One suspects that Maclean sought, but ultimately didn’t find to his satisfaction, this same sensibility in the larger-than-life figure of George Armstrong Custer. By the mid-1950s, Maclean was a full-fledged Custer aficionado, one who sleuthed Custer Hill in southeastern Montana—the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, as it’s been known since 1991—with like-minded enthusiasts. Maclean conceived and taught for years a course about Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He was soon at work on a book manuscript, an unconventional, “pretty introspective study of a battle, one involving a study of topography of certain exposed portions of the surface of the soul,” as he wrote in a letter to Robert Utley. Maclean found a valuable interlocutor for his project in Utley, a younger man about to embark on a writing and publishing career that has since made him one of our leading historians of the nineteenth-century American West. Utley’s own obsession with Custer started earlier and lasted much longer than Maclean’s, as his book Custer and Me: A Historian’s Memoir (2004) attests. His first book, Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend (1962), focuses upon the Custer myth in ways that overlapped with Maclean’s interests. Maclean acted the part of writing tutor to Utley and, through many letters, shared with him his hopes and frustrations as he struggled with his own manuscript about Custer and Little Bighorn. The correspondence shows Maclean defining and recommending “narrative history” to the talented historian—and himself. Maclean worked hardest on the manuscript from 1959 to 1963, drafting most of its projected chapters.
Maclean could not, however, see his way through to this odd kind of book—“a very strange and introspective thing,” as he wrote to Utley. He was most interested not in the battle itself, which others had already chronicled repeatedly, but in what he called its “after-life,” the myriad forms in which it was replayed or alluded to in subsequent popular art up through the present. His commitment to the battle as ritual drama baffled historians such as Utley. Maclean found that he could not shape the material to fit the tragic blueprint he had outlined in his Lear essay a decade earlier, and he had embarked on a genre of interdisciplinary, highly personal nonfiction that was well ahead of its time. “I don’t have any models for the kind of ‘history’ I am trying to write,” he told Utley in a letter. “I don’t have any models of methodology . . . and I have no compendium of truths to rely upon, and yetI aspire for something sounder, more objective than ‘so it seems to me.’” The same could be said, two decades later, for Young Men and Fire. It’s likely that the Custer story finally proved insuffciently personal for Maclean, who as a writer would finally surmount many of the same challenges only when he opened the door upon his own past.
Maclean held a complex, ambivalent view of Custer. By the time he turned to writing about him, the cult of hagiographic veneration, maintained for decades by Custer’s widow, had weakened. Custer had been mythologized as a monumental figure in this last white stand against hordes of reds, but his reputation began to crack in the 1950s, and novels such as Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), and the subsequent film of the same name, completed the demolition. Maclean was under no delusions about Custer, a vainglorious fool who had graduated last in his West Point class and who didn’t measure up as a tragic hero. Yet he remained fascinated by what he called “a certain type of ‘leaders of horse’ from Alexander the Great to Patton,” and as late as 1971 he whimsically told Utley that he might “start back on Custer.” In 1970 Bruce A. Rosenberg published Custer and the Epic of Defeat, a scholarly work in comparative mythology that covers some of the ground that most interested Maclean. But by then Maclean had let loose “the waters of memory,” as he calls them in A River Runs through It, and had begun writing his “reminiscent stories.” Within a few more years, the Smokejumpers who perished in the Mann Gulch fire—also young, elite, and doomed—had taken the place of the Seventh Cavalry soldiers as Maclean’s subject for an exploration of tragedy in nonfiction form. The Smokejumpers, like Paul Maclean, died too young. As important, in those young Smokejumpers Maclean saw himself in his imagined, other life: a hurrying youth brandishing a Pulaski whom we fleetingly glimpse down his untraveled road.
