We have read John Steinbeck's account of fishing as practised in the
USA and
England. But at the end of his essay he comes to France and finds the angling there to be superior to that in both the other countries. He invites the reader to imagine the banks of the River Oise 'on a summer Sunday afternoon'. All the anglers have a fixed spot which is theirs and theirs only, so that one has even planted geraniums along his little stretch of water, so confident is he in his right to the place:
The fishing equipment is simple but invariable. The pole is of bamboo, not expensive but often adorned. On a hook about the size of a pinhead is fixed a tiny bread pellet. The Parisian is now ready for the fishing.
Here is no sentiment, no contest, no grandeur, no economics. Most of the time there seems to be a courteous understanding by which fish and fisherman let each other strictly alone. Apparently there is also a rule about conversation. The fisherman's eyes get a dreaming look and he turns inward on his own thoughts, inspecting himself and his world in quiet. Because he is fishing, he is safe from interruption.
Steinbeck likes this approach to angling better than the others he describes. He characterises it as possessing a certain 'sanctity'. While engaged in it, he says, 'a man is alone with himself in dignity and peace', and afterwards may come away from it 'refreshed and in control of his own soul'. I'm interested in Steinbeck's choice of terms here. I think we're fairly used to the idea that fishing can be peaceful, refreshing, and so forth, but the idea that it confers a certain
dignity upon one who practices seems important. Does this quality arise in the assertion of autonomy implied in the pursuit of such a solitary activity? From the absence of 'sentiment', 'contest' and 'grandeur'? Or from the insistence on the importance of recreation - simple and uncommodified - in the midst of the demands of the capitalist economy?
Where the Oise meets the Seine to the north-east of Paris.
