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The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes
It is in the midst of a swirling river, casting a line, that Mark Wormald meets Ted Hughes.
He stands where the poet stood, forty years ago, because fishing was Ted Hughes's way of breathing - and because the poet's writing has made Mark understand that it has always been his way of breathing, too.
Using Hughes's poetry collection River and his fishing diaries as a guide, Mark returns again and again to the rivers and lakes in Britain and Ireland where the poet fished. At times, he uses Ted's fly patterns; at others his rods. It is an obsession; a fundamental connection to nature; a thrilling wildness; an elemental pursuit. But it is also a release and a consolation, as Mark fishes after the sudden death of his mother and during the slow fading of his father.
A brilliant blend of memoir and biography, The Catch is a stunning meditation on poetry and nature, and a quiet reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.
He stands where the poet stood, forty years ago, because fishing was Ted Hughes's way of breathing - and because the poet's writing has made Mark understand that it has always been his way of breathing, too.
Using Hughes's poetry collection River and his fishing diaries as a guide, Mark returns again and again to the rivers and lakes in Britain and Ireland where the poet fished. At times, he uses Ted's fly patterns; at others his rods. It is an obsession; a fundamental connection to nature; a thrilling wildness; an elemental pursuit. But it is also a release and a consolation, as Mark fishes after the sudden death of his mother and during the slow fading of his father.
A brilliant blend of memoir and biography, The Catch is a stunning meditation on poetry and nature, and a quiet reflection on what it means to be a father and a son.
- GenresMemoir
336 pages, Paperback
Published April 28, 2022
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November 26, 2022A book about Ted Hughes and fishing, two topics in which I'm not interested. Well, I should qualify that; I do love to watch Gone Fishing, and Paul Whitehouse provides a cover quote here (a laudatory one, not "DON'T WIND"); and I did love the film of The Iron Giant. But reading this has really made me dig into why I don't like Hughes beyond that. The sense of the artist as magician, the belief that art worth a damn must contain "real mana"; the sense of a world haunted by ancient presences and primal intention, the anger at what humanity has done to its surroundings – these are all the sort of stuff which normally snare me. I think maybe it's just that sense of glowering, thoughtless maleness – not quite the same reason I hate Hemingway (at least Hughes could string a sentence together, rather than sounding like an incel rewriting See Spot Run), but something a little too close to Heathcliff, as in Bronte's original git rather than the romanticised Kate Bush version. Still, this makes it all the more interesting to read about him through the eyes of a man very much not like that, and one of my old tutors to boot – both of us having gone to Hughes' old college, and indeed inherited old rooms of his when we first arrived.
There's Wormald's own story here as well, with a shaken childhood, a dad who feels in some ways like a quieter echo of Ted Hughes, if only in his determined erasure of certain elements of the family archive. I go back and forth on material like this when it's in books by a stranger – for every Helen Macdonald who pulls it off, two seem to have it in either by publisher demand or simply by default – but in a book by someone you know or knew, it's inherently fascinating, if sometimes awkwardly voyeuristic too, all this personal information which would never have come up in any other way, certainly not in this depth and clarity. And yes, his bigger, rougher brothers' games with darts reminded me of Bros, and yes, the reference to one rod's "butt extension" had me giggling, but even if the specifics of the hobby are alien, the story of going back to a childhood haunt you thought destroyed and finding it intact will always give me shivers. And that's what came through here over and over, that even if I didn't have any intrinsic interest in the solutions to the Hughes fishing mysteries Wormald sets himself, the metaphor of the search was the thing. Mark getting to know people who knew Ted, seeking a moment of indirect contact, a final answer that will never be found, but in the process giving them a connection back to their own lost youth; the attempt to piece together the clues and identify for sure the particular pool or stretch of river Ted's poem and/or fishing diary detail – it's all a search for that eternal Something just out of reach, and even if the water and the artefacts and the accumulated knowledge were one day enough to open a portal and drop Wormald back through the decades to stand beside Hughes, the encounter could only be – to borrow from a 20th century poet more to my taste – not what he meant at all. It's the thing within and behind the man and the work, the pattern in the carpet that he's grasping for, same as I am here. We're all reaching for something beyond, even if we approach it by different paths, and fishing is itself a pretty solid image for that, even if you'd never know it from a lot of angling accounts, with their tendency towards the fussy and paradoxically dry. But, animated by an awareness of that, and by its Hughes-quest woven around every fisherman's dream of that next perfect fish, The Catch instead runs with a poet's eye and a river's flow. I'm glad I waited to read it under steely skies with a chill in the air; it's a long way from the Gone Fishing idyll of sunny English streams, but then that show's using fishing as a very different metaphor, even if there are more laughs here (and not just at butt extensions) than Hughes' looming presence might lead one to expect.
