The Peripatetic Reviewer

WHEN a heat wave descends upon the Canadian woods and the river temperature rises to 72 degrees plus and the salmon, in Howard’s words, “become dilatory,” there are other things to do than flog the pools. I don’t mean that fishing ceases to be our central occupation, but common sense warns us that the fish will take only in those pools which are cooled by brook water, and there only before the sun has touched the water, or at dusk.

Meantime there is the full day to employ as the thermometer edges up to 90 degrees, with certain sensuous delights which are not part of one’s daily life in Massachusetts. Breakfast, for example. In common with most men of middle years I have a sensitivity about my waist in profile. But all thoughts of diet fly out the window when confronted with Ken’s homemade bread toasted to mahogany crispness. When after my poached egg and bacon I am offered pancakes, I take one, and it slips down so easily with the syrup that I don’t feel too guilty at accepting another. Just one more. At least I have the courage to resist the oatmeal covered with canned milk and brown sugar which Matt White is lapping up.

There are various ways of courting a river in heat. One of the pleasures of fishing with Dale is his inquisitiveness: he always wants to see and to know, and on this brassy bright morning he and Ranny, his guide, are planning to pole upstream to take the pulse of the score and more of brooks flowing into the broad Southwest between our home camp and Push-and-Be-Damned. It will be quite a journey, so Ken has made them sandwiches, and they have a light rod with the smallest Rat Face McDougalls, of Dale’s tying, just in case.

With Dale upstream and Bob and Phil on the home pools I head down to the Grilse Hole. It is a lovely voyage with the eyes luxuriating in the spruce and hemlock slopes and in the shade with which the wooded cliff shields Betz Pool. The water feels like milk; I expect no follows to my fly, and am not surprised. My excitement comes from the moose prints in the soft ground above the spring, and then after we pole across river to the moist ledge above Howard’s Rock, I gather a bouquet of purple iris and wild white orchids for our dinner table. My capture for the day.

We have cold boiled grilse, salad, and beer for lunch, with canned peaches and Ken’s doughnuts for dessert — Bob, a slimmy, eats five — and when I draw my cabin curtains for my nap, I expect to be dead to the world for ninety minutes. Easing back to reality when it is over, the mind passes through a brief fantasy of home thoughts before it focuses on the problem of how to tease the heatdrugged fish. Perhaps some of those small hair flies tied by Mr. Doak of Doaktown would help. The drive to his shop takes us along the ridge, above the river, through fogs of dust and amidst the largest flocks of evening grosbeaks I have ever encountered. Sassy, fat, brilliant yellow, black, and white birds, they keep feeding away on the salty gravel until the car is almost on them: then they flee ahead of it in long swoops, shrilling their irritation. I have to swerve from one side to the other to avoid hitting them.

Dale has returned by the time we do. Of the twenty-three springs he sampled, the coldest was 39 degrees — “ There must still be ice around that one somewhere,” comments Ranny —and they averaged out at 41 degrees. The salmon can taste that cold water a mile down river, and it is no wonder that they streak through the holding pools of June and September to get as close as possible to the cooler inflow. “See any fish?" I ask. “Grilse,” says Dale. “Close to the bank and in the shade. When the fly came close to them, they’d sniff it off.” Yes, I know that sniff, a tiny gossamer of spray instead of the wholehearted swirl one hopes for.

Since it was a zero day with no fish taken or lost by anyone, the talk at cocktails dwelt not on our exploits but on the riverbed: how it had been altered when the ice went out; how we should like to alter it if we had the use of a giant bulldozer. “Those big white rocks you see underwater in the camp pool,” said Murray, “we planted them there live years ago, and the fish like ‘em. When it’s not so hot.” Then we went into dinner, to a side of beef which Ken, unlike most camp cooks, is willing to serve pink.

If there are other places where the sleep is as tranquil as it is in Canada, I have yet to find them. But because of the long nap which divides the day into two such different halves, I don’t stay down quite as long in the dark. It was 2:45 A.M. when the river awoke me, and the moon was full. Sitting up, I looked through the screen at the bright water and listened to the sibilance with which it flows over Murray’s rocks and (in downstream. The salmon move up under a full moon as much as seven miles or ten. The night air was cool; would there be fresh ones in the brook pool tomorrow?

For summer reading I want a book like Puck of Pook’s Hill, a book which excites the imagination and one which can be taken in short bites. This year my trove was SIR ARTHUR BRYANT’S THE FIRE AND THE ROSE (Doubleday, $4.95). Sir Arthur, who is an old friend and protege of G. M. Trevelyan, has woven together his account of eight decisive events when the present and future of England were at the brink. “All,” he says, “were contests of will in which the contenders staked their all, including life.” Three occurred in the Middle Ages: the first, the duel between Henry II and Becket; the second, Edward III’s incredible campaign at Crecy, when the English longbow in the hands of disciplined archers destroyed at odds of one to four the flower of French knighthood; and the third, an illuminating explanation of how the desperate social conditions following the devastation of the Black Death drove the peasants under Wat Tyler and John Ball to a state of rebellion that I have never appreciated before. There is a day-to-day account beginning on September 3, 1651, of the miraculous journey which Charles 11, age twenty-one, with a price of a thousand guineas on his head, made after Cromwell’s net had almost closed on him at the Battle of Worcester. For nearly a month and a half, he was passed from loyal household to loyal household. He missed detection by an eyelash; his gratitude is endearing, and in that sleepless escape his steel was tempered.

