Sixty years ago, on 28 September 1964, the publication of Sven Berlin’s book on fishing, Jonah’s Dream: Meditation on Fishing, brought to fruition a piece of writing, begun in 1961, that had served as therapy in a crisis-ridden period of litigation and love lost.
Berlin was in the midst of law suits relating to his book The Dark Monarch, Sven’s roman à clef portraying his time with the artists of St. Ives, Juanita had left him and he was in debt and depressed.
‘Tomorrow your balloon goes up," wrote Anthony Dent, Sven’s publisher, ‘and this is just to say we here are all holding our hats and hoping like mad that it will penetrate the stratosphere and bring you down the golden shore…’
Thankfully, Jonah’s Dream was a critical success and even sales were promising, with the book eventually republished in America in 1975. Fifty of the drawings from the book are held by the V&A’s National Art Library. Sven had written to his publisher saying that he was looking forward to producing the drawings of ‘fly & fish & weed & root & flower, scattered everywhere - the jacket as well.’
Jonah’s Dream works on many levels. It is a series of fishing experiences in some of Sven’s favourite places - a lake in London, the river Avon of Ringwood, Lake Bala in Wales, through the ice in Dellan in Sweden, in the forests of Spain and Portugal. They have, as one would expect from Sven, a spiritual depth, and are underpinned with poetic and philosophical writing, hence the subtitle
Meditation on Fishing.
Fishermen, often solitary, gazing into the still waters, unsurprisingly fall into introspective meditation. Sven perhaps more than most. John Arlott wrote of the book ‘a rare piece of writing which tells us how it feels to fish - to catch a fish - a big fish’. And indeed it was the pike (the fish of Death) and the salmon (the fish of Life) to which Sven returned most frequently in his writing.
Sven was fond of fishermen and was always pleased to discuss this meditative sport. Captain Bryn Hammond, a retired ship’s captain with the British Conference Lines (serving Australia and New Zealand), in pursuit of a copy of Jonah’s Dream in the early 1990s, conducted a long and complex correspondence with Sven. Bryn was working on a series of articles comparing the writings of the passionate fishing writers (Berlin, Hemingway and Melville among them). Bryn was also influential in encouraging the production of Sven’s drawings for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Sven referred to him as ‘Man of the Sea’.
Another passionate fisherman and follower of Sven, Mike Pope has very kindly contributed his own memoir of his connection to Sven the fisherman and his discovery of Jonah's Dream and he has allowed us to reproduce it here. Mike first began fishing aged 11 and in between teaching writes for Fallon's Angler. The fact that he too has just turned 60 years old is serendipity indeed!
JONAH’S DREAM – SVEN BERLIN AND ME
It is thrilling to be asked to capture in a few words all that Jonah’s Dream still means to me after so many years. A daunting exercise too! That said, I too have just turned 60 and I find myself in as good a time as any to reflect on the book and its impact on my life and thinking.
My first reading of Jonah’s Dream came about in the mid-1980s, twenty years or more after its publication in the UK in 1964. In late 1986 I walked into a second-hand book shop in Cardiff. I was a serious young man of 22 but I was very unsure of many things in my world. One thing that I did know. I liked to fish. And I liked to read.
A very literary-minded cousin had gifted me a good fishing book or two for my small collection. These fishing books (Arthur Ransome, Fred Taylor) were not instructional how-to affairs but more valuable writing that carried hints of how I could think about fishing and life in a wider sense.
On my initial reading of Jonah, the subtle imagery and allusions flew right past me. But I read on. I am so glad I did. All at once I was drawn into the vivid descriptions of Jonah’s escapades. The pike and dace fishing with Cockle:
“The rain flung spears at us, helmets of water marched in armies down the river. The wind screamed at us, tearing the leaves from the giant ash and elm and willow, flinging them like money into our bankrupt faces. Sudden lightning snatched at my shoulder and hissed. Gates, brambles, fences, nails, wire, nettles: the hooks that tore at us instead of at the fish, tore at our clothes.”
And then into the abstract and back again: “The great bull stood against the night, keeping it out: the great fish was hidden beneath the river.’’ So, I too was hooked.
