[The Montana Professor 21.1, Fall 2010 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]

The Norman Maclean Reader: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by the Author of A River Runs Through It

O. Alan Weltzien, editor
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008
260 pp., $27.50 hc


Keith Edgerton
History
MSU-Billings

Beautiful. In his spare, laconic style, Norman Maclean could describe beauty perhaps better, and certainly more economically, than any regional writer in recent memory. In 1976, after retiring from a distinguished career at the University of Chicago spanning nearly five decades, Maclean virtually singled-handedly put modern Montana literature on the map with his A River Runs Through it and Other Stories. Few who've read the trio of stories can forget the title novella's elegiac description of the Maclean family growing up in western Montana at the turn of the century, with the stern Scottish Presbyterian patriarch John Maclean's conflation of fly fishing with the spiritual rhythms of the Blackfoot River serving as backdrop to Norman's tragic and ultimately doomed attempt to save his younger brother, Paul, from himself. There are probably no more famous words in Montana letters than those of his closing: "Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

Who was this writer? Why hadn't there been from him something before this? Surely someone of this talent had to have had an enormous literary corpus preceding this masterpiece. There had to have been precursors decades earlier: short stories in this or that literary review or obscure journal or perhaps several lesser novels. Yet as the reputation of the work gradually gained national traction and bits and pieces of his life emerged, we learned that indeed Norman Maclean had grown up in western Montana and he had worked for a time in 1910s in the Forest Service when both were in their youth, and yes, this soft-spoken English professor knew intimately the rawboned world of logging camps (the backdrop for the second story in A River Runs Through It) long before the din of chain saws and bulldozers intruded upon the forest solitude. This was a fellow who probably was very much acquainted with a Bitterroot valley prostitute who may very well have spoken in some variant of iambic pentameter (partially the subject of "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky," the concluding story in A River Runs Through It). We also learned that Maclean then left Montana in the 1920s, first for an Ivy League education, finally assuming a position in the English department at the University of Chicago where he flourished as an accomplished literary critic and as an inspiring professor of Shakespeare. He returned each summer, however, to his native and beloved Montana and the family's cabin on Seeley Lake. Upon retirement in 1973, and after urging from his children and friends, he began crafting his stories from the distant past, partly as a challenge to himself to see if an aging, retired professor could pull it off, and partly as a testimony of his love for Montana. Clearly, he possessed a gift.

And then, after increasing critical acclaim and widespread success of A River Runs Through It, his followers patiently waited for more. Chronic ill health, however, and an unflinchingly stubborn personal editorial exactitude limited his output. Only a life-long passion, which was posthumously published as Young Men and Fire in 1992, was to appear (Maclean died in 1990). That work was the story of the Mann Gulch tragedy of 1949 and comprises a nearly minute by minute account of the deaths of thirteen smokejumpers outside of Helena on a hot and windy August afternoon when a woodlands wildfire "blew up" and trapped them in a box canyon with walls of flames surrounding them. Maclean combined a meticulously researched reportage with an extended and elegant commentary on the timeless nature of tragedy that claimed these young people. Yet the vast majority of the public would only obliquely become acquainted with Maclean through Robert Redford's relatively faithful cinematic production of A River Runs Through It (starring, among others, a young Brad Pitt as Paul Maclean) released in 1992.

With the blessing of Maclean's children, Alan Weltzien, however, has renewed our interest in Maclean and his unique craftsmanship. Weltzien has scoured the Maclean archival holdings at the University of Chicago and provides hitherto unpublished material that will dramatically complement, supplement, and inform the Maclean literary legacy. Central is a lengthy, though unfinished, manuscript on the Little Bighorn battle. Throughout the summers of the 1950s and into the early 1960s Maclean had worked hand-in-glove with a young historian and Park Service ranger, Robert Utley (who later would become a renowned Custer scholar and western historian in his own right) in crafting a different take on the by then all-too-familiar "massacre" of Custer's command by Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe in June of 1876. It was to be an abortive attempt, ultimately, at writing about the afterlife of the battle, the mythology that had evolved in the then three-fourths of a century after the events of that June afternoon. As Weltzien writes, the undertaking was to become part of "a genre of interdisciplinary, highly personal non-fiction that was well ahead of its time" (xiv). Illness, not only his own but especially the painfully drawn out death of his wife Jessie during the mid-1960s, halted his work on Custer as a frustrated Maclean "finally could not make the material fit into the conception of classical tragedy he held in highest regard" (9). Many of us, undoubtedly, have been there ourselves.

Weltzien also provides a wealth of additional material which will no doubt keep western literary scholars busy for years. Included are a number of previously unpublished letters between Maclean and Utley, a lively correspondence between Norman and his former student and acclaimed poet, Marie Borroff, between 1949 and 1986, several letters to Lois Jansson, the widow of a central figure in Young Men and Fire, and a number of letters to Nick Lyons, former English professor and editor of Lyons Press which publishes, among other things, fly-fishing literature. There are also several disparate, autobiographical and highly personal essays which provide insight on Maclean's teaching, a transcript of a talk he gave in Missoula on his earlier life in Montana and his own particular artistic literary style, a lengthy interview he gave in 1986, and several occasional pieces he did while on the University of Chicago faculty. Weltzien also provides a sampling of Maclean's writing including a reprint of the essay "Logging and Pimping and 'Your Pal, Jim'" which he initially produced prior to "A River Runs Through It." Significantly, there are also two excerpts from Young Men and Fire that will assist readers in understanding Maclean's obsession with the Mann Gulch tragedy (as well as several letters mentioned above). All contribute to a broader and more comprehensive appreciation of Maclean's art, his talent, and why he was so thorough and severely demanding of himself. It was, to be sure, a self-imposed rigor that pressed him to the point of near literary paralysis ultimately.

Yet, most significant for both the neophyte and experienced Maclean devotee are Weltzien's contextualizing introduction and his chapter exegeses. Sensitive to his subject—and reflecting Maclean's own lean style—Weltzien is careful not to overextend his analysis or commentary, choosing rather to let the reader draw her or his own conclusions. It is clear that Weltzien's knowledge and understanding of Maclean is unparralled and that he has, through this effort, crawled for a time into Maclean's skin. And though Norman himself may have scoffed at the attention or the need to publish this material (particularly the unfinished material), Alan Weltzien has performed a noble deed for the world of western and Montana literature by providing a beautiful gift to us all as "the long-missing third panel in Maclean's biggest triptych" (xxiv).

[The Montana Professor 21.1, Fall 2010 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]


Contents | Home