Fly Fishing Book Review HOWELL RAINES' THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: A Memoir

Howell Raines

Author of Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis

New York: Scribner, 2006. First Edition. Index. Numerous photographs. 325 pages. Hardcover in dust jacket. $25.00

"Since lies have played such a prominent role in my life, there's no way around telling about the argument between Tennant and me over how we hooked the marlin at Christmas Island." So writes Howell Raines, a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran journalist and former executive editor of The New York Times, in his latest book on the passion of angling.

When Raines is writing about fishing and not politics he is in his element, otherwise I begin to go sour hearth-side or stream-side, longing for a day when fishermen just fish. He is a good writer with an adept turn of phrase, and he tells us much of the obvious as journalists are trained to do. Which brings me to my main point. Raines makes too much of the journalists of our day in a book ostensibly about fishing. So much so, that it intrudes upon our senses. I am left with the impression that the real subject of the One That Got Away is an undeclared war, a journalist's war pitting one part of society against another. And as he never formally declares that war, I feel as though I am an observer watching a brawling player beating the hell out of an opposing team member in some appalling game.

But back to the obvious--of coarse many of the camp owners are greedy, some wardens wink and the poachers are still poaching. This goes on even while journalists are forever pontificating about who is more right in America--Them or Us--a situation leading everybody nowhere with no end in sight. The face of greed is still evident in this country, even while the lids slowly close over the unburied bodies of our last great practitioners of guileless journalism. Naturally, there is also the greed to be heard, the greed to be seen, and the greed to want to be reckoned with that tarnishes our traditions and values. We are surrounded by people who often use a good turn of phrase, in order to ruthlessly provoke a response or to trivialize an important matter. These are sins in which the highest paid practitioners of American journalism most often excel. For Us, not Them, there is no happy ending. There are limits to how much people can take from these self-promoted captains and slogan-throwers of bad journalism. I think those limits are quickly being reached and the ship is sinking.

How much better it is to be a quiet fisherman in the simplified language of a Hemingway than a hubris-filled hot-shot of the press. Hucksters may learn to fish, yet they will never be content to be anything less than advocates and hawkers of politically biased forms of indoctrination. Those who follow them into this abyss have no idea of acting or thinking for themselves. They are clay in the modeler's hands. They repeat the words that the modelers teach them to say. All that follow them are the small fry strung up to dangle before us in the fish camp of advocacy-led America. And unlike fish, journalists, almost all journalists from one point of view or the another, are ridiculed rather than looked at in the spirit of admiration. The fault is entirely of their own making.

Nobody doubts that many of them grew up in little towns with quaint names or big cities with large names and all of the best intentions in the world. That they may have had two friends or three or no friends at all, and were encouraged by their teachers to do the best they can and achieve great things in their lifetime is not doubted. What is doubted is that they like the country they live in or the people they encounter or even the food they eat. Something along the way between childhood and adulthood appears to have shifted and altered their perspective, but they insist that it is not their perspective that is at fault. This is always the first sign of shortsightedness, a hint of mental-retardation for which a cure is not very promising.

They appear to have set out not understanding where they were going or what they were doing. All of their badgering and faultfinding and mocking of others insults our small intelligence. No longer are they capable of publishing good journalism. What true good they hoped to catch in this way was always elusive. The stories they tell about themselves are as old as fisherman's stories, exaggerating the size of their catch and mythologizing about the fish that got away. If they falter or show any weakness toward their supposed prey, the savage little schools that they have spawned are just as eager to kick them onto the banks to rot, while swimming happily round and round in ever tightening circles. Indeed, the severity of their predictable upsurges against their own should be a warning to Every Fisherman, but hapless Every Fisherman has learned to no longer care.

An experienced fisherman, nevertheless, usually knows what he is about. Raines writes well about fishing, all kinds of fishing in The One That Got Away. When fishing, men and women can put aside the big lie that today's journalism is still based on time-proven principles rather than the ideological fads and amoral commercialism of newsrooms, in the vein of The New York Times confabulated world. I am convinced that we have been assaulted by a senseless campaign of martini journalists from which there is no hope of evading the fight. I encourage people who feel looked upon as serfs and peasants not to fear the displeasure of these cruel masters. I know how deeply people detest incurring the wrath of booted, shaved and shirted thugs, whose power only seems to demand a silent obedience. I understand that nobody wants to throw their lives away over people with the power not only to silence their voices but to disgrace them before their friends. It is extremely unlikely that any of these dreamers will achieve the true heights of their dreams. The mountain upon which they now stand, at the right moment in their lives, will not be their final resting place but the precipice from which their conscience will urge them to throw themselves. Occasionally, I, too, want to give them a little push.

The truth is, a large number of the press have no longer become reliable sources of information. Not one single viewpoint on any side of any question is left uncontested without derision. This is their legacy and they cannot undo it however hard they try. The press has become like drill-sergeants, with swagger-stick in hand they order people about the camp as though they were raw recruits on their day of arrival. No one is safe from their terrifying bullying. Look about all the yokels they dredge up. They seem to like bossing people about with their yellow journalism in big papers or rumor mongering on tight little screens, and more than a few seem happy to be bossed by them. This is not a favorable omen.

They have reduced themselves and the taxpaying American people to a Hollywoodized version of meaningless men and women who scramble for money, fornicate, and drink between long-winded draughts of implausible small-talk, when they should be living a good life without this ethically-challenged interference. They are driven by an incurable "itch to lay down the critical law, full of honors and crowded by respectful admirers." It is no wonder that a very large number of the press appear to have escaped from mental institutions where they were lobotomized.

While fishing we can escape the bombast daily sent our way by hirelings placed in environments designed to make us comfortable with a willing suspension of disbelief in their flapdoodle. When Raines is writing about fishing Raines is very good at making us feel and see the action. I'm convinced that Raines can become a great outdoors writer on angling, but first he must put aside the hogwash that journalism has anything new to tell the American people in relation to their lives. History will never record that journalism has failed the American people because of the simple fact that many journalists respond to their own propaganda of the partisan sensationalist sort. There is nothing so radical as such stupidity. Fishing owns none of this.

Raines shifts between fishing vignettes and reflections on his Alabama childhood, family and working relationships. At the center of The One That Got Away is what he considers one of his most exciting fishing adventures--an Old Man and the Sea struggle with a marlin he hooked and fought for seven and a half hours at Christmas Island in the South Pacific.

In spite of what I consider to be a few minor flaws in Howell Raines book, I highly recommend it.

Dom Giovanni

Reviewed July 01, 2009

Note upon the style

If I have seemed to make overt use of Howell Raines own words in this review I may be excused. When it comes to words I am a borrower not a lender.