IN my mind’s eye there is a picture of what I shall do when I have leisure — not enforced leisure, but comfortable leisure. I shall stay for an indefinite time in a small English inn close to some trout streams. Morning and evening will be devoted to my fly rod. There will be Bass’s ale and bread and cheese for lunch; there will be time afterward to browse over Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, and, across the table in the evenings, a friend of a literary turn of mind who enjoys talk.
Ardor, not experience, is my strong point today, trout streams being far to seek in my part of the country. But until my opportunity comes I can work up my anticipation by reading what others have done. The affiliation between good fishing and good writing is a close one. Of all sport, angling seems to me the most in harmony with literature. There may, I allow, be more volumes written by fox-hunting gentlemen, but where among their number can you find the equals of Izaak Walton, Stewart, Grey, or our own countryman, Thaddeus Norris? No, the stream with its willows and its alternate moods of struggle and serenity is and ever shall be more eloquent than the saddle. In my small fishing library are two volumes which I commend to others, city-pent like myself: first, Letters to Young Fly-Fishers by Sir George Ashton (Houghton Mifflin), whose charming blend of lore and order tells the novice how best the thing should be approached. Secondly, The Book of the Fly Rod. edited by Hugh Sheringham and John C. Moore (Houghton Mifflin), which I have spoken of before in these columns. Here are sixteen papers touching every phase of fly fishing in North America and in England, revealing the fair play, humor, and tenacity which the sport brings out in men who are quick in action and contemplative by instinct.
Golf has called forth very little that can be classified as literature. Charlie Macdonald’s sagacious red volume, Scotland’s Gift Golf (Scribners), is an exception. So are the very personable essays by Bernard Darwin, scion of the biologist. I can’t help believing, however, that both duffers and top-flight players will benefit from reading Simon and Schuster’s discovery, A New Wayto Better Golf, by Alex J. Morrison. This seems to be the best, golf medicine that has yet been fed to a waiting world. The pills are sugar-coated with some good stories, and if you dose yourself according to Morrison’s advice and picture’s, practise his daily dozen for two weeks, you’ll lower your score or the publishers will send your money back.
Fishing in Wiltshire, golf in the suburbs, are fairly civilized adventures. For rough stuff I have been told to go to the China coast or into Central America. I remembered this advice as I read Carleton Beals’s Banana Gold (Lippincott). The author has sweated for sixteen summers in Latin America; he has a seasoned knowledge of the aristocratic Creoles, the United Fruit representative, and the long-suffering peons; he has been close to dictators, rebels, and imperialists; he told a thing or two to the Marines after his friendly visit to Sandino’s headquarters; he has an eye for women, and knows what Spanish conquistadores and American engineers have done to this hot frontier. In a series of episodes leading through five countries he fills a sweeping canvas of Central America. There is no question of Mr. Beals’s sympathies: he is for the Indian every time. His animus gives sharpness to his pen, gives something of the wrath and injustice of Hogarth to this exceptionally descriptive book.
