The Norman Maclean Reader Read online

  This last scene, Paul’s apotheosis, seals the connections between religion and fly-fishing announced in the novella’s opening sentence. Early in the book, Maclean explicitly extends Reverend Maclean’s judgment about our fallen nature to the reader—“if you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess.” And he explains that the only redemption lies in the beauty we achieve by “picking up God’s rhythms.” “He is beautiful,” Reverend Maclean remarks finally after Paul lands the big trout, but that glimpse of redemption is not enough to save Paul from the “damn mess” of the rest of his life. At the end of their final fishing trip together, Maclean writes, “It would be hard to find three men side by side who knew better what a river was saying.” But a river “has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us,” and with that qualification he relates the sudden news of Paul’s murder. The Big Blackfoot still harbors words, however, “and some of the words are theirs.” River climaxes, then, between the desire to believe in redemption and immortality, and their elusiveness before the ultimately unknowable—a river, or a brother.

  Maclean insistently employs the metaphor of “reading the water” in River. In doing so, he aligns himself with an American literary tradition seen, for example, in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Paul is an expert at reading currents and so, in other ways, is Norman. In a passage comparable to the discovery in USFS 1919 that life occasionally transforms itself into story, Maclean writes, “Stories of life are more often like rivers than books.” Elsewhere, Maclean writes, “I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.” It is a statement that recalls his Matthew Arnold epigraph to USFS 1919 while shifting the geography of knowing from mountain to river.

  . . .

  A River Runs through It closes perfectly with the utterance, “I am haunted by waters,” but Maclean was equally haunted by fire. His interest in wildfire had smoldered during his early Forest Service summers, particularly when fighting the Fish Creek fire (cited in both USFS 1919 and “Black Ghost”), and flamed after the Mann Gulch tragedy of August 5, 1949. By the time A River Runs through It and Other Stories appeared in print, Maclean was hard at work on his book about Mann Gulch. His research took him repeatedly to Forest Service headquarters in Washington, D.C., as well as Region One headquarters in Missoula. Already in his mid-seventies, he also traveled by boat, horse, and four-wheel drive into Mann Gulch, sometimes accompanied by his research partner Laird Robinson and, on one occasion, by Robert Sallee and Walter Rumsey, the two survivors of the fire. Maclean was after an exact account of how the tragedy came about, including a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the fire’s course. Along the way, he encountered cryptic or missing files, reluctant or uncooperative relatives, and, most significantly, his own relentless self-criticism. Letters to friends, some of which are reprinted in this volume, attest to his periodic doubts as well as his determination to finish and publish the large manuscript he initially called “The Great Blow-Up,” and later Young Men and Fire. Maclean researched and revised for more than a decade, and by the last years of his life, when ill health all but ended his work, he had a full but still rough draft. His long labor and inability, or unwillingness, to complete it are thematically inscribed in the book. As editor Alan Thomas wrote in a publisher’s note to the book, “Young Men and Fire had become a story in search of itself as a story, following where Maclean’s compassion led it. As long as the manuscript sustained itself and its author in this process of discovery, it had to remain in some sense unfinished.”

  Young Men and Fire is structured it as a triptych, though part 3, only eight pages, functions as both climax and epilogue to parts 1 and 2, which are almost exactly equal in length. Maclean divided his manuscript into sixty-three short chapters. When he prepared the work for publication, Thomas faithfully observed Maclean’s triadic structure but consolidated these mini-chapters into fifteen chapters, and added a prologue, “Black Ghost,” that he found among Maclean’s papers. Roughly speaking, part 1 narrates the minute-by-minute story of the blowup, part 2 narrates the story of Maclean’s research and eventual understanding of the fire, and part 3 serves as an imaginative funeral service and benediction, as the men meet their death. Part 1 encodes physical knowledge, part 2 presents scientific and a kind of metaphysical knowledge, and part 3, spiritual knowledge. Fire’s achievement rests in the insistent way Maclean approaches, closely and personally, the unknowable: the final minutes and seconds when the Smokejumpers are running for their lives as the towering, suffocating inferno overtakes them. More generally, it rests in the way Maclean concedes and makes a theme of his uncertainty and doubt in the face of unrecoverable history.

  Maclean was intrigued by resemblances between what happened to Custer’s men at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, and what happened to the Smokejumpers in this dry box canyon August 5, 1949, and he evokes the Seventh Cavalry in Young Men and Fire, though without pressing the parallel. In both cases, the speed and seeming inevitability of disaster read like a Greek tragedy, and Maclean’s attention in Fire to exact chronology—correlations by minute and location—reflects his admiration of Greek tragedy’s concentration and speed. In these conditions, the players have no choices except how to face their already-determined destinies. As he says about the Smokejumpers in Fire’s opening, “They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.” Thus both in his own struggle and in his subject, Maclean voices “the problem of defeat.”

