The other possibility is considerably darker, although I’ll try not to say it that way. It may be that I started something that is too big for me. I occasionally think of what Einstein said of chemists. “The trouble with most chemists,” he said, “is that chemistry is too hard for them.” Either way, the next month is bound to be a tough one for me, and I would appreciate it if you could say something consoling, even if it were irrelevant, as it would have to be. [. . .]
Yours,
Norman
July 30, 1963
Dear Bob,
I have been sick most of the time since we talked over the telephone last spring—an infection of the kidneys & prostate gland (just to let me know I am getting old). [. . .]
I try not to be depressed, but, God damn it, two of my last three summers have been obliterated by sickness—this summer by [my] own sickness and the summer before last by my wife’s illness when she was in the hospital threatened with TB.17 I had hoped to be finished with the Custer thing by now, but I some times think the curse is on it, and if that is an overdramatic reaction, it is a sober fact that the glow is off it. When I do work on it now—and I still try to—it seems out-of-date, whereas once I felt it was ahead-of-the-times or at least fresh and new. But I have met so many disappointments in connection with it that I shall try to view it philosophically—perhaps fatalistically, would be a better word. I think in respect to it I have no choices any more. Just as a matter of character I have to try to go on with it, even if the time for it is passed and even if I can’t get the permission of circumstances. It is interesting, though, isn’t it that I am so constantly threatened with defeat in trying to write about it? [. . .]
Best wishes to you and yours,
Norman
July 10, 1966
Dear Bob,
[. . .] I don’t think that I have ever talked to you about the Committee on General Studies in Humanities, but I feel more personally involved in it than in anything else I have done professionally. As its name implies, it is a committee for students interested in humanistic studies who (at least for a certain time in their development) do not wish to confine their training to just literature, history, philosophy or art but would like to approach problems with a perspective that relates and combines several humanistic disciplines. If I say so myself, it has proved to be very successful and selective and has been built up to think of itself as the 7th Cavalry. For instance, every graduating senior this year either received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, or a Danforth, or a fellowship from some first-class graduate school or went in the Peace Corps. Although we have kept ourselves guardedly small, our graduates receive more honors than do the whole graduating classes of many colleges. Like Custer, we think we can beat all the God damn Indians. Well, anyway, it is probably at its finest moment now, and so I have resigned as chairman. Fifteen years, given my political theory, are normally five years longer than anyone should administer anything. The committee would get a booster-shot from new leadership, and I am tired of the job and want to do something else. I have only two more years before I reach the retirement age of 65. I didn’t mean that I want to start crawling into my hole and getting ready to hibernate. For that, I’ll wait until the snow falls. Actually, I am trying to crawl out of my hole and look around in the late autumn—and, among other things, write you and Jim [Hutchins] a letter.
I don’t think, though, that I’ll ever take up Custer again—at least, seriously. He was one more life than I could live, and he didn’t tie up with any of my others. But, who knows? I might change my mind as I start giving up some of these other lives and looking around for other identities. [. . .]
Best wishes to you and yours,
Norman
May 18, 1971
Dear Bob,
[. . .] Believe it or not I may start back on Custer this summer. Well, if not exclusively on Custer at least it involves him among others. I think I see a certain type of “leaders of horse” from Alexander the Great to Patton, and it interests me—God, it’s even somewhat analytical—and so maybe is the fact that I feel like going back to work again. Anyway, I feel a lot better than I have for a few years, and I am looking around for something (not too big) to start me going again. [. . .]
I am always proud of you,
Norman
Dec. 15, 1972
Dear Bob,
[. . .] May be I’ll do a paragraph trying to bring myself up-to-date. In December, I shall reach my Biblical allotment of 3 score years plus 10 (Jesus, isn’t that appalling?). I am 5 years beyond retirement age but I am still teaching and actually feel better than I have for the last 8 or 10 years. A good time to quit, don’t you think? As my son, John, said to me recently (he claims now he didn’t), “Dad, why don’t you quit when may be you are more or less even?” On the hypothesis that I am, I think that I’ll resign next month to be effective in June when I have finished the school year. I’d rather not teach than not to teach well.
