The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  One of my editors admitted to me that he spent two evenings looking through the Bible and Biblical concordances for the source of the title of the book, A River Runs Through It. But its source, as far as I know, is in such an ordinary farmer’s expression as “a creek runs through the north forty,” listed to beauty perhaps by the substitution of “river” for “creek” and “it” for “the north forty.” The liquid R’s that begin and end “river” are to be contrasted to the grunting K’s that begin and end “creek”; and the farmer’s “north forty” (forty acres being a 16th of a square mile or section of land) is to be contrasted to the substituted “it” which is the “it” of the world to come and the “it” of Shakespeare, as in, “If it be now, ’tis not to come.” Also, the farmer’s ordinary phrase is without rhythm, made up, except for “forty,” of staccato one-syllable words, whereas the two syllables of “river” turn “A river runs” into running rhythm, the rhythm running over three alliterative R’s. So my father is also co-author of the title of this book, A River Runs Through It.

  (3) My final acknowledgement is that it was my father from whom I first learned rhythm, perhaps without his or my quite knowing it. Every morning we had what was called “family worship.” After breakfast and again after what was called supper, my father read to us from the Bible or from some religious poet such as Wordsworth; then we knelt by our chairs while my father prayed. My father read beautifully. He avoided the homiletic sing-song most ministers fall into when they look inside the Bible or edge up to poetry, but my father overread poetry a little so that none of us, including him, could miss the music.

  Although since retirement I seem to have turned to the narrative art, most of the courses I have taught have been in poetry, and unlike teachers of poetry who devote most of their courses to the psyche and society, I always devoted a big portion of each course in poetry to rhythm—quantitative and qualitative, accentual and intonational and superimposed rhythms.

  Twice a day when I was very young I heard my father read such English as: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

  And so to the end of the 23rd Psalm, by the way with only two adjectives, green pastures and still waters, both of them immortal, which is the right way to use adjectives if you can’t stay away from them. As for rhythm, it may be said that I learned rhythm early on bended knees.

  Of course, when I was between six and ten and a half I didn’t know anything about superimposed rhythms; I only knew when I heard my father read the 23rd Psalm that I could hear the still waters moving and pausing and the Lord comforting me. Now, since I have long been a teacher, I can say that it is a wonderful example of superimposed rhythms, although I always try to remember in making an analytical statement like that to remember the still waters and the Lord’s comfort. Still, I can count at least three concurrent rhythms in the harp of David. There is, perhaps most obviously, what we can call quantitative rhythm, a patterned recurrence of speech groups of almost the same length or quantity. Concurrent with this quantitative rhythm is a second rhythm; in each quantitative unit there is a repetition of or a coming close to the same grammatical structure, which we shall call a grammatical rhythm—the repetition of subject, verb, and predicate in that order. Let us listen to just these two at first, the patterned recurrence of length and grammatical structure: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.” But listen now to the lovely variants of patterns so that the song is a song and not a singsong of mechanical repetition. In “thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” the subject still comes first but instead of being just one word as “I” or “He” or two words as “The Lord,” it is now six words. “Thy rod and thy staff, they,” and so the verb is only one word and the predicate only one, “comfort me.” And what about other such lovely variants, as “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow”?

  These two rhythms, what we have called quantitative and grammatical rhythms, are deep in Hebrew poetry, but present also in the King James translation is the modern base rhythm of English poetry—accentual rhythm, or, as we used to say in school, “the stuff that scans,” where what recurs is what we called “feet” when I was young, although I believe now in high school and even college feet go nameless and perhaps unnoticed. The foot is a unit of two or more syllables that are disproportionately stressed, and, when the first syllable is relatively unstressed and the second stressed it is called an iamb and when the first two syllables are relatively unstressed and the last one stressed it is called an anapest. Furthermore, when the rhythmical pattern is a patterned recurrence of either or both of these feet, we shall call it here falling-rising rhythm, and we shall not bother about the opposite, rising-falling, made up of trochees and dactyls, because the King James version of the 23rd Psalm is in falling-rising rhythm, made up of iambs and anapests, which are often changing place for variety and richness, both being falling-rising rhythms and easily interchanged. The first line of the psalm opens and closes with an iamb and two anapests in between:

  Thĕ Lórd / iš y shép / hĕrd: Ĭ sháll / nŏt wánt.

  The psalm ends with a line that likewise has two anapests in the middle and an iamb at the end (with a feminine ending) but opens with two iambs instead of one:

  Ănd Í / wĭll dwéll / ĭn thĕ hóuse / ŏf thĕ Lórd / fŏrévĕr.

  There are, then, at least three kinds of rhythms going on at the same time in this translation of David’s psalm—quantitative, grammatical, and accentual—and three rhythms all at once are a lot of rhythm for a little poem that is marked as being six lines long, and especially since there is always the danger of poetry becoming too poetical. Important for us, too, there is always the danger of prose seeming to be poetical at all. It is perhaps enough to say here that the 23rd Psalm does not bang out its rhythms, but hovers about them, sometimes stating them precisely so the ear knows what it is listening for, then drifting off into the dim shadows of rhythms, and then bouncing back into sunshine rhythm again.