There's Wormald's own story here as well, with a shaken childhood, a dad who feels in some ways like a quieter echo of Ted Hughes, if only in his determined erasure of certain elements of the family archive. I go back and forth on material like this when it's in books by a stranger – for every Helen Macdonald who pulls it off, two seem to have it in either by publisher demand or simply by default – but in a book by someone you know or knew, it's inherently fascinating, if sometimes awkwardly voyeuristic too, all this personal information which would never have come up in any other way, certainly not in this depth and clarity. And yes, his bigger, rougher brothers' games with darts reminded me of Bros, and yes, the reference to one rod's "butt extension" had me giggling, but even if the specifics of the hobby are alien, the story of going back to a childhood haunt you thought destroyed and finding it intact will always give me shivers. And that's what came through here over and over, that even if I didn't have any intrinsic interest in the solutions to the Hughes fishing mysteries Wormald sets himself, the metaphor of the search was the thing. Mark getting to know people who knew Ted, seeking a moment of indirect contact, a final answer that will never be found, but in the process giving them a connection back to their own lost youth; the attempt to piece together the clues and identify for sure the particular pool or stretch of river Ted's poem and/or fishing diary detail – it's all a search for that eternal Something just out of reach, and even if the water and the artefacts and the accumulated knowledge were one day enough to open a portal and drop Wormald back through the decades to stand beside Hughes, the encounter could only be – to borrow from a 20th century poet more to my taste – not what he meant at all. It's the thing within and behind the man and the work, the pattern in the carpet that he's grasping for, same as I am here. We're all reaching for something beyond, even if we approach it by different paths, and fishing is itself a pretty solid image for that, even if you'd never know it from a lot of angling accounts, with their tendency towards the fussy and paradoxically dry. But, animated by an awareness of that, and by its Hughes-quest woven around every fisherman's dream of that next perfect fish, The Catch instead runs with a poet's eye and a river's flow. I'm glad I waited to read it under steely skies with a chill in the air; it's a long way from the Gone Fishing idyll of sunny English streams, but then that show's using fishing as a very different metaphor, even if there are more laughs here (and not just at butt extensions) than Hughes' looming presence might lead one to expect.
September 26, 2023
I REALLY wanted to like this book; its evocation of poet and place, its gorgeous cover, its connection with so many things I'm interested in (Hughes, poetry, landscape, rivers, Plath ...) firmly in the poetic landscape memoir that I generally relish.
And there are moments of strange beauty, even if the fishing seems more important than the poet and the poetry and Sylvia Plath is dismissed slightly as something like that silly thing who wanted to go fishing with the men. This was never intended as a Ted and Sylvia memoir, but I felt she needed more than she gets here, particularly as Wormald goes to closer and much more intimate details about other (fishing) relationships that are significant for Hughes.
It doesn't help for me that much of this is set in that strange UK world of exclusivity: private rivers and private fisheries, fishing hotels and inns, Tory councillors, gentlemen farmers, the Avon Picscatorial Society and 'the pampered playground of the elite'.
And despite (because?) Wormald is a poet, there is a strange stunted, staccato inarticulation at the heart of much of the prose that had me stumbling, re-reading sections and re-reading again, for meaning. Clause within sub-clause within clause. It's blurry often, like we're underwater, in some depthless Irish lake, looking up from the bottom like an ancient pike, as he struggles to evoke the intrinsic meaning in this activity for Hughes and him.
The final two chapters get somewhere, almost. About why fishing and the total concentration it requires, matters, but in the end, 'few things are more tedious than watching a fisherman' or the fisherman himself (this book is full of 'hims') breathlessly recollecting one x-pounder after another being dragged struggling from their environment and wrestled into language.