Then I’ll try a little writing. The summer before last I started some “stories” based on my memories of hunting and fishing and working in logging camps and for the Forest Service when I was young and when Montana and Idaho were younger than they are now. I think that the “stories” are pretty good. The one I worked on last summer [what became USFS 1919] I didn’t get finished. It is on the year when I was 17 years old and the United States Forest Service was 14. It got long and difficult (almost novelette size and I had to start it 4 times before I liked the feel of it), but I hope to finish it this winter quarter when I don’t teach. Some time I may send you the 2 shorter ones I wrote the first summer (the subtitle of one of them is “Logging and Pimping”) and when I get the Forest Service “story” finished I’ll take a hard look at all 3 of them and decide whether I want to pursue this direction any further. I have other things in mind, including an odd, half-formed article on Custer. [. . .]
As ever,
Norman
Oct. 23, 1974
Dear Bob,
I’m going to ask you a favor, but without much apology, since in my time you have asked the same favor of me. Can you find time to read something I have written—a story about a 100 pages long?
Shortly before my retirement I began to write reminiscent stories. My children wanted me to, and I also wanted to. I felt it was important as one grew old to clarify himself about his life—to see if it ever took on patterns or form and, perhaps more important, to clarify one’s attitude about life, especially about his own. In my stories so far I always have a second intention—that of giving a historical representation of how we once did things that we now do very differently, and, important, how it felt to do them. The historical part is not supposed to be just background. I believe that how things were done and how we felt doing them should be in the story, should be part of the story.
To date, I have written 3 such stories—one short and the other 2 long, one 100 pages and the one I am finishing will be 10 or 15 pages longer. The short one is called “Your Pal, Jim & Whoring and Pimping” and is a story in which is embedded the knowledge of what it was like to be a logger when it was still hand and horse and before anyone had heard of a chain saw and “a cat.” Also, in a world when nothing was so important as work—where even whoring and fighting weren’t as important.
The second story is longer—about 100 pages—and is the one I should like to send you. It is called “USFS 1919,” and is based on my third summer in the Forest Service (all told, I put in 12 or 13). It is the story of a boy of 17 seeing for the first time his life change into an art form and becoming briefly a story. The title suggests its second intention—to portray what we did in the early Forest Service, how we did them, and how it felt to do them—again in a world of hand and foot and horse—and no roads.
The story I am finishing up now is in memory of my brother, who was one of the great fly fishermen of his time and who was murdered when he was 32. Its secondary intention should be clear, to give someone a knowledge of and feeling for the art—from
rods and flies to casting, to “reading water,” to landing (and losing) fish. I should have a first draft ready to go to the typist in another month. Naturally, it means a great deal to me, but I have tried hard not to make it too personal.
In any event, when I finish it I believe I should stop, look and listen, and maybe ultimately stop. The 3 stories add up to a certain “body” of writing—a sufficient body to decide whether I am largely wasting the mornings of my remaining years in writing. I would rather spend my time fly-fishing than in writing a mediocre story about fishing, because I am better than mediocre as a fisherman.
If you have time, then, Bob, what I would like is for you to tell me from the hip whether this story of mine on the early Forest Service (which comes closest to your experience, I should think) has interest and merit beyond my family and close students, and, if you think it has, what I might do to try to get it published. If you think it hasn’t, I am anxious to know that, too. I am 71, this story and the one I am finishing now are about as well written as I will ever be able to write. I fished well this summer, and, as I said earlier, I’d rather do that or something else than not to write well. [. . .]
