Fish Stories BLUES

By Stefan Kanfer

"As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler," wrote Izaak Walton. He was both, but that was an easier accomplishment in the day of The Compleat Angler (1653), when there were fewer artists and more fish. Today it is harder to coax a fresh idea or albacore to the surface.

So the aesthetic and ichthyological achievement of Blues should not be minimized. John Hersey, previously noted for elaborations of such historic themes as World War II (A Bell for Adano), the Holocaust (The Wall) and the atom bomb (Hiroshima), has chosen the dialogue form for what seems a lighter topic: the pursuit of bluefish off Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. But as the book's insatiably curious Stranger talks informally with the knowledgeable Fisherman, a cascade of lore and documents, poetry and tragedy is netted along with the glistening quarry.

Early on, the Fisherman pays his respects to the food chain: "It takes 50 pounds of silversides to produce a five-pound blue. It takes 500 pounds of plankton to produce those silversides. It takes 5,000 pounds of microscopic sea plants to produce those plankton animals . . . 'All flesh is grass.' " Yet there is not an ounce of false sentiment in his speeches: "It probably doesn't make sense to talk about pain in a fish . . . an angler who had caught a perch told of finding himself unable to remove the hook without taking one of the fish's eyes out of its socket with it; he threw the fish back, baited his hook with the eye, and a few minutes later caught a one-eyed fish -- the very same one."

Herring gulls may have some attraction for birders; to the Fisherman they amount to rats with wings. He rings in Ogden Nash for support: "Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;/ He weeps because he's not an ea-gull./ Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,/ Could you explain it to your she-gull?"

This is the lightest of the poems by various hands, liberally scattered through the text. Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" recalls an oversize catch: "victory filled up/ the little rented boat . . . until everything/ was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!/ And I let the fish go." John Ciardi celebrates "The Lung Fish," a survivor intact from prehistoric epochs: "If no/ creature is immortal, some/ are more stubborn than others." And Robert Lowell hopes that "when shallow waters peter out," he will be able to "catch Christ with a greased worm" and save his soul. The Fisherman notes, "Lowell was a Christian, and he was probably right to resort to the metaphor of fishing for his purpose. Christianity is an aquarium . . . in the fourth century, the cross was not the prevailing symbol for the Man-Fisher; the fish was . . . when ((Jesus)) rose from the dead and went up on the Mount, he took with him only three, all fishermen."

Despite the book's originality of structure and style, Blues owes an unacknowledged debt to Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell and other works that draw large morals from minuscule sources. A drop of seawater is viewed under a microscope, and the Fisherman becomes "aware that all sorts of . crimes were being perpetrated in this driblet of liquid. The muggers were mugging; the killers were killing; the thieves were stealing . . . there were two ways of looking at what was happening in that crowded sea in the bowl in the slide: You could see violence, desperate struggles to survive, the will to live, the drive to perpetuate the species. You could also see, though . . . nature's serene determination to keep in balance all the forms of life."

There is no question that Hersey prefers the second interpretation, and why not? A balanced water ecology provides for a biblical plenitude, with room for the silent fish and the screaming gulls, the predators and the scavengers -- and even those oddest of animals, at once useless and invaluable, the celebrators who go down to the sea in books.