The Right Angle

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2021

The Right Angle

On Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler

After the Bible and Shakespeare, one of the most reproduced books in the English language is Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. No surprise there: the seventeenth-century fishing how-to is as alluring today as when it was written. Walton’s understanding of the behavior of freshwater fish remains remarkable for the depth of his acuity and the intimacy of his language. No one else could describe a trout or a pike or a perch in such living terms as Walton. Published amid the turmoil of the Interregnum, the book also offers an escape from the failings of man into a more companionable world of fish and freedom, a particularly English freedom revealed in Walton’s observations and candor. Whether as a “Brother of the Angle” or mere “Pretender,” rare is the reader not hooked by this “Compleat” discourse on, as its subtitle suggests, the “Contemplative Man’s Recreation.”

Walton sets Angler as an extended “Conference betwixt” a fisherman (Piscator), a hunter (Venator), and a falconer (Auceps): “You are well overtaken, Gentlemen!,” Piscator begins. “A good morning to you both! I have stretched my legs up Tottenham-hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine fresh May morning.”

The three become confiding friends who soon reveal that complaints about fishing are nothing new. Venator says that he has “heard many merry Huntsmen make sport and scoff at Anglers.” Auceps admits that he too has “heard many grave, serious men pity them, ’tis such a heavy, contemptible, dull recreation.” As each sportsman proceeds in “commending his recreation,” Piscator sets the hook for reeling in his audience to the joys of angling:

O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Flie? a Trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have nam’d, and more watchful and timorous than your high mettled Marlin is bold?

A Trout! For most, a fish is a fish, but Walton makes a friend of his forage as great fishermen do. He respects the mind and manners of his creel as he would a visitor and guest.

Piscator goes into an extended consideration of the connections between fishiness and Godliness, one that should leave the reader with little doubt that the one true church is waterside and the one mode of veneration is angling. Of the twelve Apostles, Jesus “chose four that were simple fishermen,” as Walton writes. Not only that, but “when our blessed Saviour went up into the mount, when he left the rest of his disciples, and chose only three to bear him company at his Transfiguration, that those three were all Fishermen.” Why fishermen? Because “he found that the hearts of such men, by nature, were fitted for contemplation and quietnesse; men of mild, and sweet, and peaceable spirits, as indeed most Anglers are.”

The hook is clearly set. As if there were any lingering doubt of a fisherman’s divine favor, “I might tell you that Almighty God is said to have spoken to a Fish, but never to a Beast; that he hath made a Whale a Ship, to carry and set his Prophet Jonah safe on the appointed shore.” In this extensive dialogue on the life aquatic, Walton’s discourse suggests that Melville’s latter-day fish tale may have been another product of The Compleat Angler’s influence.

Mixed in with many discussions of flies and worms, of just where to set the hook and when to reel it in, are Walton’s affecting chapters on fish species: The salmon is “accounted the King of freshwater fish”; the tench is the “Physician of Fishes”; the perch is a “very good, and very bold biting fish”; the eel is the “most daintie fish . . . The Queen of palat pleasure”; and the carp is the “Queen of Rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish.” We learn such details that “in Italy they make great profit of the spawn of Carps, by selling it to the Jews, who make it into red Caviare; the Jews not being by their Law admitted to eat of Caviare made of the Sturgeon, that being a Fish that wants scales, and (as may appear in Levit. 11.) by them reputed to be unclean.” As for the trout, “He may be justly said, as the old poet said of wine, and we English say of venison, to be a generous fish.” Pikes, meanwhile, are “maintained by the death of so many other Fish, even those of their own kind.” This apex predator is the “Tyrant of the rivers, or the Fresh-water wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring, disposition; which is so keen.” As for just what to do with such a “solitary, melancholy and a bold Fish,” Walton offers up a recipe:

First, open your Pike at the gills, and if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly; out of these, take his guts, and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small with Time, Sweet-Marjoram, and a little Winter-savoury; to these put some pickled Oysters, and some Anchovies, two or three; both these last whole (for the Anchovies will melt, and the Oysters should not) to these, you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well salted.

The recipe continues on from there. Walton truly set out to make his Angler “Compleat,” resulting in an amiable book that is a tackle box of information.

The title page to the first edition of The Compleat Angler.