You’re always welcome,
Norman
Dec. 29, 1974
Dear Bob,
Thank you for your kind words. Don’t worry, they were worth much more than the postage. I don’t quite know why I started writing in old age, but certainly not with the hope that I would turn out to be a writer. If anything like that was going to happen it would have happened half a century ago. One reason, for sure, that started me off was the hope that I would please my children and some close friends. So thanks again, Bob—you did all I could hope for. You liked it.
In so far as I have thought of publication, clearly I haven’t thought in the same direction as you have. You speak of it as being “too long,” so you must have thought of its possibilities for magazine publication. Although I find it very hard to write with publication in mind—a real literary limitation of mine—I don’t think I ever imagined when I was writing the Forest Service story that it could or would be published in a magazine.
I really don’t know what I was thinking about publication when I wrote it; not a book, certainly, because it is too short for that. I guess I wrote it the way I wanted it. Then I went ahead and wrote 2 more—a conventionally short one and one some 20 pages longer than the Forest Service one which I am just finishing now. Together, as far as pages go, they would make a small book, and they are all about long ago in the high hills, and, Bob, I’m a fairly good student of literature, and I don’t know any really first-class stories of long ago in the high hills. Ones that are very real and accurate as well as stories.
So I think I’ll tie these three stories into a package and try them on one or two big publishing houses, although, as an old-time westerner, I have a complete lack of faith in the eastern literary establishment. They probably can’t stand reading more than four or five pages about the son of a Scotch Presbyterian minister working in the Forest Service and logging camps or fishing the big rivers. What could be more boring than the son of a Scotch Presbyterian minister walking around in trees! It should have been the son of a rabbi locked in the bathroom masturbating in his sister’s underwear to be literature. And, Bob, I don’t know how to write that story (although lots of others do), so I am resigned.
But I have already partly accomplished two things that I wanted to do by writing these stories. I thought it would be important for me in old age to look back on my life to see moments when it took on the beauty of art. I also thought it would be important for me in old age to find out how I had felt about life—and to be doubly sure how I felt about it now. This is a long way from saying that I thought I would find I was a writer. The story I am in the process of finishing now means more to me personally than the others, but I know enough to know that does not mean it is the best thing I have written. It is about my brother who was murdered and who was a master in the art of fly-fishing, so the story is also about the art of fly-fishing as the Forest Service story is also about how we did things in the early Forest Service and how we felt doing them. I hope for my brother’s sake it is the best thing I have ever written, but it may have meant too much to me to be as good as it should be. [. . .]
Thanks again,
Norman
[from Seeley Lake]
Aug. 28, 1977
Dear Bob:
[. . .] Bob, as long as I have known you, you have known how to write a book. You knew how to write a book before you knew how to write.
And all of them have been very good. You are truly an author.
I have written just one little book (a few pages over 200—a mere chapter for a genuine book-writer like you [. . .]). But it is doing very well. It has been out now for 1½ years and its last 3 months have been its best and the last month the best of all. And Paramount is going to do the long story that is the title for the whole collection, “A River Runs Through It.” And last week Esquire bought an early story of mine [“Retrievers Good and Bad”] and all the talks I gave this spring are sold for publication. I haven’t written anything, Bob, since I retired at 70 that hasn’t been or soon will be published. It’s something like what you say about your getting honorary degrees—once you get the hang of the thing, they come easy. The hanging took a long time, though, at least for me.
If you get to Chicago, let me know in advance. Stay overnight with me—I have a nice little condominium near the University and live there about 9 months of the year. The other three I spend here in the cabin my father and I built in 1921. I stay alone and write and walk and fish. It is my country and I love it. It is only 16 miles from the glaciers and night before last it snowed, clear to the edge of the lake. It snows every month of the year.
I am now 74, but it is still my kind of country. It was 29° this morning when I got up. [. . .]
Bob, if this letter goes on much longer I’ll never write another book, but it was sure nice talking to you.
