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Perspective

Sharp-tongued son of the South

The One That Got Away is also, inevitably, an exploration of loss: lost illusions, lost chances and, though he says it's "not what this book is about," one rather important lost job.

By DIANE ROBERTS
Published April 30, 2006

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: A Memoir

By Howell Raines

Scribner, $25, 308 pp

"As no man is born an artist," said Izaak Walton in 1653, "so no man is born an angler." We are estranged from nature these days, and it may be that likening the making of art to the catching of fish seems peculiar. But what human endeavors - aside from running for office or falling in love - are so haunted by the likelihood of failure? The poem could always be more perfect; there is always a fish, a mighty fish, that slips the line and swims off.

Like his earlier Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, Howell Raines' new memoir tells an awful lot about fishing: angling expeditions to Russia, the South Pacific and even exotic Panama City, Florida. The One That Got Away is also, inevitably, an exploration of loss: lost illusions, lost chances and, though he says it's "not what this book is about," one rather important lost job.

The New York Times is the biggest catch in journalism. Raines had been the paper's editorial page editor and before that its Washington bureau chief. For 22 months beginning a few days before Sept. 11, 2001, Raines ascended to the heights as the New York Times' executive editor. Under his leadership, the paper washed much of the gray off its pages and out of its soul, with pumped-up coverage of popular culture and greater attention to jazzy prose. The paper also won a bushel of Pulitzers. But an editor's cred is only as good as his reporters' integrity: By early summer 2003, the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal had dragged Raines down off Olympus.

Chasing some semimystical, lordly fish (let's be zoologically incorrect and include white whales, too) is an irresistible metaphor for the unattainable and has been since before Izaak Walton tied flies on the green banks of a Hampshire river. Fishing is a quest, the watery equivalent of plunging into the woods to confront the buck or the bear. Raines is in good company: Cooper, Twain, London, Hemingway and Faulkner all used hunting or fishing to pit their protagonist against the mysterious natural world where humankind is emphatically not in charge. Hemingway, that show-off, used both. Indeed, like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, Raines finds himself battling a metaphor-laden marlin. Not that Raines takes himself so seriously: He's accompanied by his best friend from Birmingham who later disputes details of the Raines vs. Fish struggle (was the sandwich ham or peanut butter?) and the whole thing takes place on a leaky boat piloted by a dubious Christmas Islander named Tuna.

Raines doesn't work his catch as epically long as Santiago does, but the fight to beat the marlin - not to kill him: God, no - just to triumph over him, experience him and then cut him loose, goes on for many pages. Santiago needs his marlin way more than Raines needs his. But like Santiago's, Raines' marlin is a symbol, an incarnation of both the prize and the impossibility of hanging onto it. Raines uses his marlin the way John McPhee uses his shad in The Founding Fish: that is, as a structural device to provide narrative drama. And you'd better have drama in a book even nominally about fishing if you want nonfisherfolk to read it.

Now Old Man Walton may be right in saying that no one is a born artist, but Raines sure seems to be a born storyteller in the High Digressive style:

"Boris Yeltsin actually looks a little like Big Jim Folsom, and in the 1996 Russian presidential election, damned if he didn't do the same thing Big Jim did in the Alabama gubernatorial campaign of 1962. He got drunk. Yeltsin at least had the good sense to go to bed. Poor old Jim went on statewide television where he forgot, among other things, the names of his children."

Despite what he calls a "lucky inoculation" of Hemingway, Raines is essentially a Faulknerian. He understands that "Faulkner was an omnipresent and dangerous model for young Southerners since he writes so much like we think we talk when we get drunk," but he can't help himself. The Latinate, archaic or flat-out fancy diction (it's not easy to get away with "perforce" and "nonce," even used in a sentence), the florid, sometimes febrile adjectives, and the unabashedly rococo style recall the Squire of Yoknapatawpha at his sensory-overloading best. Raines can't touch Faulkner for guilt-driven racial Gothic and Poe-esque family romance: Hell, it's a book about fishing. But Raines is funny and, like H.L. Mencken, another sharp-tongued son of the South, mean as a snake. Of the wretched state of political intelligence in America, he says:

"Indeed, conservative Roman Catholics had been absorbed into a pan-Christian alliance of a sort I never would have predicted back in the days when I thought the South was recovering from its monkey-trial fundamentalism. Instead, that Old-Time Religion was mutating, all the way from the suburbs of Atlanta to the industrial ruins of Cleveland, into the New Redneck Church Militant that would, in few months, deliver us into the Land of W., where the monkey trial gives way to the monkey grin."

After journeys into the wit and wisdom of coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, the wonders of True Love (and she likes to fish!) and the consolations of art, Raines brings us back to the subject - back to the marlin and back to the greatest newspaper in the nation. You will not be surprised that the one provides a lesson in how to deal with the other, though Raines handles the payoff of his overarching metaphor with grace. He even works in echoes of the liturgy, a couple of hymns and poetry from the Bard of the '60: "I thought of the Dylan lyric: 'I shall be released.' So may we all be released, fellow travelers, in our hour of darkness, in our time of need."

Neither fishing nor journalism ever sounded so grand.

Diane Roberts is the author of Dream State, a book about Florida.

[Last modified May 1, 2006, 09:34:19]