A River Runs Through It: The Tragic Vision of Norman Maclean

Nearly everyone has seen Robert Redford’s fine film, A River Runs Through It. The book on which it is based, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, has sold almost two million copies and been translated into more than twenty languages. Neither the book nor the movie is a strictly factual account of Norman Maclean’s life. Yet both readers and moviegoers are likely to have suspected that a remarkable man stood behind them. Rebecca McCarthy’s Norman Maclean: A Life in Letters and Rivers proves them right.

McCarthy first met Maclean in 1972, when she was a teenager and fledgling poet visiting Montana from her native Georgia.[1] She had come to help care for Marilyn, a sister-in-law suffering from breast cancer. Marilyn and her husband, together with McCarthy, went to a restaurant for dinner with Maclean. Marilyn had clandestinely given him a sheaf of her amateurish poems. Rather than dismissing them, Maclean began immediately to offer constructive critiques. Thus began a friendship that was to last until his death in 1990 at age eighty-seven.

The word “tough” pervades McCarthy’s account of Norman Maclean’s life and work, almost like a leitmotiv. Toughness can indicate callused hands and knotted fists. Maclean in fact dramatized himself as a tough guy, sprinkling his informal speech with Anglo-Saxon expletives, confessing that “Just as Chesapeakes [hunting dogs] are coded for retrieving, Scotchmen are coded for profanity” (142). Such toughness, in Maclean’s case, was an outward guise to mask an inward tenderness. Yet Maclean was in fact a fighter—especially in bouts with other young toughs in his native Missoula.[2] His otherwise staid Presbyterian minister-father would exempt him from church attendance if he had won a Saturday night brawl. Maclean’s spiritual toughness became evident in his lifelong struggle with what he regarded as the tragic character of human existence. “A good teacher,” he explained to students in his final course on Wordsworth at the University of Chicago, “is a tough guy who cares very deeply about something that is hard to understand” (165).[3] “Tough guy” is his phrase for a person possessing not only the resilience to withstand life’s hard-to-understand tragedies but also the willingness to endure those that cannot be overcome.

***

Norman Maclean is clearly, unabashedly Rebecca McCarthy’s hero. She lavishes him with well-deserved praise, especially for his many kindnesses to her. Back in Montana, he had taught her how to fish for trout in the rushing rivers:

I watched Norman cast, the line whipping over his head before he dropped the fly, leader, and line in the water with only a small ring of rippling water. It was so beautiful, the line falling as softly as a sigh, and I wanted to be able to do that. I know the fish appreciated how he didn’t disturb them; he just offered them a little bite of something—with a hook on it (82).

Maclean persuaded McCarthy to enroll at the University of Chicago rather than a lesser school, convinced she could meet its rigorous standards but also determined to be her guardian once she arrived. They took long and frequent walks together in neighboring parks, no matter how bitter the cold. “He told me how he made Chicago a place where he could thrive by finding enough pieces of Montana to nourish his soul. He was the only person I knew, other than a minister, who talked about caring for one’s soul” (56). Yet she does not spare herself from Maclean’s hard judgment. Long after his death, she found a note he wrote after she had visited him in the hospital as he was suffering from a kidney infection. Perhaps she had offered him sentimental assurances. He complained that he had been “engaged in what her friends refer to as ‘Recovery from Rebecca.’ I’ll trade her to you for an infected kidney” (25).

McCarthy was far from a star student, sprinkling B’s and C’s among the A’s. He urged her to take to teachers, not courses. The soul of strong teaching, he believed, lies in the soul of the teacher. She admits to being intimidated, especially at first, when she enrolled in a course where a fellow student “was reading The Republic in Greek while I struggled to understand Plato in English” (39). Maclean himself had not entered the academic world trailing Wordsworthian clouds of glory. It took him ten years to finish his dissertation. Though his professors urged him to turn it into a book, he declined. At heart, he was a teacher rather than a scholar. His first and last calling was to the classroom, even though the burden was heavy. For us who are accustomed to a two-course load teaching a dozen students in each one, it is difficult to imagine what his life was like. Beginning in 1943, Maclean taught three classes of thirty students during each quarter, requiring them to write two essays per week, then returning them with extended critiques—roughly 1800 papers!