Born around 1593, in the town of Stafford in the English West Midlands, Walton was a staunch Royalist whose works and deeds looked back to the pastoral age of his Jacobean youth. He published the first edition of The Compleat Angler in 1653, “in the most troubled years of the early Commonwealth,” writes John Buchan, who edited a 1901 edition of the work, in his introduction. Through 1676, Walton revised and updated his treatise in five editions. In addition to Angler, he also wrote several “Lives,” such as the one of his friend John Donne. Buchan describes these biographies as “all with this old-world, Jacobean flavour, churchmen all, members of the church quiescent, devout, learned.”

As a young tradesman, Walton ran a small shop in London’s Fleet Street, but Royalist losses pushed him back out to the countryside—as it happens, to a small plot by a stream. Here, “few long lives have been so free from conspicuous misfortune,” Buchan observed. “He had sorrow in his own family, and to one of his peculiar temperament the Royalist reverses must have come as real afflictions. But in the main he lived his easy life of books and angling undisturbed.”

In one episode, Walton was entrusted with a royal jewel known as the “lesser George,” which he secreted away from Cromwell’s London until the Restoration. Otherwise he was a “man of letters pure and simple,” Buchan notes, “the main incidents in his career are the dates of his book, and any attempt at biography is a monotonous chronicle.” In writing his introduction, as the author of spy thrillers, Buchan might have wanted a little more out of his subject. Instead Walton lived out ninety years surrounded by friends of “quietistic temperament,” for which the “strong rude wind of the outer world rarely disturbed those peaceful dovecotes; gentle meditation, mild and sincere devotion, innocent pleasures—such was the order of their days.” Upon his death in 1683, Walton left his cottage, now a museum, to the benefit of his Stafford neighbors so that it might generate income “to buy coals for some poor people that should have most need thereof in the said town.”

Walton wrote as impeccably as he lived. His Angler was not the first fishing book, but it was the one to breathe that “very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart,” commented Charles Lamb: “It would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it.” Wordsworth dedicated two sonnets to “Walton, sage benign.” Walter Scott wrote that Walton “had so true an eye for nature,” but only wishes he had “made this northern tour” to Scotland. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica stated, “There is hardly a name in English literature, even of the first rank, whose immortality is more secure, or whose personality is the subject of a more devoted cult.” Buchan concurred, noting that “The Angler has been so praised for centuries that a modern writer must refrain from eulogy and seek only the bare phrases of justice.”

In the sixteenth century, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published his 4,500-page, four-volume encyclopedia of the animal world to which Walton often refers. A 1577 book called The Arte of Angling, which was only rediscovered in partial text in the 1950s, carries more than a few similarities to Walton’s own, signaling likely source material. Yet no other nature writer quite “seems always to speak with the living voice,” as Buchan notes, “and it is the living voice that is wanted in a country book.”

Through its “deftness of phrase, the use of mellifluous words, the pleasant cadence of the sentences,” Buchan writes, The Compleat Angler “remains a model of ease and charm.” The “beginning of true angling literature,” the book was the “first to give the sport a halo of letters which it has never lost.” More than a “quaint medley,” Angler in its own day was the “most valuable treatise on the practice of the art, and that still it is not wholly superseded.” But Walton also offers fishing as philosophy and meditation. For Part II of The Compleat Angler, which appeared with the fifth edition,Walton’s friend Charles Cotton extended the franchise by writing a longer discourse on fly fishing: “Here’s a Trout has taken my Flie,” a newbie fisherman laments at one point. “I had rather have lost a Crown. What luck’s this! He was a lovely Fish, and turn’d up a side like a Salmon.” To which Piscator responds: “O Sir, this is a War where you sometimes win, and must sometimes expect to loose. Never concern your self for the loss of your Flie; for ten to one I teach you to make a better.” After all, as Walton writes,

he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self; but having once got and practis’d it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like Vertue, a reward to it self.

In our own time of troubles, Walton continues to unfold, as Buchan wrote, the “heart and soul of the angler—not necessarily the sportsman, but the angler—a man who loves books as well as his art, who sees nature through the glass of culture, the townsman and the gentleman.” I have not been alone in taking up a renewed interest in fishing over this pandemic year. My Connecticut bait shop still speaks of the “great minnow shortage” of 2020 as more of us became a “Brother”—and Sister—“of the Angle.” Walton is therefore a writer for our age, a needed addition to the pockets of fishermen and non-fishermen alike. “We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of Strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did,” Walton concludes, “and so (if I might be judge) God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than Angling”—just as no other writer made such a book about the angle.

