Nick Lyons: A Life Well Fished

Nick: Thank you. Thanks, Beth. Thank you all for coming, for being patient. This started in September, when I was supposed to come. And I had pneumonia. Then it happened again, but I had a family matter that I could not break. My granddaughter was playing Lear in King Lear, so I just thought that was a unique situation that I couldn’t pass up. But I’m delighted to be here. And I’d like to talk about some of the early moments of my fishing, how I got started, which is different in each case, but it overlaps with the way everyone got started, I think. And then get to the publishing, which became an important part of my life, and something about it, and I’d be glad to answer any questions, eventually, that would be of some help. I was a cunning little kid, and when I was six, I think, and I can remember back that far, I was catching everything that moved up at the Laurel House. I caught frogs, salamanders, newts of various kinds, crayfish, and then eventually a catcher gets to the catching of fish. And I can remember catching perch and what we called shiners, they got quite large, in what is called South Lake now. My grandfather owned the Laurel House in those days. Most of what went on with the older folk were pinochle on the back deck, and swimming. No one else fished.

Come on in, Liz. And Star. Star is invited also.

So I was just at the place where I’m catching everything that moved, up at the Laurel House. And there was a comic that they hired to be there and entertain the guests, not just at performances, but also to walk around and make them laugh a little bit. He had the name of Pitzy Katz, as I remember. And I did my first enterprising activity related to fishing at that time. He paid me five cents a frog, little frogs, the little ones, to go under... he would turn a cup over, like this, or all the cups were turned over, when they served at the dining table, and then when somebody opened it up and they saw the frog, it became a moment of some hilarity and shock. There was a little creek that came out of South Lake. I think it’s called simply Lake Passage now, or something like that. I don’t know what South Lake, what they sell now, what it produces now, but it only had shiners, blue gills, they’re rather big, and also perch in it. And what I didn’t know, since I’d never seen one of them, was that it also had the shark of the pond, very large pickerel, that ate everything in sight, and were better catchers than I was. One day I was bringing in a shiner of maybe 6 or 7 inches long, and suddenly, like a dog taking it, the shot of a pickerel comes along, grabs it, doesn’t get the hook in him, but wouldn’t let go, he wouldn’t let go of his meal. I got him into the boat, and lost an aunt, who started to scream, who was out there with me. The little runoff from the lake had a little area just below where the water was very clear, and where the smaller pickerel go maybe 11, 12 inches, were, and being a devious little kid, I figured out that in the short time that they wouldn’t feed down there, and what I had to do is get some piano wire on the end of a stick, put the piano wire down with a noose on it, and yank them. And I got them. My next big accomplishment was even worse, and I had a very, very bad childhood for someone who became a lunatic fly fisherman for a while. Partway down the runoff from the lake, there was a little ballooning of the water, of the stream, and lying on the boards one day, just watching things happen, I spotted the nose of some fish I’d never seen before. Quite lovely. And hiding under one of the bulwarks, and this is mid-summer I think. I tried everything I could. I used worms, of course. I started with worms. I tried a crayfish. I tried one of the frogs. I was capable of trying anything that I had caught elsewhere to catch fish. Nothing got this thing to move. So I went down onto the buttress of the little bridge, and it was trout. It was a very big trout, maybe 15 inches, which was a lot for me. I tried the wire on him, but I couldn’t get it around him. And then I figured out the only way to do this, since he was a very tame and quiet trout, was to tie a Carlisle hook on the end of one of these sticks that I used, and very, very patiently, perhaps after 10 minutes of very slowly lowering it down, slip it below the head, and yank. So I did so. And I caught this really beautiful trout, killed it immediately, beautiful, probably the last of the Mohicans in that water. I brought it back and was feeling very, very proud of myself. A fly fisher happened to come up to visit at that time, a guy named Leo Mertzl, as I remember, and he had a trunk full of fly fishing equipment. It seemed bizarre to me to have boxes of flies. Six or seven rods in cases. Special places for the reels. This would have been in 1940, maybe, 1939, perhaps. I didn’t know what it was about. And he was brought to me in good time, as the resident angler, all of age 7, and wanted to fish for trout, naturally. I