The latter half of The Fire and the Rose is composed of narratives drawn from Britain’s twenty years of conflict against the dynamic power of the French Revolution and Napoleon, beginning with the mutiny in the British Navy when the invasion barges were first being gathered in the Dutch ports. Sir Arthur’s description of the conditions within the British fleet, of the mutiny gathering head at Sheerness, or of Nelson preparing his captains at Aboukir is brilliant writing; and as evidence of his style throughout I should like to quote three passages — first, this vignette of England after the Black Death: “Deep down the malaise of England after the Black Death was spiritual. It was the sickness of soul of a people who felt that justice was being outraged. The old static feudalism, in which every man knew and accepted his place, was disintegrating; the more fluid society that was replacing it was on the make and given to lavish and ostentatious luxury.” Of Ireland in 1798 Sir Arthur writes: “For here in the island which she had conquered, misgoverned and never understood, proud England was faced that spring with disaster.” And last, these words about Nelson: “His was that strange combination of brooding patience, study and intense concentration with a mercurial temperament that rose like lightning out of storm and, in the hour chosen of destiny, lighted the path to victory.” This is indeed history raised to the level of epic; each episode comes alive once we have passed through the vestibule of orientation.

The Delicious apple in its size and sweetness is redolent of California, though if kept too long it can be punky and soft. The Roxbury Russet has all the characteristics of New England; firm and juicy, it will retain its flavor well into the winter. ABIGAIL ADAMS HOMANS is a Roxbury Russet. She was named for her famous forebear, the loyal and spirited Abigail who was the wife of our second President. After her father’s death in 1894 she was “educated” by the most famous trio of uncles in the United States, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Adams, and Brooks Adams, and today, in what I might call her sagacious autumn, she is as keen-witted and as attractive as she must have been in the Quincy and Paris of 1900. Her brief memoir, EDUCATION BY UNCLES (Houghton Mifflin, $4.00), is a tangy introduction to the Adams family and their way of enjoying each other and the world. It is crisply written, not a mushy word in it, as delightful a delineation of the New England character as I have tasted in a long time.

With the fine clarity of age, Mrs. Homans has recaptured the impressionable years. We see her elders as she saw them then, but we feel in the candor of her judgment the appreciation and criticism which came to her as an older woman. Her candor is salted with humor. Her father’s house in Wollaston was built at the worst period in American architecture, and she remembers it as “the ugliest and most inconvenient house that I ever was in.” Her account of the Paris convent into which she was shoved by Uncle Brooks is just as austere and amusing. Her portrait of her popular, diffident, unambitious father, the oldest of the four brothers, is charged with affection and invigorated by the forthrightness of his letters and of the speeches which he made in an effort to bring South Carolina and Massachusetts to an understanding after the Civil War. No woman has ever written of Henry Adams so well, of his immaculate house on H Street in Washington, where it was his invariable rule that “serious things must be discussed lightly and light things seriously”; where he maintained a pose as a recluse as a blind for living exactly as he wanted; where at his select breakfasts (served at noon) he introduced his niece to his famous friends with the quiet admonition: “Have your own ideas but keep off other people’s.”

Brooks Adams was educated in rude isolation in an English boarding school while his father was our unpopular minister to the Court of St. James’s during the Civil War, and Brooks never acquired the art of making friends. He was, in Mrs. Homans’ words, “brusque, intolerant, opinionated, cranky and tactless to the last degree.” And she loved him. It was Brooks who took her on most of her early travels, and it was of this craggy uncle that she said to her young husband, “You must spend five minutes every morning on the problem of liking Uncle Brooks.”

Uncle Charlie, more social, energetic, and unaccountable, was forever moving, from Boston to Lincoln to Washington, and he wrote in his autobiography that he had tried Boston society drunk and he had tried it sober, and drunk or sober there was nothing in it. Washington, he thought, would provide new and interesting people, which caused his brother Henry to chuckle. As for that rocky, windy promontory in Massachusetts Bay where the Adams clan traditionally spent their summers, the Spartan activity there must be read to be believed. Brooks visited it once, and afterward remarked, “Oh, that is the place where they all cat in the cellar.”

Whether she is writing of the Boston Cotillion, where she sometimes had to sit waiting for favor, or of Uncle Henry as he showed her through Canterbury, or of English house parties which she enjoyed with Ambassador Hay, Senator Cameron, and Uncle Henry, young Abigail is in her element, and I am at her feet.