The Norman Maclean Reader - Hardcover

Maclean, Norman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226500268 ISBN 13: 9780226500263

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written.

The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career.

In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana.

Various and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices.

About this title

About the Author

Norman Maclean (1902-1990), woodsman, scholar, teacher, and storyteller, grew up in the Western Rocky Mountains of Montana and worked for many years in logging camps and for the United States Forestry Service before beginning his academic career. He was the William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago until 1973. O. Alan Weltzien is professor of English at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, Montana. He is the author of A Father and an Island: Reflections on Loss, a memoir (2008), coeditor of Coming into McPhee Country:  John McPhee and the Art of Literary Nonfiction (2003), and editor of The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass (2001).

Reviews

Coming late to fiction writing, Maclean (1902–90) wrote his first book, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, at age 70, after he had retired from a 45-year teaching career at the University of Chicago. That book, consisting of two novellas and a short story, brought rave reviews and even more acclaim after Robert Redford's film adaptation. This book introduces readers to Maclean's life and writing, collecting previously unpublished essays, stories, letters, and selections from his two books. Rooted in his native Montana, where he returned every summer to the cabin he had helped his father build, the man who emerges from these pages is funny, irreverent, and thoughtful. He was homeschooled until he was 11 and absorbed his father's lessons in writing lean, penetrating prose. Of particular interest are Maclean's letters, which give careful, insightful writing advice to friends and former students. This book will appeal to those who love fly-fishing, hunting, the Forest Service, and, above all, good writing.—Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Maclean (1902–1990), an English professor at the University of Chicago, did not establish himself as a writer until late in his life, but quickly gained national acclaim in 1989 for A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. His posthumous nonfiction account of doomed firefighters, Young Men and Fire, was also praised by critics. Excerpts from both of these works are in this anthology, skillfully edited by Weltzien, to provide a broad and chronological selection from nearly four decades of Maclean's writing. The book includes six previously unpublished pieces, five of them chapters from his uncompleted book on Custer, written between 1959 and 1963. Another standout piece is a 1986 interview in which Maclean ranges widely from the rhythms of prose, his own influences and his native state of Montana to creative writing, fly-fishing and publishers who rejected A River Runs Through It. Readers of the two earlier books will find, as Weltzien phrases it, new biographical insights into one of the most remarkable and unexpected careers in American letters. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Norman Maclean Reader

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2008 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-50026-3

Contents

Introduction, by O. Alan Weltzien......................................................................viiTHE CUSTER WRITINGSEdward S. Luce: Commanding General (Retired), Department of the Little Bighorn.........................3From the Unfinished Custer Manuscript..................................................................9Chapter 1: The Hill....................................................................................11Chapter 2: The Sioux...................................................................................26Chapter 3: The Cheyennes...............................................................................40Chapter 4: In Business.................................................................................55Last Chapter: Shrine to Defeat.........................................................................62A MACLEAN SAMPLER"This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon": A Few Remarks on the Art of Teaching................................69"Billiards Is a Good Game": Gamesmanship and America's First Nobel Prize Scientist.....................78Retrievers Good and Bad................................................................................93Logging and Pimping and "Your Pal, Jim"................................................................101An Incident............................................................................................116The Woods, Books, and Truant Officers..................................................................130The Pure and the Good: On Baseball and Backpacking.....................................................136Black Ghost............................................................................................141From Young Men and Fire................................................................................150Interview with Norman Maclean..........................................................................166SELECTED LETTERSLetters to Robert M. Utley, 1955-1979..................................................................183Letters to Marie Borroff, 1949-1986....................................................................212Letters to Nick Lyons, 1976-1981.......................................................................234Letters to Lois Jansson, 1979-1981.....................................................................246Acknowledgments........................................................................................257Suggestions for Further Reading........................................................................A gallery of photographs appears following page 104.

Chapter One

The Hill

Every battle has something of a personality and a personal after-life. But it is true of battles as of men-only some have a deep personal life of their own with the capacity to affect permanently the lives of those associated with them and to be known everywhere by those who know almost nothing about them. The battle of the Little Bighorn, which from the ordinary historical point of view lacks any great significance, has been an immense personal force altering the feelings, beliefs, daily routines and larger destinies of those who survived it or were related to the dead. It has given a structure to their lives, however harsh the outlines, for (it seems that) the dead who continue to live become abstracted into patterns and are transformed and transform others, as it were, into a kind of geometry.

