(Excerpt from Sailing Across Europe
Mynheer snook, you ha...)
Excerpt from Sailing Across Europe
Mynheer snook, you have failed me. That is sorry, said Mynheer Snook. Yes, I insisted, you let me down. Just when I needed you most, you weren't there.
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Going Fishing: Travel and Adventure with a Fishing Rod
(This is just the story of some rods, and the places they ...)
This is just the story of some rods, and the places they take you to. It begins with surf-casting on the New Jersey coast when I was 13, and carries on to such scenes as flyfishing the headwaters of the Kuban in the upper Caucasus, and casting for rainbow trout in the rivers of southern Chile, with a volcano erupting every ten minutes within plain view. 'There is not a record, or even a very big fish in it; and some of the finest things fishing has given me I have found beside the steams of the West Country in England. Chiefly, I love my rods because of their associations, the places they have brought me to. They have been part of my kit when I travel, for many years. 'This magic wand has revealed to me some of the loveliest places on earth. That is the story of this book.' - Negley Farson
James Negley Farson was an American author and adventurer.
Background
He was born James Scott Negley Farson in Plainfield, New Jersey, the son of Enoch Farson and Grace Negley. He was raised in an atmosphere of precarious gentility. His father was president of a struggling manufacturing company that bore his name, but he devoted most of his attention to yachting.
Farson was raised by his grandparents. Major General James Scott Negley, a veteran of the Mexican and Civil wars, awed his grandson and attempted equally to awe his numerous creditors. Upon his death a cynical man who had lost his fortune on Wall Street was appointed Farson's guardian.
He always tried to make a showplace of his estate, in an attempt to impress financiers. Farson remembered shooting ducks so that his guardian could put food on the table.
Education
At the age of fifteen Farson was expelled from Phillips Andover Academy for helping to throw a Latin professor into the campus lake.
He left his studies in civil engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1912, after his parents insulted his girlfriend, who was an actress.
After leaving college he sold oil in New York, chains in Manchester, England, arms in Moscow, and trucks in Chicago.
Career
He volunteered to fight with the United States and France in World War I, but he ended up with a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. Farson flew a scout plane in Egypt.
In 1918 his plane crashed near Cairo, and he spent two years recuperating on a houseboat in British Columbia.
Farson did free-lance writing after returning from the war. In 1924 he took a riverboat across Europe and wrote regularly for the Chicago Daily News. This assignment, like so many that followed, allowed him to express his interests in travel and fishing. Farson was a foreign correspondent for the News for eleven years.
An anglophile, he covered the blitz but did not overlook the ignoble behavior of some Londoners under the bombs. Farson's detachment and love of adventure were displayed in books about his travels in South America, Africa, and the Caucasus.
The writing in the travel books is uneven, and in his second volume of memoirs Farson tried to explain why.
He confessed that the pressure of daily reporting in the 1930's had been unbearable.
Farson began to drink heavily.
Farson died near Georgeham, North Devon, where he had fished and written during the last two decades of his life.
Achievements
He spent about half of this time in England, and from 1933 to 1934 he was president of the London Association of American Newspaper Correspondents. He also reported extensively from western Europe, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and India.
During the isolationist 1920's and 1930's, Farson made foreign news exciting to Americans by offering an exotic travelogue interrupted by human interest stories about ordinary citizens and great leaders.
Farson wrote with the same enthusiasm about the hospitals in these countries, where emergency surgery often interrupted his coverage of the news. Farson wrote much about human disasters, providing little in the way of analysis; and this style was probably the key to his popularity.
His readers preferred a vivid record of personal experience to abstractions. Few readers of Farson could feel sorry for themselves, so briskly did he parade the misfortunes of other peoples and his own injuries. This approach often produced good reporting. Farson's political commitments did not color his vision. He defended the Soviet Union but wrote as appreciatively about czarist officials as about Lenin's bureaucracy.
Quotations:
Like these journalists Farson wrote a best-selling memoir, The Way of a Transgressor (1936), which glamorized the role of the foreign correspondent: "I watched the world come to bits. .. . I talked with Dictators, I shot the great fin-whale with the dean of Norwegian gunners, I sat with Gandhi under his mango tree at Karadi, and I went up to Lossiemouth, to talk with Ramsay MacDonald. .. . I made a trip back to my own country, to sit with the strikers, listen to the wails of my taxable friends, talk with the drought-stricken farmers and cowboys of the Dakotas, to see if America was really getting a new sense of values under Roosevelt. I talked with Roosevelt in the White House and had a private view of John Dillinger, naked on the slab, after he had been shot. I watched Stalin review the Red Army in the Red Square. "
Often, Farson recalled, he had only "an hour to write a dispatch of some 800 words or more, which in a few hours was going to be read by the State Department, the diplomats in Washington and the university professors nearly every word of those cables was written with nerves taut as a tuned-up violin. "
He discovered, though, after leaving the Chicago Daily News in 1935, that the daily schedule was not the problem. It was the job of foreign correspondent itself: "I know of no profession more calculated to kill one's enthusiasm for the human race. " Farson found no simple path away from alcoholism, nor could he define a better role for the journalist. He contributed regularly to the London Daily Mail and continued to defy authorities who thought they knew better how to live: "I sometimes think that if life has taught me anything, it is not to believe all these people who make it their business to tell you how to live, " he wrote in Mirror for Narcissus (1956).
Often, Farson recalled, he had only "an hour to write a dispatch of some 800 words or more, which in a few hours was going to be read by the State Department, the diplomats in Washington and the university professors nearly every word of those cables was written with nerves taut as a tuned-up violin. "
Membership
He was a memeber of the London Association of American Newspaper Correspondents.
Connections
On September 22, 1920, he married Eve Stoker; they had one child.
Father:
James Scott Negley Farson i
mother
Grace Negley
Wife:
Eve Stoker
Grandfather:
James Scott Negley
Major General James Scott Negley, a veteran of the Mexican and Civil wars, awed his grandson and attempted equally to awe his numerous creditors.
colleague:
Walter Duranty
colleague
John Gunther
colleague
Vincent Sheean
He made fewer judgments about European politics than colleagues such as Walter Duranty, John Gunther, and Vincent Sheean.
