November 15, 1955
Dear Bob:
Just a hasty note telling you how glad I am to learn that we are going to work together in applying the Shinola to the Major. I’m sure we’ll do a good job on him. [. . .]
Mighty glad to hear that you’re getting parts of your thesis into print. It’s a damn good thesis, Bob, as I have told you before, and don’t be impressed by my reservations concerning the self-sufficiency of its individual chapters. [. . .]
Sincerely yours,
Norman
January 4, 1956
Dear Bob:
[. . .] I guess the time has come for us to get down to business, so this morning I scratched off a tentative outline [of the Luce profile]. Regard it merely as a punching-bag, something to condition ourselves on.
[. . .] I wrote him several weeks ago and told him you and I were going to do this article on him, and told him I would be asking him for lots of information. In his reply, he gave me his life in one coy paragraph. I realize this is embarrassing for him, but he’s got to sober down and give us several pages of general vital statistics and also more detailed matter on particular points we decide to develop. [. . .]
O.K., I’m willing to assume that it’s my responsibility to write the first draft of the article. I am assuming, however, that we will not submit the article until it suits both of us. [. . .]
Sincerely,
Norman
May 9, 1956
Dear Bob:
As you know, I think your thesis is a dandy but I don’t believe I should try to find some coy and involved way of telling you that I don’t think this piece comes off.9 Unlike your thesis, it is narrative history, its intention being to make acts and men of the past come to life in the present. I suppose that ultimately this is the most important kind of history, and yet it is the history most dependent upon something else—art, the creative imagination and skill in writing. That is, it is possible to be great as a historian of ideas, as several of my friends are, and not be able to create characters, feelings, and events. I hope you will become eminent in many kinds of history, but your present weakness is narrative.
Some of your major difficulties arise, I think, because you had an interesting narrative idea but one which would require a mastery of narrative technique to execute successfully. “The idea” was to present a whole campaign ending in a tragic climax, not by following it chronologically step by step, but by cutting into it at dramatic moments. In other words, by representing, as it were, only the stations of the cross. Such an attempt presents many problems, and I’ll start with a technical one, what is called the problem of “exposition.” By “exposition” I mean the problem of working into a narrative while it is still going ahead incidents and events that occurred outside or before the situation being narrated. Thus you jump from Ft. Abraham Lincoln to the mouth of the Rosebud, which is your second scene or station—but many events occurred between these two scenes that you judge the reader must know about for the narrative as a whole to be intelligible. The ancient dramatists had a chorus or prologue which told the audience what they needed to know to understand what he was about to see, and you also are without any technical devices to handle this problem. For instance, your scene at the mouth of the Rosebud begins by you, the author, retracing the route to tell the reader what he ought to know. With merely the problem of “exposition” in mind, you should look again at the opening scenes of Hamlet and Othello and see how the needed information about the past is incorporated into (not dragged into) the drama of the present.
A more serious difficulty arises from your intention of flashing the campaign to the reader in 27 pages—the problem of creating emotional interest and unity. My guess is that the unity, given the shortness of the account, must be primarily emotional rather than intellectual, since there is not space to give at each important moment of decision the conflicting pieces of information and misinformation, etc. needed to make the battle an intellectual puzzle, like a mystery novel. The best you can hope to do is to keep the main lines of action intellectually coherent, and this I think on the whole you have done. But there is nothing the reader can attach his emotions to, nothing human he can identify himself with and follow throughout with mounting interest. It could have been a single figure like Custer; or a human relationship, such as the tensions between Custer, Reno,10 and Benteen;11 or a set of characters with a common and unusual point of view—such as the non-coms. But it has to be something human and continuous and unfolding. [. . .] When and if you look again at the opening scenes of Hamlet and Othello, will you note how they are pointed at Hamlet and Othello, even though neither character has yet appeared? They are the characters for the reader to watch although they haven’t been seen. One of the crucial aspects of the art of narration, as well as the graphic arts, is the art of proper focus.
Proportion or size is also important. Things are worth so much, and have so much weight, and I think your scales are off at times. Thus you take 2¼ pages to describe the start of the expedition but less than a page to recreate what to the reader is its eternal moment. [. . .]
I turn finally from some of the problems of constructing narrative to some of the problems of writing it. Perhaps the most basic thing I have to say is that there is a vast difference between saying or stating what an action, character, or emotion is and creating that action, character or emotion. Thus you tend to say that Custer “responded icily,” “Wallace looked at Godfrey apprehensively,” “The squaws were at their ghastly work of mutilating the dead,” etc. But to say it is ghastly does not make it so, or make the reader feel it so. De Rudio, if I remember correctly, said he could hear the silvery voices of the squaws as they mutilated the dead, and when he said that he was a fine historian and artist.12 T. S. Eliot is always talking about “the objective correlative,” the action, speech, gesture, reaction that serves as a sign for the emotion or character or state of mind and will create it in a way in which the mere naming of the emotion or character will not. I shall refer to our little Valentine to the Major [Edward S. Luce], not because I am sure it is successful, but because I am sure of why most of it was written the way it was. In this piece, which attempts to create something of the character of the Major, it is never once said (if my memory is correct) that he is such and such a kind of man (tough, sentimental, colorful, devoted, etc., etc., or any combination of these). It tries to create him, not out of adjectives and adverbs, but out of actions and reactions and remarks that are characteristic of him. Thus, if you want to create Custer replying icily, you drop the icily, and have him replying, “If the saddle fits, put it on.” [. . .]
