighties, Keel Cullen hounded the residue of the Downy estate for papers that might concern the various indignities that had destroyed his grandfather, and in 1979 he succeeded; he won discovery of sixty crates of Downy papers as part of a civil action of slander . Cullen was deaf and nearly bedridden from old wounds by now, but his secretary Linda Darling continued to sort through the papers on her own time. In August of 1985 she discovered a whole squad of smoking guns.

The most pertinent find for Cullen was a carefully kept chronology of the plan to destroy Allan Fenimore Cullen. This was gleefully digested, reporters were called, articles were written; few cared, of course, but Cullen younger found more comfort and resolution in that moment than in his greatest wartime triumph--the assassination of a high ranking SS strategist in Zagreb with a garrotte improvised from a black market silk stocking and two Moet corkscrews.

Later, Miss Darling found the truly earthshaking thing, the evidence of Cyran and Ajax Downy’s real assault: a systematic effort to purge any mention of fly-fishing from Western Literature. Apparently encouraged by his father’s dismantling of Cullen, Ajax had continued to flex his literary muscle and his sense of vengeance until he died atop his fifth wife in 1966 at the age of 98. Using his power of punctuation, Downy the younger empowered a cadre of editorial henchmen who redacted, revised, and expurgated everything they could reach and nearly eliminated all mention of fly fishing from the Canon.

But they did not destroy what they redacted—oh no. Tucked into envelopes at the bottom of a chest were dozens of packets of manuscript pages from dozens of books--most insignificant but several, as we shall see, momentous.

Oddly enough, the decision to publish those lost chapters here wasn’t simple. It seems obvious that new chapters to the classics of American Literature need to see the light of day, but these works have become established; they are the basis for lives and ideas and careers. We hesitated to simply dash that to pieces in the chauvinistic interest of raising the profile of an arcane and rather silly sport. But in the end the quest for truth outweighed any complex judgement about possible damage, and we elected to publish the chapters as we found them.

So here you have, gentle reader, the most shocking development in the study of literature since the solution of the Shakespeare mystery: a trove of missing chapters from some of the greatest works of the last 100 years. Taken singly, they are unremarkable, and some may say that they don’t improve the novels anyway; indeed, Downy’s own editors hid under a pretext of edition for the sake of quality; but it is clear that they are quite important. In the Gatsby chapter we see the first evidence of a connection between Gatsby and Jordan Baker, the set-up for the famous conference at the party; we see Huck form an early sense that he has an obligation to treat Jim as an equal, worthy of trust and honest treatment.

Critics will argue but one thing is certain: the role of fly-fishing in American literature is far more prominent than was once supposed, and the machinations of Cyran and Ajax Downy and the odes of John Keats created an unlikely chemistry that nearly suppressed that fact.

Read on.