Let me begin by saying upfront that Rebecca McCarthy’s biography of author Norman Maclean, Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, is wonderful reading.
Much as Maclean divined a new genre in his writing of A River Runs Through It—for McCarthy “a fictional, poetic collection of stories with elements of autobiography, history, memoir, tall tale and myth”—McCarthy has not written a traditional biography.
Part family memoir, part bildungsroman, part literary criticism, part orthodox biography, Norman Maclean is a splendid addition for the Macleanophile, for those who not only collect all of Maclean’s writing that is publicly available, but also any writing by anyone else that pertains to him.
Maclean grew up in the mountains of Montana to become a professor at the University of Chicago, writing A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire late in life.
“His second career could not have happened without his first,” McCarthy observes correctly, “And he couldn’t have written either book as a young man.” Maclean’s small output was the perfect convergence of means, motive, and opportunity.
Forty years of teaching Shakespeare and Romantic poetry, a lifelong desire to make sense of his life through writing, and the deep loneliness that followed retirement and the death of his wife forged a relationship in Maclean’s seventies to help him create a few stories that in the words of Pete Dexter, “filled holes inside of me that had been so long in the making that I’d stopped noticing they were there.”
McCarthy, a journalist and a poet, was a friend of Maclean’s long before she became his biographer. She met Maclean as a high school girl while visiting her older brother, John, his wife, and their young baby at Seeley Lake in Montana—where Maclean had spent his summers since childhood and her brother worked for the Forest Service. Maclean joined the family for a restaurant dinner.
McCarthy was writing poetry as a teenager, which she shared with her sister-in-law, Marilyn, who, in turn, had shown the poems to Maclean. He devoted this particular evening to McCarthy, talking about aspects of her poetry, not treating her like a kid but rather as another scholar of the literary arts. McCarthy was overwhelmed. This was the beginning of Maclean becoming a great source of both criticism and advice regarding McCarthy’s writing. He would be supportive but never patronizing.
Always the teacher, Maclean also provided lessons on other matters that first night. McCarthy had ordered a Tom Collins, but Maclean let her know that rainbow-colored cocktails served with umbrellas were inappropriate at the dinner table.
“Those drinks are for you and your boyfriend after a game of tennis,” Maclean said, “but not before a meal.”
Whiskey, with or without water, is what met his approval, and he ended the lecture by saying, “That’s it, darling, those are your choices.”
McCarthy lets us know that being so judgmental came easily to Maclean. “I learned it was his nature to pass judgement on, well, everything and everyone,” McCarthy wrote, “without worrying about the fallout. I think his compulsive judging sprang from the Calvinist training of his Presbyterian minister father.
Maclean strongly argued that McCarthy should attend the University of Chicago, telling her brother, “You don’t want any small-town provincialism wrecking Rebecca’s chances just as she’s starting out. And neither do I.”
The major dichotomy of Maclean’s life is well-known to his admirers—his fishing roots in the mountains balanced by teaching poetry at one of the country’s finer universities—but McCarthy reveals how deeply Maclean’s relocation to the East Coast scarred him, quoting his explanation to her of why he left home: “I decided to leave Montana by asking myself, ‘Who would you talk to if you stayed here? And what would you talk about? Fishing?’ I would have died. I needed to live in the world of ideas, and so do you.” Maclean tore himself from a world he loved and never wanted to leave but knew could not, ultimately, fulfill him, leaving a wound that would never completely heal.
He returned to Montana several times before—just shy of turning thirty—permanently moving to Chicago. It is easy, in this context, to understand how important the summer retreats to the mountains were to Maclean, even after everyone in his family, all his blood relations, were gone.
He saw a younger version of himself in McCarthy. “You can’t stay here, Rebecca,” Maclean said. “You would end up married to some piss-fir willy with too many children and no time for poetry.”
McCarthy did enroll at the University of Chicago and Maclean took her under his wing. He promised McCarthy’s mother he would look after her and that he did.
Dartmouth is where Maclean first studied, but he was miserable there. “His classmates were learning to sail and play polo,” McCarthy wrote of Maclean’s time in the Ivy League. “Norman had been fighting forest fires and leading pack mules in the Bitterroot Mountains.”
He eventually transferred to the University of Chicago, with a more egalitarian atmosphere, and Maclean grew to love his new hometown. He shared that love with McCarthy.
Maclean was generous with his time, the two taking daily walks that often served as counseling sessions, even in winter. He would point out animal tracks in the snow, and afterward they would toast their outing with hot tea and whiskey.
He relished the demographic diversity of Chicago, and they enjoyed dinners at a wide variety of ethnic restaurants as Maclean introduced his protégé to her new environment, letting her know that he had made Chicago his home by finding areas, such as Jackson Park, that reminded him of Montana.
What McCarthy would come to learn is that she was probably doing as much for Maclean as he was for her. Only the year before their meeting, Maclean had been hospitalized with depression, struggling in his loneliness following the death of his wife, Jessie. In helping McCarthy to become established at the university and serving as her guidance counselor, Maclean had a reason to live.
“In coming here, you have made an old man very happy,” he told her.
“I wonder just who the hell I am, darling,” Maclean said to McCarthy on one of their walks, which she found very comforting, thinking that if someone as heralded as Maclean, old enough to be her grandfather, was still wondering about himself, then her confused state as she entered adulthood might not be as troublesome as she worried.
