On ‘A River’

Authors can spend a lifetime publishing, honing their craft under the gaze of the reading public until their eager fans are gifted a seminal work. A rare few shock the publishing world with a timeless classic in their debut.

The publication of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories in 1976 introduced millions of readers to the life of first-time author Norman Maclean as a Montana fly fisherman and woodsman, and a laconic wordsmith. Rebecca McCarthy’s new biography of the author also uncovers with crisp detail his celebrated career as an English professor at the University of Chicago.

In the recently published Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, McCarthy reveals many of the autobiographical details of his famous work of fiction. Art and life swirl together like a river eddy in many novels, but few writers have done it as beautifully in a debut piece of writing as Maclean in his story of family, religion and fly fishing.

McCarthy’s biography is illuminated by her long friendship with the aging author from 1972 until Maclean’s death 1992, as well as conversations with his close friends, colleagues and former students. She depicts a man living in two worlds: the intellectual hive of a major university in a cosmopolitan city, and his refuge in the woods and rivers of his Montana cabin on Seeley Lake northeast of Missoula.

McCarthy met Maclean in Montana as a 16-year-old, visiting her brother who was working for the U.S. Forest Service in the Seeley Lake District. Maclean encouraged the nascent writer from South Carolina, convincing her to leave the south and attend college in the “city of Al Capone, machine-gunning gangsters, butchering hogs and playing with freight trains.” But his tutelage came at a cost: cutting critique of her poetry and judgment she found he cast on all but his closest friends.

Yet Maclean also took time and patience to teach his young friend how to cast a fly rod on the Swan River and from the shores of Seeley Lake near his cabin. “He thought I was a fast learner, but I wasn’t so sure,” McCarthy writes. “But I knew he was a good teacher because, after three lessons, I managed to land the fly, leader, and line in the proper order. I never caught anything, but Norman assured me that catching fish was the easy part. Casting correctly was the hard part.”

His failing health from a lifetime of smoking and drink led to Maclean’s retirement just before her arrival at the University of Chicago. But he was still there as a mentor, friend and guide through the city he claimed had the “most beautiful skyline in the world.”

They took long walks through Chicago’s Hyde Park bracing against the cutting wind off Lake Michigan and dined at Maclean’s favorite ethnic restaurants, discussing writing and the history of his beloved city. These outings offered McCarthy a window into her new home that few students leaving rural life for the urban would have experienced. He was still reeling from the death of his wife Jessie after a long battle with emphysema.

Maclean waded through tragedy in his work, coming to terms with the murder of his younger brother Paul, and an attempt to find the truth behind the 13 lives lost to the Mann Gulch wildfire near Helena in 1949. The first featured in his most famous work, and the second he analyzed in Young Men and Fire, which was released posthumously and won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction.

Maclean’s prose was as precise as his fly casting. His debut book rippled through the literary world and made him a best-selling author in his 70s. It would likely have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but the committee declined to award a prize that year: As McCarthy writes, “1976 was a ‘thin year’ for fiction—only the tenth time in the prize’s sixty-one year history that it had done so.”

However, the publicity surrounding the snub may have brought more attention to Maclean’s “little blue book” than actually receiving the prize. And a Pulitzer wouldn’t have shot him to stardom like Robert Redford’s adaptation of A River Runs Through It, the film released shortly after Maclean’s death.

McCarthy recounts the author wrangling with movie studios and potential screenwriters before another celebrated Montana author, Thomas McGuane, introduced Redford to the short story that would launch his career as a director.

After reading a previous attempt at the script, Redford pledged in 1987 to visit Maclean in Chicago three times in six weeks and review it line by line. In a letter to Maclean, Redford wrote of his vision for the screenplay, as McCarthy recounts: “He realized any film of A River Runs Through It needed to shift its focus to Norman because ‘the voice is Norman’s and Norman is a character. But the light is on Paul. So we must feel Norman in a very special way.”

Redford took care to discover the meaning of Maclean’s story and following the film’s 1992 premiere Montana was no longer viewed as a dangerous backwater territory, but rather a sparkling landscape with cold rivers and hungry trout. The movie led to explosive interest in the fly-fishing industry, with some estimates claiming 60-percent growth in the first year after its release.

McCarthy returns to Maclean’s struggles as an aspiring author throughout her book, but the strength of the portrait is spent with the man.

Leaving Montana to attend Dartmouth College in 1921, Maclean developed a lifelong aversion to affluence fueled by the privilege of his fellow students, primarily wealthy New Englanders who viewed his Montana home as an uncivilized wilderness. But his timing at Dartmouth coincided with poet Robert Frost, who had returned to his alma mater to teach writing courses. Maclean used his time there to grow the campus humor magazine as its editor in chief in a close collaboration with fellow student and friend Theodor Seuss Geisel, known now as Dr. Seuss.

After a short time teaching at Dartmouth following graduation in 1924, Maclean was hired as a professor at the University of Chicago where he became a beloved lecturer and mentor to young talent. When the second World War broke out in the 1940s, he taught marksmanship and other rifle skills to the likely volunteers, thanks to his father’s training. “After completing his eight-hour course, many participants received a high ranking for accuracy,” McCarthy relays.

He was heavily involved in student life but never published any work as a professor, though he fired off hundreds of pithy letters to his friends and colleagues. The first foray into publishing surprised his friends and colleagues and also broke the resolve of the University of Chicago Press, which had never before published a work of fiction. His rejection from the big New York publishing houses resulted in a gift to his beloved university.

A River Runs Through It resonates with readers: fly fishing is a beautiful, cerebral pastime, and Maclean used it as a vehicle to tell the complicated tale of his family’s devotion to his kid brother Paul, whom they couldn’t save from himself.

“Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect,” Maclean writes. McCarthy suggests her friend stopped waiting for his prose to become perfect, and the result was near perfection.

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