[unsigned]
January 27, 1981
Dear Marie:
The “Dirge for the Living” is one of the best poems you have ever written.18 It’s very moving—it’s a masterpiece of the dramatic lyric, of thought going backward in pain through life until suddenly it is stopped by the pain of being alive now. It is very lovely, everything under control—except the next-to-last line, which seems kind of sick itself in its attempt to find a rhyme. The last line, though, is terrific. Absolutely pure.
The “Concerto” is lovely, too—it is a world you do beautifully, of music fading into dreams and of dreams returning from music of long ago and stopping just on the edge of reality. [. . .]
I’m sorry to learn that your critical essays on the American poets have not been best sellers. This in no way alters my belief that they are remarkable essays on individual poets. I suppose that more critical essays have been written on individual poets than on all in all the other fairly obvious subjects for critical essays—on individual poems or groups of poems, of poetical periods, on critical methods, so your essays entered a highly competitive field, but they are among the very best. Do not be down-hearted, Marie, because they have received no immediate large audience. Criticism is a very fashionable thing. Thirty or forty years ago it was all the fashion. It was a mania. Graduate students in English would far rather to have been noted critics some day than noted creative writers. It was unnatural and criticism in recent years has receded back more into the natural water levels. But there is something unnatural in the levels it has receded to—modern aesthetics and criticism has receded to fads, mostly fads, and, darling, you don’t belong in any school of structural nuts. There are plenty of others in the Yale Dept. of English who do, but you are above such things [and] when it does recede to sense and sensitivity you will be floating on top of its waters, but don’t ever be foolish enough to think that criticism is more important than creativity. Most of the time it is mostly a foolish fashion.
Thank you again for your lovely poems.
As always, with love,
Norman
January 29, 1985
Dear Marie:
I must start this year off right by reestablishing some band of connection with you, bodily or spiritual. My last glimpse of you (purely spiritual) was on a raft on the white water of the Grand Canyon, and I would like to have been with you, except it probably would be too tough for me now. I still do a little fishing, and all of it is boat-fishing, from a boat on the Blackfoot river, and it is beautiful but a damn poor way to fish. You look ahead and see a stretch of white water coming that after 150 yards eases off into blue, and you know that 150 yards is going to be so fast and rough that you will be lucky to get in just one cast, and then comes the white water, you are turned sideways going down, drop your rod and grab an oar to straighten out, are turned sideways the other way hitting the next trough, now have to drop your oar to save your rod, emerge from the bottom of your boat to float into the blue water without either rod or oar in your hand and without having made a single cast. It’s a hell of a poor way to fish, as I said, but I would like to have been with you, even if I saw you only when I went down without the oar passing you coming up with it.
I pause for a breath to see where I go from here. I suppose to your writing and mine, which is also a perilous undertaking, sometimes, taking you up and sometimes down and sometimes without a rod and sometimes without an oar, which at least describes the way my writing goes. I hope, though, by the end of the summer that I will float out on the blue water with a manuscript of a story on a forest fire ready to lay on the publishers.
How does your writing go, both criticism and poetry? I have had great respect for the criticism you were doing when we last followed each other closely—the using the aesthetic to illuminate the linguistic and vice versa. I thought you were one of the very few (if any) who could make one work for the other. But I suppose it and all other illuminating criticism have been put in the shade by the present fad for “structuralism” (which fad Yale has done more than its full share to promote). I find it completely unilluminating about literature and arrogant to the point of being snotty. Darling, fads come and go. You alone have the possibility of being steady. You go on doing what you know you can do and is worthwhile.
Near the bottom of this page, Marie, I ask you as always to remember you are a poet. Maybe the vein is not a wide one, but it is very pure. As we say out in my country, it is “high-grade ore.”
I love you, as I have for a long time.
Norman
Oct. 30, 1986
Dear Marie:
Forgive me for I know not what I do—but I know a lot of what I don’t do. I work all the time, from 6:30 in the morning to 12 at night, but on the ‘not’ side I don’t get much writing done of my own any more and I never went fishing once this summer and seldom go for a walk any more and I don’t write you any more and I have almost no fun any more and I don’t seem to get all my bills paid any more. What I do is get up at 6:30 every morning, weekends included, and go to bed at 12:00, which at least sounds like something positive for a change, but isn’t because I still don’t get anything done, including writing you. I take a little nap once in a while, but that doesn’t freshen me up, because I still don’t write you. I’m glad, though, that you still stay awake and keep on revising “Mischa Levitzki, Valse in A Major” because as you say it gets better each time until it has become one of the best—maybe the best—poems you have ever written.
You don’t know what a compliment that is because it comes from someone destitute of musical sensitivity. There is not a musical gene in my musical heritage—on either side of my family. Neither my father nor my mother could hum a tune. But your poem deeply touches me—it makes me feel deeply in touch with something deep that has happened and has been translated into sound waves.
