The River Keeper
Sometimes you meet people who were raised in the Mountain West who carry that space with them wherever they go. They retain a certain ruggedness and cool reserve—a suspicion of settled places. One gets the sense that, for them, the streets of Paris can’t really compare to a morning on horseback in Montana. The writer Norman Maclean was one of those people. He and his brother, Paul, were raised in Missoula in the 1920s, a world, in Maclean’s words, “with the dew still on it.” Their father, a Presbyterian minister, taught them how to fly-fish and to fear a mercurial God. Maclean would go east to Dartmouth and then establish himself as a revered professor at the University of Chicago. He was 74 years old when he published A River Runs Through It.
A new biography, Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, presents a portrait of Maclean in late winter. He’s retired from teaching and living in Hyde Park in an apartment near campus. He’s lost his wife, Jessie, to emphysema and has settled into the comforting routines of an early scotch and slow-cooker dinners. Yet he still finds the time to mentor students such as the book’s author, Rebecca McCarthy, a family friend that Maclean convinces to matriculate to Chicago. And he still has his poets—Housman, Tennyson, Robert Burns—whose words he instilled in generations of undergraduates. In the mornings, and during his summers in Montana, he works on what he calls “his stories.”
The opening section of A River Runs Through It is famously a sermon about fly-fishing, delivered by Maclean’s father: “It is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between 10 and 2 o’clock.” But the story’s center is the younger brother, Paul, with his natural charisma and recklessness. Paul seems to play at life, and his father and brother hold him in awe while trying to rescue him from his drinking and gambling. For me, the story’s most memorable lines are not those about fishing, but the ache and regret expressed in the final passages: “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” We all have a version of that person we love but who dances beyond our understanding.
The biography provides a new perspective on Maclean’s most famous work. To my surprise, the real Paul was not murdered in Montana, as implied, but rather on the South Side of Chicago. It was Maclean who had persuaded Paul to come east and get away from his dissipated life in the West. As McCarthy writes: “He carried the burden of his brother’s unsolved murder, and the guilt of having invited him to Chicago, for almost forty years.” In this way, A River Runs Through It was an act of public grieving. Friends who had known Maclean for many years had never heard him speak about Paul until the story was published. The repressed sadness was transmuted into art.
It’s unusual to become a writer in your 70s, especially a famous one. The almost-family intimacy that McCarthy shares with Maclean lets us into his doubts and his constant sense of unworthiness. Even after A River Runs Through It becomes a national success, we witness Maclean becoming enraged over perceived slights and, perhaps justly, the foolishness of Hollywood. (He wouldn’t live to see the 1992 movie that Robert Redford would make, with Brad Pitt as Paul.) Maclean was insecure in the way of the Romantic poets that he so admired: His sense of self was never fixed. These questions of purpose and identity are usually the province of the young, but Maclean tells McCarthy that “it should haunt old age, and when it no longer does, it should tell you that you are dead.”
Still, one wishes that Maclean had been better at sorting through his own peculiar chemistry. The very openness to the past, to melancholy and to feeling, that led to the breakthrough of A River Runs Through It became a hindrance. Maclean was consumed with General Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn, and he did copious amounts of research before abandoning the project. What a book that would have been. He also worked for many years on the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire, which took the lives of 13 smoke jumpers. But he never felt that he was getting the story right; his retelling was never good enough or precise enough to honor their memory. (This material was published posthumously as the book Young Men and Fire.)
Reading this biography enlarged my understanding of Maclean. He never would have become the writer that he did without his years in the classroom, teaching the rhythm and pulse of great literature. He also became somehow more of a Westerner in Chicago, preserving that part of himself on urban shores and in academic settings. If there is a fault to be found with his choices, it’s this: Perhaps holding yourself to the standards of immortal poets is too high a standard! Maclean was acutely aware of his perfectionism, and his fading energy. He ran out of time, like we all do.
