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A River Runs Through It and Other Stories Maclean, Norman

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A River Runs Through It and Other Stories Maclean, Norman 1976 Foreword by Annie Proulx Norman Maclean (1902-1990) was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His book on Montana’s Mann Gulch forest fire 1949, Young Men and Fire, is also available from the University of Chicago Press. Annie Proulx is the author of a number of books, including Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Accordion Crimes, and Postcards. Her novel The Shipping News won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. For Jean and John to whom I have long told stories Foreword by Annie Proulx Norman Fitzroy Maclean was born in Iowa on 23 December 1902 into a Scots-Presbyterian family with Nova Scotia roots. His brother Paul, born three years later, was murdered in 1938, the cruel event around which the title story twists. The father, John Norman Maclean, was a minister. When Norman was seven the family moved to Missoula, Montana, a place that burned its brand into Maclean hides, marking them for life. The father tutored the boys in religion, literature, and fly fishing. Paul became a master of the fly rod. When he was fifteen Norman Maclean started working for the U.S. Forest Service and saw the USFS as his calling in life until the summer of 1919 when he experienced the several epiphanies described in “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky” and his life cut into a new channel. He spent nearly all of his working life at the University of Chicago teaching English literature and writing scholarly essays, his last ten years as the William Rainey Harper Professor of English. In 1968 his wife of 37 years, Jessie, died. Five years later Maclean retired and took on the most intimate of writing projects, the metamorphosis of his own and the Maclean family’s lives into literature. In 1976, when he was 73, A River Runs through It was published to the excited astonishment of critics and readers. A few more short pieces and essays followed, then the powerful Young Men and Fire, an exemplar of journalistic investigation into the Mann Gulch wildfire of 1949. In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made. When A River Runs through It was published in 1976 I was living in low-life conditions in northern Vermont, logging country on the Quebec border, far from a bookstore, without electricity or telephone and no money. At the time I was just beginning to write fishing and hunting stories for Gray’s Sporting Journal. It was not until sometime in the 1980s, a hundred miles downstate but still living in a remote situation—a decrepit farmhouse at the foot of a steep hill—that I read Norman Maclean’s “little book.” It was late summer. I had been out west and on the way back, at O’Hare, I picked up a copy of A River Runs through It. The flight was two-thirds over when I started reading. When the plane landed in Burlington I was with Maclean, casting into the tricky red osiers along the shore. But I had to put the book away as there was a long drive to the farmhouse. When I got there it was late afternoon, the place washed with somnolent, old-gold light. I hurled my suitcase into the hall, got a glass of water, and went to the porch to finish reading the story. There are few books that have the power to put the reader in such a deep trance that the real world falls utterly away. A River Runs through It has that power, and, when I read the famous last line, “I am haunted by waters,” I sighed and looked up. It was deepening twilight. In the long grass at the end of the porch, perhaps twenty feet distant, stood an uncommonly large bobcat, staring at me. It made no movement except for a slight twitching of its upward-curved tail. Such was the power of the story that I was still in the “Arctic half-light of the canyon” and the bobcat seemed on the bank of the river that runs through all things, and there it has stayed, forever joined in my mind to Maclean’s story. Some years later, along with several other local writers, I was asked to read at a Dartmouth gathering to honor Maclean who attended and taught at the school from 1920 to 1926. The others read their own work, but when my turn came I could not, for my sentences seemed raw sticks beside the work of Maclean who learned the high art of literary architecture through his lifetime of teaching. And so I read the section of the title story of A River Runs through It that balances on both sides of the finest line— “What a beautiful world it was once.” In this stretch Maclean described the three parts of fishing water: the rapids, the deep bend, and the tail of the hole, which we comprehend not only as separate parts but as an entirety. The sequence, repeated again and again, as anyone who fishes living water knows, makes a river. The parts of a river can also be seen as the stages of life, the flow of time. In the afterword of the 1983 edition Maclean wrote that the artistic unity of the story is modeled on this fishing water; the section I chose to read that night was “… the curve of a story.” Almost no other author’s work reads aloud as well as Maclean’s, elegiac and haunting and taut. It is one of the rare truly great stories in American literature—allegory, requiem, memoir—and so powerful and enormous in symbol and regret for a lost time and a lost brother, for human mortality and the consciousness of beauty, that it becomes part of the life experience of the reader, unforgettable. Many critics were astonished that a writer in his seventies could have produced such a masterpiece as a first venture. But, in fact, is that not when we should expect the fire and ice, the distillation of a life’s hard experience filtered through decades of immersion in the world’s literature? Given Maclean’s Scots- Presbyterian youth on river and in woods of rough country, his personal knowledge of loss and grief, his sense of rhythm and structure, his ceaselessly inquisitive mind, we ought not feel surprise but a sense of satisfied justice that he got it right the first time out. Maclean possessed remarkable story sense. In a talk, “Teaching and Story Telling,” that he gave at both the University of Chicago and Montana State University in 1978, he explained its source:… If I am a story teller, I got my early training in a bunkhouse, and, if you are familiar with the bunkhouse variety of the narrative art, you can see readily that my present stories still have these humble origins. When I first went in the woods I was so young I just listened to the masters—but even then things fundamental to the art began to appear. I saw early that oral stories have to be short.… Early, too, I learned that your friends won’t listen to a story unless a lot happens in it.… [A]nother characteristic of the western story is that practically always it has something to do with the truth, but it was only later that I realized how complicated the relations are. Although “A River Runs through It” is a long story, a novella, Maclean never considered writing it as a novel, a literary form he dismissed as “… mostly wind.” There is a kind of surety in his authorial voice—he knew he was good, and undoubtedly it rankled that several dim-witted city editors in eastern publishing houses declined to publish the manuscript, one complaining that there were too many trees in his story. In the end it was the University of Chicago Press that published it, an unlikely book for a university press, but one that became not only a much-loved best seller but earned a permanent place in the body of serious American literature. We can pick out characteristics of Maclean’s style beyond brevity, action, and truth, and his perception that lives can be stories. A striking feature is his didactic curiosity; he examines people, work and situations, turns them about and looks at all angles, discusses possibilities and probabilities of character. On the page this takes the form of aphoristic sentences followed by beautifully constructed explication. Readers have often declared that his stories are instructive manuals of woodsmanship and work. He saw high art in various kinds of labor, celebrated the expertise of work now lost, told of masters of fly fishing, ax and saw work, mule and horse packing, fire fighting, small scale mining. Wallace Stegner, for decades the prolific and preeminent voice of the literary west, dismissed the two other stories in A River Runs through It, “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim,’” and “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” as lesser than the title story:The fact is, the title story contains everything that the other two do, and far surpasses them, transcends them. It flies where they walk. Where they are authentic, humorous, ironic, observant and much else, ‘A River Runs through It’ is both poetic and profound.1 This comment may be a novelist’s prejudice that long works are more important than stories; Stegner’s own short stories, some of them very strong, do not achieve the classic perfection of “A River Runs through It.” “Logging and Pimping” is a comparatively microcosmic 18 pages, really a bunkhouse story, a tale to be told aloud, but vivid and tight, packed with wry observation of human behavior, the difficulties of judging character, the memorable study of a backwoods tinhorn, and a sharp look at a western logging camp before the invention of the chainsaw.
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