That’s pretty high up the musical register, though, andI don’t know whether it can be made more resonant by further orchestration, so why don’t you write me another poem for Thanksgiving, if not Thanksgiving then Christmas?
I love you very much, and will follow (if I have the talent) every new step in your musical career.
As ever,
Norman
Letters to Nick Lyons, 1976–1981
Nick Lyons taught English for twenty-eight years, first at the University of Michigan and then at Hunter College in New York City. In New York he also became a book editor and publisher, founding in 1982 what has become the Lyons Press, which has published an impressive list of fly-fishing books as well as works by writers such as Tom McGuane, Edward Hoagland, Verlyn Klinkenborg, and Jon Krakauer. Lyons has himself authored twenty-two books and hundreds of magazine articles during his long career. He earned a special place in Maclean’s heart because of his enthusiastic review, in Fly Fisherman magazine (Spring 1976), of A River Runs through It and Other Stories. Lyons’s proved the first published review of River, and he called it a “classic” of American literature. In his letters to Lyons after May 1976, Maclean discusses the writing and reception of River, his work on the Mann Gulch fire book, and their common love of fishing. For Lyons, he became a generous friend and trusted sounding board, inquiring about Lyons’s teaching and then new publishing career, and always affirming the quality of his fishing essays.
May 26, 1976
Dear Mr. Lyons:
I am deeply touched by your review of my stories in the Fly Fisherman’s Bookshelf. I should like to think that the story, “A River Runs Through It,” is somewhere near as good as you say it is, not so much for my sake as for the memory of my brother whom I loved and still do not understand, and could not help.
Since you wrote so beautifully about the story, I feel that I must speak personally of it to you. After my father’s death, there was no one—not even my wife—to whom I could talk about my brother and his death. After my retirement from teaching, I felt that it was imperative I come to some kind of terms with his death as part of trying to do the sa
me with my own. This was the major impulse that started me to write stories at 70, and the first one naturally that I wrote was about him. It was both a moral and artistic failure. It was really not about my brother—it was only about how I and my father and our duck dogs felt about his death.1 So I put it aside (and have carefully never tried to publish it). I wrote the other stories to get more confidence in myself as a story-teller and to talk out loud to myself about him. The story, which now stands as the first one in the book, is actually the last one I wrote.
I hope it will be the best one (although not the last one) I ever write, and I thank you again for writing beautifully about it.
Very sincerely yours,
Norman Maclean
July 11, 1976
Dear Mr. Lyons:
Your warm-hearted and encouraging letter was waiting for me when I finally arrived here [Seeley Lake, Montana] a week or so ago. As an ex-English teacher, I always have to admire your prose, too. Being an English teacher always leaves its mark. When I’m fishing and look upstream and see somebody fishing downstream, I pause and watch for a cast or two, and then say to myself, “C minus.” [. . .]
Your prose should go well with rivers, even with the Madison which at least used to be one hell of a river. The last time I fished it, though, it was covered with bastards from Texas in rubber rafts. I believe, now, however, it can’t be fished by raft. The bastards from Texas in rubber rafts have all moved over to the Big Blackfoot—they are in danger of capsizing from collision.
I am enclosing a colored photograph of my home. My log cabin, which my father and I built over half a century ago, is right on the Lake at the extreme left side of the postcard—the Big Blackfoot is 17 miles from here. Drop by some time and I’ll take you down, but there are so damn many fishermen on it now you have to bring your own rock with you.
Yes, I hope to write another book, if I can ever get out from under the effects of writing the first. If you write one book, is it ever possible to write two?
May you live to write many and may a river run through them all.
Norman Maclean
Nov. 10, 1976
Dear Nick:
Your letter of 28 October has reached me by what we used to call in bridge, “the approach system”—anything that reaches me in Chicago by way of Seeley Lake through the United States Postal Service can be thought of as approaching gradually.
Nevertheless, I was delighted finally to receive it. I am grateful to you for nominating my story (I am sure it was you) for the Gingrich Award,2 and I hope only that your committee thinks as much of the story as the chairman does. I suppose by now that she has received most all of the reviews it will have—and it has received a good many of them, but yours is still my all-time favorite. In part, that could be because our lives and interests and professions have overlapped each other a good deal, but I still like to think that primarily it is because as a thing apart it is such a fine review. In respect to your committee, I hope you’re as good a rhetorician as a critic.
I was also delighted to hear that you fished the Big Hole in September, but was surprised to hear you say that practically no one besides yourself was [there]. The Big Hole used to be home, sweet home for every son-of-a-bitch from Butte, but I am sure there is still fishing there andI am glad you ran into at least a day of it. At about the same time, I was having some pretty good luck with big ones on a fly I suspect was very much like your “hopper”—with a big dark wing and an absorbent yellow wool body, meant, I am sure, to be fished wet and allowed to sink a few inches. But this September I fished it dry, and had some unusual luck. I’m really a wet-fly fisherman and when I go to a dry it is to something little in the quiet water of the evening, but in recent years I have been fishing a dry a lot—often in the middle of the day—and big, big as a mattress. When they are on the bottom and won’t come up, they will come up and at least take a look. We call the fly “Joe’s Hopper,” but I think that is a local name.
