The Norman Maclean Reader Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2008 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2008

  Paperback and e-book editions 2012

  Printed in the United States of America

  21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13:978-0-226-50026-3 (cloth)

  ISBN-10:0-226-50026-8 (cloth)

  ISBN-13:978-0-226-50027-0 (paper)

  ISBN-10:0-226-50027-6 (paper)

  ISBN-13:978-0-226-50031-7 (e-book)

  ISBN-10:0-226-50031-4 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maclean, Norman, 1902–1990.

  [Selections. 2008]

  The Norman Maclean reader / edited by O. Alan Weltzien.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13:978-0-226-50026-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN-10:0-226-50026-8 (cloth: alk. paper)

  I. Weltzien, O. Alan (Oliver Alan) II. Title.

  PS3563.A317993A6 2008

  818′.5408—dc22

  2008014519

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  The Norman Maclean Reader

  EDITED BY O. ALAN WELTZIEN

  The University of Chicago Press

  CHICAGO & LONDON

  Contents

  Introduction, by O. Alan Weltzien

  THE CUSTER WRITINGS

  Edward S. Luce: Commanding General (Retired), Department of the Little Bighorn

  From the Unfinished Custer Manuscript

  Chapter 1: The Hill

  Chapter 2: The Sioux

  Chapter 3: The Cheyennes

  Chapter 4: In Business

  Last Chapter: Shrine to Defeat

  A MACLEAN SAMPLER

  “This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon”: A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching

  “Billiards Is a Good Game”: Gamesmanship and America’s First Nobel Prize Scientist

  Retrievers Good and Bad

  Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”

  An Incident

  The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers

  The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking

  Black Ghost

  From Young Men and Fire

  Interview with Norman Maclean

  SELECTED LETTERS

  Letters to Robert M. Utley, 1955–1979

  Letters to Marie Borroff, 1949–1986

  Letters to Nick Lyons, 1976–1981

  Letters to Lois Jansson, 1979–1981

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A gallery of photographs

  Introduction

  O. ALAN WELTZIEN

  In 1976 the University of Chicago Press published an original work of fiction for the first time in its history. It was an unusual compilation, two novellas with a short story placed between them, and its author was a legendary English professor at the university who had recently retired after a career of forty-five years. The Press hedged its bets by binding up three thousand copies of a five thousand–copy first printing, but from its very first notice—by Nick Lyons in Fly Fisherman magazine—the book had rave reviews and sales followed accordingly. A River Runs through It and Other Stories made Norman Maclean famous far beyond his adopted city of Chicago and native state of Montana, where he spent his summers. The book helped inaugurate the contemporary literary flowering of the Rocky Mountain West and, in ways that would have both horrified and pleased Maclean, introduced a broad public to the hitherto cultish, hidden sport of fly-fishing. A generation later, River enjoys a global reputation, one enhanced by numerous translations and Robert Redford’s sensitive film adaptation, which was released soon after Maclean’s death in 1990.

  Where did this astonishing book come from? Maclean had to reach, as he was fond of saying, his biblical allotment of threescore years and ten before he could write it. As he approached his retirement—having weathered several bouts of extended illness—he followed the suggestion of his son, John N. Maclean, and daughter, Jean Maclean Snyder, and began writing what he called “reminiscent stories” about his youth in western Montana. A story about his summers working in the Forest Service turned into a long one, and only after completing that did he turn to fly-fishing and his long-lost younger brother, Paul Maclean—his only sibling. In many letters from the period 1973–75, Maclean speaks of writing a story about his brother, whom he considered one of the great fly fishermen of his time. He wanted this story to be the best he was capable of writing, and his standards were unforgiving. By 1975 he had finished the book he wanted. It was a triptych, the title novella already promising to overshadow the short story and novella that follow it. Maclean knew it was an odd package, but he always favored structures and rhythms composed in threes, which for him echoed, however faintly, the Holy Trinity he grew up knowing from his father, for many years minister of Missoula, Montana’s downtown First Presbyterian Church.

  So Professor Maclean became famous during our Bicentennial year, and for the remaining fourteen years of his life he followed with pride the career of his book. He hesitated about a movie version, calling the Hollywood people who had begun to pursue him “jackals” and fearing they would “prostitute” his family. It was only after rebuffing several directors and screenwriters that Maclean optioned the film rights to Robert Redford. Maclean was less preoccupied with movie negotiations than with his next book, which concerned a 1949 Smokejumper tragedy little remembered outside Montana, or at least outside Region One of the U.S. Forest Service. Maclean devoted over a decade to researching and writing this fire book, which he still had not finished to his satisfaction by the time of his final illness. After his death in 1990, University of Chicago Press editor Alan Thomas, working closely with John N. Maclean and Jean Maclean Snyder, edited Maclean’s manuscript, and two years later the Press published Young Men and Fire. This second, longer book received the National Book Critics Circle Award for best nonfiction and has considerably broadened his literary reputation. Fire is a strange and haunting and eloquent book—part autobiography, part “fire report,” part classical tragedy, part elegy, part philosophical statement. It resists easy classification but is both sublime and, to use Maclean’s favorite word, “beautiful,” its beauty deriving in large part from its somber poignancy.

