Norman Maclean (1) (1902–1990)

I read somewhere that every equation or graph in a book decreases its sales by 10%. Publishers and editors take this maxim to ridiculous extremes; in one “popular economics” book I read the author described graphs (e.g., “A graph of X versus Y would look like an arch”) rather than printing them. It’s good, therefore, that the University of Chicago Press editors are made of sterner stuff, because the most moving feature of Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is a graph.

This is not show more to say that the text of the book isn’t moving as well. A Great Day to Fight Fire, reviewed earlier, tells the story of the men involved – how they grew up, what their lives were like, how they got to be smokejumpers. Maclean focuses instead on technical aspects – what was known about fires in 1949, how the fire might have moved and spread, and modern (for 1990, when Maclean died with the book unfinished) forest fire science. Yet, somehow, Young Men and Fire manages to be more moving and personal. Maclean made several trips to Mann Gulch – including one while the ashes were still warm, when he worked for the Forest Service himself, then several much later when he had retired from being an English Literature professor at the University of Chicago. He explored the area – which is brutal and steep and hot – even though he knew that a Forest Service fire scientist 20 years younger had died of a heart attack doing the same thing in 1949 – trying to piece together science and survivor’s narratives to make sense of what they saw on the ground.

Maclean’s description of the fire basics is essentially the same as Matthews’; started by lightning, burned slowly until it got out of timber, then rapidly as it caught dried grass and moved upslope. Wag Dodge realized things were going poorly and that his crew could never outrun the fire up the slope – so he started an “escape fire” – but nobody realized what the was trying to do and bypassed him. Two of the crew made it out by climbing up a slope; the rest tried to “sidehill” away from the fire, and didn’t. Maclean persuaded the two remaining survivors to return to the scene and explain what they did, why they did it, and where they were when they did it.

The survivors – Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee – had remarkably accurate memories as they approached the rock slide they had used as a refuge. They noted – from hundreds of feet away – that the memorial cross for one of the victims (William Hellman, who survived to die of his burns the day after the fire) was in the wrong place; they remembered moving Hellman to a large flat rock to keep his burns out of the ashes, and giving him the only liquid they had to quench his thirst – the juice from a can of potatoes. They found the rock, poked around in the grass a little, and found a thirty-year-old rusty can. Trying to pick out their escape route was more problematical – although they agreed on where they had crossed the ridge they disagreed on where Dodge had lit his escape fire. Maclean, on a return trip, found the escape fire spot (still marked with a wooden cross, now fallen and covered with weeds, which Dodge had placed there when he returned to the scene) and the ridge crossing, identified by a juniper that Rumsey had tumbled into.

Maclean’s prose is remarkable – you might expect a literature professor to get overly eloquent, and there are times when Maclean is eloquent – but not overly. There are some digressions – a description of Albert Abraham Michaelson’s billiard skills and the comments of a veteran Forest Service firefighter on the wartime use of Mennonite smokejumpers, for example – but they all eventually tie together.

Near the end of the book, Maclean visits the Forest Service’s Fire Science lab and tries to answer some unsolved questions – why did Dodge’s escape fire burn directly up the slope while the main fire burned at right angles, up the gulch, and why was there disagreement over fire timing (the official report used 5:55 PM as the time the men died, based on the melted watch of Jim Harrison, but other recovered watches showed times from 5:42 to 6:40; a ranger down at the gulch outlet to the Missouri estimated the crew had died sometime between 5:35 and 5:45 but was persuaded to change his story to the “official” time). In 1949, the question of the “escape fire” was pretty important, because the father of one of the victims contended in a lawsuit that it was the escape fire, not the main fire, which killed the crews. Maclean’s explanation of the apparently anomalous behavior of the escape fire is that the main fire was creating its own wind, opposite to the prevailing wind direction, and Dodge was lucky enough to set his fire at a place and time where the two canceled out. In Maclean’s reconstruction the escape fire had nothing to do with the deaths – it burned upslope just enough to allow Dodge to shelter in the ashes, but was quickly surrounded and bypassed by the main fire.

The fire science lab had mathematical models of how fast a fire will progress, given fuel type, wind speed, and slope angle, and also how fast men can run on a slope. That’s what the graph I mentioned is all about – time on the X-axis and distance on the Y. There are two curves – a solid one showing the distance traveled by the men, including their head start, and a dashed one showing the distance travelled by the fire. They converge at 5:55 PM.

All our lives trace curves, some irregular and some purposeful. Some other curve converges with us – an advancing fire, perhaps; or the growth of a patch of cells; or the blood pressure in an artery; or the route of an automobile driven by a drunk. Sooner or later the curves touch, and our curve ends.

