Norman Maclean

Norman Maclean was born at Clarinda, Iowa, on December 23, 1902, and was the son of Clara Evelyn (née Davidson; 1873–1952) and the Rev. John Norman Maclean (1862–1941). Rev. Maclean homeschooled the young Norman and his brother Paul Davidson MacLean[7] (1906–1938) until 1913. [8]

While Maclean was a child in Clarinda, he often witnessed his father working hard to learn diction and elocution and to rid his pronunciation of all signs that Canadian Gaelic, rather than Canadian English, was his first language. It was also in Clarinda that Rev. Maclean first developed a passion for the American sport of fly fishing, which had not previously been practiced by the minister or his forbears in the Inner Hebrides or in Nova Scotia. Rev. Maclean successfully passed on his love of fly fishing to both of his sons.

When asked by an interviewer about having been homeschooled by his father, Maclean recalled, "I think the most important thing is that he read aloud to us. He was a minister, and every morning after breakfast we had what was called family worship. We'd all sit with our breakfast chairs pulled back from the table and he would read to us from the Bible or from some religious poet. He was a very good reader... that was very good for me because in doing that, he would bring out the rhythms of the Bible. That reading instilled in me this great love of rhythm in language."[9]

At the invitation of the elders of the Presbyterian church there, the Maclean family relocated to Missoula, Montana in 1909. The following years considerably influenced and inspired Norman's writings, appearing prominently in the short story The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers (1977) and the semi-autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976).[10]

Maclean was only 14 years old and was too young to enlist in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, so he instead found work for the United States Forest Service in what is now the Bitterroot National Forest of northwestern Montana. The novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky[11] and the story "Black Ghost" in Young Men and Fire (1992) are semi-fictionalized accounts of these experiences.

Maclean later attended Dartmouth College, where he served as editor-in-chief of the humor magazine the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern; the editor-in-chief to follow him was Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss and who, according to Maclean, was "the craziest guy I ever met."[12] He was also a member of the Sphinx and Beta Theta Pi.

During a 1986 interview, Maclean described the enormous gratitude he felt for having been able to attend creative writing classes taught at Dartmouth by the poet Robert Frost. Maclean stated that he learned an enormous amount from Frost, which he carried with him for the rest of his life.[13] During the same interview, Maclean recalled that his lifelong admiration for and emulation of the writing style of Ernest Hemingway also began during his time at Dartmouth.[13]

Maclean received his Bachelor of Arts in 1924 and chose to remain in Hanover, New Hampshire to serve as an instructor until 1926—a time he recalled in "This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon: A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching".[14]

Jessie Burns first met Norman Maclean during a December party in the Helena valley. They were returning home after the party with another couple in Jessie's car, when a blizzard descended and the car's radiator froze. MacLean tried pouring water in, only to have the water freeze as well. Maclean then started hiking through the blizzard to seek help, but soon found that the car had caught up with him, as the cold had prevented the engine from overheating. Norman felt foolish, but Jessie always considered him the hero of the blizzard.[15]

Maclean and Burns married on September 24, 1931, and had two children: a daughter Jean (born in 1942), now a lawyer, and a son, John Norman Maclean (born in 1943).

Following their marriage, Jessie handled the family's finances and wrote all the checks. Norman also gave up typing and wrote almost everything, including his books, "in a cramped longhand that generations of typists at the University and elsewhere prided themselves on learning to decipher."[16]

Their son, John Maclean, has since written that their family always led two lives. One life was during the summers at the log cabin built by Rev. Maclean near Seeley Lake, Montana. The other life took place in Chicago during the academic year.[17] In fact, on July 26, 1950, the Maclean family was driving between Gillette and Sheridan, Wyoming when they heard over the radio about the outbreak of the Korean War. Stunned, Jessie Maclean said, "We're at war; it should feel different." Outside their family's car, however, "nothing moved but heat waves."[18]

At the University of Chicago, Jessie Maclean's "open personality", made her a lot of friends. It was often said of her in later years, "She was the only one who'd talk to the young faculty wives."[19]

During a 1986 interview, Maclean recalled, "I love Chicago. My wife was very wonderful in helping me come to feel that. I was very provincial in a lot of ways. She was gay and loved life wherever she lived. She really worked me over in our early years in Chicago. I was insolent and provincial about that city. She made me see how beautiful it was, made me see the geometric and industrial and architectural beauty."[20]

The neurologist Dr. Sidney Schulman later said of Jessie Maclean's role at the university, "Jessie knew what was to be said. She said less than she knew, but what she said was enough, and she said it with humor, with literary allusions, and with simplicity. She came to be a sort of housemother. In being this, she was unaware of it - no self-satisfied awareness that what she was doing was noble. She was not playacting. It was part of her existence."[21]

Jessie Maclean died of emphysema and cancer of the esophagus, the result of decades of chain smoking, in 1968.[22]

Their son, John Norman Maclean is now a journalist and author of Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire (1999) and six other books, Fire & Ashes (2003) and The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal (2007).[23], "The Esperanza Fire," "River of Fire," "Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River," and the centennial edition of Ernest Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, for which he wrote the foreword.