  . . .

  Maclean then published only one slender book during his lifetime, and a second, longer book followed posthumously. In addition, he published a handful of essays during the 1970s and early 1980s, several of which appeared in a 1988 Confluence Press anthology of writings by and about Maclean. How did Maclean’s youth and long academic career lead to this late achievement, and why didn’t he publish more? The two questions overlap, but the simplest answer to the second concerns his severe habit of self-criticism. Writers know that rewriting entails a good deal of subtraction, but Maclean was perhaps too ruthless in this respect. He learned to be hard on his own writing under the harsh tutelage of his minister father. As Maclean has written in “The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers” (reprinted in this volume), he never attended public school until age eleven. Up to then, his entire curriculum consisted of reading and writing, carried out in a room across from his father’s study. When he crossed rooms with a written composition, his father read it and then told the boy to return with the composition half that length. And so on, until the reverend had him tear it up.

  Maclean looked back affectionately upon this early school of hard knocks, however, because he had afternoons free to roam the woods surrounding Missoula while other
kids his age sat in classrooms. Maclean was born in Clarinda, Iowa, on December 23, 1902: his family didn’t move to Missoula until his sixth year. Because River and Fire contain so many autobiographical elements, Maclean’s readers already know some pieces of his life story, though significantly compressed and rearranged. In 1917 Maclean began working summers for the Forest Service—a big federal institution, particularly in the western states, founded in 1905 and so a bit younger than Maclean; throughout his life, Maclean liked to say that he and the Forest Service were contemporaries. After earning his B.A. at Dartmouth (where he took a writing seminar with Robert Frost) and spending two years there as a teaching assistant, Maclean returned to Montana in 1926 to work for the Forest Service. Maclean’s years as a Forest Service employee did not end until he took a job as a graduate assistant at the University of Chicago in 1928. Yet he never imaginatively surrendered the idea of a Forest Service career; it was always his road not taken. His novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky condenses and shapes experiences from at least four Forest Service summers into a coming-of-age story, and he based his short story “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’” on those Forest Service summers as well. Also, without his own experiences in wildland firefighting, Maclean would never have become obsessed with the deaths of the twelve Forest Service Smokejumpers and a recreation guard killed in the 1949 Mann Gulch tragedy.

  During his college years in New Hampshire, Maclean would take the long train ride home every summer. Beginning in 1921, he helped his father build what became the family cabin on the shores of Seeley Lake, Montana, fifty miles northeast of Missoula. That cabin became his cynosure in his native state. After the spring term at Chicago ended and many of his colleagues had left for London, to study and write in the British Museum’s Reading Room, he and his wife, Jessie Burns Maclean, and their son and daughter would drive west to Seeley Lake and the mountains of home. Those migrations west and back defined Maclean, who relished playing the Montana exotic in the intellectual circles of Chicago’s Hyde Park. After retirement, he spent more time at Seeley Lake, staying on until autumn snows drove him back to Chicago. He liked to remind friends that the cabin was only sixteen miles from glaciers, and that the fishing kept his “wand” bent.

  Looking back on his early years at the University of Chicago, Maclean recalled the miserable load of assigned compositions that needed attention every weekend. Yet he quickly became a first-rate teacher and in 1932, only a year after being promoted to instructor, won the University of Chicago’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, a distinction he would win twice more during his career. Maclean was a legend in the classroom: that rare professor with such gifts that he marks students for life. His status was acknowledged by the endowed chair (William Rainey Harper Professor of English) he held during his final decade at Chicago.

  In 1940 he became Dr. Maclean, having completed his Ph.D. at Chicago. R. S. Crane, chairman of the English department and spokesman for what became known as the neo-Aristotelian school, served as his mentor and something of a father figure. Maclean taught Shakespeare and the British Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats—favoring close readings of the poem or scene. Though scholarly, he never published much scholarship: he thrived at Chicago even as “publish or perish” became the byword at American research universities. Over the course of his career, Maclean produced two scholarly articles, both of them in a landmark volume of literary criticism, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952), edited by R. S. Crane. The first, “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” explains Maclean’s views of lyric poetry in British eighteenth-century literature. Deriving from Maclean’s dissertation, it is a long, erudite performance that shows his aptitude as a literary scholar. The second essay, devoted to Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, anticipates the concerns of his later writing. Dauntingly titled “Episode, Scene, Speech and Word: The Madness of Lear,” it unfolds Maclean’s theory of tragedy, which he deemed the highest literary form, and to the discerning reader tells as much about Maclean as about Shakespeare.1

  It could be said the “the problem of defeat”—a phrase appearing in a letter to Robert Utley in the early 1960s—became Maclean’s consuming theme. It served as his contemporary expression for that welter of tragic forces he found best distilled in the ancient Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s tragedies. Certainly he wrestled with this theme in his book manuscript, eventually abandoned, about George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, whose final chapter was to be titled “Shrine to Defeat.” Near the beginning of the Lear essay, he announces the essay’s scope:

