In an essay for The Atlantic in 1926, Edwardian novelist EM Forster said, “Literature is a flying fish.” Ironically, it was a quote that never took off. As an afterthought, perhaps knowing it was a dud, he surrounded it with some explanation.
“The fish are the English emotions,” he mumbled, “which are always trying to get up to the surface but don’t quite know how.” He goes on to say that when these emotions do come out as art, “it is a proof that beauty and emotion exist in the salt, inhospitable sea”. A supplementary explanation is always a bad sign with a quote.
While he did not have the quotability of someone like Oscar Wilde, Forster did leave us with some good novels that gave us a view of the stifling world of Edwardian England. Colonisation, foreigners, the frustrations of the English class system were some of his favourite themes. The stories usually involved attempts to push through some form of social or cultural barrier, but being bounced off its mirrored ceiling and ending up slightly mangled on the floor.
There is no record of EM Forster having ever seen a flying fish, despite twice taking a steamer to India from England and back. If he had, I’m sure we would have heard about it, as it is an Alice in Wonderland experience. Something zips out of the water, sprouts wings and glides for what seems like an unfeasibly long time. Sometimes, there are whole squadrons of them spread out in formation, defying logic and gravity in equal measure. It’s like seeing your first rainbow and has the same element of the incredulous about it. The uninitiated will let out a gasp or a whoop and turn to you wide-eyed and say, “I had no idea fish could fly!”
Like dreams, they seem paler in the daylight, with wings that look more like wet seaweed than tools of levitation.
Despite their ability to dazzle, they are largely ignored by all but a handful of ichthyologists who insist they are pronounced as one word: flyingfish.
On a pelagic birding expedition traversing the Pacific Ocean from Auckland to Japan on an old Russian research ship, I came across a fellow expedition guide, Steve Howell. He was an enthusiastic bugger and is one of the world’s top birders.
On the long stretches of tropical ocean, which the birders referred to as the “blue desert”, I noticed Howell stayed in position at the bow of the ship, snapping away with his expensive camera and long lens. He was taking seemingly impossible shots of flying fish and at night would sidle up to our group with an image on his camera and say, “What will we call this one, then?” The collective would furnish him with names like “raspberry wing” or “necromancer”.
Without knowing it, he was forming a taxonomy of flying fish, bothering to notice and study what most had ignored. Later, he produced a slim volume, the well-named The Amazing World of Flyingfish, and it remains the best source of information on the 60 species that inhabit the world’s warm oceans.
Howell showed me some of his photos detailing the curious take-off sequence of the flying fish. Underwater, they are unremarkable, their long pectoral fins are folded along their body and look invisible. At the approach of a predator, such as mahi mahi or tuna, or the bow of a ship, they appear to briefly pause and crook their body into the form of a question mark before springing into a blur of tail thrusts that gets them to take off speed, and they punch through the surface in a very short time. They like to take off upwind, and once clear of the water they open their pectoral and anal fins and bear off across the wind.
Once gliding, they use the ground effect and the pressure differences between waves to maximise their hang time over hundreds of metres. Occasionally, they will dip their lower tail fin back into the water and scull like mad to maintain their air speed and stay above the surface.
In the air, they are free of fish predators, because the reflection of the underside of the sea surface forms a mirror when seen from below. It is a highly effective way to fool predators, and they eventually return to the ocean knowing things only a bird could know about the world above.
Flight not fight
In an environment where big fish eat small fish, the only two options you have are fight or flight. The flying fish put all their eggs in the flight basket and have turned it into an artform. It is a simple recipe: threat, question mark, spring, fly, land and repeat. They swim through the mirror of the surface to seemingly disappear into another world for a while.
Once free, they cannot rest on their wings, though, as tropical birdlife has developed a taste for them, too. Brown, masked and red-footed boobies swoop and will make a short meal of flying fish in spectacular fashion. Howell has plenty of images of these dog fights on his camera. The snatched flying fish always carries the air of a rugby player who’s been tackled just before the try line and wears a startled expression, despite fish being well known for not having facial expressions.
Accidental Stowaways
Each morning on a voyage north through the tropics, there will be a handful of unfortunate flying fish that have flown into the rail and bounced on to the lower decks of the ship. Like dreams, they seem paler in the daylight, having lost all their colour, and with wings that look more like wet seaweed than tools of levitation. The magic escapes them with the coming of death.
“Perhaps they dream of becoming birds,” I say to Howell as we flick their stiff bodies over the side. He is not a man prone to metaphor or indulging in Edwardian novels. He gives me a bemused look.
EM Forster’s quote about flying fish and their relation to literature has been largely ignored in the 99 years since it was offered to the world. His great Edwardian novels, conversely, remain famous and shed light on the vast, nuanced trail of the dying British Empire. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 22 times, declined a knighthood in 1949 and reluctantly accepted an Order of Merit before his death in 1970.
The novels were all about class, colonisation and a clear-eyed view into the English character. These were all things you would expect from a man of his times – until his last novel, Maurice, was published after his death, that is. He had written it more than 50 years before, but had judged the time was not right for it to be released. It was a love story that was scandalous for the period and mirrored Forster’s own life, where his homosexuality was never publicly acknowledged while he was alive.
Maurice was his literary version of a flying fish. Questioning, springing and flying through the mirrored surface of Edwardian decency, never to swim in that salt, inhospitable sea again.