After similarly graduating from Dartmouth, Norman's younger brother, Paul Davidson MacLean, became well known as an investigative journalist, who fearlessly exposed political corruption in Helena, Montana linked to the powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Paul Maclean later worked alongside his brother and sister-in-law at the University of Chicago during the Jazz Age and the Depression era. In addition to his talents for both writing and fly fishing, Paul Maclean suffered from alcoholism and gambling addiction, in addition to being a notorious brawler and a womanizer. According to Norman, all of these addictions and behaviors had a very long generational history and could be traced all the way back to the Maclean family's earliest origins among the Gaels of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.[1] Despite repeated attempts by his family to offer help, Paul MacLean rejected all such overtures.

On the early morning of May 2, 1938, Paul Maclean was attacked and brutally beaten at Sixty-Third Street and Drexel Avenue in Chicago by two men who, according to the testimony of an eyewitness, drove away afterwards in a car. Paul Maclean was taken to nearby Woodlawn Hospital, where he died, without regaining consciousness, at 1:20PM that same afternoon.[24] According to his brother Norman Maclean and statements made to the press by Detective Sergeant Ignatius Sheehan, Paul Maclean fought back savagely against his assailants and sold his life very dearly. So much so, in fact, that nearly all the bones in his right hand were found by the medical examiner to have been broken during his last fight.

Following a homicide investigation led by Detective Sergeant Ignatius Sheehan, Chicago Police Department Captain Mark Boyle testified before an inquest by the Cook County Coroner's Office that he believed Paul Maclean's murder to be a mugging gone bad, which remains the official explanation in police files. Another widely held theory at the time was that Paul Maclean's murderers were linked to organized crime and the murder was over Maclean's refusal or inability to pay them an illegal gambling or loansharking debt. No arrests were ever made, however, and the case remains officially unsolved.[25]

Only Norman Maclean accompanied his brother's casket on an overnight train trip from Chicago to Montana. After the funeral, Maclean spent several weeks of compassionate leave with his parents at their family's cabin at Seeley Lake.[26]

Rev. Maclean was understandingly very skeptical of the Chicago Police Department's official explanation for his son's murder. During the compassionate leave, he asked Norman, "Do you think it was just a stick-up and foolishly he tried to fight his way out? You know what I mean -- that it wasn't connected to anything in his past?" Norman replied that the Chicago Police Department didn't know and that neither did he.[27]

Norman Maclean later wrote that their father aged rapidly following Paul's murder and that, "Like many Scottish ministers before him, he had to derive what comfort he could from the faith that his son had died fighting."[28]

A few years later, Rev. Maclean brought up his older son's fondness for writing nonfiction and advised, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."[29]

During visits to the cabin at Seeley Lake in later years, journalist John Norman Maclean would often hear his father calling out over the lake in the evenings, "Paul! Paul!"[30]

Maclean began graduate studies in English at the University of Chicago in 1928 and earned a PhD in 1940.

Like his contemporary C.S. Lewis, Maclean acquired a reputation for personal magnetism and for making the writings of difficult Medieval authors like François Rabelais and Geoffrey Chaucer come alive in the lecture hall. One of his students later said, "Norman F. Maclean is one of the best liked guys around this place. He is best remembered because when we were freshmen we used to come to class only when he lectured. His classes were always overrun."[31]

According to another of his students, the poet Marie Borroff, Maclean was considered a unique figure at the university because he came from a "wilderness outpost", was a gifted marksman with a rifle, played a rough game of handball, and was every bit as much of an expert on George Armstrong Custer as he was on Aristotle.[32]

During World War II, Maclean declined a commission in the Office of Naval Intelligence to serve as dean of students. During the war, he also served as director of the Institute on Military Studies and co-authored Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs.[33]

Maclean eventually became the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of English and taught the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. "Every year I said to myself, 'You better teach this bastard so you don't forget what great writing is like.' I taught him technically, two whole weeks for the first scene from Hamlet. I'd spend the first day on just the line, 'Who's there?'"[34]

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens took a poetry class taught by Maclean at the University of Chicago and later called him, "the teacher to whom I am most indebted."[35]

Maclean also wrote two scholarly articles, "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century" and "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear",[36] the latter describing a theory of tragedy that he revisited in his later work.

