The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  Dickson, the master of numbers, was sometimes expectedly brilliant in a game where only 13 × 4 numbers were involved; his habitual troubles were at least partly environmental—he had come here by way of Texas. He almost consistently overbid and, when he lost three or four hands in a row, he would slam his cards down on the table and leave the card room in a rage, always denouncing Carlson on the way out. No matter who had misplayed—Carlson, Michelson, or himself—he always denounced Carlson. While the cards were still shivering on the table, he would shout, “Why the hell, Carlson, don’t you go back to your lab and feed your dogs? And don’t let Irene Castle catch you killing any of them.”

  Overbidding three or four hands in a row and then blaming the great biologist seemed to put the great mathematician in the right state of mind to race back to his office and resume his classic studies on the theory of numbers.

  But be sure that Dickson or no one else ever even mentioned that Michelson did not play bridge well. Michelson was something like the other great University tradition we had in those days (observed in these present days only by James Cate and me)—namely, that the University shield in the floor of the Reynolds Club, in front of the entrance to the cafeteria, should never be stepped on. No one wanted to play with Michelson, but he was Michelson, and no one ever stepped on him and said he did not play bridge well.

  At seventy-five, though, he was still the best billiard player in the club. He even looked like a billiard player. In fact, he looked like everything he did well—he looked like a violinist, a water colorist, a chess player and a physicist. And he still looked like an Annapolis-trained naval officer. At seventy-five, he was slight, trim, and handsome. He was quietly dressed, with a high, stiff collar and a small, sharp mustache. He was small all over, and even his hands did not look particularly unusual. In fact, one of the fascinations of his hands was that they looked fairly ordinary. I suppose we are used to thinking of a master’s hands as being long and powerful and “esthetic,” but the hands of the greatest of all billiard players, Willie Hoppe, were not particularly unusual just to look at, although those of his great rival, Jake Shaefer (the Younger), conformed to the picture in our minds and were like long and powerful bridges. I had learned, though, while working in logging camps, that a man’s hands don’t always tell how good he is with them.

  Michelson was slightly stooped-shouldered (possibly from age), and his small size and slight stoop made him fit the proportions of a billiard table when he was taking a shot, and, when he was standing, he looked as if he were leaning over his cue to chalk it. With a shift of context, of course, the slight stoop and quiet elegance made him look like a violinist, a painter and a chess player.

  Like most of the very good “downtown players” at Bensinger’s, he seemed to shoot slowly, an obvious illusion if you kept track of the number of points he was making. It would be more accurate, therefore, to say he shot steadily and rhythmically, only occasionally taking more time to study one shot than another. Those who had seen him shoot in his prime said he was best at three-cushion billiards and credited his skill at this wide-angle game to his mastery of physics, but when I saw him play, his long game was his weakness, possibly because his eyesight was not so sharp as it had been.

  In 1928 what he was best at was getting the three balls close together and then “nursing” them—that is, making long runs by keeping the balls together with a soft, delicate stroke. When they slowly worked apart, he would bring them together again with a “position shot” that required an understanding of the angle each ball would take when it came off a cushion, together with perfect control of the speed and hence the distance each ball would travel. Speed and angles he had under his control. When I saw him play, he was essentially a control player.

  It would be non-scientific to describe him as a great billiard player but he was a very good amateur player. At seventy-five he could have played downtown at Bensinger’s, and he was the best billiard player in the history of the University. I saw him run over forty several times, and it was not unusual for him to put a string together of twenty or thirty; he had to start with a tough “leave” if he didn’t make five or ten.

  Once he handed me his cue and said, “Shoot a few yourself.” Considering my general confusion, I thought I did pretty well. In fact, he said, “Not bad.” Then he added, “But you use ‘English’ on too many of your shots.” English comes from putting a spin on the cue-ball by hitting it on one side instead of the center so that it comes off the cushion or another ball at an unusual angle. “Once in a while it is necessary to use English,” he said, “but it is hard to predict accurately. Cue your ball in the center as often as you can. Don’t use something hard to control unless you have to.”

  Only this once did he hand me his cue and ask me to shoot, so once must have satisfied him that, although I wasn’t good enough to play with him, he could turn to me now and then and lift an eyebrow.

  Often when he missed a shot, he stood silently studying the green cloth until (I think) he had reconstructed the preceding series of shots and had decided where he had started to lose control of the balls. Once he said when he missed a shot, “I am getting old.”

  Just he and I were present, so he said this to me or himself, but I had to let him know I heard it and I have always been glad I did. I said, “No, no. It was a hard shot, but it was the one you should have taken, and you barely missed it.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I said, “I am sure. The easy shot would have left the balls spread all over the table. Any of the good players down at Bensinger’s would have played it the way you did, and a lot of them would have missed.”

  EXTENDED EPIGRAM

  I think that he was glad I had stopped him from blaming old age, but he was through for the day. He locked his cue into the rack on the wall, and said, either to me or himself or the wall, “Billiards is a good game.”