For several years during the 1960s, Maclean suffered months of ill health—stomach flu, dysentery, kidney and prostate infections, fever—and spent over half of 1964 in the hospital. By then Jessie had contracted emphysema and never regained robust health, cancer finally claiming her in 1968. In the final sentence of Young Men and Fire, Maclean recalls Jessie “on her brave and lonely way to death,” embodying, like the Smokejumpers, “courage struggling for oxygen.”
By the time Maclean reached “three score years and ten” in December 1972, his physical health had improved and he turned up the lights on his youth. His sharp autobiographical focus enabled him to define the relationship of life—his life—to art. Maclean enjoyed talking about his aesthetic principles, particularly the way in which he construed his life to have occasionally, mysteriously, transformed itself into story: story with plot and characters that he didn’t author or control. The British Romantic poet William Wordsworth remained one of Maclean’s primary influences, since Wordsworth insistently addressed this conversion of life’s random moments and raw materials into the charged, happily shaped textures and structures of poetry. It was Wordsworth who, in the “Preface” to his Lyrical Ballads (1798), famously changed the course of poetry by defining it as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.” Maclean came to see the genesis of art in similar terms, as the sustained, disciplined recollection in tranquility, and borrowed Wordsworth’s notion of “spots of time” to describe those moments in his past when, looking back upon them, he felt his life had become a story. Maclean’s writing expresses and confirms those Wordsworthian transformations of one’s life. It is the outer sign of a hard-won, inner grace.
The idea of life shaping itself occasionally into story is one that Maclean elaborated in several essays and interviews, but he wrote about it most memorably near the beginning of USFS 1919:
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.
The passage amounts to an aesthetic credo. Maclean never would have adopted and expressed it in these terms had he not absorbed Aristotle’s notions, in his Poetics, about the essential psychology of tragedy (“complication” and “climax” leading to “purgation”). The very shape of the sentence demonstrates how the drab bombardments of the mundane can give way to the superior order of literature, which possesses, as Aristotle urged, a beginning, middle, and end—what are sometimes called the unities. If life is made, it reveals rhythm and design.
Yet the most revealing words in Maclean’s aesthetic, quoted above, must be “every now and then.” Maclean’s temperament and his writing oscillate between the hope that this is true and the fear it is not. He swings between conviction and profound uncertainty, as there is no telling what pieces of life might be apprehended and shaped into some form he can call literature, or whether that might happen at all. This fundamental tension offers an essential clue to Maclean’s fiction and nonfiction. His prose never moves far from a sense of despair, a fear that life merely happens, incapable of being charged with meaning and grace. The statement from USFS 1919 expresses Maclean’s idealism and desire, but also the doubt so characteristic of his voice.
Rhythm and design also form cornerstone aesthetic principles for Maclean. In fact, these principles fuse the aesthetic with the theological (derived from Maclean’s Presbyterian upbringing) and the philosophical. Maclean wants to see literature rescuing life from randomness, above all the unfathomable chaos found in ??
?the problem of defeat”—madness in old age, self-destructiveness in youth, or the premature arrival of death for elite young men. I earlier remarked upon Maclean’s stylistic fondness for triadic series or cadences, which in their regularity suggest the kind of order observed in those Aristotelian unities. One hears that triadic rhythm when life “lines out straight, tense and inevitable,” as indeed in the title “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’” and the subtitle The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky. One source of Maclean’s appreciation for design in the mountains of home was the landscape art of USFS photographer K. D. Swan (1911–1947). Swan taught Maclean how to “compose,” that is, discover ordered visual structures in lines of peaks, canyons, and rivers that are analogous to what he sought to create in his stories. In USFS 1919 Maclean calls the mountains of Idaho “poems of geology,” and he lyrically describes the Continental Divide in the Bitterroots as a dance in three parts with two geometric shapes: “It was triangles going up and ovals coming down, and on the divide it was springtime in August.”