  We propose to follow Lear and Shakespeare across the heath to the fields of Dover on what for both was a unique experience, and then to be even more particular, considering the individual scenes leading to this meeting of Lear and Gloucester when in opposite senses neither could see. And, for smaller particulars, we shall consider an incident from one of these scenes, a speech from this incident, and, finally, a single word. In this declension of particulars our problems will be some of those that were Shakespeare’s because he was attending Lear and at the same time was on his way toward a consummation in the art of tragic writing. (Critics, 599)

  This prospectus describes, in various ways, Maclean’s approach to the Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn, to his doomed brother, Paul, and to the Smokejumpers in Mann Gulch. Influenced as he was by Aristotle’s Poetics, which defines tragedy as the epitome of literary art, Maclean always held that the “the most composed” writing illuminates “the disorderly” forces within us, whether in an eighty-year-old king gone mad or a younger brother out of control. In his essay, he describes the old king’s philosophical dilemma in terms that go to the core of his own later writing: “The question of whether the universe is something like what Lear hoped it was or very close to what he feared it was, is still, tragically, the current question.”

  At Chicago and elsewhere, he was known as Norman. In addition to teaching his popular courses, he took on many service roles at the university, including, from 1942 to 1945, the job of dean of students. In 1942 Maclean coauthored a Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs, and from 1943 to 1945 was acting director of the university’s Institute on Military Studies. After the war, Maclean founded the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, a highly successful interdisciplinary program he oversaw for fifteen years. His pride in the committee is clear in several of his letters to Robert Utley included in this volume.

  After his third year at the university, Maclean married his sweetheart of several years, Jessie Burns, whose family ran the general store in Wolf Creek, Montana. Wolf Creek lies at the mouth of Little Prickly Pear Canyon, near the Missouri River, and only a few miles from Mann Gulch. After his wife’s death, Maclean scattered her ashes atop a mountain near Wolf Creek that Burns family members had named for Jessie. Maclean was fond of recounting how his tough, hardworking wife described him in his late twenties: “Norman, I knew you when you were young and you were a goddamned mess.” Their daughter, Jean, was born in 1942 and their son, John, followed the next year.

  Four years before he became a father, though, Maclean’s younger brother, Paul, was murdered in a Chicago alley. This remained perhaps the single most shattering event of Maclean’s life, and it haunts his most memorable writing. Robert Redford’s film version of River plays up contrasts between the older, quieter brother, Norman, who observes closely and constantly, and the talented, reckless younger brother, always the life of the party and of the family. Both the novella and the movie obscure Paul’s actual history. In the movie’s adaptation, when Norman goes east, Paul stays behind in Montana, as though incapable of leaving the great trout rivers of home. In fact, Paul Maclean followed Norman to Dartmouth and, after his own graduation and several years of working for Montana newspapers, to Chicago, in hopes of landing a job on a big-city daily. Given these facts, it is temptin
g to speculate about whether Norman felt personally responsible for Paul’s death. But in A River Runs through It, readers face only Maclean’s silence as they ponder the tragic ramifications, in life and literature, of being one’s brother’s keeper.

  . . .

  Maclean was built like an early twentieth-century halfback, which in fact he was in high school in Missoula—short at five feet eight and a half inches, but solid at 165 pounds, a weight he maintained for most of his life. At Dartmouth his nickname was Bull Montana, after a movie character of the day. He spoke with an unhurried voice, choosing his phrases as carefully as he crafted his tight, ironic sentences. His mobile, deeply lined face registered his moods as swiftly as changing light over a mountain lake’s surface. He did not suffer fools gladly. His Chicago reputation rested in no small measure upon his other life in a big rural state where cowboys and loggers and miners worked hard and cussed easily. Maclean’s research partner during the Young Men and Fire years, Laird Robinson, once said that Maclean was “frequently profane but never vulgar”—a key Montana distinction. This is a writer who, as we see in one of the letters to Marie Borroff, delighted in reading aloud a story with “pimping” in the title to a select University of Chicago group called the Stochastics. This also is a writer who savored the word “beautiful,” parsing it one syllable at a time, and who might call somebody he disliked a “prick” or “pig fucker,” though rarely to his face. In Montana such names don’t qualify as vulgar. And beer isn’t alcohol.

  Maclean embodied the tough-but-tender formula in his own distinct fashion. A student who knew him well described him as owning a tensile grace, as though he were a coiled spring always controlled with some effort. He lived his own version of the Hemingway credo, grace under pressure. He had been in fights as a “town” kid and weathered several rough logging camps. He favored metaphors from boxing and, of course, memorably describes Paul as fighting right to his end. USFS 1919 climaxes with the hilarious brawl between the Forest Service crew and several card sharks who judge them easy pickings but who are themselves fleeced by the crew’s cook, a card pro. Looking back on his childhood and weighing the respective influences of his father and mother, Maclean concluded he was a “tough flower girl,” which gives us a clue to the sensibility that makes him so distinctive on the page.