  He made sure that his tie was in the center of his stiff collar before he added, “But billiards is not as good a game as painting.”

  He rolled down his sleeves and put on his coat. Elegant as he was, he was a workman and took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves when he played billiards. As he stood on the first step between the billiard room and the card room, he added, “But painting is not as good a game as music.”

  On the next and top step, he concluded, “But then music is not as good a game as physics.”

  As you can see, I have never forgotten this extended epigram, but for many years I thought of it largely as an extended epigram and for some time I thought probably he had shaped it for me, knowing vaguely that I was in English and should appreciate a literary construction that extended across the billiard room to the top of the stairs. As I grew older and more detached from myself, however, I could see nothing in our relations that would have suggested to him what I intended to do with my life, so next I came to assume that it was just a stylish remark he made to himself, because at seventy-five he was still very stylish—in appearance, dress, serenity, and slowness of movement that turned out not to be slowness but the shortest distance between two points, which is one definition of grace.

  Always, though, I must have sensed that this extended epigram was more than a reflection of style, because, forty-five years later, by which time I had several subjects I might have talked about, I suddenly decided I would tell the Alumni Cabinet about Michelson’s comment on games. I also decided it was time for me to clarify to myself what was missing to me but I always knew was there, so I went over to the President’s Archives, got Michelson’s file and read his most serious scientific prose. Then, not long afterwards—but unfortunately not until after I gave my talk to the Alumni Cabinet—I discovered and read the humanly and scientifically perceptive biography of him by his youngest daughter. You should read it, too, if you wish to experience for a short time Michelson’s universe which moves in beauty playing games. It is not a universe governed by morality or theology but by esthetics, mechanics, and gamesmansh
ip, all shades of one another.

  In 1928, then, Michelson was not talking to the wall when he said, after missing a correct but hard shot: “Billiards is a good game, but billiards is not as good a game as painting, but painting is not as good a game as music, but then music is not as good a game as physics.”

  He was saying much the same thing many years earlier, only more formally, and more beautifully. In 1899, for instance, he began the Lowell Lectures on physics before his Boston audience by speaking first of esthetics:

  If a poet could at the same time be a physicist, he might convey to others the pleasure, the satisfaction, almost the reverence, which the subject inspires. The esthetic side of the subject is, I confess, by no means the least attractive to me. Especially is its fascination felt in the branch which deals with light, and I hope the day may be near when a Ruskin will be found equal to the description of the beauties of coloring, the exquisite graduations of light and shade, and the intricate wonders of symmetrical forms and combinations of forms which are encountered at every turn.

  In the games that were going on in the universe, the participants were not only the universe and those hoping to understand it, but even the machines that were made to help the understanding. Of one of his machines that Michelson could never quite master, he said:

  One comes to regard the machine as having a personality—I had almost said a feminine personality—requiring humoring, coaxing, cajoling—even threatening! But finally one realizes that the personality is that of an alert and skillful player in an intricate but fascinating game—who will take immediate advantage of the mistakes of his opponent, who “springs” the most disconcerting surprises, who never leaves any result to chance—but who nevertheless plays fair—in strict accordance with the rules of the game. These rules he knows and makes no allowance if you do not. When you learn them and play accordingly, the game progresses as it should.

  Einstein left behind, not only a formulation of the universe, but a formulation of Michelson’s delight in it. His telegram on the one-hundredth anniversary of Michelson’s birthday began:

  I always think of Michelson as the artist in Science. His greatest joy seemed to come from the beauty of the experiment itself, and the elegance of the method employed.

  Although I watched Michelson play billiards regularly at noon for a few months before he retired from the University, I have the feeling now that he never came to know anything about me, except that I put English on too many of my shots and so did not have perfect control of them.

  But I am certain that eventually I came to know something important about him, perhaps in part because I taught literature, and certainly in part because I was brought up in pool halls and logging camps—he was an artist and played many games well, especially those involving something like a cue, a brush, a bow, or, best of all, a box with slits and silvered mirrors. In that game he was playing with light and a star.

  WORKS CITED

  Livingston, Dorothy M. The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

  Retrievers Good and Bad*

  Shortly after 1970 when, at the behest of his son and daughter, Maclean began to write what he called “reminiscent stories,” “Retrievers Good and Bad” was the first result. He had long wanted to write about his murdered younger brother, Paul, but found himself approaching the subject obliquely through their father and the succession of duck dogs he owned. “Retrievers” shows Maclean’s humor in a strong light, and the essay’s swift modulation to tragedy at its climax closely anticipates the same movement in A River Runs through It. Maclean was not satisfied with it, however, referring to it in a letter to Nick Lyons as both a moral and artistic failure. In 1977, after the success of A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Maclean finally published the essay in Esquire magazine.