Because Maclean taught close analyses of Shakespeare’s and the Romantics’ verse rhythm, his students learned scansion, the method of parsing the metrical structure of a poetic line. Scansion used to be taught in schools generations ago, and through it Maclean’s students would have learned the almost unconscious grip and power of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter (a line of five pairs of syllables, or “feet,” with the second syllable of each pair accented). In fact, a discussion of iambic pentameter works its way into one of the funniest scenes Maclean ever wrote, in which the narrator of USFS 1919 eavesdrops on “a pimp and a whore screwing up and down the bed” and scans her indignant refrain: “You are as crooked as a tub of guts.” (Perhaps no other passage in Maclean so well shows him cultivating his “tough flower girl” persona.)
Maclean sought the supple rhythms of verse in his prose because rhythm manifested, more than anything else, the presence of design. He subscribed to Chaucer’s conviction that a poet is a “maker” (the root of “poetry” is the Greek poiesis, meaning “to make”), a wordsmith who forges his materials into something elegant and pleasing and enduring. Consider the opening sentence of USFS 1919, which Maclean rewrote several times and was quite proud of, citing it on occasion as an example of sentence rhythm. It is a poem of adolescence: “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.” Here Maclean strings five short independent clauses together with coordinating conjunctions, and the sentence’s rhythms show him a direct descendant of a line of American writers running from Mark Twain through Hemingway. The sentence, which evidences an older narrator assessing his earlier self, summarizes the cockiness and intimates the gradual maturing of the teenage narrator, the autobiographical Mac, youngest member of Ranger Bill Bell’s Forest Service crew. The clause Maclean was most proud of, “and I knew it was beautiful,” captures the idealism of young adulthood when life’s possibilities seem endless, and the novella’s physical setting realizes this idealism. “Beautiful” was Maclean’s talismanic word, one he claimed Presbyterians were shy about using but that he picked up from his father. For Maclean, beauty could be realized in the mountains and rivers of Montana or in the physical grace of his brother as he worked a trout stream, but it was also the aim of his carefully controlled sentences, which pulse as deliberately as the casting technique the Maclean boys learned “Presbyterian-style, on a metronome.”
. . .
How did Maclean’s personal style and aesthetics shape the two novellas and longer book upon which his reputation rests? I have already referred to a couple of scenes and quoted a few sentences from USFS 1919, which functions like a bildungsroman, that is, the education of the protagonist into the greater world. As with the autobiographical narrator in “Logging and Pimping,” Mac survives his harsh work detail, including some forced time alone at a fire lookout. More significantly, in the novella he learns a lesson in vulnerability and compassion through the cook, his antagonist. Mac’s ego is checked, and by the summer’s—and novella’s—end, he emerges a bit less hotheaded and more thoughtful than he had started out. He acts less superior to the other, older crew members, and Ranger Bill Bell, the boss Mac admires deeply, suspected Mac capable of such growth all along. The experience is transformational because the narrator—and Maclean right behind him—sees his life self-consciously, for the first time as a story.
Maclean opens and closes USFS 1919 quoting two lines from Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life”: “And then he thinks he knows/The hills where his life rose . . .” At the beginning this topographic image of one’s youth serves as an epigraph, but at the end Maclean declares these lines “are now part of the story.” They ground the novella just as the Bitterroot Mountains of Lolo National Forest—particularly Blodgett Canyon and Pass, and Elk Summit beyond them—specify this writer’s native topography. The novella circles back to its beginning to underline the changes in the main character. As in the more famous novella Maclean wrote after it, memorable scenes of low comedy balance passages reflecting Mac’s growth and commemorating those expert with their hands in the woods and mountains. “Logging and Pimping” describes a logging camp and the rhythms of cutting old-growth trees with a two-man, six-foot crosscut saw. USFS 1919 celebrates the knowledge of Ranger Bill Bell, Mac’s role model, who handles the pack mules, loading and balancing their panniers and deftly tying off these loads and the lines running between mules with particular knots. A pack train resembled a work of art. Bell ties and links his motley crew with similar finesse.