This is, in a lot of ways, a hell of a letter to send to a friend for a wedding present. But then there are ways in which it is not. If a present should be the best thing one can give, then for better or worse, the best thing I can give you are some of my views about writing which I have taught now for 32 years. A teacher, too, ultimately is supposed to know something about people—the hardest kind of people in the world to know something about, those who have promise. You may be sure that if I hadn’t picked you as someone with great possibilities, I would never have written you at such length or with such directness. A teacher soon learns to save himself by treating the mediocre gently and briefly.
As my Presbyterian father would say, “May happiness and success attend you.”
Sincerely,
Norman
May 26, 1956
Dear Bob,
Thanks very much for finding time amid the general festivities of the moment to drop me a note. And I’m also glad if any of my comments were of use to you. I was a little troubled by them. It is tough business criticizing someone’s writing when you don’t know him, for, no matter what any of us say, we all have a sentimental attachment to our writing and to a degree take any criticism of it as a personal affront. For a number of reasons, I always have every thing I write criticized by a variety of people whom I respect, but, damn it, Bob, each criticism is a slight stab in
the heart, andI can’t always tell which causes the greater pain—the criticism that I think is erroneous or the one that really has me nailed to the cross. Still, I’m a deep believer in the school of lumps and bumps. I was initiated into it by Father who was a Presbyterian minister and committed to the view that the right way was the hard way. He used to make me take a page of each paper I wrote for him and justify every word I had used. Perhaps the training was too tough and constricting, and it’s a cinch I still feel him looking over my shoulder as I write, but still there’s much to be said for the feeling that creation and criticism are not unrelated acts.
I was also a little troubled by the fact that I was bearing down on you so much for conventional phrasing. I don’t want to encourage you into a style where every sentence is unique and brilliant—such a style creates the worst possible effect in that the reader gets the impression the writer is more interested in the way he says something than in what he is saying. Actually, I think I might write an essay someday “On the Art of the Cliché,” an art ignored by the criticism of the last 30 years or more which talks altogether of the unusual word, the brilliant image, etc. (so the modern critics talk only of images such as Eliot’s one about the evening stretched across the sky like a patient etherized upon the table). But a little of this stuff goes a long way, even in lyric poetry, and actually it is easier to write this way, once you have caught on to a few tricks, than to move people’s hearts by simple constructions. [. . .]
Sincerely,
Norman
Oct. 20, 1956
Dear Bob,
I’m going to be so indebted to you that I’ll have [to] steal the author’s line to his wife in the foreword (“without whose aid and inspiration this work would not have been possible, etc.”) and transfer it to you, and even it won’t be sufficiently accurate or sentimental. [. . .] I can already see this whole autumn quarter is blown out of the water as far as my getting any work of my own done. In fact, I’m not even getting time to prepare my teaching decently. I doubt if I ever told you that, in addition to my full time duties in the English Department, I am chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities which was authorized some four years ago to give bachelor and master programs for those who wanted a wider view of humanistic activities than can be obtained in a specialized department. We started with nothing—but a certain amount of political opposition—yet four years later we are one of the largest departments in the Humanities Division and this year have a 100% increase over last year, and the students are really good, and naturally I can’t help but be pleased. Also, crucified. God damn it, Bob, I can’t run one of the largest departments in the Division and keep up a full schedule of teaching in the English department and get any reading—let alone research [word written over] (I can’t even spell the word any more) of my own done. [. . .]
Sincerely,
Norman
July 7, 1959
Dear Bob,
I don’t know where to begin, it’s been so long since I’ve written you—perhaps with an explanation of the fact, which I suppose essentially is that I’ve started to write on Custer & the Battle and when I’m through each day the last thing I can do with the remaining time is write some more.
The University gave me an extra quarter off this year, for the first time in 31 years—so with the summer, my regular quarter off, I’ve five months or so free (or at least the mornings thereof, for part of the deal was that I continue at least in a minimum way my administrative chores which bring me over to the University about three or four afternoons a week). Still, I’m very grateful, and I’m not sure with complete time off I could accomplish more. I’m getting pretty old to write a book—sometimes I’m not sure I have the physical stamina—and four to five hours a morning morning after morning has me whipped. Also it’s very lonely, and I’m glad to get over to the University now and then just to hear a human voice.