  The stakes in Fire are high: Is catastrophe beyond human ken? Can disaster be made to own some sense, or is the universe as capriciously destructive as mad old King Lear believes it to be? Fittingly, Mann Gulch belongs, as Maclean notes, to a geological zone that scientists call the “Disturbed Belt.” Fire’s drama unfolds between faith and knowledge, the need to believe and the ultimate failure to know as much as we need. Maclean’s articulation of these core questions takes by now familiar form and sustains his aesthetic principles: “This is a catastrophe that we hope will not end where it began; it might go on and become a story.” Yet his uncertainty and the anguished irresolution of his nonfictional quest give the book an emotional power that is new in Maclean’s work. He closes Fire’s first chapter by memorably summarizing where he hopes his quest will lead:

  It would be a start to a story if this catastrophe were found to have circled around out there somewhere until it could return to itself with explanations of its own mysteries and with the grief it left behind, not removed, because grief has its own place at or near the end of things, but altered somewhat by the addition of something like wonder. . . . If we could say something like this and be speaking both accurately and somewhat like Shelley when he spoke of clouds and winds, then what we would be talking about would start to change from catastrophe without a filled-in story to what could be called the story of a tragedy, but tragedy would be only a part of it, as it is of life.

  This passage paraphrases Aristotle’s experiential definition of tragedy formulated in the Poetics: our witnessing tragedy on stage arouses pity and fear, which are purged from us such that we emerge cleansed and ennobled. Fire contains Maclean’s most extended discussion of tragedy in the chapter reprinted here, and parts 2 and 3 model the kind of Aristotelian purgation he recommended. The passage also suggests that one kind of knowledge is never enough to translate catastrophe into story. It will not be enough, for example, to explain what happened in terms of the science of fire behavior. So Maclean invokes the “most Romantic of the Romantic poets,” Percy Shelley, referring to two poems, “The Clouds” and “Ode to the West Wind,” which he elsewhere describes as “mixtures of the poetic and scientific imaginations.” Ghosts occasionally appear in Fire, and Maclean makes r
epeated references to the Stations of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Fire thus embraces not only the graphs and mathematical formulas of fire scientists, but poetry, Christian symbolism, and metaphysical speculation.

  Young Men and Fire is not as tightly shaped or written as A River Runs through It, and Maclean faced many more diffculties writing it. But more than River, it braids together the strands of Maclean’s life as a woodsman, scholar, and writer. And it is a strangely moving and gripping book, one suffused with remarkable writing. Fire painfully registers the impasse suggested by the statement “it is all cockeyed and it all fits,” and, seeking to restore “the key to the . . . eternal arch of Montana sky,” worries continually that it cannot.

  . . .

  The Norman Maclean Reader includes six hitherto unpublished pieces by Maclean, five of them chapters from his uncompleted book on Custer. Readers for the first time will discover Maclean’s obsession with Custer and Little Bighorn, and glimpse the unfinished book that foreshadows and informs both River and Fire. The anthology provides a comprehensive cross-section of Maclean’s writing, arranging the material mostly chronologically across thirty-six years, from his 1956 essay on Edward S. Luce, coauthored with Robert Utley, to “Black Ghost” and the eighth chapter from Young Men and Fire. Seven of the pieces included here were written or published between 1974 and 1979—the years immediately surrounding A River Runs through It and Other Stories—and the interview dates from 1987, when Maclean was still working hard on Young Men and Fire.

  The four sets of correspondence each highlight a different facet of Maclean the literary critic and writer. When readers turn from a writer’s published work to his letters, they travel inside to more private, less guarded territory. The letters to Robert Utley begin before their collaboration on the Luce article and extend well beyond the time that Maclean gave up on his Custer book. The letters to Marie Borroff also cover a broad span of years. By contrast, the letters to Nick Lyons date from a shorter span in the late 1970s and track the growing reputation of Maclean as a writer. And finally, the letters to Lois Jansson cover three years (1979–81) when Maclean was most actively researching and rewriting what became Fire. Each set of letters demonstrates Maclean’s capacity for friendship and conveys his distinctive voice with particular immediacy.

  Here, then, readers can see the themes and characteristic style of River and Fire in new contexts and gain new biographical insights into one of the most remarkable and unexpected careers in American letters. As his third published book, published thirty-two years after his first and sixteen after his second, The Norman Maclean Reader provides the long-missing third panel in Maclean’s biggest triptych.

  The Custer Writings

  Edward S. Luce*

  COMMANDING GENERAL (RETIRED), DEPARTMENT OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN

  Norman Maclean & Robert M. Utley

  Norman Maclean’s 1956 profile of Edward S. Luce, coauthored with Robert M. Utley, pays tribute to a retiring superintendent of the Custer Battlefield National Monument. Until it appeared in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Maclean’s only substantial publications were two scholarly articles and a military manual. Utley has said the article bears Maclean’s impress much more than his own, and in it we first see Maclean’s playful irony and wit, and tightly constructed style of writing. A biographical note accompanying the article notes that Maclean “has devoted years to an exhaustive psychological study of the golden-maned soldier, George Armstrong Custer. We look forward to its early publication.”

  It was in the year—even in the season of the year—marking the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn that Major Edward S. Luce retired as Superintendent of the Custer Battlefield National Monument.