And there are moments of strange beauty, even if the fishing seems more important than the poet and the poetry and Sylvia Plath is dismissed slightly as something like that silly thing who wanted to go fishing with the men. This was never intended as a Ted and Sylvia memoir, but I felt she needed more than she gets here, particularly as Wormald goes to closer and much more intimate details about other (fishing) relationships that are significant for Hughes.
It doesn't help for me that much of this is set in that strange UK world of exclusivity: private rivers and private fisheries, fishing hotels and inns, Tory councillors, gentlemen farmers, the Avon Picscatorial Society and 'the pampered playground of the elite'.
And despite (because?) Wormald is a poet, there is a strange stunted, staccato inarticulation at the heart of much of the prose that had me stumbling, re-reading sections and re-reading again, for meaning. Clause within sub-clause within clause. It's blurry often, like we're underwater, in some depthless Irish lake, looking up from the bottom like an ancient pike, as he struggles to evoke the intrinsic meaning in this activity for Hughes and him.
The final two chapters get somewhere, almost. About why fishing and the total concentration it requires, matters, but in the end, 'few things are more tedious than watching a fisherman' or the fisherman himself (this book is full of 'hims') breathlessly recollecting one x-pounder after another being dragged struggling from their environment and wrestled into language.
June 9, 2022
Wormald is in search of Ted Hughes through the poetry he writes about fishing.
Wormald is a keen fisherman himself and the obsession he has to track down and fish in, all the places where Hughes has fished is so all consuming that lines often get blurred. It's clearly more than an academic exercise. At times it feels like a kind of grail quest.
As he criss crosses the country and hops about in time, and sometimes mixes his own, personal life with plotting what was going on for Hughes at any given moment, this becomes quite dizzying.
I would say to get the best out of this you need to have a very keen interest indeed in fishing and the technical aspects of it, more than an interest in Hughes, which is what brought me to the book. An interest in the poetry alone is insufficient to truly appreciate the book's worth.
Wormald is a keen fisherman himself and the obsession he has to track down and fish in, all the places where Hughes has fished is so all consuming that lines often get blurred. It's clearly more than an academic exercise. At times it feels like a kind of grail quest.
As he criss crosses the country and hops about in time, and sometimes mixes his own, personal life with plotting what was going on for Hughes at any given moment, this becomes quite dizzying.
I would say to get the best out of this you need to have a very keen interest indeed in fishing and the technical aspects of it, more than an interest in Hughes, which is what brought me to the book. An interest in the poetry alone is insufficient to truly appreciate the book's worth.
May 29, 2022
Yet another biographical study in which it appears compulsory for the author to fill pages with autobiographical material and to attempt to repeat scenes from the subject's life for little apparent point and certainly zero interest for the reader (e.g the toe-curling breathless excitement when Wormald illegally fishes in the same water Hughes did). Norman Sherry and Robert Macafarlane (who of course contributes a laudatory tribute printed on the front cover) have so much to answer for.
So, derivative both in terms of genre and what has already been written about Hughes. Above all it's the pervading smugness about the fact that Wormald is too a fisherman and the complacency with which he assumes that everything he writes is revelatory which makes this a really difficult book to finish. Stop this, Mark Wormald, you are destroying us.
So, derivative both in terms of genre and what has already been written about Hughes. Above all it's the pervading smugness about the fact that Wormald is too a fisherman and the complacency with which he assumes that everything he writes is revelatory which makes this a really difficult book to finish. Stop this, Mark Wormald, you are destroying us.
August 18, 2023
3.75 stars
The book really captivated me early on. I would say though, I came to it with a great interest in Hughes and none in fishing. In the latter half I found my interest waiting slightly, where the fishing 'hook' becomes the key centre of the content. I think a reader who loves fishing as well as the biographical subject would rate this much higher
The book really captivated me early on. I would say though, I came to it with a great interest in Hughes and none in fishing. In the latter half I found my interest waiting slightly, where the fishing 'hook' becomes the key centre of the content. I think a reader who loves fishing as well as the biographical subject would rate this much higher
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews