What's in a Name?

By John Skow

The wary reader, overdosed these many years on both Hemingway lore and mystical guff about fishing, and weary, in addition, of all too believable accounts of alcoholic decline, might tune in to Championship Bowling and leave Lorian Hemingway's memoir on the nightstand. Fair enough, but Walk on Water (Simon and Schuster; 250 pages; $23), though it does deal with booze and fishing addictions (the first deadly, the second a kind of soul's balancing act, said to be curative), is chiefly the record of a writer growing up and learning her trade.

She learned. And grew up, calamitously and against long odds. Both achievements shine in a graceful sentence early in her story, as she explains her communion with unresponsive fish: "I had patience, the sort I suspect God has with people like me." Patience with her own demons came slowly. As a young woman, "a booze-sucking, pill-popping, dope-slamming druggie," she turned 18 in jail, jugged on a possession charge. She seems not to have known Grand-Papa Ernest well (and would say, no, no, not that Hemingway family, not me), though later she adored his younger brother, her great-uncle Leicester, and spent memorable days deep-sea fishing with him.

Her own father, Greg Hemingway, a short, oily, muscular man by her resentful description, was a brooding depressive, mostly absent, who tried desperately to be an outdoor guy like Ernest. Tried to be a father, at their first meeting in 10 years, when he took the 16-year-old Lorian marlin fishing off Bimini, lost his nerve and lost a great fish. She didn't know him, she writes, and wasn't able to comfort him, or help him laugh it off, or pretend that the failure was O.K. She certainly did not understand what became apparent later, that Greg's real passion, his father's ghost mocking him cruelly, was to dress in women's clothes. And in middle age, sober, married, a mother and a novelist (Walking into the River), she still can't quite accept this joker in the hand life dealt her. She writes, "There are no greeting cards that read, 'Thinking of you fondly, transvestite Dad.'"

A long road from that disillusion, and near the rock bottom that alcoholics talk of having to hit, Lorian was up in Michigan on the Big Two-Hearted River, the subject of a photo shoot. Never mind that Ernest had actually fished the nearby Fox River, which had more trout, and merely used the Big Two-Hearted name because he liked it. Her difficulty was that she was drinking 32 cans of beer a day. An old, reformed alcoholic camped nearby told her she needed help, and that the truth hurts.

It did. She blamed "family history," her father, her grandfather. An old aunt, dying, said, forget that, you're a drunk. The author went through detox, then months in which her shaking hands shook less. And finally--family history, of course--learned to fly-fish properly. Taught, she insists, by a vision, possibly supernatural, of a naked man, fly rod in hand, drifting down a river on a raft. Sure. Anyhow, she is now able to cast a Royal Coachman so that the fly walks on water, "and the circle of fish shatters like beads in a kaleidoscope, bathing me in light."

--By John Skow