Highly recommended. show less

"… it is hard to imagine that a fish has anything to think about. Still, I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear. I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don't see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt." (pg. 19)

A River Runs Through It is a collection of three lightly-fictionalised autobiographical stories that are as fine an example of the writer's craft as you could hope to find. There is something in show more the best of American writing that you can't find anywhere else: a crisp, laconic prose style that has a nose for character and an ear for their ways of speaking, which reveals great things in simple words, lacks the affectation of the Old World and which, most remarkably, breathes, so that in Hemingway's 'Big Two-Hearted River', Thoreau's Walden, and the titular story of Norman Maclean's collection, you get a sense of the wide bounty and exuberance of this land through things that would otherwise seem closed and mundane.

The effect of the titular story of Maclean's collection, 'A River Runs Through It', is difficult to communicate in a review. It sounds unpromising: the writer, in his seventies, is relating the fishing trips of his youth in Montana which he spent with his brother (who died young) and his father. But it is as meticulously constructed and yet as natural a story as you could hope to find, becoming a tale, a narrative voice and a rhythm that you never want to leave. Through a combination of character, prose, thought, flow and setting – in short, everything a writer would want to master – Maclean delivers a story that is, at once, a story about fishing in Montana and a story about everything, about human interaction and hopes and tragedy and memory. Its narrative is peppered elegantly with aphorisms, but the greatest insight comes from the culmination of everything in the storytelling. The story ends with a "wonderful afternoon when all things came together" on a fishing trip (pg. 88), and as it all comes together in the prose you get the feeling that no one ever wrote better. That may or may not be true, but certainly 'A River Runs Through It' is the sort of thing writers hope to achieve when they put pen to paper.

The other two stories in the collection show that this was not a mere accident or fortuitous aligning of the stars for Maclean. Though neither reach the heights of 'River', they each showcase that same understanding of character, prose structure and scenery. Where 'River' was about Maclean's memories of fishing in Montana, 'Logging and Pimping and "Your Pal, Jim"' is about his same youthful memories of working as a logger in the state's forests. 'USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky' is about another job of his fighting forest fires. Each of the three reminiscences relate Maclean's sense that "life every now and then becomes literature" – as he writes in the third story – "not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember" (pg. 127). Maclean wrote these, his first "fictional" stories, in his seventies, and clearly he remembered their events, or the sense of the events, keenly. He recognised there was something in these youthful memories that had lasted, and through his writing he brings it out.

Even though I've read Moby-Dick and the afore-mentioned Thoreau and Hemingway, I still didn't expect to be stirred so greatly by what seemed like just another fishing story (it's not one of my hobbies). Some will balk at following the writer as he talks about fly-fishing for a hundred pages or more, and see it as boring, but for readers of substance this is writing of high calibre. You shouldn't expect writers to spoon-feed you what you think you want, and if you want good writing you should seek it out anywhere and when it is about anything. And you should accept that as a reader you have to work for it; if you want to reach the heights that these writers are making available to you, you have to climb. As Maclean writes in his second story, "if you expected to duck all challenges, you shouldn't have wandered into the woods in the first place" (pg. 107).

When you approach a story in this way, you are allowing it to be beneficial to you. You appreciate the thing for doing what it does well, not for doing what you wanted it to do. And it is this which is part of what Maclean communicates with his 'river'; the flow of life that is there, moving, and which has more than what you came there for. At the end of the story, Maclean watches his brother catch a fish – "the last fish we were ever to see [him] catch" – but he's so far away "we never saw the fish but only the artistry of the fisherman" (pg. 100). The profundity of this is apparent even if it loses something in quotation, but couched within the completeness of Maclean's story and the flow of his river running through it, it reveals itself as something truly special. show less

Maclean's writing surprised me. All I knew about this book before my dad passed it on to me was that a movie had been made out of the title story. I never saw the movie but had some vague awareness that it was about fishing. The title story is the best in here, although the others are quite good, too. Maclean lives very much in his own head as he tells his stories, keeping the reader abreast of what's going on around him while at the same time sharing his inner thoughts on related matters. show more In the stories, Maclean retains a matter-of-fact easiness about him, with a complimentary quick and dry wit. The easiness is often tested by his dealings with his family members, who he obviously cares for very much, but who also occasionally cause him to fret and over-analyze. And while fishing plays a big role in the title story, it is less of a theme and more of a convenient framework for Maclean to hang his thoughts and insights upon. show less

I chose to read the book when the movie version of A River Runs Through It was released a number of years ago. The stunning scenery, excellent acting, and significant passages of the story that were taken straight from the book produced one of the best films in recent memory and solidified the book's status as one of the greatest American stories. Everyone agreed that it was the best fishing narrative ever written. I diligently looked for it and read it. I learnt to appreciate it when I show more recently went back to it with more knowledge and just enjoyed the language and the poignant family story it told.

Here is the famous opening:
" In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."

In his timeless tale of dads, sons, and brothers and their frequently fruitless attempts to understand one another, MacLean shows how sport may serve as a link—and even the only link—between them. In this very nearly perfect book, MacLean's crystalline style and the moving plot will leave you haunted. It certainly did that for me and I heartily recommend this book to anyone who loves great literature. show less