As ever,
Norman
Nov. 29, 1979
Dear Bob:
I was delighted to hear from you. I was delighted to hear that you were going to quit the God damn government and give yourself over wholly to sin and writing fiction. I don’t see why you can’t succeed at both—you had a good start when you were young on Custer Hill. One of the earliest things I remember you writing was the story of the two Cheyenne boys charging down the hill just outside Lame Deer to take on the 7th Cavalry drawn up to meet them. Always in your histories, Bob, you have shown unusual narrative gifts—if you feel like trying some narrative not bound by history, you sure have the credentials—and my blessings. After my blessings, however, I have to add a word of caution. As I get older and older I am more and more sure that Plato was right when he said man was highly specialized in his gifts. Who besides Shakespeare has excelled in both forms of drama—comedy and tragedy? And, although Browning was the great master of the dramatic monologue, he wrote pretty dismal dramas, although he tried hard. Historical narrative and narrative sound close, but it is hard to name any who were good at both. H. G. Wells? except that he wasn’t much good at either.
But good luck to you and good sailing. [. . .]
Best wishes,
Norman
Letters to Marie Borroff, 1949–1986
Marie Borroff, a student of Maclean’s at the University of Chicago, went on to a distinguished academic career at Yale University, where she taught from 1960 to her retirement in 1994. A scholar of medieval and twentieth-century English poetry, and a poet herself, Borroff in 1962 became only the second woman to be granted tenure in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and in 2008 Yale established a professorship in her name. She is famous in the academic world for her verse translation of and scholarship about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and her poems have been published in the American Scholar, the New Republic, and the Yale Review, among other journals. A selection of poems written over a period of more t
han fifty years, entitled Stars and Other Signs, was published by Yale University Press in 2002 and is dedicated to Maclean.
In his letters to Borroff, Maclean shows himself a tough poetry critic and tender friend, one who always pushes her to write and send more poems even as he praises her career as a scholar and academic leader at Yale. Borroff has said, “My friendship with Norman was one of the greatest good fortunes of my life. Still is.” In a 1971 letter, he delightfully recounts the discovery, via a student they both had, of their nearly identical teaching style. As with Utley, Maclean felt this protégée’s career exceeded his own as mentor.
March 22, 1949
Dear Marie,
I hope that you will forgive me in taking so long to acknowledge your poems, but for the last five or six weeks I have been down and out, crawling to classes and then back home again and being contagiously unwholesome both in transit and at destination. Mr. Crane,1 too, has been exhaling morbidity, but finally discovered he was suffering from a thyroid deficiency (this has happened before with him). The pills he has been taking for the last several weeks are, I think, correcting his deficiency, and the last two times I have seen him he was most like himself. I, too, am better, and I hope, nearly well, but I give you this medical chart only to assure you that I am writing you about your poems at the first moment I think I can be somewhat objective about them.
I think you describe your own poems in the lines “now sedate/and half-withdrawn, now passionately tender,/seeming to hesitate/upon a gesture of complete surrender.” They touch at the same time chords that are feminine with tenderness and yet dignified, almost stoical. And, of course, they are very competent in craft—emotions such as these cannot be aroused without competence.
You are a young poet and so your question is, “where do I go from here?” and so I am going to make some very dangerous observations. With an older poet, the critic pretty much accepts the emotions and thoughts of the poet. The critic accepts these as the confirmation of the poet’s personality and his times. But you are young and elastic—and bigger and more exciting than the role you have assigned your poetry. And, although I recognize that the role you have assigned your poetry is not out of keeping with the poetry of your times, I am going to say that the times and the traditions are dying. The poetical transition of the last twenty or thirty years is no longer productive—it has become as sterile as the Romanticism against which it revolted. It has run its cycle, I feel sure, although naturally I have no notion of what will come to replace it. That is the work of the inventive poets. What I am saying is that I want you to think of being of them. I shall say one thing more general—the poetry that endures generally has one quality to it however it adjusts to and/or revels at its own age—it has excitation. Name for me the facts that have gained immortality shaded in wistful half-lights.
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 28