  The day I was born, as I was to be often told, my father gave me a dog for a birthday present. Very early in life, then, I was to learn about the power of odd coincidence, because my dog turned out to be a duck dog and my father turned out to be a duck hunter and evidently, at least in my infancy, I did not resemble a duck and the dog did not give a damn about me. We talk painfully about father and mother rejections, but if you are going in for rejections, there is nothing like being the supposed infant owner of an animal and wanting to be loved by it and instead being studied by yellow eyes that wished you were a dead duck. Even so, in many ways and for long periods of the year, the dog belonged more to my mother than to my father or to me.

  My father was a Scotch Presbyterian minister. He was intellectual and somewhat poetical and referred to Methodists as Baptists who could read. He thought he was fulfilling his calling by preaching two very good sermons on Sundays and by baptizing, marrying and burying the local Americans of Scotch descent on weekdays. The so-called church work he regarded as woman’s work, and so it was my mother who visited the new members of the church and ran the Ladies’ Aid and Christian Endeavor and tried to sing louder than anyone else in the congregation.

  My father’s ideas about a duck dog were highly specialized. He expected the dog to be totally his from the opening morning of duck season until the closing sunset. During the remaining portion of the year, he expected the dog to be taken care of, as the church was, by God and my mother, but in the case of the dog, God with some justification left the work to my mother. So she fed the dog all year until hunting season, she combed and brushed it, and she saw that the dog had a good bed and clean bedding. She even watched—more closely than my father—the coming date of the opening of the duck season; a month before, she would confine the dog to the garage because she knew my father was not unique among mankind in expecting to have a duck dog on opening day even though he hadn’t taken care of it until then. Any dog resembling a duck dog, any dog even with yellow eyes, could not venture alone on the streets of my town two weeks or even a month before the opening of the season without being—not exactly stolen—but abducted until November 30. So my mother locked up the dog and then of course she had to walk it.

  My mother was a fine working woman, but she had one shortcoming. She ran the church and all that, she had a family to take care of and she was stable-boy, as it were, for a succession of large female Chesapeake Bay retrievers. But she was not a dog trainer, and my father on the opening day of duck season expected not only a well-fed and well-kept dog but a perfect retriever. Since he would not train the dogs himself, it may be difficult to understand just how he expected them to show instantaneous perfection, but this is what he expected of hunting dogs and firstborn sons.

  My father’s interest in the dog business was more theological than scientific, so if a dog did not approach perfection, we got another Chesapeake Bay retriever for the next season. They were always called Fanny, a name I did not like, and the dogs never particularly liked me, but my father always said they were mine. This process went on long after I left home and included dogs that I practically never saw, but it is easy to understand how in over thirty years I came to own a kennel, as it were, of “almost duck dogs” and even one dog that on her own power approached perfection. Then, finally, there was a dog that was not given to me.

  I realize that my father and my town were fairly special, but it’s a good guess that something like what went on in my town went on in most small towns that were near shooting water. Universal pulsations seem to spread among ducks and duck hunters alike. It is said that far north in Canada, in the marshes where the ducks nest, you can hear increasing restlessness both day and night some weeks before the migrations begin, even if there is no visible sign of the storms that finally set the ducks off. And, at the same time, south of the border, there is a stirring all along main streets when something like a duck dog—even a cocker spaniel—goes by. Doors flutter open, sales are postponed, and customers and salesmen alike, especially hardware salesmen who sell shotgun shells, come out on the walk and suddenly become dog fanciers. It is almost a sure bet, too, that not one of the dogs,
even those with good bloodlines, is well trained. It takes time to train a dog—summertime—and in summertime the duck hunters and hardware salesmen I knew went fishing, including, of course, my father, who even tied his own flies. Come autumn, a dog hasn’t much choice but to rely on his blood, which, given my experience, is never quite enough.

  The almost duck dog whose genetic deficiencies aroused my father most was Fanny II. By the time I acquired title to her, we had moved to western Montana, where there was excellent duck shooting and where for the first time my father was tempted to shoot over his legal limit. Accordingly, he started taking me with him, although I was scarcely as long as the castoff double-barrel shotgun I kept stumbling over and not half so powerful, at least in reverse. Naturally, my father didn’t take me along to shoot ducks. I was too young to have to buy a license, and all the ducks over the twenty he shot (twenty was the limit then) I was given to carry. They were mine—along with the dog. The dog, when I try honestly to remember, looked like any other Chesapeake Bay retriever—big, with brown curly hair, yellow eyes, intelligent, professional. We were shooting in an outlet of a lake, quiet water covered with dead reeds, stuff that looked to me like seaweed and muck of that sort. Every time my father dropped a bird in the water, Fanny II would charge out and, swimming high, would shoulder the dead duck aside and, four or five feet beyond, snap a mouthful of floating seaweed. She had a passion for seaweed, and with an almost sexual smile on her face she would return it to my father. Then, still standing right in front of him and still untrained, she would shake all the water out of her coat, most of which he had to absorb.