The sound of silence

The Spectator, May 2021

The sound of silence

While a few went to the Moon, Jacques Cousteau was opening the oceans to all.

For a few years in my youth, I tried to be a scuba diver. In the deep pool of the 63rd Street Y, I learned how to clean my goggles and clear my air regulators. In a lake in upstate New York, I earned my certification by swimming around a junked car in 40 feet of murky water. I went on to dive to some cold wrecks in Rhode Island and to swim among the warm sea life of Key Largo. But it wasn’t for me. The bobbing boats and the heavy equipment caused much discomfort. In one dive I banged my head against the tank of my divemate and nearly got knocked out. It was all less elegant, and quite a bit more involved, than I had expected.

My inspiration, of course, had been Jacques Cousteau. The French underwater explorer dived the world’s oceans a generation ago as both celebrity and icon. His ubiquity then is now only matched by his cultural absence today. Since his passing in 1997 his reputation has sunk, much like his beloved ship Calypso.

There was always more beneath that red knit cap. For those of us brought up on the compressed air of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, his primetime series broadcast from 1966 through 1976, and The Cousteau Odyssey, its PBS follow-up of 1977-82, the gaseous emissions of these environmental ‘reality’ shows can cut against the true reality of a philandering adventurer who found his share of trouble both under the surface and under the covers.

The Silent World — Le Monde du silence — Cousteau’s early landmark film of 1956, presents an artful submersion into his lasting achievements. Codirected by the 23-year- old Louis Malle, who went on to give us My Dinner With André and Au revoir les enfants, the film won an Oscar and the Palme d’Or at Cannes — the only documentary to receive both honors.

With Malle behind the lens, The Silent World revels in the abstractions of the depths. Created at the dawn of the space age, the film shows us an alternative space, equally mysterious, more sensual, far more palatable, with the tricolore fluttering from the mast of Calypso hundreds of feet above. In its accented voice and imagery, The Silent World has become so iconic, so repeated, even so parodied that it is all the more remarkable to view its scenes in their original presentation. Unlike Cousteau’s later television work, the film is now widely available online. Sixty-five years on, it deserves a deeper dive.

The Silent World opens with a pop. A balloon covering an underwater flare inflates and explodes. The divers of Calypso descend holding their burning red torches. Perrier-sized bubbles of noxious gases rise to the surface like rocket exhaust.

‘These divers, wearing the compressed air aqualung, are true space men, swimming free as fish,’ begins the narration. ‘These are the divers of the Calypso, the research ship of the undersea explorer, Captain Cousteau.’ The cameras, the lights and the mobile air regulation were all as new as moon suits. Much of it had been developed and refined by Cousteau himself since World War Two, when Lieutenant Cousteau and the engineer Émile Gagnan tested their first aqualungs, the early scuba design that freed divers from the copper suits, leaden feet and heavy lines then required to pump air down from the surface.

Like its namesake nymph who detained Odysseus, Calypso captivated Cousteau just as it transported a world audience. The malt magnate Thomas Loel Guinness bought the American-made minesweeper from a ferry company in 1950 and leased it to Cousteau for a franc a year. The arrangement was not revealed until after Cousteau’s death, all on the understanding that Cousteau would never ask Guinness to fund his adventures. Instead, bankrolled and maintained by Simone Melchior, his beleaguered wife who sailed on every voyage but never appeared onscreen, the ship received a viewing pod riveted to its prow and oceanographic and videographic equipment outfitted bow to stern.

Cousteau was a promiscuous fundraiser as much as he was a precocious adulterer. Before the launch of his environmentalist Cousteau Society in 1974, his major funders were oil companies out to develop deep-sea drilling. His ‘Conshelf’ undersea pods of the 1960s were prototype saturation platforms, allowing divers to live and drill for oil at depth without the dangers of decompression. In the 1950s, British Petroleum and the Compagnie française des pétroles sent Cousteau to the Trucial Coast, where some tiny sheikdoms were about to taste the Texas tea lapping beneath their Arabian sands. It was this exploratory voyage, through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, that provided the two years of footage used to create The Silent World.