  The questions raised by rhythm in prose are too big to go into here, so I will not start any arguments but instead just state a few of what to me are axioms about rhythm and prose. You don’t have to believe them but you can bet they’re true. (1) All prose should be rhythmical. (2) One should practically never be consciously aware of the rhythms of prose; one should be aware only that it is a pleasure to read what one is reading. (3) There are, of course, exceptions to my statement that prose rhythms should not be noticeable—there are times indeed when rhythms should be both seen and heard, as for instance, when one is fooling around and showing off. I will quote again the opening sentence of the story “USFS 1919,” which I used earlier as a sentence made out of American idioms, but it comes back now as an example of a sentence having the three kinds of rhythms of the 23rd Psalm—quantitative, grammatical, and accentual. “I was young, and I thought I was tough, and I knew it was beautiful, and I was a little bit crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.” It is a showoff sentence, and the rhythms go with it, but I couldn’t go around writing many sentences like that in a row without getting challenged. (4) The fourth and final axiom is that there are places in prose where the reader not only will accept but expects a great deal of rhythm—where he will notice an absence of rhythm and take it as a deficiency not only in the writing but in the author. If an author writes out of a full heart and rhythms don’t come with it then something is missing inside the author. Perhaps a full heart.

  The Pure and the Good*

  ON BASEBALL AND BACKPACKING

  “The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking” focuses, as does “The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers,” on Maclean’s personal and
pedagogical interest in rhythm in language. In this essay, he analyzes the old ballad “Lord Randal” to define four overlapping rhythms that together create the ballad’s music. Maclean also reviews some core aesthetic principles, calling his first book “love stories” that include his “love of seeing life turn into literature,” citing USFS 1919 as an illustration of this view. Along the way, he compares “a fair number of professional literary critics” unfavorably to baseball fans.

  I must have been a little confused when I agreed to talk on this subject, “The Pure Good of Literature.” A member of the Association of Departments of English (ADE) Executive Committee that planned the program, no less a person than Arthur Coffin, asked me whether I would as I was walking to the platform to talk to his students at Montana State University in Bozeman. “Pure” and “good” are words that don’t come through to me clearly at normal altitudes, but Bozeman is such a beautiful town, with the Spanish Peaks behind it and the Bridger Mountains in front, that the pure and the good seem possible there, so I said yes, and went on to the platform to talk about something very different.

  Next morning, though, I was troubled enough to look Arthur up before leaving the Gallatin Valley to ask whether I had heard him right, and he repeated himself in daylight and went on to say that maybe I didn’t know but since I had retired from teaching there had been a steady decline in the enrollment of students in English. He stated this in such a way as to suggest some relation of cause and effect, so I remained sufficiently confused to be here this morning to speak, in New York of all places, about the pure and the good.

  There isn’t a chance, though, I will say anything timely to affect the job market. I began teaching in 1928 during the Great Boom but just before the Great Depression and, although I always had a job during the Depression, I never once in all those years got a raise in rank or salary. So I have taught in good times and bad times, without greatly affecting the economy.

  Something tells me that this may be true of many of us. All we can do at any given time is to teach what we see as best in literature and, I may add, in ourselves. It is also true, however, that in literature, as in life, we may come to take things for granted when times are good, or may do the opposite—through affluence, get fancy and lose sight of the fundamentals in a sea of aesthetics. In either event, it probably makes sense to take a fresh look at ourselves when things are not good to be sure we are at our best.

  For instance, it pays from time to time to see whether, as teachers, scholars, and critics of literature, we are as good as professional baseball writers or even as baseball fans. Baseball fans are among our leading exponents of the art-for-art’s-sake school of criticism—to them the art of baseball is a thing in itself and sufficient unto itself. They love it deeply and are very learned about it. The difference between a double steal and a delayed steal is primer stuff to them, and, as critics, they all know it is a disfigurement of the art to try a steal of any kind when your team is three or four runs behind. They know what they are talking about, and they are willing to stand up all night to get a ticket to see the big game. I have just written a small book of stories that was widely enough reviewed to entitle me to the opinion that a fair number of professional literary critics don’t even know what kinds of questions to ask about a book. There are people in the grandstands of our profession who wouldn’t be allowed in the bleachers of baseball. And many of our students in poetry can’t tell an anapest from third base.

  I am old-fashioned. I believe that one must know something about craftsmanship to come to know and love an art in its purity. We just must assume that one of our greatest loves is of the things men and women make with their hands and hearts and heads. We must assume that some of these beautiful things are hard to make and that therefore it will probably be hard to know as much as we should about an art in order to love it as we should. Even the ordinary baseball fan operates on these assumptions.