  He and the Hill have long been closely connected. Indeed, like the Hill itself, he has become part legend, part history, and part an inseparable mixture of both. Some tourists have pointed him out as the sole survivor of the Battle, others as Captain Keogh, and one mother was heard to tell her son that he was Comanche. But no tourist since 1940 has ever been mistaken about two facts—the Superintendent was 7th Cavalry, and the Hill is a memorial to its dead.

  Since the 7th Cavalry was not organized in 1066, it may be irrelevant to trace the Major’s ancestry back to Count de Luci, aide to William the Conqueror. More likely, genealogy proper begins with the Major’s great-uncle, Andrew Jackson Smith, first colonel of the 7th Cavalry, with Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer as second in command. In any event, the Major’s post-natal connection with the 7th began early. His family knew both the Custers and Godfreys, and his memories of Mrs. Custer go back as far as 1890. Although Gen. Godfrey often bounced him on his knee, it was Young Corbett, then lightweight champion of the world, who gave him the bounce that started him on his way to the Custer Battlefield. Young Corbett was touring the country, offering $50 to any one who could stay with him for four rounds. Edward S. Luce lasted three rounds and a certain number of seconds about which there has never been any argument. Two months later, after the imprint of the canvas had faded from his back, he enlisted in the 7th Cavalry—on the strength of the first three rounds.

  At Fort Riley, he was assigned to headquarters as a clerk where four survivors of Reno’s command at the Battle of the Little Big Horn were present in the flesh compiling a history of the 7th Cavalry, now an item for collectors who don’t ask about prices. The clerk’s assignment was to take down the sacred words of Edgerly, Godfrey, Hare, and Varnum. So he was introduced to history almost as soon as to the saber-drill, and has never forgotten either. In 1939, he published Keogh, Comanche, and Custer, itself already a collector’s item and invaluable for any close understanding of the 7th Cavalry at the time of the Battle.

  But from the time of his first enlistment (1907) until he was gassed in World War I, he was soldier of fortune, with only a few months between enlistments. During one of these periods he became a motorman in Dorchester, Massachusetts, so that he could drive by his home and ignore the stop signals of certain members of his family who had disowned him. One day, while he was asleep in the carbarns, an organ-grinder came by, turned the crank, and out came Garryowen, battlesong of the 7th. Sgt. Luce awoke looking at a monkey that reminded him of the commander of E Troop. He gave the monkey a nickel, the monkey saluted, and the sergeant reenlisted, but the 7th had been sent to the Philippines and he found himself in the Coast Artillery.

  Between hitches in 1914, he put in three months fighting with the Mexican rebels. American machine-gunners were at a premium, and it was safer to get captured than to escape. So he was kept busy changing hat bands from green to red to white and shouting “Viva Villa,” “Viva Carranza,” “Viva Madero,” and sometimes just “Viva.” Re-enlisting, he was assigned to the 12th U.S. Cavalry (known, but not affectionately, as the “Royal Siberian Uhlans”) who had the job of guarding eight Mexican armies that escaped across the border—some of which he had just served in.

  In 1917 he was commissioned captain in the Quartermaster Corps. His transport was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland and he was gassed in France, a disability that ultimately ended his active military career. For a while, he tried banking and acquired the long cigarette-holder which is the only visible part of him that does not seem to derive from the 7th Cavalry. But the banking experience has been important behind the scenes, for the growing popularity of the Monument has meant, among other things, that it has become big business. Before coming to the Hill, he also had experience in meeting pilgrims at a public shrine. For a short time he was Assistant Superintendent at the Arlington National Cemetery where daily he greeted the fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers, sisters, and wives of the Unknown Soldier. Not until coming to the Hill, however, did he greet pilgrims who wanted to know whether the Continental Divide was a WPA project.

  Mrs. Luce says that she never did anything spectacular except keep out of trouble until she met Major Luce, and the Major adds that she has been in nothing else s
ince. She wouldn’t make this added comment herself, but might admit that she has never ceased to be amazed. She was teaching high school in St. Louis when they were married in 1938, and since then she has had to revise considerably the theories about educational psychology she learned at Drake University back in Iowa. The 1938 edition of the Major has also been subject to slight revisions—certain words have been deleted from the text, a gentle “Address to the Reader” has been added, and last year, when he was on a speaking tour, friends telegraphed ahead to each other the news that he was taking bubble-baths. Mrs. Luce’s previous training in history has had even more important effects. She is one of the best informed of all those who have studied Custer, and was Historical Aide at the Museum (ten years without salary) where she spent most of each day cataloging collections, following leads that might bring new items of importance to the Museum, conducting the research necessary to answer the hundreds of letters from scholars and writers, etc. It is hard to see how she found time to make a home out of the big stone house down the Hill, and it is an even greater mystery how she made all who entered feel that it was their home, too. Mrs. Luce is very embarrassed when nice things are said about her.

  Major and Mrs. Luce became custodians of the Hill in 1940 when Custer Battlefield National Cemetery, as it was then known, was transferred to the National Park Service and the Major was appointed Superintendent. In 1946 its name was changed to the Custer Battlefield National Monument, but much more than the name has changed since the Luces arrived as is indicated by the increase in the number of visitors—from 80,000 in 1940 to 140,000 last year.