reading and doing

Washington Irving's short piece, 'The Angler', is part of a collection, The Sketch Book, published in 1819. It begins with some thoughts on how books inspire people to change their lives, sometimes recklessly - 'many an unlucky urchin' has run away to sea after reading Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote himself embarked on his curious adventures after reading books of chivalry. In much the same way, Irving's narrator - Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman - tells us that he and his friends took up angling as a result of reading Izaak Walton.

The first part of the essay follows their progress - or lack of it - with a gently satirical eye. One of the group 'had equalled' Don Quixote in the extravagance of his outfit:

He wore a broad-skirted fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes and leathern gaiters; a basket slung on one side for fish; a patent rod, a landing-net, and a score of other inconveniences, only to be found in the true angler's armoury. Thus harnessed for the field, he was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the country folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was the steel-clad hero of La Mancha among the goatherds of the Sierra Morena.

The landscape of the Upper Hudson Valley was delightfully picturesque but unsuitable for the techniques described in The Compleat Angler. Crayon himself gave up fairly quickly - 'I ... had not angled above half an hour before I had completely "satisfied the sentiment"' - and sat on the bank reading. But his friends 'were more persevering in their delusion' and spent the entire day fishing 'with scarcely any success', at which point, 'a lubberly country urchin came down from the hills with a rod made from a branch of a tree, a few yards of twine, and, as Heaven shall help! I believe a crooked pin for a hook, baited with a vile earthworm - and in half an hour caught more fish than we had nibbles throughout the day!' They ate their dinner under the trees while one of the group read Walton aloud and Crayon himself 'built castles in a bright pile of clouds, until [he] fell asleep'.

This description of an impulsive fishing expedition forms a prelude to an account of an angler that Crayon met while travelling in Britain - an old fellow whose 'face bore the marks of former storms' but who now 'had altogether the good-humoured air of a constitutional philosopher who was disposed to take the world as it came'. On the face of it, Crayon recalls the former episode as a result of the latter - it passes 'like a strain of music over [his] mind,' summoned up 'by an agreeable scene which [he] witnessed not long since'. But there is a complex relay between the two. The satire on those whose experience is mediated through books interacts trickily with the encomium to the practical old man in the second half. Is Crayon's perception of the angler itself rendered sentimental by his reading? Do his literary tastes prime him to find the virtue in the old fellow? The fisherman himself has also 'read Izaak Walton attentively'. He is not some simple illiterate who contrasts entirely with the narrator - a 'man of action' in contrast to the 'man of letters'. And readers of the 'sketch' are themselves engaging not with reality but with a literary work and should, perhaps, think twice before mocking Crayon for his romanticised reading of the fishing literature.

I've seen discussions of this work that present it as a meditation on the respective merits of direct engagement with the world and immersion in the the written word. I think I broadly agree with that perception of it but I think it's wrong to suggest that Irving (or his narrator) comes down firmly on one side or the other. It is, in a sense, a work about writing in which the angler's art operates both as material for the writer's craft and also as its foil. I came across the work in the anthology, Fisherman's Bounty, but I've found it very thought-provoking and might need to see what other scenes and experiences Irving deals with in The Sketch Book.

Washington Irving