Although in his later years Norman Maclean was renowned for his nuanced and often lyrical autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (subsequently filmed by Robert Redford, and known in angling circles – with mixed feelings – simply as ‘The Movie’), by all accounts he could be forbidding and ornery in person. He informed one Hollywood shyster: ‘When we had bastards like you out west we shot them for coyote bait.’ The novelist Pete Dexter once described him as ‘an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock’n’ roll’ – and that was only from a photograph.
There are indeed some moody photos in the journalist Rebecca McCarthy’s agreeable and trenchant memoir of this interesting author, though she deftly reveals a compassionate nature behind that Calvinist scowl. They first met in 1972 in Montana – Maclean’s homeland was Missoula, where his stern father was a Presbyterian minister and fervent fly-fisher; she was a teenager and he an ageing academic, beginning to write fiction. He became her mentor (‘I had never had an adult take me so seriously’) through her college years at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many decades, and though she was clearly devoted to him, this book – a blending of their two stories – is by no means a hagiography.
Maclean disdained all whimsy: ‘When you suspect a writer is trying to write pretty, then he’s dead’
As a boy, Maclean was tutored by his father. He then attended Dartmouth College (the future Dr Seuss was a classmate), where he was taught by Robert Frost, but developed a lifelong mistrust of social privilege. His long career in the Chicago English faculty was not accompanied by much in the way of academic publication, but in the classroom he became a formidable teacher: wiry, sardonic, combative, inspirational, puffing on Lucky Strikes and with a trademark hiss of disapproval. His pupils included Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, and you can only admire someone who awarded George Steiner a B grade. Largely thanks to his adored wife Jessie he came to love Chicago, despite its hardships, and he instilled this too in his young protégée. The only pall cast over his life there was the unresolved murder of his younger, hell-raising brother Paul (Brad Pitt, in the film) in 1938, ‘the big tragedy of our family’.
Having abandoned a longstanding literary project on General Custer (Maclean was ‘defeated by the defeat’) and setting aside after a decade his account of the 1949 Mann Gulch inferno (posthumously published as Young Men and Fire), in retirement he fastidiously set to work on three stories: ‘River’, and two companion pieces which fictionalised his youthful experiences in sawmills, lumber camps and the Forest Service. Initially, there were many rejections from eastern publishers, which confirmed his ‘hatred of New York’. One editor returned the manuscript, saying: ‘These stories have trees in them.’ Eventually his ‘little blue book’ was published in 1976 by the University of Chicago Press, its first ever volume of fiction, and A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was nominated for the Pulitzer, optioned by Paramount, and garnered more than 600 favourable reviews.
Catching a fish is no more the entire aim of angling than telling a story is for a writer – it all depends on how it’s done. What strikes me as remarkable about ‘River’ is its masterful admixture of the hardbitten and the spiritual. There is something of the frontier and its engagement with terrain that lend Maclean’s rhythmic prose that mineral quality; yet above this bedrock (the metaphor is his) flows a narrative suffused with a Wordsworthian feeling for nature. Of a lost trout: ‘No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.’
One consequence of this mythologising of fly-fishing was a spate of pale literary imitations. Maclean disdained all whimsy and artifice, stating that when you ‘suspect that the writer is trying to write pretty, then he’s dead’. When it comes to ‘outdoor writing’, I think there is something to be said for John Cheever’s memo: ‘There is a path through the woods that I could take this rainy morning, but instead I will take the path to the pantry and mix a martini.’
In this stylish and fittingly fluent blend of scholarship and reminiscence, McCarthy gives us multiple glimpses of her idiosyncratic subject: his fondness for Crock-Pot dinners in his condo, his preference for LL Bean clothing (disdaining the tonier Orvis), his negotiations with Redford, his working methods, two later loves after Jessie’s death, how he drank whisky, his loyalty, his prejudices and his passions. Maclean died of prostate cancer in 1990, waiting for his breakfast. He was an enigmatic person, and a truly outstanding writer. There – at least I won’t end up as coyote bait.
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