To the large world outside, the Battle has many personal traits that attract a wide diversity of personalities. It has the power of an endless argument, one of the world's battles destined to be fought forever. More has been written about it than about any American battle excepting possibly the Battle of Gettysburg, and at times with as much fury and general confusion as darkened Custer Hill late in the afternoon of June 25, 1876. Some of its power, undoubtedly, is in its artistry. It is almost a ready-made plot with ready-made characters for that large class of writers who lack the power to invent plots and characters of their own. To painters of similar abilities, it is close to a finished composition-a hilltop in a big sky; repeating the circle of the hilltop, a circle of kneeling men in blue; within the embattled circle a central standing figure highlighted by blond hair; and, surrounding the circle of blue, larger circles of contrasting redskins. The Battle has also had the power to promote business, draw customers and sell beer. And it has had two powers perhaps deeper than all others-the power of horror and of jest. It shocked the nation as nothing had since the death of Lincoln, leaving permanent marks upon the individuals, families and tribes connected with it. Recently-but only recently-we have become enough at ease with it to make it into a joke. The joke has many variants, some of them dirty and all of them grim, but essentially it is one joke and underneath the many variants is a kindly undertone, as if some joke had been played upon the bluffs of the Little Bighorn for which there should be universal forbearance, on the chance that the joke played there is played some time on all of us. Clearly, our dead are delivered from oblivion when they become a joke on us.

The history of the personality and personal after-life of an event is not history of any commonly recognized kind, and this one, for lack of a classification, may be called the biography of a battle. That the Battle still lives and grows, however, is a fact demonstrable by the ordinary kinds of historical and even statistical evidence-by the number of books written about it, the number of times it appears visually in paintings or on the screen or TV, the number of times it is heard in such common sayings as "so-and-so made his last stand" or "too damn many Indians." But a reality of a somewhat different order has to be explored for the sources of its life, and observations about this reality cannot always be documented with footnotes, since life-after-death, at least in this life, depends upon patterns and geometrical extensions and may of course depend upon much more. Yet what lives beyond its natural self is clearly structured for remembrance. The patterns are partly in the natural thing which must have had a higher sense of form than that of most of the living matter surrounding it. The patterns are also partly superimposed and come from us, who strive or at least feel at times that we should strive to make something structural out of our own lives. The history of this life-after-death, however, involves much more than the matching of two sets of fixed patterns. As there is no life in fixities, so each who achieves immortality must retain something of his past and yet take on new meanings with the passing of time. Unless capable of such organic growth, even immortality dies.

The ground itself upon which the Battle was fought has its own history of death and transfiguration, and it seems right to begin with the reality of the earth and to trace first how this isolated piece of it soon after the Battle became known to the whole world and eventually was transformed into a National Monument. On the Hill itself, which is somewhat symmetrical, there are also lines to be traced. The lines are of white-stone markers and they correspond roughly to the Hill's contours and converge near its top. Each stone is indeed an abstraction of what was found there.

1. THE NEWS

News of the Battle was spread first by mysterious smoke signals in the sky and by mounted warriors, the "moccasin telegraph" of the Plains Indians, and days before news from Terry arrived, apprehensiveness deepened at Ft. Lincoln because the Indians there seemed to know that a big battle had been fought and that Indians had better be quiet about its outcome.

It was by a newspaper scoop, one of the biggest ever made by small western newspapers-not by official report-that word of the Battle first reached the outside world and the War Department. (3) On July 1, Muggins Taylor, one of Gibbon's scouts, had been sent west from the mouth of the Bighorn where Terry had now moved his troops to carry the official sealed report to Ft. Ellis. But a newspaper man met him on his lonely way and it was Taylor's account, not the sealed report, that was the basis for the stories appearing in the Bozeman Times of July 2 and the Helena Herald of July 4. Since the white man's telegraph lines were down, it was July 6 before eastern newspapers told the country what at first seemed impossible to believe. When interviewed, Gen. Sheridan said, "It comes without any marks of credence," not from any information received by the War Department but from frontier scouts who have "a way of spreading news." So the country paused in the midst of the Centennial Exposition, its pride momentarily supporting its disbelief although not removing its anxiety.