Though Maclean gradually advanced up the academic ladder, his duties were not lessened. After Pearl Harbor, he applied to be a gunnery officer in a naval station. Before he could receive a reply, he approached President Robert Maynard Hutchins who, at age thirty, had become the youngest college president in the nation only a dozen years earlier. He wrote Hutchins that teaching literary criticism and lyric poetry had become “so much hay in my mouth. There are others not fit for military service who can teach my courses. In these circumstances I feel by day and by night that I am not fit for academic service” (47). Hutchins soon appointed Maclean to serve as liaison between the Navy and the University. While still teaching courses in the English department, Maclean—a civilian with no military experience—was also teaching rifle marksmanship and orienteering for recruits in the Institute of Military Studies. He even co-wrote a Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs, published in 1943. As the recently appointed dean of students, Maclean had short shrift for anyone wanting to parlay his studies into an avoidance of the draft. “There are just two kinds of students who sit in that chair,” he tartly told one of them. “Crooked students with straight faces, and crooked students with crooked faces” (48-9).

Neither would Maclean suffer smart fools gladly. To one group of Hutchins’ Wunderkinder—whom he had invited to enroll as high school juniors and then to be graduated in just three years—Maclean joked: “You guys think you’re so sophisticated, but compared to Egyptian youth in the days of the Pharaohs, you’re like monkeys climbing in the trees” (134). He also urged a group of his own undergraduates to remember that, “While you’re worrying about your B+, at the same age Keats had already written ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’” (161). Yet Maclean is not remembered chiefly for his snappish remarks but for his exceeding generosity. He was the consummate writer of letters, hundreds of them—notes of encouragement to colleagues and friends, recommendations to prospective employers of his students, memos for academic committees, nominations to boards bestowing awards, etc.

***

Partly because Norman Maclean spent so much time in non-academic writing, he never published a book. Though he was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English, some doubted that he was a real scholar. Yet he contributed two crucial chapters to an important 1952 volume, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, by Chicago faculty. One is a magisterial essay entitled “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century.” There he carefully refutes the canard that a brittle anti-lyricism dominated the poetry of the age. Quite to the contrary, some of its finest poets wrote lyrically powerful odes. Already in the late eighteenth century, Coleridge and Wordsworth had become their inheritors.

In “Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of King Lear,” Maclean hits full stride. “Tragedy, on the whole,” he declares, “has proved to be the most moving of literary forms.” As Aristotle taught, tragedy induces both pity and fear. The pity induced by tragedy is not sentimental sorrow at another’s misfortune. In the realm of tragedy, pity is prompted when we discover that something we hold most dear—the love of parents for children, Lear’s love for his daughters—has been egregiously violated. Yet what we pity in tragic protagonists, we fear for ourselves: “This might happen to me. I could suffer a similar fate.” Pity thus draws us toward tragic characters, while fear makes us recoil from what destroys them. When a tragic figure such as Lear is destroyed, we recognize that something essential has been lost—though in such recognition it has paradoxically been found. “The way to love anything,” said Chesterton, “is to realize that it may be lost.” Authentic tragedy, far from leaving us desolate, gives us hope.

The conviction that life is essentially tragic is voiced in the complaint of desperate King Lear: “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning.” A tragic hero is ruined, in large part, by his hamartia—an error or mistake which, though it may begin innocently, leads to hubris. Proud and foolishly mistaken Lear demands that his daughters declare which of them loves him most, so as rightly to divide the assets of his kingdom among them. He erroneously assumes that love dwells more in words than deeds. Cordelia remains faithfully silent—“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”—while her sisters wickedly flatter their father, then with their husbands visit unspeakable perfidies on him. Finally discerning the hubristic error that has destroyed him, Lear is appropriately humbled. Yet it is too late for victory, as murdered Cordelia lies dead in his arms:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
And thou no breath at all?
Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.

In granular analyses of the play’s key characters and scenes, Maclean shows how Lear gradually rejects his maddened conviction that Goneril and Regan and Edmund are right—”that sex and self are the sole laws of life.” Yet Lear’s saving recognition comes, not at the end via a grand redemptive vision, but near the middle of the play (III, iv) in a somber question consisting of fourteen words, all but two of them monosyllables:

Hast thou given all to thy two daughters,
And art thou come to this?

There are few better readings of King Lear as our supreme Anglophone tragedy than Maclean’s.