After his retirement in 1973, Maclean began, as his children Jean and John had often encouraged him, to write down the stories he liked to tell.

As their father had urged before his death in 1941, Maclean wrote an iconic and slightly fictionalized novella about his relationship with his parents and, even more so, with his brother Paul, beginning with their childhood together in Missoula and particularly focusing on the last summer in Montana before Paul's murder in 1938.

According to his son, John Norman Maclean, "The portrait Norman managed to create in A River Runs through It gave Paul a lasting afterlife as the charming rebel, doomed but beautiful and gifted with a fly rod. He was forever the younger brother who struggled for an independent life and went down fighting. Norman's vision of him, though, brought the consolation of shared experience, taken to an eloquent level, to a host of brothers and sisters who have reached out to wayward siblings only to see them twist and dodge away as Paul did."[37]

The resulting novella was included with two other stories in the book A River Runs Through It and Other Stories.

Pete Dexter, in a 1981 profile of Maclean in Esquire magazine, described the novella, "It is a story about Maclean and his brother, Paul, who was beaten to death with a gun butt in 1938. It is about not understanding what you love, about not being able to help. It is the truest story I ever read; it might be the best written. And to this day it won't leave me alone."[38]

The second story in the book is "Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'." The third story describes Maclean's employment as a teenager by the United States Forest Service and is titled "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky."[11]

In 1976, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories became the first work of fiction ever published by the University of Chicago Press. The book received enthusiastic reviews, with Publishers Weekly calling it a "stunning debut."[39] It was nominated by a selection committee to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Letters in 1977, but the full committee ignored the nomination and did not award a Pulitzer in that category for the year.

In a May 26, 1976, letter to Nick Lyons, Maclean explained that "Retrievers Good and Bad" had been the first story he attempted after retirement, that it was about his brother, and that he considered it "both a moral and artistic failure."[40] Despite his misgivings about the essay, Maclean published "Retrievers Good and Bad" in Esquire in 1977. That year another essay, "The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers," was published in Chicago magazine.[41] Both essays were anthologized along with a selection of other short writings by Maclean, two interviews, and "essays in appreciation and criticism" in the 1988 volume Norman Maclean.[42] They were collected again in The Norman Maclean Reader (2008).[43]

In a 1986 interview, Maclean expressed contempt for New York City publishers: "Not until recently have the Western writers ever gotten a good break from the publishers in New York."[44] He recalled that A River Runs Through It had been rejected by Alfred A. Knopf and that when Knopf later approached him about his second book, "I really told those bastards off" in a letter that was "probably one of the best things I ever wrote."[45] That 1981 "middle finger of a letter,"[46] to Knopf editor Charles Elliott, concludes, "if the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I was the sole surviving author, that would mark the end of the world of books."[47] In that 1986 interview MacLean added, "I had the good fortune of having a dream come true. I'm sure every rejected writer must dream of a time when he's written something that was rejected which turns out to be quite successful, so that all the publishers who rejected him are now coming around and kissing his ass at high noon, and he can tell them where to go."[48]

By the time Maclean published A River Runs through It and Other Stories, he had begun researching a book about the 13 smokejumpers who lost their lives fighting the 1949 Mann Gulch Forest Fire.[49] Maclean's letters, some of them gathered in The Norman Maclean Reader, "attest to his periodic doubts as well as his determination to finish and publish the large manuscript he initially called 'The Great Blow-Up,' and later Young Men and Fire," according to the Reader's editor, O. Alan Weltzien.[43] That book was published posthumously in 1992 as Young Men and Fire by the University of Chicago Press and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• 1940: The Theory of Lyric Poetry from the Renaissance to Coleridge[57]
• 1943: A Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs (with Everett C. Olson)[58]
• 1976: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (Illustrated by Barry Moser in 1989)[59]
• 1992: Young Men and Fire[60]

• 1952: Two essays—(1) "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century" and (2) "Episode, Scene, Speech, and Word: The Madness of Lear"[61] and (2) —in R.S. Crane's Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern[62]
• 1956: "Personification But Not Poetry" in ELH: English Literary History Vol. 23, No. 2 (Jun., 1956), pp. 163–170.

• 1988: Norman Maclean (edited by Ron McFarland and Hugh Nichols)[63]
• 2008: The Norman Maclean Reader (edited by O. Alan Weltzien)[64]