A flâneur of the fishy realm, Cousteau would as soon eat, pickle, lacerate, cage, torture or blow up his discoveries as protect them. In The Silent World, he manages to document each one of these achievements. In one scene, he and his crew dive for spiny lobsters to make a shipboard feast. As it turns out, most of the lobsters were purchased at a market in Marseille. Meanwhile a related plot device regarding nitrogen narcosis was made up out of thin air. In another scene, flying fish land on the Calypso’s deck. ‘In the morning,’ Cousteau explains, ‘we simply pick them up for breakfast. They are very tasty.’

For Cousteau, scientific investigation, combined with the potential for good image-making, presented an unavoidable hazard to sea life. In The Silent World, he and the crew hitch rides on sea turtles and stand on giant tortoises. He locks up an annoying grouper he nicknames Ulysses in a shark cage.

‘In order to take back a brief sampling of the reef,’ he says, ‘we must unfortunately cause some damage.’ What that means here is the use of underwater dynamite. ‘For the purpose of scientific study, it is the only method for taking a census of all of the varieties in an area,’ he says, detonating an explosive that shatters all the fish in the area.

‘For every 10 fish killed, only one or two float to the surface. The rest sink with injured air bladders, and only divers can collect them all. At the bottom we swim into a tragic scene.’ The tragedy ends as a gasping puffer fish, filled with water, disgorges its final gulp. ‘When this puffer fish is in danger, he inflates himself with water so the enemy can’t swallow him. But the trick does not work against dynamite,’ Cousteau concludes.

The most startling scene of The Silent World concerns the crew’s encounter with a large pod of sperm whales. One of his crew-members, Cousteau explains, wants to fulfill his dream of harpooning a whale. The Calypso then steers too close to the pod and rams one of the creatures with its underwater observation room. ‘We’ve crashed into a whale. I listen to its cries of distress,’ says Cousteau. ‘Then just before our eyes the drama becomes a tragedy.’ In ‘childish carelessness’ a whale calf falls behind the pack and is lacerated by Calypso’s propeller. ‘We speed up to harpoon him. We must put the whale out of its misery. The little whale fights bravely to keep up with his parents. The baby cannot be saved. We all feel very bad about the baby whale. Dumas gets his rifle and makes a merciful end to his suffering.’

But that’s not all the drama. As the whale’s blood spills through the water, dozens of sharks begin to circle the fresh carcass. The first bite ‘is the signal for the orgy to begin,’ says Cousteau. ‘Every seaman hates the shark. After what we have seen, the divers can’t be held back. They get anything they can to avenge the whale.’ After killing the whale, the Cousteau crew then hauls the sharks on board to bludgeon them with the blunt ends of their axes. In a final, comic scene, a diver sticks a suckerfish to the back of another seaman.

In 2004, Wes Anderson released The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film that tanked at the box office despite an all-star cast and lavish budget. One reason the film may have failed to find its audience is that this send-up of Cousteau, played by a dyspeptic, thin-skinned, money-grubbing Bill Murray, seemed so unlike the beloved Cousteau we thought we knew. As it turns out, the film portrayed Cousteau more honestly than Cousteau did himself.

The ownership of Calypso was not the only secret the diver maintained in life. He also kept a secret family and married his much younger mistress upon Melchior’s death in 1990. As his philandering has come to the surface, the dysfunction exhibited between the two sides of the family has divided the Cousteau legacy and kept Calypso rotting in dry dock after it was sunk and salvaged in the port of Singapore in 1996. A 2016 French biopic called L’odyssée took even more air out of Cousteau’s reputation, focusing on the troubled relationship he maintained with his sons — leading up to the death in 1979 of Philippe Cousteau, who died while piloting the Calypso II, the PBY Catalina flying boat that featured in the opening credits of the television series.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was the boulevardier of the oceans. He explored the seas as a post-Napoleonic savant. He told its story as a latter-day Jules Verne. He was not, as it turns out, a saint in life. But nor should he be seen as a sinner in death. Cast aside our Anglo morality, our enviro-puritanism, and the Cousteau who bubbles up is, simply put, French.

