TROUT MAGIC

The author of Anatomy of a Murder reveals his lifelong passion for speckled browns and rainbows and slightly less long love affair with dry fly-casting. To be sure, he began as a bait fisherman and often he went home troutless. Even today, snob that he is, Traver when hungry will use a wet fly or nymph and not throw his catch back in — though the noblest snobs fish for sport, not meat. Nor is size the measure of the delight (or melancholy) of successful fly-fishing. A native of Michigan, as was Hemingway, Traver suggests that Papa's great short-story "Big Two-Hearted River" purposefully disguises the great trout stream of the Fox River as the more famous but less interesting Two Heart River, thus saving the Fox for private fishing. (Carlos Baker, though, quotes Hemingway as saying that the name change was made "not from ignorance nor carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry.") Writing in a somewhat impish, unsophisticated voice, Traver still makes fly-casting invigorating.