The main character in Tom McGuane’s second novel migrates from Michigan to Montana, then down to Key West, which was pretty much the writer’s own course in those days. Because The Bushwhacked Piano was published in 1971, however, readers will never know just how Nicholas Payne ever might have fared during Key West’s “decade of decadence” that was the Seventies. McGuane, on the other hand, came to know that reckless period quite well, for often the writer was right there in the eye of its storm. And while he somehow managed to weather it all, the young storyteller of that time had no trouble fitting a constant full-tilt feeling into his next two novels: Ninety-two in the Shade in 1973, then Panama in 1978. Populated with shrimpers and smugglers and artists of every stripe, the island life had changed quite a bit since the arrival of Nicholas Payne. And it had become a whole lot different than McGuane’s very first look, as well.
A much younger Tom McGuane had been introduced to Key West when his father brought him down from Michigan to fish. That little father-and-son excursion played out in the more tranquil Fifties: Tom was in his teens, Truman was out of the Little White House, and the Old Town of the Cold War years still struggled in somewhat of a stupor. The water-based economy relied fully upon some spongers and turtlers, along with struggling shrimpers, as well as the U.S. Navy. Nonetheless, there was more than enough water surrounding the Keys to make young Tom McGuane want to come back some day, a sentiment best stated by his fishing-guide hero of Ninety-two in the Shade. “God, if they will only leave the ocean alone,” Tom Skelton exclaims, “I can handle anything.”
In the years between that first look and his second, McGuane fished the waters of his home state Michigan and enrolled at Michigan State. There he met Jim Harrison, who would prove in time to be the charter member of a rather remarkable circle of lifelong friends. As a student in the early Sixties, McGuane had dreams of becoming a comic novelist; Harrison, a poet. The two of them shared a fondness for the written word, as well as a mutual affection for hunting and for fishing.
Once McGuane’s graduate work in both dramatic literature and playwriting was finished at Yale, he accepted a fellowship at Stanford, where in 1969 he managed to churn out The Sporting Club in less than two months. He was thirty years old, and that first novel proved worthy of the sort of critical acclaim that labeled him “a language star.” It was the sale of the film rights to that story, however, that enabled the newly-minted novelist and his wife to purchase a ranch in Montana and to spend some winter month’s on Florida’s Summerland Key, where McGuane could fish and work on The Bushwhacked Piano.
Before long there emerged a sporting club of sorts that orbit around this language star. Harrison was lured down for the fishing, and a guide named Woody Sexton drove down a client named Guy de la Valdéne to meet up with the fishing novelist on Summerland. In time, Guy would become known affectionately as “The Count,” and one day would produce a documentary about fishing the flats entitled Tarpon. This circle of friends was just beginning as the McGuanes would move further on down US 1 to Key West in another season or two.
In career terms, Tom McGuane was a bit more like Hemingway than he was Nicholas Payne. After all, Papa had been attracted to Key West not so much by the island’s working conditions as by its fishing opportunities . . . Not to mention its somewhat lawless social recreation: rumrunners and smugglers are one and the same. And just as Hemingway had regularly contributed pieces on deepwater fishing to a new magazine called Esquire, so McGuane contributed several of his own about flats fishing to Sports Illustrated, including his classic essay about permit fishing on the flats entitled “The Longest Silence.” In fact, some of Sports Illustrated’s very earliest articles about Key West’s sport fishing had come from Martin Kane, who -- in his retirement -- remained a rather flamboyant member of the McGuane circle at the Chart Room Bar. Jimmy’s own SI article about fishing in the 2004 swimsuit issue gives a tip of his fishing cap to the legendary Marty Kane.
In retrospect, one can only wonder what life might’ve been like for Jimmy if he’d never met up with Tom McGuane. Perhaps someday Jimmy will recount for us those stories about how he came to live under the same roof with Tom and Becky and young Thomas McGuane, as well as how McGuane introduced him to bartender Phil Clark, about whom Jimmy composed “A Pirate Looks at Forty.” But those tales, along with those of the Full Moon Saloon, of the Snake Pit, of the Club Mandible, and of McGuane’s self-described “Captain Berserko” period must wait for another volume.
Still, this much remains clear: without Jimmy’s meeting Tom McGuane, the Count might never have photographed the cover image for A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean, and “the language star” might never have composed those liner notes on the back that say (among other things): “What Jimmy Buffett knows is that our personal music history lies at the curious hinterland where Hank Williams and Xavier Cugat meet with somewhat less animosity than the theoreticians would have us believe.”
Without McGuane, we might never have had a film called Rancho Deluxe along with Jimmy’s trek to Montana to compose the musical score with “Livingston Saturday Night,” to meet the writer Richard Brautigan, and to stumble upon the dying town of Ringling. Without Guy de la Valdéne’s Tarpon, we’d never have his footage of flats fishing, of the Seventies Key West, and of the young Harrison, Brautigan, and McGuane holding forth together on the topic of fishing the keys. And without Tom McGuane, Jimmy might never have had such a talented writer for a brother-in-law.
As for the McGuane selection included in The Occasional Margareader, the source is from Jimmy’s own liner notes in 1985 for “Desperation Samba” on The Last Mango in Paris, where he’s written this little nugget: “This song brings to mind two things. First, an image of Robert Mitchum standing in the doorway of a bar in Tijuana, and second, a line by Thomas McGuane, my brother-in-law, from his book, Panama, ‘The night wrote a check the morning couldn’t cash.’” By then, the McGuanes had moved back to the ranch.
So, of all the marvelous prose that Tom McGuane has produced over the years, it’s Jimmy who’s directed us to this particular passage that concludes with that specific line. From drinks at the Full Moon Saloon to the oyster shell parking lots of Garrison Bight, Panama provides a panorama of the island that’s just as sweeping as that in Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. And in a great many ways, none of the things had changed at all since Papa had roamed those streets. There can be doubt that you will be reading all of McGuane’s island stuff; then, you’ll move on with him to his stories from Montana. After all, Deadrock seems a lot like Livingston(e).