told him that I had heard of a trout, I didn’t tell him the whole story, it looked like it would be too complicated. So we went to the pond first, and he fished for bass. And he got nothing. There were no bass in South Lake at that time. And we fished for a week, and I really tolerated him, you know, with his flies. And all of his equipment. Then when he left, I had a little drawing that I had made of this trout, before I turned it over to the kitchen to cook it. And I sent him the drawing and said, here’s something that I, is this a trout? It’s something I caught a little before you came. And I caught it on a worm. So I not only caught it by gigging it, but I also lied. It was the beginning of many lies that fishermen are heir too. And I remember him riding writing back and saying, you know, it looks like a trout to me. But I really couldn’t be sure from your drawing, and that creek that we fished didn’t have any fish in it. So I’m not sure what it is. It was my first falling. I fell. And things continued. The last time I fished was with a very old friend named Knox Burger, a literary agent. And we fished in a place that I called Bill’s Pond. Bill Kronenberg’s pond. You may know Bill. It was filled with absolutely gigantic rainbow trout that he fed on pellets. And that’s all they wanted. They want pellets for lunch, dinner, all the time. And they would come readily to it, and not to the fly at all. I had taken a few of the fish, I had figured out the great problem that you needed a pellet imitation, not a fly. And Knox, I’m afraid, was on his last months, and was very frail, lost a lot of weight, he was a great literary agent, and he wore a T-shirt all the time, saying, Honest Prose and Nerves of Steel. And I don’t think he weighed 90 pounds then. And his eyesight had gone bad, and his hearing had gone bad. And it was coming to the end of things, as things go. He wanted to fish once more, so I figured the best place was Bill’s pond. I took him there, and just as we sat down, I said, Knox, you can’t catch them on flies here. You need a special pellet fly that I’ve devised. The big devising, it was a piece of cork that had a hook in it. But Knox said, no hamburger! He wanted just to fish with flies. He couldn’t tie the fly on himself, he could hardly see it. So I tied on flies, 4 or 5 or 6 flies that we changed. And nothing came to it. I mean, you could see these huge fish cruising. Finally he put on the—he didn’t put it on—but he said, one more try, and this time, went to the side, I put on the famous Lyons pellet fly, and of course the first cast something, I don’t know 20 inches, maybe 7, 8 pounds, comes and takes it and just about pulls Knox into the water. He was sitting on a chair, and I had to hold him with two hands, or he’s going to go in. We bring it in, put it in the net, he puts his hands over it, so he tells how big the thing is, and it’s gigantic. And he turns and says to me, no hamburger! And I said, and I lied, just like I had lied about the trout. I said, that’s right, Knox! It was a great catch, a great fly, and I lied through my teeth. In between those two events, I learned a bit about the ethics of it all, and did a batch of different kinds of fishing. I think that the most interesting part of my relationship to fishing, and including all types, is that my father had died before I was born, my mother had to work. Living with my grandparents, people thought I was being spoiled rotten. I was a nice kid then, I mean, I didn’t believe that they were going to do to me what happened. They sent me to a boarding school. And it scared the shit out of me. I really had never seen anything like that in my life. It had one virtue. It was on a pond called the Ice Pond, which had been used in revolutionary times for cutting ice. And I went there. And there are pictures of me fishing it. And I believe that it probably saved my life, going down to that pond, fishing with the bobber, watching the pecking, trying to tell what was down there, watching the lines go into the water. The lines of light going into the water, and somehow touching something numinous and real and mysterious. And it hooked me. And I became very, very involved with it. When my mother finally remarried, we lived in Brooklyn. And I fished for all the junk that was available down at Sheepshead Bay. Hackleheads of one kind or another. Fish that blew up when you touched them. Fish with odd names. And loved it, loved it madly. Trout still echoed in my brain a little bit. And at 13, which is, I was quite small at 13, I began to make the long trip with a friend of mine, by subway, from Brooklyn to Grand Central, and from Grand Central up to Brewster. We had big backpacks on us, we had rods, could have lived for a month in the wilderness with all we took up for this one day. And we caught, we caught trout. We were catchers. We knew how to catch and kill trout in those days, first with night crawlers that we got on the lawns in Brooklyn, and almost