***

If there is disappointment to be found in Norman Maclean’s life and work, I believe it lies in his obsession with the Mann Gulch Fire of August 1949, a large rapidly-spreading forest fire. It burned 4,500 acres, killed thirteen people, including twelve elite smokejumpers. Maclean was at home in Missoula when the horror occurred, and he visited the scene while the ashes were still warm. Summer after summer, Maclean returned to Mann Gulch. He sought to trace all the firefighters’ moves, calling them stations of the cross and referring to himself as undergoing a purgation. He also pored over the minutiae of the federal investigation that followed. Above all, he sought to comprehend the Mann Gulch blowup, which consumed 3,000 acres in ten minutes. Such firestorms have the power of a nuclear bomb—with flames that outrun flying birds, boil the water of streams, burst open boulders, incinerating mountainsides in seconds. Maclean was a man on a mission to find out what happened and why.

His main interest in the Mann Gulch Fire lay in the actions of the fifteen elite smokejumpers who had parachuted from airplanes into the holocaust. Rather than seeking hopelessly to outrace the firestorm, Robert (“Wag”) Dodge their foreman did the unthinkable: he set a small backfire in a grassy space, covered his face, then plunged downward as the towering flames roared over him. Dodge had hollered for his crew to join him, but none did so. Bill Hellman, Dodge’s second-in command, was heard to shout, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” He succeeded but was fatally burned. Two more managed to escape, but the other ten died. For fourteen years, from 1976 until his death in 1990, Maclean sought to create an account of the fire as a wrenching tragedy. Yet, the Mann Gulch disaster was not a tragedy but a calamity—a series of colossal mishaps. Courageous and superbly trained firefighters were overtaken by unforeseen turns of events. They were no tragic victims or villains.

Rather than writing a thick imaginative essay on Mann Gulch, Maclean left endlessly revised manuscripts still unfinished when he died. Young Men and Fire was printed in 1992, after his friend Wayne Booth had pieced together the numerous versions. Despite its 300 pages, and though it won a National Book Critics award, it does not come remotely close to the greatness of the 104-page A River Runs Through It.

***

One cannot but wonder what Maclean might have produced if he had overcome his obsession with Mann Gulch and recast the death of his brother Paul—the central grief of his life—as a quasi-Shakespearean tragedy. In A River Runs Through It, he depicts Paul’s death as resulting from a drunken brawl back in Montana. In fact, it occurred at 63rd and Drexel, just south of the University of Chicago campus. As a Hollywood-handsome youth with fly-fishing talents far outstripping Norman’s, Paul was the ultimate “tough guy.” He boasted that no one could defeat him in a fistfight. And so he left his girlfriend’s apartment in Hyde Park, his wallet stuffed with cash, for a midnight stroll through a nearby ghetto. He was found the next morning with his skull smashed and his pockets emptied. Despite a massive police investigation, no suspect was ever named. His senseless murder became the cornerstone of Norman Maclean’s conviction that human existence is fundamentally tragic.

Though it is always perilous to speculate, Maclean might have refashioned Paul’s story much as he did his own early life in A River Runs Through It—telling the truth “slant,” as Emily Dickinson insisted. The book need not have been set in Chicago for the sake of historical fidelity, nor the protagonist have been called Paul. Maclean could have placed the narrative in a nameless city. It might have included scenes from their rough-housing years in Missoula, even their sexual escapades, though recast in urban terms. His corpse could have revealed that the bones of his right fist were crushed, as in the original story. Paul’s hamartia could have lain in his proud solitariness, his refusal to make common cause—not even joining street gangs—with anyone but his brother. Thus, might Maclean have shown the tragic end of a brilliant and talented youth fatally infected with a mistaken and hubristic regard for the power of his fists.

***

For Norman Maclean, “tragic” is not a synonym for “absurd.” Maclean understood human existence, far from being absurd, as imbued with transcendent meaning. For him, both faith and fly-fishing are stringent forms of self-discipline, mastercrafts of self-control. From them he learned to direct his attention away from his small self to a great and worthy purpose. He also learned to practice a careful economy of effort, the grace to achieve maximal results with minimal exertions. Fly-fishing, his father taught him, “is an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock.” “Until man is redeemed,” Maclean confesses in clear biblical terms, “he will always take a fly-rod too far back, just as natural man always overswings with an ax or golf club and loses all his power somewhere in the air. . . . Power comes not from power everywhere, but from knowing where to put it on.” “It is natural, he adds, “for man to try to attain power without recovering grace.” Evil, it follows, is heavy-handed and graceless.