In its closing, after Mac shakes hands with Bell and watches him recede with his string of horses, Maclean illuminates the scene:
Then the string swung to the left and trotted in a line toward Blodgett Canyon, with a speck of a dog to the side faithfully keeping always the same distance from the horses. Gradually, the trotting dog and horses became generalized into creeping animals and the one to the side became a speck and those in a line became just a line. Slowly the line disintegrated into pieces and everything floated up and away in dust and all that settled out was one dot, like Morse code. The dot must have been Morse code for a broad back and a black hat. After a while, the sunlight itself became disembodied. There was just nothing at all to sunlight, and the mouth of Blodgett Canyon was just nothing but a gigantic hole in the sky.
“The Big Sky,” as we say in Montana.
Maclean’s geometric recession marks an epiphany for both character and reader. It is as though Mac’s summer, epitomized by his crew boss, expands and diffuses itself across the entire visible sky, and his future. For the first and only time, Maclean cites the third part of his subtitle, which subsumes the human characters, the ranger and the cook, who most shape Mac. Maclean favored metaphors of geometry to symbolize that design essential to his world-view. The abstraction of geometry, that reduction to lines, forms a key signature in Maclean’s writing. Though the shapes shrink and disappear, the vision expands because we understand, along with Mac, that his life now “lines out straight, tense, and inevitable.” It’s as though Bell has disappeared into one of K. D. Swan’s black-and-white landscapes or through the lower center of a sprawling, glowing Albert Bierstadt canvas.
In Montana’s Bitterroot valley, Blodgett Canyon, running due west until it curls south to Blodgett Lake, looms as one of the most imposing in the Bitterroot range. The walls of the lower canyon, hundreds of feet high, attract rock climbers, and its mouth, a giant V, yawns just west and north of the booming town of Hamilton. Maclean’s visionary closing inflates and elevates the V into a figure, a hole in the sky, common in Native American tales of cosmogony. It also gestures to A. B. Guthrie’s enormously influential historical novel, The Big Sky (1947), whose title became the official epithet for Montana after 1961: Montana is the only state whose license plate slogan derives from a novel. Years later William Kittredge, who had known Maclean for years through the project of writing a screenp
lay for River, used the same figure, titling his memoir Hole in the Sky (1991).
If USFS 1919 centers on Mac himself, A River Runs thought It puts Maclean’s brother at the center of a family that eternally loves him but is eternally unable to help him. That homily, voiced by both Norman as narrator and by Reverend Maclean, marks Maclean’s best fiction as a universal human fable and locates “the problem of defeat” agonizingly within the family. River borrows as it rewrites and darkens the parable of the Prodigal Son, and it relentlessly exposes the role of being my brother’s keeper: a rack we cannot avoid but squirm upon as helpless witness. Certainly there is a great weight of painful confession in the autobiographical narrator, who fails to help let alone save this brother. And the failure is not entirely explained as Paul’s refusal to be helped, proud and out of control though he is. Norman often talked about his family’s Scotch restraint, in which emotions were rarely expressed. Paul was the only one who broke through that restraint regularly: as Maclean liked to recall, Paul was the only man in the family who openly held Mrs. Maclean in his arms, kissing her and laughing.
After its publication in 1976, Maclean enjoyed discussing the structure of A River Runs through It and otherwise playing literary critic of his own work, as the interview in this volume attests. He would gleefully paraphrase a reluctant student at Minnesota’s Southwest State University who reduced River to a skeletal formula: these two brothers go fishing, then they go fishing again, then they drink, and later they fish again. Maclean claimed she got it right. But he also took special pride when fly-fishing guides praised River as an effective manual on fly-fishing. He had, indeed, structured the novella so that each fishing scene progressively elaborates the art of fly-fishing. The novella climaxes with Paul making “one big cast for one last big fish,” and then his mighty struggle with a huge trout, “the last fish we were ever to see Paul catch.”