A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
and Other Stories
Norman Maclean
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
Foreword by Annie Proulx
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago and London
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.
The author and publisher wish to thank R. Williams for the book illustrations. Thanks are due as well to Region One of the United States Forest Service, and to the Montana Fish and Game Commission, for providing photographs on which some of the illustrations are based.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
(c) 1976 by The University of Chicago
Foreword (c) 2001 by Annie Proulx
All rights reserved. Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-50072-1 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-50066-7 (paper)
ISBN: 978-0-226-50077-5 (Electronic)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maclean, Norman, 1902-
A river runs through it and other stories / Norman Maclean.— 25th anniversary ed. / with a new foreword by Annie Proulx.
p. cm.
Contents: A river runs through it—Logging and pimping and “Your pal, Jim”—USFS 1919.
ISBN 0-226-50072-1 (acid-free paper)—ISBN 0-226-50066-7 (pbk.: acid-free paper)
1. Montana—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 3. Fly fishing—Fiction. 4. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563. A317993 R58 2001
813’.54—dc21
2001035157
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
For Jean and John to whom I have long told stories
CONTENTS
Foreword by Annie Proulx
Acknowledgments
A River Runs through It
Logging and Pimping and “Your Pal, Jim”
USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky
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 justi
ce 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. In this story Maclean, through craftsmanship, and eschewing wind, shows his enviable ability to whittle people and events down to the heartwood. The last sentence is a kicker, and at its laconic delivery the bunkhouse would have exploded with satisfied laughter.
All three stories honor truth, decency, and skill, heightened by the contrast of despicable characters: Norman and Paul Maclean were wary of “… the world outside, which my brother and I soon discovered was full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the farther one gets from Missoula, Montana.” In “A River…” the bastards are Neal, the tennis-playing brother-in-law and Old Rawhide, the local whore; in “Logging and Pimping” it is Jim, the other man on the end of the two-man saw; in “USFS 1919” the show-off, tennis-shoe-wearing, cardsharp cook takes villain’s honors. So skillful is Maclean that the reader hardly notices it is the vinegar of these apposite characters that gives the stories their savor and humor. A very wry, dry wit enlivens every passage, the subtle understatement and a straight face of the good poker player characterizing the Maclean style more than adjectival flourish.
This last story, “USFS 1919,” is rich in incident and memorable detail. It is a brilliant thumbnail history of the character and early days of the United States Forest Service and the men who worked for it in the post-frontier west. It is also an important story for illuminating Maclean’s literary awakening. When he is sent by Bill Bell, the head ranger whom he admires, into fire-watch exile on Grave Peak for speaking ill of the cook, whom he dislikes, he experiences a major shift of sensibility, a moment of epiphany:
… I began to have another feeling, although one related to the feeling that I wasn’t going to let Bill punish me by making me watch mountains. Somewhere along here I became conscious of the feeling… that comes when you first notice your life turning into a story. I began to sense the difference between what I would feel if I were just nearing the end of a summer’s work or were just beginning a story.
Maclean, somehow, in his seventh decade, was able to pinpoint the time when his young perception of the world and his place in it crystallized, when he saw several paths through the forest of life and chose one. In this story there are some parallels with the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found that I was in a dusky wood; / For the right path, whence I had strayed, was lost.” Dante’s steep mountain, the difficult journey, the valley below, echo in young Maclean’s 28-mile one-day hike from the logging camp, over the Bitterroot Divide, and down to Hamilton, Montana. He intended to set a walking record and to show Bill Bell… something. And, at the end of the Hamilton showdown, when Bill asks him to come back the next summer he already has stepped into the story his life was becoming.
This story contains a pivotal passage that explains much about Maclean’s stories:
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.
“USFS 1919” is memorable also for the savory detail and odd slant that lights up much of Maclean’s work: the toothpicks in the hair, the gamblers’ hat brims graded to size as olives are, Bill Bell in the saddle with torso frontal but head turned back so that he resembles an Egyptian bas-relief, shrubs released by melting snow like jackrabbits kicking. It is in this story too that we first learn of Maclean’s experience of and interest in wildfire, an interest that grew into the posthumously published Young Men and Fire, a tortuous examination and reconstruction of Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch blowup.2
“USFS 1919” is notable as well for its references to repetitive, rhythmic action, first implied in the steady blows of ax on trunk and limb, in the monotony of repetitive days and bunkhouse nights, in the Herculean hike to Hamilton, head down, one foot before the other thousands of times until the rhythm of walking dominated muscle and bone. There is not a writer in the world who will not jump with the shock of recognition when Maclean discerns iambic pentameter in the business of the whorehouse, a second epiphany when everything heard sorted itself into rhythms. (The description of Paul’s metronomic casting in “A River Runs through It” again shows Maclean’s sensitivity to rhythm.) Here Maclean, at seventeen, becomes conscious of the shape of language, the way it falls on the ear. In that whorehouse, ill, dazed, and swimming in and out of consciousness, he became the writer who bloomed fifty-odd years later.
Near the end of the story Maclean puts in a wonderful sentence. “Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone.”
There is something large and powerful here about the nature of event, memory, possibility, and pulling it all into a piece of writing. William Gass, that virtuoso of American fiction, in his great short story “The Pedersen Kid,” has the character Jorge, in a tense moment, observe “The wind whooped and the house creaked like steps do. I was alone with all that could happen.”3 This is the central pillar of the writer’s craft, to pull from the myriad of possibilities of all that could happen those that did and had to happen. Maclean could do it with his eyes closed.
* * *
1. Wallace Stegner, “Haunted By Waters,” in Norman Maclean , ed. Ron McFarland and Hugh Nichols (Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1988), 157.
2. Recently, Norman Maclean’s son, John Maclean, wrote Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire (New York: William Morrow, 1999), about the 1994 Colorado fire tragedy with eerie parallels to Mann Gulch. The two books are properly shelved side by side.
3. William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 75.
Acknowledgments
Although it’s a little book, it took a lot of help to become a book at all. When one doesn’t start out to be an author until he has reached his biblical allotment of three score years and ten, he needs more than his own power. Then, to add further to their literary handicaps, these stories turned out to be Western stories—as one publisher said in returning them, “These stories have trees in them.”
It was my children, Jean and John, who started me off. They wanted me to put down in writing some of the stories I had told them when they were young. I don’t want, though, to put the blame on my children for what resulted. As is known to any teller of stories who eventually tries to put a few of them down in writing, the act of writing changes them greatly, so none of these stories closely resembles any story I ever told my children. For one thing, writing makes everything bigger and longer; all these stories are much longer than is needed to achieve one of the primary ends of telling children stories—namely, that of putting children to sleep. However, the stories do give evidence of retaining another of those purposes—that of letting children know what kind of people their parents are or think they are or hope they are.
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