These are lessons Maclean imbibed from his pastor-father. He never lamented his upbringing in a Presbyterian manse, even though he found his father far too strict. He would sometimes flee in tears back to his room after the Reverend John Maclean had made a withering response to one of his daily essays. Norman remembered, with gratitude, that his chipper mother Clara taught him and Paul their letters and numbers while their dour father prepared his sermons. Yet he regretted that his father never told his sons that he loved them—even though Norman confessed that, except for his brother Paul, he loved his father more than any other man he had ever known.

After the father would lead his sons in a study of the Westminster Shorter Catechism on Sunday afternoons, he would ask them only the first question: “What is the chief end of man?” Norman and Paul would answer in unison: “‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.’ This always seemed to satisfy him, as indeed such a beautiful answer should have.” Maclean adds, albeit wryly: “He certainly believed God could count and only by picking up God’s rhythms are we able to gain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians, he often used the word ‘beauty.’” Hence Maclean’s gratitude for the deeply ecclesial quality of his upbringing:

The church of Missoula is forever a part of me. It is something inside of me where I stand bowed [after collecting the offering] and above me my father bends over and prays and to my sides are friends tied to me through my shoulders into my heart and behind me in a pew is my mother very proud of me and her minister and in her lap my young brother lies asleep. (144)

Despite these fond remembrances of things past, Maclean wanted nothing to do with organized religion. With his oak-knot honesty, he could not call himself a Christian. He did not believe, as Christians do, that we are more sinning than sinned against. Nor do we place our faith in such lofty goods as masterly self-restraint but in a lowly Rabbi from Nazareth—in the crucified Christ and his Church. There we are saved by grace through faith, not of ourselves, lest we boast. We are working out our salvation in fear and trembling, making sacramental and prophetic witness to the world. Christians live and die in the conviction that life is not essentially tragic but comic in the Dantesque sense. In modest deference to the “high tragedy” of Vergil’s Aeneid, Dante called his unfunny epic la Commedia because it ends in neither Hell nor Purgatory but in Paradise. This joyful Victory lies “beyond the walls of the world,” as Tolkien said. Christian faith thus incorporates while surpassing tragedy. Norman Maclean knew and respected these Christian claims, but he could affirm only the first verse of the Fourth Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.” He was unable to embrace verse fourteen: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth.”

Yet Maclean remained a deeply religious man, full of grace and truth. This becomes especially evident in a passage from the story entitled “USFS 1919”:

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

Maclean’s incurably religious character also becomes clear when he accounts for the origins of A River Runs Through It:

As the heat mirages on the river in front of me danced with and through each other, I could feel patterns of my own life joining with them. It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.

These lines come mid-way in A River Runs Though It. They prepare for the mystery-laden final paragraphs:

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 the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

***

Norman Maclean was water-haunted because he believed that a literal and symbolic “river” runs through the “It”—the seemingly pitiless process of brute physical causes and effects. The “It” is “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson said. “Man matters not to nature more than an oyster,” David Hume had declared a century earlier. Even Cardinal Newman feared that the “It” is godless:

Our first feeling [upon moving from the divine to the natural world] is one of surprise and (I may say) of dismay, that His control of this living world is so indirect, His action so obscure. . . . What strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is, His absence (if I may so speak) from His own world. . . . It is as if others had got possession of His work. . . . I see only a choice of alternatives in explanation of so critical a fact:—either there is no Creator, or He has disowned His creatures.[4]

Maclean discerned what Newman did not. He saw, like Coleridge, that God’s creatures are co-creators in naming the supernal significance of the natural world. There are redemptive rivers coursing, figuratively speaking, through the entire cosmos. “I used to think water was first,” declares the Reverend Maclean, “but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are under the rocks.” Words paradoxically lie beneath the waters and the rocks, undergirding them. Poetic imagination does not impose a soft subjective meaning on the hard objective fact. It identifies, instead, what nature itself—with its symbol-generating powers—is already doing. The Anglican poet-critic Malcolm Guite clarifies this revolutionary Coleridgean insight:

Nature herself may be imaging that which is beyond nature—. . . she may be not only a distinct series of opaque objects but also a language of symbols.

Unlike some of the other Romantic poets [Coleridge] was concerned with more than creating beautiful fantasies as an alternative to grim [materialist] reality. He wanted to challenge the philosophers on their own ground and show that the insights of imagination are insights into reality itself.[5]

There is perhaps no more fitting tribute to Norman Maclean’s remarkable life and work than to say that he magnificently employed his imagination to provide perduring if also tragic “insights into reality itself”—indeed, into Reality raised to the upper case.

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