Norman MacLean: A Life of Letters and Rivers

Rebecca McCarthy met Norman Maclean in 1972 at his cabin in Seeley Lake, Montana. Maclean was 70 at the time and McCarthy was a high school student from South Carolina; her brother was a forest ranger where Maclean had a summer cabin. He liked some of the poems she shared with him. Her family wanted her to go to college in the South, but he urged her to go to the University of Chicago, where he was a beloved teacher of English literature. This became the start of a mentoring relationship that would last until Maclean’s death eighteen years later. Given the circumstances, it would have been easy for McCarthy to write a hagiographic biography. It would also have been easy to write a tell-all that featured Maclean’s character flows. McCarthy manages to find the sweet spot between these two extremes. She has written a loving biography of a difficult man, a mentor who showed his confidence in her talents through blunt criticism of her work. Maclean was a perfectionist. This is why he wrote so little, and wrote only after retiring from the University of Chicago. Each of his published stories combines fact and fiction, and each is meticulously crafted. His novella, “A River Runs Through It,” is part of the American canon. As a long-time reporter, McCarthy brings a journalist’s sensibility to this story. She draws on her personal friendship with him and interviews with others who knew him. Using the Chicago alumni magazine, also solicited stories from his former students. To this she adds some literary criticism of his work, using a light touch. Like Maclean’s own work, this biography does not take a chronological approach to its story. That poses its challenges, and leads to some repetition, but it also helps the story unfold around themes. Readers of his stories will know his love for Montana and his knowledge of the US Forest Service. McCarthy adds Maclean’s love of Chicago to the story of his life, and adds some of his administrative work at the University of Chicago. Maclean showed her Chicago’s neighborhoods, restaurants, architecture, and forest preserves, among other things. This reveals a side of him that Maclean kept hidden, for reasons that appear late in this biography. We also learn of character flaws beyond the perfectionism. His tendency to offer blunt criticism pushed many people away. He reciprocated, and he found it easy to break off relationships with people after they had committed some offense. Sometimes he patched things up again; sometimes not. Like others of his time, he drank heavily and drank throughout the day. McCarthy does not say so much, but it is clear that Maclean routinely drove under the influence. Since drinking appears as one of his brother’s fatal flaws in “A River Runs Through It,” it would be easy to offer some amateur psychology and literary criticism on this point. (In this case, McCarthy eschews both.) Both Norman and his wife Jess also smoked heavily. It killed her slowly and painfully, and it apparently contributed to his final illnesses. That does not really appear as a theme in this biography, but it too was part of his life. Since Maclean wrote beautiful, well-crafted prose, I am sure that McCarthy wanted to offer a well-crafted tribute to her mentor and friend. She has succeeded. You don’t need to know Maclean’s fiction to appreciate it, but you will doubtless want to read his work after reading her biography.

Imagine a story that begins with an idealistic teenage girl from the rural South enrolling in college at the intensely non-rural University of Chicago. Now imagine that she spends a substantial chunk of her free time outside of class engaged in an intimate relationship with her nearly retired English professor, some 50 years her senior. Now before your imagination runs amok, learn how that teenage girl’s lifelong (and utterly platonic) passion for the professor culminated in the writing of this wonderful book. Norman Maclean was a legendary English teacher at the U of C who late in life became famous for writing a semi-fictional, semi-autobiographical collection of stories entitled "A River Runs Through It", including one story which was eventually made into a popular movie starring Brad Pitt. Rebecca McCarthy was a student of Maclean’s and, having been introduced to him in high school by an older brother, decided to attend college where Maclean taught. The book takes us on a journey back and forth between Montana and Chicago, where Maclean split time over the course of his adult life. The story is initially, and briefly, about McCarthy, the naïve young coed, but soon focuses almost entirely on the intriguing life, and often hard times, of this remarkable professor, writer, and lover of English literature. The book is not for every reader, and a familiarity with either the University of Chicago or Montana is definitely a bonus, but it is solid reading for anyone who appreciates good biography.

This is a beautifully written book - Norman Maclean would have been very proud of McCarthy's work. Anyone with an interest in Maclean or Montana, or A River Runs Through It or Young Men and Fire, or the University of Chicago, or even just great biographies, must read this book. As a native Montanan who spend some childhood years camping at Seeley Lake (and who now has a son at UChicago), this book occasionally caused wetness in my eyes that I can’t explain.

Rebecca McCarthy was a teenage high school student and aspiring poet when her brother introduced her to Norman Maclean, the legendary University of Chicago English professor and future author of “A River Runs Through It” and other Montana stories of fly-fishing, logging, fire fighting and growing up. Maclean became a mentor to her, as he was to numerous students, throughout his storied career. McCarthy has now written a luminous biography cum memoir of Maclean that shows him in all his complexity as well as his brilliance, both as a teacher and as a writer. Maclean was born in Iowa in 1902, the son of a strict Presbyterian minister and his wife. The family soon moved to Missoula, Montana, where their father homeschooled Norman and his brother, Paul, up until the sixth grade. Maclean’s father set towering standards for writing, fishing and comportment. These spurred Norman as a teacher and a writer, but they also made it impossible for him to finish some of his best work and made him a judgmental friend and colleague. As McCarthy writes, “The Calvinist in him hated failure.” Nevertheless, Maclean had a long, happy marriage and many friendships. Devastated after his wife died of emphysema and cancer, he was hospitalized for depression. It’s a testament to his grit and determination that he was able to go on in retirement to write the nearly perfect novella, “A River Runs Through It” and other classic stories. McCarthy’s book is an moving read about a remarkable person. Maclean’s most famous work, “A River Runs Through it,” tells the story of man whose fly-fishing bond with his brother, while deep and true, cannot surmount their differences. As McCarthy points out, it can appeal to anyone who has ever loved someone they could not help. Sadly, “A River Runs Through It”, which was made into a 1992 movie by Robert Redford, was not available either in my local Virginia bookstore or at the library (though of course trusty Amazon had it). I, for one, am hoping McCarthy’s book will introduce a new generation of readers to Maclean’s work, as it did for this reader.

A very warm profile of a masterful teacher and author. I have read all of Maclean's books and felt like I learned so much about who he was as a person