On July 3 at five o'clock in the afternoon the Far West left the mouth of the Bighorn with orders to reach Bismarck in "the shortest possible time." For the wounded, the deck had been made into a large mattress with new tarpaulins spread over eighteen inches of marsh grass. The Far West also carried a "confidential" dispatch from Gen. Terry very different from Terry's official dispatch carried west by Taylor to Ft. Ellis. A sentence from it may suggest its guarded import: "For whatever errors he [Custer] may have committed he has paid the penalty and you cannot regret his loss more than I do, but I feel that our plan must have been successful had it been carried out, and I desire you to know the facts." Although meant only for Sheridan and Sherman, this confidential dispatch was soon to become public property and to arouse conflicting indignations. So Terry's "secret" was part of the hurried preparations being made to endow Custer and the Battle with immortality, a part of which depends upon the perpetual motion of a heated argument.

At full steam, the Far West slid over sandbars and caromed o= the banks of the river on the sharp bends, tumbling the crew to the deck. Then, draped in black and with flag at half-mast, she tied up at Bismarck in the darkness of the night of July 5. "She had covered 710 miles at the average rate of thirteen and one-seventh miles per hour and, though no one stopped to think of it then, she had made herself the speed champion of the Missouri River."

In the office of the Bismarck Tribune whose editor, Col. C. A. Lounsberry, was also correspondent for the New York Herald, the telegraphers worked in relays sending fifteen thousand words in a day and holding the key between messages by clicking out passages from the New Testament. But again the white man's telegraph lines were down-this time east of St. Paul-so that it was July 7 before the messages reached the east, and the country and Gen. Sheridan received "the marks of credence."

Even before sunrise of the 6th, however, the Far West had docked gently at Ft. Abraham Lincoln with the wounded, although the wounded by now were not so heavy a burden as the news that had to be told to women. Of the sunrise of July 7, 1876, Mrs. Custer wrote one sentence, "From that time the life went out of the hearts of the 'women who weep,' and God asked them to walk on alone and in the shadow."

2. THE RECEPTION

It is not easy to become a part of the world that received the news of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, for any modern analogy is remote and the imagination is taxed to recover even the shadows of past feelings. Let us go back no further, then, than the early winter of 1950. A few years earlier our country had concluded its greatest war, in which we had finally assembled a military machine never before equalled in efficiency and complexity. One of the proudest generals of that war, Gen. MacArthur, had been directed to bring this modern might against some dark- skinned north Koreans and Chinese communists who in a semi- barbaric way had been annoying one of our distant outposts. As soldiers, they were known to be good when it came to crawling through the underbrush, suddenly appearing and disappearing, enduring hardships, living o= a handful of rice, and torturing prisoners, but they were thought to be without modern organization, weapons, and generalship. Among the other units under Gen. MacArthur was the First Division of the Marines. The "end-of-the-war" offensive was on, and advance units had reached the Manchurian frontier. Then garbled accounts began to appear suggesting through the censorship that the front of the American army had been trapped and shattered and that few American prisoners were being taken alive.

The analogy is not very close. To transform the incredulity of 1950 into the horror of 1876, the imagination must place Gen. MacArthur in personal command of his advance units, kill him and all those directly under his personal command, leave their bodies mutilated upon the battlefield, and permit no survivor to return to mitigate part of the incredibility and horror with a factual explanation. There are still other imaginative additions that must be made. Like Custer, MacArthur was not only a proud but a political general, in deep trouble with the President of the United States, but the imagination must reverse the political affiliations and then send MacArthur to Washington prior to the Korean campaign to testify to corruption in the administration of President Truman-who must next remove MacArthur from command, arrest him, and finally give him a lower command. It also has to make the early winter of 1950 into the summer before a presidential election, with the Democratic and Republican candidates already nominated.