  But many of our students in poetry courses—even in graduate courses—can do nothing, for instance, with the rhythm of poems. Reading a poem to them is like going to the senior prom and not being able to dance. But they have to know some things about craft before they can see and feel some of the complex beauty that has given immortality to such a seemingly simple old ballad as “Lord Randal.” To see its beauty they must see that part of it is in its complex rhythm and in the suitability of its rhythm to a musical form such as the ballad, and in particular to “Lord Randal.” At the end, they should be able to write a paper showing that it has at least three rhythms superimposed on its base English accentual rhythm of falling-rising syllables—carefully varied iambs and anapests—as “o where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son.” But they should be able to go on from there and show that the music only begins with qualitative rhythm, that quantitative rhythm is concurrent with the qualitative, that above the patterned syllables are larger verbal units of half lines and whole lines falling into patterns, as in Hebrew verse, and that the four-line stanza itself eventually becomes a foot, with the first two lines being a question and the last two lines the answer. This patterned repetition of grammatical structure we might call grammatical rhythm, and with it comes another kind of rhythm, a patterned recurrence of pitch or key, the question asked in the first two lines by the anxious mother in a high female key and the answer in the last two lines in the low masculine tones of her dying son.

  So in this old-time immortal ballad there are at least four rhythms harmonizing with one another: the qualitative patterned recurrence of stressed syllables; the quantitative rhythm of recurring half lines, whole lines, and four-line stanzas; the repeated grammatical structures within these quantitative units; and finally a patterned change of key within each stanza from high key in the first two lines to low key in the last two.

  “O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my son?

  O where hae ye been, my handsome young man?”

  “I hae been to the wild wood; mother, make my bed soon,

  For I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

  “Where gat ye your dinner, Lord Randal, my son?

  Where gat ye your dinner, my handsome young man?”

  “I din’d wi’ my true-love; mother, make my bed soon,

  For I’m weary wi’ hunting, and fain wald lie down.”

  Such a lovely old poem, forever fresh and forever carrying with it its own musical accompaniment.

  Let us leave the baseball fans behind in the bleachers. Ultimately, of course, literature does not play a game unless it is the game of life, and life is impure—it flops around and has spasms and in between it runs too straight, routinized by jobs and families and what the neighbors think. What then can be pure or good about it?

  From here on I speak for myself, while hoping I speak for others. As I look back at my life now that I have been allowed to pass considerably beyond my biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I find times when it lifted itself out of its impurities of spasms and routines and became, usually briefly, as if shaped by a poet or storyteller. When the time was short and intense, like one of Wordsworth’s “Spots of Time,” it became, alas for a moment only, a lyric poem. If it went on through time and took in characters and events, it became a story. Now, looking back at my life, I see it largely as a sheaf of unarranged poems and stories with a few threads binding them together. I don’t remember much of what happened in between. What I remember most about my life is its literature.

  I don’t want at my age to go metaphysical, but I doubt that there are, outside us in X, assortments of ready-made poems and stories and that we just happen along and find roles in them. It takes a poet and a storyteller to make a poem and a story. Even if such literary works are lying ready-made outside us in X, it takes a poet and a storyteller to recognize them when they come along.

  As perhaps several of you know, I turned to writing stories of my own life to fill a gap left by my retirement and the death of my wife. I had the good fortune of having been brought up in the early
part of this century in the woods of western Montana and of not having to go to school until I was nearly eleven. My collection of stories is called A River Runs Through It, and they are love stories: stories of my love of craft—of what men and women can do with their hands—and of my love of seeing life turn into literature.

  The reaction to these stories suggests that at times I may have succeeded. One of the stories, entitled “USFS 1919,” is about my third summer in the early United States Forest Service, when I was seventeen years old, but older than the Forest Service. It is, if anything, overloaded with the excitement of learning how to do things in the woods of northern Idaho and how it feels to do them, of how, for instance, to fight forest fires and how it feels when the heat is so great that the only oxygen left is less than fourteen inches from the ground. But now in my hometown of Missoula, Montana, I am something of a hero to the big-legged boys and girls who are backpackers—they stop to congratulate me because an excerpt from this story was published in the Backpacking Journal. The excerpt contains a brief sketch of the history of the art of packing horses, mules, and camels—of its origins in Asia, its travels across Africa and from there by way of the Arabs to Spain, where it picked up much of its present terminology (such as manty and the cinch of a saddle), and from Spain to Mexico and from Mexico to squaws and from squaws to us. To the big-legged boys and girls of my hometown, no greater honor can befall a living writer than to have something published in the Backpacking Journal, especially if it tells how to throw a diamond hitch.

  But I have had several letters about this story from some girls from Brooklyn that pleased me even more. The overall plot of my Forest Service story is that of a boy in the woods who for the first time sees his life turning into a story, and the girls from Brooklyn, where supposedly one tree grows, wrote to tell me that they liked my story of the boy in the Forest Service in northern Idaho in 1919 because that very summer (1976) the same thing had happened to them—for the first time ever they had seen their own lives turn into a story. I don’t know what had happened to them—perhaps they had fallen in love with some boy in a summer camp in upstate New York—but what was even more important to them is that for the first time they had seen their lives have a complication and a purgation.