The neighborhood of the university campus had suffered socio-economically since Maclean had moved in, with students regularly warned about which areas were less safe than others. But Maclean appeared unconcerned.
He was “too annoyed by the many changes to be afraid,” McCarthy writes—letting us see the curmudgeonly, sometimes cantankerous, Norman Maclean many of us came to love through his writing. He did not avoid streets or parks that had been crime scenes. He did not care.
But Maclean could be less than cuddly, too, which we see as McCarthy weaves the story of her growing friendship with Maclean together with her own family’s hardship, as her sister-in-law dies of cancer. “No one could replace her,” McCarthy wrote, but her brother, the grieving husband, looked for someone who would.
The involvement of Maclean in this drama is a lens through which we can better see him. McCarthy describes a hissing sound Maclean would make when disturbed by someone’s behavior, “a cross between a punctured tire and an angry rattlesnake.”
She heard that hiss as Maclean saw her brother trying to fill the hole in his life through the company of other women. Maclean felt that John was being unfaithful to Marilyn, or at least to her memory.
“The Calvinist in him hated failure,” McCarthy writes, and he would at times, when he saw failure in a friend, break with that person, and “[s]ometimes the split was irreparable, and he cast them out of the tribe forever.”
McCarthy quotes a friend of Maclean’s, describing the relationship Maclean had with those to whom he was closest, “To be loved by Norman was to have expectations set on you.”
Again, she refers to the scars received in how Maclean was raised by his father, with Maclean’s awareness that in those early years his father was possibly “too tough and constricting.”
“Many children,” McCarthy wrote, “have had kinder beginnings.”
The overbearing nature of Maclean senior certainly contributed to Maclean’s devotion to his mother. This attachment was obvious to everyone in the family’s orbit, including his children. “There wasn’t much room for my mother in that relationship,” his daughter, Jean, said.
Despite Maclean’s disappointment in McCarthy’s brother for his behavior as a widower, Maclean, too, would again have a romantic life, even if not one as constant as he had lived with his wife. He courted the widow of a friend, Virginia Heiserman, a stunningly beautiful woman who was employed at the university.
“Darling, I love you too much to marry you,” Maclean said to Heiserman, but asked her to come to Montana with him in the summer, admitting that, “I don’t know what that will do for your reputation, but I know what it will do for me.”
Heiserman would marry another, but Maclean saw other women, one to whom he did propose, although that would not come to pass, either.
The great unrequited love of Maclean’s life was his interest in General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Maclean spent much of the 1960s trying to write a book about Custer and the battle in which he died, presenting that point of history as a ritual drama in the psychological development of America, with tragic overtones.
He completed most of the chapters he wanted for the book but could not achieve the degree of cohesiveness he wanted, an Aristotelian sense of unity, and eventually gave up on the project.
He taught a course concentrating on his research methods: “General Custer and the Battle of the Little Big Horn: A Study in Historiography and Literary Method.” One student remembers that “the Custer segment, offered as an example of using textual evidence, made its way into every course [Norman] taught,” even those in Shakespeare or Victorian poetry.
Although unable to complete the book on Custer, Maclean undoubtedly learned some valuable lessons in writing historical stories with tragic dimensions. That experience is what provided him the confidence to tackle the degree of difficulty he met in writing A River Runs Through It.
“I am trying to take historical remembrances and reminiscences far beyond memories and yet they are memories,” is how Maclean explained his efforts.
Maclean’s best writing was intensely personal, antithetical to the scholarly work by which the academic class achieves distinction. Maclean wrote only two literary papers and was resentful to be considered only an “undergraduate teacher” because of that.
Resentment came easy to Maclean. Those who knew him well were aware of this. He shopped at L. L. Bean but was contemptuous of Orvis, for example, for reasons known only to him.
Early in his teaching career, Maclean “developed a reputation for toughness and kindness.” He also cultivated a persona as “a lone wolf from the mountains, where men were men.” He was a taciturn operator in university politics and could hold a grudge. When he found himself running low on grudges he would seek new grudges.
This personality was described by colleague Wayne Booth as coming from Scottish tribal warfare. “You’re either in the tribe or out of it,” Booth said. “When somebody violated his code, they had been disloyal to the clan.”
Maclean had a vendetta against the Forest Service over several matters and threatened to “leave Montana and the Forest Service behind because “of the sustained smell of their shit, but it is the smell of their incompetence that’s even more sickening.”
McCarthy knew her friend well enough to write, “Aggression seems to have been hereditary with the Maclean clan.”
Maclean’s final years were humbling. After the publication of A River Runs Through It, he hoped to write several more books, but his decline and the amount of research needed for Young Men and Fire would not allow for that.
Prostate cancer and an increasing number of falls, some with harrowing results, left Maclean increasingly incapacitated.
His daughter appreciated when her father was alert but said, “there were times when he wasn’t there.” The money he made from selling the movie rights to A River Runs Through It paid for round-the-clock care in his final years.
When Maclean wrote, “There’s a lot of tragedy in the universe that has missing parts and comes to no conclusion, including probably the tragedy that awaits you and me,” he knew what he was talking about.
Rebecca McCarthy was extremely fortunate for her early adulthood to have been so influenced by Norman Maclean as both friend and mentor, and we are fortunate, too, for her sharing that gift with us. McCarthy’s biography of Norman Maclean helps to remove the rose-colored glasses through which we tend to regard a favorite writer, allowing us to see the whole man while at the same time also watching our appreciation of him deepen.
Image via Picryl.