It must be wonderful to have a year off. I envy you (in retrospect). I never had a year off. The University of Chicago does not grant sabbaticals and I must have been young even before the Guggenheims developed the flotation process which led to the smelter which led to the fellowships in the humanities. But I never got closer to one than working in a Guggenheim smelter in East Helena and getting my skin all pitted.
As for you, take the General’s advice and count your blessings.
Yes, my book is in its second printing. I don’t know what it means for a book of stories to do well, but I at least think it [has] done well and has been well received. Paramount is negotiating with the Press for an option to make a film of the fishing story, and People magazine supposedly is going to run a story on me (provided, I suppose, if they can find some sex to go with the fishing—something I wish I could find, too).
Try fishing that hopper (and a big hair Royal Coachman) fly some time.
Thanks again,
Norman
Dec. 2, 1976
Dear Nick:
It was great, as always, to hear from you, but I haven’t received as yet “the two little fishing books” that were written “during several long city winters.” That’s a hell of a good time to catch fish. I’ve caught more then often than in the summers. I’ll be waiting with interest to see what you use to fish through the ice.
Personally, I used to use that brand of booze I talk about in my first story—named after the sign of the Vigilantes—3–7–77. You get in one of those little houses over a hole in the ice and start the kerosene burner and you are already drugged from the fumes before you start on the 3–7–77.
I am glad that you gave our sales department a booster shot. And me, too. I sure can’t kick about the number or kindness of the reviews that the little blue book has received, but I’ll be God damned if Fly Fishing [Fly Fisherman] isn’t the only one of what might be called “an outdoor journal” which has reviewed it. I don’t even start with “pig-fucker” in referring to Field and Stream.
I’m sure, though, that part of the fault lies in the inexperience of the press in dealing with the kind of thing I write, and I know both the Director, Mr. [Morris] Philipson, and the Sales Manager, Mr. [Stanley] Plona, were grateful for the list you sent them of [illegible] points for fly fishermen. I’m grateful too.
In case this turns out to be the letter-before-Christmas, I should like to thank you for the lift you have given me this year and to wish you health and happiness for the coming season and the coming year. May they always rise in the evening.
Norman
Jan. 1, 1977
Dear Nick:
A good way of starting the year off is to tell you how much I have enjoyed your books (which did not arrive until the day before Christmas!). Although they are about fishing, they are almost escape literature for me. Never in my life did I get up at 2:30 A.M. to catch the milk train to try for trout. About the only thing it resembles in my background is duck hunting, and then the only resemblance is the starting hours. I remember I always had a bottle of whiskey under the bed, and took a couple of shots before I got into my long underwear. But by continuing to drink steadily while I was in the blind I kept even, but when I got back to the warm cabin I would almost pass out just from opening the door.
Nick, you’re not only a fine writer but you are also a poet, so I wasn’t surprised to see that your first publication was a book of poems. Of course, I doubt if one can really write about fishing unless he’s at least a half-ass poet, and you’re really a poet. I like some of the human ones best—fishing with your boy or taking your wife (who sounds like quite a gal) along. I can remember being like your boy—at the age where I thought I was pretty damn good and so couldn’t understand how my father could catch them and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t see what he had that I didn’t have, but it had to be something.
So I like not only your writing but the fragrance of your situations.
Best wishes,
Norman
[P.S.] Speakin
g of poems, I wrote one the other day—the first in 50 years. What if I end as you began—with a book of them?
FOREVER
Loneliness is not always lonely.
It can go on to ecstasy.
When I am alone in the woods
I am the universe.
What is there
I do not know
Or cannot do?
Do not tell me I cannot live forever.
I already have.
Sept. 10, 1978
Dear Nick:
It was sure good to hear from you again, even though I was saddened to learn that you had returned to publishing. I was glad, though, to find out you were going to continue teaching—you must be a fine teacher—and I hope you will find time (and the energy—God damn it, it is a kind of energy more than time that passes away—) to go on with your brilliant writing and editing. And how about a little fishing now and then?
I almost went out of the fishing business myself about a month ago. I was fishing on the Swan river. It is a beautiful river, one of the most beautiful in the world, running as it does between the Mission Glaciers and the Swan Mountains. It is perhaps more beautiful than if it ran by the Tetons, but, by the same token, it is in very rough country. It has no banks—the banks are all occupied by blue spruce, and as you well know, there is no way, least of all by climbing through the needles, of getting a fly out of a spruce once you have got careless about one back-cast. So, to fish the Swan, you have to ford it lengthwise. I still don’t know how I did it, but I never fell so hard. I pulverized a glass rod, and everything inside me that has turned to glass-fiber from old age. For 10 days I put ice packs on whatever I felt still circulated inside me.
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 31