got arrested for, and go around with a flashlight on someone’s lawn, you’re liable to get arrested. And then with spinning lures for a while, which seemed to us a very great advance on our technique, particularly something called the homo reverso, which sounds worse than it is, I guess. And also a fly, a spinner called the CP Swing, which was the great killer. I remember the second time we went up, I found a feeder creek to the East Branch, and was fishing with worms and a bobber, and caught a green fish about that long. I would have been 14 that year. It was a fish of 12, 13 inches. Put it on a stringer, didn’t know what the devil it was. Caught another. I had three of them on there. And the warden came. The only time a warden has ever come to visit me when I was on a river. And he said, how’s luck? And I said, well, I’m just, I just got this nice green trout, I said. And he said, have you got any more of them? And I said, yes, and showed him the stringer. And he said, they’re not trout, son. They’re bass. They’re smallmouth bass. The season doesn’t start until July 1st. [laughter] I can remember vividly taking the fish I had on the line off, and let him go immediately, and then the ones on the stringer, one at a time, the last of which was over on its side, wiggled for a while, went downstream, and I kept praying that it would suddenly right itself and take off. Finally it did. He said, learn the trouts, son. I mean, learn the fish. Learn what the fish are. Which I tried to do. I think that the years in college at the University of Pennsylvania, I fished a bit, and I picked up a fly rod for some reason, one of those Shakespeare rods, and figured out that you don’t put the line through that little ring, that you can’t cast as well when you put it in the little ring. I would cast in the Palestra after basketball practice. I didn’t get very good at it, and I didn’t think it was a good way to catch fish, I didn’t believe you could catch fish that way. But in graduate school in Michigan, I went to the Au Sable once for a visit, and just going up country, and I stood at a bridge ... one of the bridges over the Au Sable, and I stood there for a minute watching a fly fisherman, really the first I’d ever seen. I was 25. I’d been in the army, I’d really advanced my fishing to being a very lethal kind of killer of trout, with a spinning rod. But I watched this guy, and there was something about the fly rod and the line, and the aerial ballet that took place when a good caster is working. And the fly. He was using a big yellow fly, a big sulphur of some kind. And you could watch it go down right under the, he would cast it just upstream of some overhanging branches, and you could watch the fly on the surface, a dry fly of course, float down, and slip into the main current. And then of course a trout came up and took it. And it just electrified me. I almost lost my wife on that trip. She was sitting in the rain in the car and couldn’t figure out why I was standing on a bridge in the rain over that. But it was absolutely hypnotizing to see that casting, the fact that he not only caught fish, caught a fish, but also caught it beautifully, caught it in an interesting manner. And after that I became more and more involved with fly fishing, ‘til one summer I was beginning to fly fish a little more in the Saw Kill that runs through Woodstock. Spent a couple of summers there with four children, all of whom were, four years apart, and from the youngest to the oldest, and looked like quadruplets at times, and we required two or possibly three babysitters at a time to handle them. But I would slip off to the Esopus, which I, when I first had contact with Ed, who is a master of the Esopus, and I also fished the creek, the little Saw Kill. Someone told me about a man who was the painter named, Manny Bromberg told me about a man who was the best, serious fly fisherman of them all. And I had to go with him, and he was going to set up a trip. It turned out to be Frank Mele. And in the fullness of time, maybe two weeks of trying to get him, I finally made an arrangement to meet at 8:00 in the morning, at Jim Mulligan’s house. I don’t know whether you knew Jim Mulligan. Cartoonist for the New Yorker. So we set out at 8:00, to go to the Beaverkill, which he called Mecca. The trip, we finally got there at 8:00 that night. Frank was in his cups for a while in those days. And he also would stop at every bar, and he would make comments on every person he saw. He’d stop and look at someone in the fields, and give me a whole story about them. And it was quite an event. We finally got there. I’ve never been a drinker, but I think I had one or two beers along the way; I could hardly stand. We rushed down to the water. I had, that winter, tried to develop a fly that would imitate the spinner of the green drake it was called, I called it the pigeon drake. And what you find in New York are a lot of pigeon quills hanging around. So I had taken the quill, strapped