Rather swiftly these 1980s became interesting times for me. I realised I was not cut out for my job in the bank, too many rules and regulations. I read on, deeper still into Jonah’s Dream.
The next chapter in Jonah took me to France. The overland drive to Les Eysies and Val d’Enfer is described in poignant personal terms, emotional as well as geographic. I had studied French and would do so again within a short time. In this French chapter, Man of Tarshish, I was struck by a few lines in particular.
“…that Southern Archipelago where colour and fish and love are no longer an obsession but part of life.”
In Dordogne “…Ancient man still breathes over the shoulder, and the footsteps of mighty animals snarl at the modern mind and walk indifferently away.’’
Earlier in The Sacrifice, Jonah had gone to France to
“…catch the last brilliance of the year, to live with people to whom colour was a necessity, not an eccentricity; to whom wine and sacrifice and music were indispensable factors of living.’’
This was it, akin to Cockle’s Satori as seen in Jonah’s autumnal fishing. I was barely half way through the book and I was finding a new set of benchmarks.
What of my actual fishing in all of this? I recognised in the Dedication, The Face Of The Waters, a facet of my own angling that had skirted around my own consciousness.
This,
“A young fisherman has the making of a man of vison who might learn to tie his own fly, fight his fish and then release it into the great stream of life for another migration.’’
And
“Fishing therefore is not only a matter of meditation, of peaceful moments in which the reflected images are as real as those above the water, through which fish move and thought is seen upon the fin, turning, nuzzling the mud, searching with tis golden eye for a pearl. It is also a dream of prehistory.”
These were weighty ideas. And now they were mine too. The pursuit of a fish is part of a greater whole that puts me in touch more closely with the nature of being. I think I had always been aware of this vast idea but now I actually knew it. Heady days.
And what did we do in those pre-internet times? Well, I wrote to the author! I outlined the effect that the book had on me and asked Sven whether he fished anymore.
In a matter of a few weeks, I had a reply. Within Sven’s letter to me, almost as a coda to Jonah’s Dream, was another rich slice of the author’s philosophy.
Of the book, Sven explained:
“It was a rare experience. Someone else fishing from the same bank might have caught it.” He continued: “It all seemed to happen on its own like laying pages of gold leaf.”
And this golden nugget: “The experience of fishing is always being re-discovered and is now part of the evolution of the mind as well as of creation itself.”
Sven added that he fished no more but used that which “fishing taught me in the understanding and discovery of life. It is good that you have been awakened to the poetry and mystery of passing through experience before it is frozen into fact.”
Occasionally, I pull out that letter for the words still resonate so heartily.
The chapter too where Jonah travels to North Wales, so redolent of my time salmon fishing in West Wales. As much as Under Milk Wood, the depictions of small town life could have been written about my friends on the river Tywi.
Later the next year, I was in Dorset with my girlfriend. I had Sven’s address to hand and we called unannounced at his cottage in Gaunts, Wimborne. His kindly wife Julia told us that Sven was with his agent and could not be disturbed. We thanked Julia and headed back down the path.
“Wait!” We turned around. It was Sven himself running to catch up with us. We shook hands, exchanged some pleasantries (while I stood like a gormless teenager in awe) and he signed my copy of Jonah’s Dream. I was so impressed that he took time out to come and speak with us.
“You must come back another time and have some tea?” Alas, I never did.
They say that among all the sports and pastimes, angling has the greatest collection of literature. The best fishing literature uses fishing as a medium for wider ideas and storytelling. Some 60 years on, Sven’s book still stands head and shoulders above much of the written fishing word. Perhaps equalled, but never outshone for being the first true fishing story that delved into the nature and creative thoughts of humankind itself. More importantly, it placed these crucial aspects against a wider picture of eternal life that magnifies and clarifies their meaning. Its prose still takes me from the mundane to the mystic in the blink of an eye. And, of course, there is no small amount of this in Sven’s other writing and in his biographies.
Moreover, Jonah’s Dream opened up to my mind to superb writing by US and UK writers from the last 100 years. My fishing books now number over 500. Thanks to this book in particular, I gained a world view that I could not have dreamed of. It has been some adventure. And it has not slowed down yet.
Mike Pope
Cardiff. August 2024
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