In our family, there was no clear line between religion
and fly fishing.
One way to classify sentences is simply beginning, middle, and end sentences, referring to the
place they hold in an essay, story, or other unit. A beginning sentence can catch the reader's
interest, or can introduce the themes or topics to come, or can do both. Our sentence is the
beginning of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (1976). It does both things, brilliantly.
Its catchiness needs no comment, but its function in signaling the themes of the book deserves
careful appreciation. The main themes are family, fly fishing, religion, and the close connections
among them, in about that order. All of them are clearly developed in the first few pages.
The family is the father, Presbyterian minister and fly fisherman, two sons, and the mother. The integration of fishing and religion, the catchy part of the beginning sentence, is what Maclean develops to lay the foundation of the book. (Note that while it reads like a novel, the book is autobiographical of the elder son, Norman.) He points out first one of his father's lessons about Christ 's disciples, that they were fishermen. The boy Norman assumes they were fly fishermen and that Christ's favorite, John, was a dry-fly fisherman. The father's other religious lessons, delivered between demonstrations of casting correctly, were theological. "Paul and I probably received as many hours of instruction in fly fishing as we did in all other spiritual matters." The theology was Presbyterian and so was the fishing. "Izaac Walton," the father taught, "is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman."
Maclean sums up his father's theology, directly parallel with proper fishing: "To him, all good things--trout as well as eternal salvation--come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy." Maclean works word magic in this sentence that links trout and salvation: Grace is conveniently ambiguous so that it can refer to both trout and salvation and thus remove the clear line between them crucial to the point of the beginning sentence. God's redeeming grace, leading to salvation, blends nicely with art's skillful grace, leading to trout.
One suspects that the Maclean brothers never tried to separate the grace of artistic handling of a fly rod from the grace of God that redeems the natural man, who, Norman learned from his father, was "a mess." The boys learned that fly fishing "is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock" and that a mess of line will result if you don't learn the art . "Well," Maclean writes, "until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far back" and make a mess of his line. "Since it is natural for man to try to attain power without recovering grace, he whips the line back and forth making it whistle each way" and messing it up.
I have quoted liberally from the first few pages of the book to demonstrate how tightly Maclean weaves the weft of fishing into the warp of religion to fulfill the promise of the catchy beginning sentence. Even recognizing the word magic he tries to put over on us, we have to admire the web he creates.
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