it to something, put some white hair on the sides, and I thought this was going to be a great fly for that hatch. I get out on the water, weaving and bobbing, and make a cast and this, can I call it a fucking thing, sinks! Sinks like a stone. It was terrible. By the time I got it off and got on new flies, Frank had, calmly, with his pipe in mouth, caught one fish, and was catching a second fish. We left, we got back in 45 minutes, I think. And I kept thinking about this odd day. And I, you know, from my teen years, I wanted to be a writer, and I’d written by this time maybe 15 scholarly essays based on the advanced studies in English that I’d done in Michigan. I’d written somewhat about the publishing world, which I was now involved with. But somewhere in the back of my head there was something else rattling around, some other voice. And this voice didn’t seem to be mine, the one that I was using to write about Chretien de Troyes or Kafka or other folks. So I sat down, and I wrote this story called Mecca, about this trip with Frank. And it just came right out. It’s not the best piece of writing, but it was a different voice, and I could feel it as being different. I sent it off to Field & Stream within three days of the time, and they responded within three days. The New Yorker has yet to respond [laughter] ... still trying. Now they don’t even respond. But the old days they used to send little slips of various kinds. I had shoe boxes full of them. But there’s something about that prose that really said maybe this is closer to what would be a happy thing to write. So I sat down and wrote another about gigging this trout, which I called First Trout, First Lie. I sent that to Clare Connelly at Field & Stream, and he took that too! And paid $1000 each for two of them. I said, gee, this is a lot of fun! [laughter] And I love doing these. I think the second one, First Trout, First Lie, is a better story and is closer to what I finally set upon as a writing voice that I had confidence in. But since then I wrote maybe 2-, 300 of these little, I call them shaggy fish stories. There seem to be an endless number that come from the fishing world. Sometimes just an odd situation like some grand fly fisherman who boasted about the number of fish that he caught, once too often. And I heard a story about him coming off a float trip on the Madison river, and having caught a 15-inch rainbow, and someone, and the guide told me, he said, well that’s the first time I’ve had a fish grow 6 inches between when we left and when we got back. But a lot of little things happened. Gingrich telling me that he had caught, Arnold Gingrich from Esquire telling me that he’d caught on a western trip 19 inches worth of trout in four installments [laughter]. Or Charles Ritz once when I published his book out of having lunch with him in a rather New York restaurant, he had just fly fished in salt water for the first time, and I said, he was about 83, 84, very vigorous, and had just brought his mistress in to the Ritz hotel, I think, I said, did you enjoy it? You know, I didn’t know what to ask. And he said, he said, well, it is like, it is like sex after lunch: meant for men with hard stomachs. I think the editing I did, the fun I had with the hundred odd books on fishing, most of them, about 90% on fly fishing, I think gave me a huge amount of pleasure. Met some very interesting people, fished some very interesting water, from pike and trout in France, in England, on the chalk streams, and whereabouts. I think it was Frank, actually, who not only gave me the first story, but also gave me the suggestion of republishing some of the greater older books. And I knew about Art Flick’s Streamside Guide. I did not know marinara, Marinaro, from a sauce. He just was a totally new name to me. And I started with those two. Frank introduced me to Art Flick, with whom I got along very well. I published his little book. I had insisted to the editor-in-chief that we do it with a water resistant binding, since it was a book that seemed to be proper for taking to the river, and even if you didn’t drop it in, it at least would resist any kind of splash. And I remember him saying, well, we’ll try it with a lead binding, so that it sinks, and people will have to buy another one. [laughter] But the Flick was amazing. It sold 15,000 copies before you could blink. And they suddenly said, well, sign up all the ones that you can. And we’ll sell 15,000 right away. And I did some practical books that in, you know, the years, this was when, 40 years ago that I started doing these. Some of them still very much in print. I remember the first practical book was Selective Trout, which did very well and still sells. I did Lefty [Kreh], poor Lefty is not well now, I did his book with Mark Sosin, Practical Fishing Knots. I was always a little more reluctant to do practical books, because I’m not good with my hands. I tie with three thumbs, and I, the technical aspects of fishing somehow have