Both political parties saw the Battle as a political slaughter. To the Democrats, Grant was the butcher. "General Grant's administration has a heavy responsibility to incur for the reverses and sacrifice of life reported in these accounts," said the Charleston (S.C.) Times, a more moderate remark than was being made by many Democratic papers in July of 1876. Democratic indignation was flamed both by the President's treatment of Custer in the Belknap case and by the unfortunate publication of Terry's "confidential" dispatch to Sheridan, which implied that the annihilation of Custer and his troops was the result of Custer's failure to obey orders. This dispatch was delivered to Sheridan in Philadelphia where he and Sherman were attending the Centennial. Sherman wished to forward it by telegraph to the War Department, but the man who represented himself as a government messenger proved "to be a newspaper man by profession and a thief by incidental occupation," and the dispatch appeared in print on the evening of July 7. Then the President entered the battle by repeating the charge:

"The New York Herald has interviewed the President at Long Beach, and reports as follows: 'Correspondent: Was not Custer's massacre a disgraceful defeat of our troops?

'The President: (with an expression of manifest and keenly felt regret) I regard Custer's massacre as a sacrifice of troops, brought on by Custer himself, that was wholly unnecessary-wholly unnecessary. He was not to have made the attack before effecting the junction with Terry and Gibbon. He was notified to meet them on the 26th, but instead of marching slowly, as his orders required in order to effect the junction on the 26th, he enters upon a forced margin of 83 (!) miles in 24 hours and thus has to meet the Indians alone.'"

So the Battle on the Little Bighorn almost immediately extended its lines across the country and was on its way to being one of the longest battles ever fought.

3. THE BURIAL

Even the dead on the Little Bighorn were not destined for composure. In the public mind, they lay mutilated and unburied upon the battlefield, and deep in the mind of this modern age was the belief inherited from all our ancestors, that eternal peace of spirit is dependent upon decency and formality of interment and intactness of the body. There were horror stories about the general condition of the battlefield, but as usual the public imagination focussed upon the top of the Hill and took on concreteness as it approached Custer whose heart, so the stories went, had been cut from his body and then was circled by dancing Indians.

By July 25, Lt. Bradley felt impelled to make a public report on the dead as he had found them, the bare fact being painful enough, as he said, without fictional exaggeration. He admitted that there had been "real mutilation" of Reno's troopers who had fallen near the Indian village, but of the dead on Custer Hill his account was very different. According to his account, most of the bodies (although not all including the body of Kellogg, the correspondent) had been stripped; possibly a majority had been scalped; there were only a "comparatively few cases of disfiguration"; and Custer lay as if in sleep, his body "wholly unmutilated."

Bradley's report, however, has not always been received as completely accurate, especially his description of the bodies on Custer Hill. There has never been any dispute about the bodies of Reno's men who fell near the Indian village. Even as Terry's troops moved through the deserted Indian camp on June 27 they found three burned heads threaded on a wire stretched between lodge-poles, and what was found up the valley was not much better. On Custer Hill, it was not so bad, if for no other reason than that mutilation was primarily the sport of squaws and children who had enough to do closer to camp. Witnesses agree that nearly all the dead on the Hill were stripped, lying in bloody socks, that most were scalped and slashed on the right thigh by Sioux knives marking their dead, and that the axe had often been used to finish off the wounded. But only some of those who saw the battlefield agree with Bradley that the disfigurement beyond this was limited, others, both Indians and whites, maintaining that the mutilation was general. Most certainly Bradley's intention in writing the letter was to say what little he could in the way of comfort to the anguished families of the dead, and certainly such an intention affected what he said and did not say; for instance, he gives no detailed or concrete description of mutilations whereas he describes in commemorative prose the unmarked features of his hero whose expression was that of a man "who had fallen asleep and enjoyed peaceful dreams." Such an intention, however, does not justify the often- whispered rumors that he and others lied about the dead to spare the living. Bradley as chief of Gibbon's scouts was a trained observer and so unyielding in his integrity and convictions that he sometimes irritated and amused his commander; McClelland's testimony about the condition of the dead coincides closely with Bradley's, and part of his assignment as Gibbon's engineer was to make an objective record. Others undoubtedly saw with their own eyes more horror than these did, since the threshold to horror varies with the observer, but probably the facts were substantially those reported by Bradley in words chosen to blur their visualization. To have seen these facts would have been something else. Nauseated troopers had to be excused from the burial details that crossed the Field on the 28th.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Norman Maclean Reader Copyright © 2008 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226500268
• ISBN 13: 9780226500263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Weltzien O. Alan