Snowbound at City Ballet

THE NEW CRITERION

Snowbound at City Ballet

On Kyle Abraham’s When We Fell, performed by New York City Ballet.

Video killed the ballet star. At least that’s the impression we got watching the many attempts over the past year at translating the ballet stage to the computer screen. Iced out of the David H. Koch Theater, last fall New York City Ballet tried to turn up the heat for the final week of its digital fall season with five video premieres. To its credit, the pre-recorded programs gratefully brought ballet out onto the streets. Coming home from the office one evening, I happened to see one of the works in production, with the principal dancer Taylor Stanley moving fluidly, then spastically, as if suddenly possessed, as he stood up from a bench in Riverside Park.

The joy of seeing live dance—even just a few seconds of it set to recorded music—seemed far removed from the treacly, overedited final product that ensued. Created by Justin Peck, with Jody Lee Lipes as the director of photography, that sneaker ballet became just another Nike ad, in this case set to Chris Thile’s earworm of a tune called “Thank You, New York.” Really, no thanks. Another reason to pack up and move to Texas.

Despite the talent of their choreographers and dancers, the other four works fared little better. The problem was the overly redolent filmmaking by Ezra Hurwitz and cinematography by Jon Chema. In Andrea Miller’s “new song,” set to music by the executed Chilean singer Víctor Jara, the perfume was at its fullest, and was in fact quite evocative. But ballet does not need quick cuts, smokey closeups, and lens flares. Just let dancers dance.

With its new spring initiative, City Ballet has learned from the mistakes of last fall. The mandate to let dancers dance is what makes choreographer Kyle Abraham’s latest video premiere, called When We Fell, so compelling. Developed with eight City Ballet dancers during a three week residency—“COVID-compliant,” we are assured—at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York, the ballet offers a haunting return to form. Co-directed by Abraham and the cinematographer Ryan Marie Helfant, When We Fell captures the performers in 16-millimeter black-and-white film as they move across the Koch Theater stage and, even more affectingly, Philip Johnson’s mezzanine. Now the cameras are static, often fitted with a fisheye lens, so that the point of view resembles surveillance footage switching intermittently among feeds. In the otherwise empty theater—empty of all of us for far too long—the work feels like “night at the ballet,” or day at the ballet, with the ghosts of dance filling the shadows.

But of course, the Koch theater has not been entirely vacant this past year. Those colossal marble statues, enlarged by Lincoln Kirstein from tiny figurines by Elie Nadelman, have kept watch over the hall. With bodysuit costumes by Marc Happel, in When We Fell the dancers arrive as marble halfway made flesh. In her pantomime poses, the soloist Claire Kretzschmar enters the scene as a Nadelman sculpture herself, at times come to life, at others returning to the cold stone of the space.

Captured at various angles, this ballet, which remains available for streaming through Thursday, makes the most of the rigid geometries of the mezzanine’s architecture. The dancers move like chess pieces across the gridded marble floor. They watch one another. Then they freeze in position, as when the corps dancer India Bradley pauses in penché. Taylor Stanley is most adroit at incorporating Abraham’s liquid breakdancing flow with the Balanchine technique—two dance traditions that are not so far removed as one might imagine. Done right, the hip-hop dancing looks like ballet in reverse, with movement made strange, popping and melting down. The opening music of “Piece for Four Pianos,” by Morton Feldman, adds to the odd emptiness as it seemingly reverberates through the vacant theater.

We should not expect such ballet, at moments like this, to resolve into the Nutcracker Suite. And indeed, as Abraham’s sixteen-minute work continues, it shifts from the mezzanine to the Koch Theater stage, with dancers now overanimated by the cacophony of Jason Moran’s “All Hammers and Chains,” which sounds as advertised. As the performers dance past one another, an abundance of cabriole leaps and fouetté turns by the apprentice KJ Takahashi resolves into a pas de deux. Now the lighting designer Dan Scully shines a backlight on the principals Lauren Lovette and Taylor Stanley and it seems as if we observe them from offstage. Nico Muhly supplies the music, titled “Falling Berceuse,” for this elegiac coda. Finally the camera zooms out to reveal dapples of light that turn out to be the faceted lamps of the Koch auditorium, so well known, but here become strange. Created during a snowy residency in upstate New York, When We Fell captures that eerie, snowbound feeling of a year in frozen isolation.