been less interesting to me, though enormously important and enormously interesting. One of the books that was not about anything technical was old Sparse Grey Hackle’s book, which had been called Fishless Days originally, when it was published by the Anglers Club. And I met with Sparse. We had some, he was a remarkable man. I think he was in his early 80s. He had been the debating champion of New York state in 1914. I mean, really, a remarkable old fellow. And I once went fishing with him on the DeBruce water, and he said to Mari, he said, you know, Nick has been working too hard. Why don’t you go fishing, Nick, and I’ll entertain your Missus. This great old fellow talked to her about ballistics in the Mexican American War for about an hour. Mari just smiled and said she didn’t remember or understand a word of what he had said. But Sparse’s book is one of those odd, not practical books, that had a very, very interesting life as well. I’d bet him the summer, I was feeling very cocky, that these books could really sell. And I bet Sparse a dime that we would sell out the first 7500, which was a large printing, of this book of stories, is what they are. Nothing practical in it at all. There’s a very funny story in it, Who is Sparse Grey Hackle, about some 50-pound trout, and soaking bread with scotch, and it’s a bizarre thing. I didn’t see how it could sell 7500 in ten years, but I’d bet him anyway, because the dime I could afford to spend. And in late November we had to go back to press, and I called up Sparse, and I told him, you know, we’re going back, and I’m winning the bet. I mean, we’ve sold out that edition, you owe me a dime. And he [grumbles]. Every time he came by, which, I don’t know what his work was, but he always seemed free enough to show up with his double breasted suit and his very formal and big thick glasses – he’s still the best proofreader I’ve ever met – but he could barely see, I think. I’d say, Sparse, can you pay me the dime, please. And I said, it’s a very serious bet, I was very serious about this, I worked very hard to sell it. He says, don’t worry, buster. I always pay my bets, debts. Around April, this gnome of a man shows up and drops a box on my desk, and he says I always pay my damn debts, buster. And walks out. And I wish I had it here in Woodstock, but he gave me a leather bound, bound in green Moroccan leather with the dime inserted into the ... and with the inscription, for Nick, who published this book.

And I realized something that term, something about my interest in language, enormous. And I remember at the end of the term walking up to him and saying, sort of, can I make the team? Can I go on? Is it stupid of me to think that I can understand this stuff? And he, cocky son-of-a-bitch, and he said to me, he said, Nick, he says, you’re not dumb. You’re just absolutely illiterate. [laughter] I took that as a great compliment at the time. And I went to Bard as a freshman, under the GI Bill. And it, Ruth was there then, and my wife was there. I got married that summer and trailed Mari into Cranbrook, in Michigan, and looked around for some place to go back to school there, to parlay the courses at the New School and Bard College, none of which had been anywhere near better than a B minus. I’d been a terrible student. And some awful monster like Grendel in Beowulf guarded the door to the MA program and said I should go back to the garment district [laughter] that I would never get through here. But I said, it’s too late, I’m already signed up. I’m ready to go. Can you let me into the MA program? And he said, I can’t, actually, I can’t. But go and take these psychological and aptitude tests, and then come back and we’ll talk. And I came back, and he said, well, I really can’t keep you out. But I’m not going to let you into the program unless you get five A’s, which I’ve never gotten in my life. And we were living up in Pontiac, which is about 50 miles from Ann Arbor, and in the winter I’d come down, it was like a bobsled trail going down the Pontiac trail. And I got five A’s, and really began to discipline myself then. He let me in, and I got an MA, and a doctorate a couple of years later. And I’m reasonably comfortable with my head now. But it’s, you know, it’s the kind of change that I think we all make or should make sometime in our lives, when we say, this is the thing I want to do. And I’m late learning it, but I’m going to go back to the beginning if I have to, and learn it. And I see a lot of people who make choices later on, some much later than I did. I thought I was antique at 25. But it turned out to be a very fortuitous choice, scared me out of my wits, and I was in total apprehension that I could get through, and it was just a delight year after year to see that my head was good enough to get through all of this, and that it was, that I just lost a lot of time, but that time really didn’t matter. It certainly doesn’t matter now, at 85, you don’t worry too much about time anymore.