Oddly, I have started with the last section first—the part on the after-life of the Gen. and the Battle. I had several reasons for doing so, but probably the crucial one was that I thought I could just about finish a first draft of it in the 5 months off and it would be good to have some self-contained unit completed so that it could be looked at with fishy eyes and I could decide whether I had something worth going on with. Bob, I’ll need you real bad next autumn to save me from error, to remove my clichés, and to give me an overall estimate of what I am trying to do conceptually. In the mean time, I have been using you a lot, and between now and the fall I’ll have to call directly to you for help.
As for instance now. Bob, as an expert in the legend of the Gen. & the Battle, if you had to trace a curve of the public reaction from the event itself to the present, what would it be like? That is, in your thesis [. . .] you were dealing at least primarily with controversies over the Battle & the conduct of Custer, Reno, etc., as it went on among the pros or semi-pros, but how much effect [did] these controversies have upon the public? I’d say off-hand almost none. [. . .] [A]ctually I find that there has been very little change in the juveniles to the present day in respect to the “Boy General” pictures it gives of Custer, and, although some of the authors know more and some less and some almost nothing of the events, still they are roughly the same in respect to the large picture in its emotional design and color—Custer was a fun-loving boy with whom the boy-hero identifies himself.
With adult novels, I find the picture changes abruptly, from the Last of the Cavaliers to a disobedient little son-of-a-bitch to even an ego-maniac. [. . .] [I] would say that literary and eventually public opinion were determined by what might be called “scholarship”—plus the general cynicism of the times—especially about heroes, courage, the Army, etc. Also, the modern feeling about minority groups and our treatment of them has helped to alter this picture of Custer and when two Jews write the script for the movie “Sitting Bull” the Indians are the heroes who were attacked by a well-disposed nation only because this green ego-maniac disobeyed the orders of Grant, president of a peaceloving nation.
As for poems, I know lots of them that were written early, and they are all of one sweep and one color and I can’t remember any of them that do other than make the Battle heroic, and therefore seem uncontaminated by any disputes among historians about ‘theme.’ The truth is, I’m not aware of many poems by modern serious poets on this subject. Are you? Archibald MacLeish’s “Wildwest” (inspired by Neihardt’s “Black Elk’s Memories of Crazy Horse”) is about Crazy Horse, representing him as owning and loving the country which was taken from him by railroad speculators, but it never mentions Custer or the Battle directly.
As for paintings (as I know them), they become more historically accurate and Jim Hutchins portrays Custer very close to the way he looked, but they still seem to me essentially romantic in their treatment. Custer is always the center and focal point of the design [. . .] the culmination of the Hill, the other figures are grouped about him, and, although his dress is fairly realistic, he is a romanticized figure.
In other words, my tenuous conclusions which I wish you to criticize are these: (1) That not until the 1930s (after the death of Mrs. Custer) did so-called “scholarly” discussion of Custer & the Battle seriously affect literary and public opinion—then they radically altered it so it is represented or induced by adult novels and magazine articles presumably of a historical nature; (2) that as far as juveniles are concerned, they just go on essentially as before[. . . .] Likewise, highschool and college text-books, of which I have had a study made, also show no curve of change. (3) That paintings also remain on the side of the hero, even if they emphasize the Indians more and make the equipment more realistic.
God Almighty, Bob, I’ve made this letter all about myself and my problems—after working 3 months straight on Custer, I’m getting ego-centered myself. How the hell are you? And what is the status of that story about the 2 Cheyenne boys that touched me so? And what about the big study on the Ghost Dance?13 I have a long footnote about it, ass
uring the reader of its progress and hailing its quality and regretfully admitting that I’ve had to take my account essentially from Mooney14—although, Bob, that report is the work of a very intelligent and modern mind and I’m glad it’s you and not me who is competing against it. Still, I’ve got this one page footnote staking out your claim as the forthcoming author of the definitive study on the subject—as I remember, there’s a son-of-a-bitch up in Michigan who has aspirations on this subject, and I thought I’d better get you in ahead of time. [. . .]
Yours,
Norman
July 20, 1959
Dear Bob,
Thanks so much for your prompt reply. I guess I was lonesome—God damn this daily writing is a lonely business—and needed some one to give me some advice, some confirmation, some tips and a kick or two to keep me going. Anyway your letter helped a lot and I needed it right then.
I also heard what you said about “ritual drama” to which I shall make as short a reply as I am able. (1) The account you are probably referring to is probably in the Chicago Brand Book,15 but the account is of a talk I gave without notes even and it is [an] account written by someone else and I did not see it until it was published. (2) When I read it, a lot of it was also beyond my comprehension, a fact, though, that has been helpful to me. (3) I think, however, that what I said at the meeting was received with some enthusiasm [. . .] and they are a pretty hard-boiled bunch of boys; (4) I think that it will be cleaner when I write it, but I don’t say that you will like it—I don’t know whether you will or not; (5) You ought to be pleased, though, to learn that in a book of say 650 pages I don’t contemplate more than 40 pages or so devoted to an analysis of the Battle as “ritual drama”—and that in a separate section near the end where it can be skipped over if it seems exhausting.
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 26
