Negley Farson, 1942

hey don't write them like this any more and maybe they never did before. Farson was an interesting guy: a well known journalist, drinker and hell-raiser. I think that the publishers must have sensed that they had a classic on their hands, because the illustrations are by C.F. Tunnicliffe. The story begins surf casting for stripers on the New Jersey coast, and in the telling it vaults effortlessly from the chalk streams to the Caucasus. By the time the tale ends, with a fine fish taken from the Savitca, a swift-flowing Slovenian river, you will be touched by the same regret that I had on finishing the book, if you have any soul to speak of.

Negley Farson was the most extraordinary writer, who could produce the most incandescent prose. Just listen to him talking about fly boxes: “I did not know the name of the finest fly I ever had, nor did the man who tied it; he was an English captain in the Army of Occupation, at Cologne, and he said it had worked well enough for him in southern Germany. After a prodigious career, a trout took it away from me one night in the Balkans.” Few writers from any discipline can match the romance that Farson paints with those few sketchy lines; although Stevenson might have had a bash at it. This is a man who can talk casually of dipping into Leonid Andriev’s “Red Laugh” while he was pinned down by the Finns in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution; and make you believe that he enjoyed reading it.

Farson fished for a wide variety of reasons, and not always because it pleased him to do so. In the winter of 1921, which he spent in British Columbia, he had to fish, because money was scarce and his family needed cheap food. The hunger sharpened his senses, and some of his finest writing is about Pacific salmon dying in order to give life to a new generation, their bodies coming to rest in the small eddies of the vast rivers which that province boasts.

If they let me take two books on my desert island, this would sit on the shelf next to The Old Man and the Sea, the pair of them propped up between a reel and a bottle of whisky.