Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph?
I suppose so, but that would vary. I’m a great believer in the power of the paragraph. I can’t say that I always write by paragraphs, but I often do. I think that paragraphs should have a little plot, should lead you into something strange and different, tie the knot in the middle, and at the end do a little surprise and then also prepare you for the next paragraph.
Why did you choose to write those particular stories?
The title story, “A River Runs Through It,” was the big tragedy of our family, my brother’s character and his death. He had a very loving family, but independent and fighters. We were guys who, since the world was hostile to us, depended heavily upon the support and the love of our family. That tends often to be the case with guys that live a hostile life outside.
There was our family which meant so much to us, and there was my brother who was a street fighter, a tough guy who lived outside the mores of a preacher’s family. We all loved him and stood by him, but we couldn’t help him. We tried but we couldn’t. There were times when we didn’t know whether he needed help. That was all and he was killed. I slowly came to feel that it would never end for me unless I wrote it.
The others? Well, they’re all spots of time. Spots of time become my stories. You get that very openly in the Forest Service story. That’s the plot. They go out and it’s spring, and the things that they do and their order are determined by the job. There’s no human preference indicated. The first thing you did was clear out the trails from the winter, dead trees and all that fallen-down stuff. Then you made some new trails, then pretty soon fire season came and you fought fires. It was determined by the seasons and the nature of the job.
The plot starts that way and then things begin to happen in such a way that human decisions are determining and changing this natural order of things. It’s the change in the causes that order the events which is the story.
I’d had a good training when I was young in the woods. My father didn’t allow me to go to school, kept me home for many years until the juvenile officers got me, and as a result I had to work in the morning, but the afternoons were mine. All the guys my age were in school, so I went out in the woods alone. I became very good in the woods when I was very young. I trained myself, both in the logging camps and in the sawmills. I was going to know the wood business from the woods to board feet.
When World War I came along they were looking for young guys or old men to take the place of the foresters who were getting grabbed up as soldiers. So I was in the Forest Service when I was fourteen. And it became a very important part of my life. I almost went into it; I thought until I was almost thirty that I was going to go into the Forest Service as a life profession.
All these things are important to me: my family, the years I spent in the logging camps, the years I spent in the Forest Service.
Why are these stories about your life in Montana, rather than about teaching in Chicago?
I’ve written many things about Chicago and teaching, some of my best things in articles, stories, talks, discussions about teaching. I wrote a story about Albert Michelson, who measured the speed of light and was the first American scientist to win the Nobel Prize. Strangely, when I was quite young I came to know him intimately. I was just a kid from Montana, a half-assed graduate student and teacher in English, and I was knocking around with this guy who was regarded as one of our two greatest scientists (Einstein being the other). Now I suppose Nobel Prize winners are a dime a dozen, but in those days we had only two in the whole country; he was one of them, and Theodore Roosevelt was the other. I was very touched, as a young boy from Montana, to be trusted with the acquaintanceship of such an outstanding, strange and gifted man. I think my story about him is one of the best things I ever wrote.
Did anyone help you in editing the stories in A River Runs Through It?
I’m a loner in respect to writing. First I should go back to my origins. My schooling was lonely. My father taught me himself, and the prime thing he taught me was writing. I studied by myself and reported to my father three times every morning. I was brought up as a lonely kid and that’s continued. Now that everybody has gone off to town after Labor Day and there’s nobody on this side of the lake, I’m just coming into my own here. That’s the way I am, and it’s pervaded my writing.
Having said that, though, I always try to turn, somewhere short of publication, to four or five friends to read over the manuscript. Two or three are from the University of Chicago, and then the first woman full professor at Yale in the English Department, who was a student of mine in her day. She’s a great critic. Then three or four from the woods.
I have this three-fold cadre of critics. I give it to them before it becomes a manuscript to be submitted. I listen a great deal to what they say. They’re tender with me, but they know me from a long, long time back and I suppose they know what to say and what’s useless to say.
What did your father have you read when he was teaching you?
I think the most important thing was what he read out loud to us. He was a minister, and every morning after breakfast we had what was called family worship. And family worship consisted of his reading to us. We’d all sit with our breakfast chairs pulled back from the table and he would read to us from the Bible or from some religious poet. He was a very good reader, and if he had any faults as a reader it was that he was kind of excessive, as preachers often are. But that was very good for me because in doing that, he would bring out the rhythms of the Bible. That reading instilled in me this great love of rhythm in language.
Now when I teach poetry or prose I can teach it quite analytically. When I was at Stanford, I had a long session analyzing prose rhythms with their advanced creative writing class. That’s not easy to do, partly because the rule of prose rhythms is that you better not have them show very much. And most of the time you better not have them show at all. Any time you or I or anybody else who has any taste at all suspects that the writer’s trying to write pretty, then he’s dead. That guy is just as dead as a dead snake.
If you are a writer whose prose falls into rhythm you have to be very, very careful. Most of the time you just approach rhythms and then drift away from them, and then drift back towards them, not really going into any rhythmical passages except as the tension mounts, as the passion increases.
If you look at the last page of “A River Runs Through It,” you can scan it as if it were written in accentual rhythm. But when you’re on the sand bar with the whore and that goddamn brother-in-law of mine, you don’t hear any rhythms although they’re there. They’re very faint. They come close to rhythm and then drift out. My ordinary style is better than ordinary speech, but not so much you would notice it.
In that story, were you more conscious of the differences in rhythms?
It depends upon the kind of emotional level you’re operating on. “A River Runs Through It” is my notion of high, modern tragedy. It’s tragedy and deep feeling, and I tried to write about how men and women do things with great skill and loving kindness, with their hands and their hearts, both at the same time. Fishing is such an example. But rhythm is there even when I stop and tell you how you put hobnails in a shoe and why you put them where you put them, and how you pack a horse. I like to tell you about things that men and women can do with their hands that are wonderful. I write about them very carefully. All the time I’m on a level above ordinary speech because what I’m trying to tell you is above ordinary speech. I’m trying to tell you how you do things expertly. When I do that, the language goes up a little bit.
And certainly when you come to the great tragic moments, when you’re just pouring out your heart, you don’t have to worry about your rhythms; they’ll be there if you’re at all a rhythmic person.
So the ear has a great deal to do with your writing?
Yes. It goes along with the art. The great fly-tier from Livingston, Dan Bailey, said, “The bookshelves are full of books on how
to fish, but only Maclean tells you how it feels to fish.”
Could these stories have been set anyplace other than Montana?
Montana is very dear to me. You talk about a man without a country, but I’m a man with two countries. Montana’s always been one, no matter where the other one is.
So you wrote the stories because the area was important to you?
It’s my homeland. I love it, I’ve always loved it and I always will. When I tell my doctor I’m getting old, that I better close up that place in Montana, that it’s getting too tough for me to run, he says, “If you do, Norman, you’ll die.” So here I am.
Why was it important that you get every detail of those stories correct?
Again, I could answer “because my father told me so.” But I’ll jump to the other extreme. If you are interested at all, as I told you I was, in whether there are designs and shapes in the passage of events, then design is very important to you. It’s very important whether the design or shape or form of a series of events is really in the thing or whether it’s something that you, the artist, have manufactured. It’s important to me that there is a design and shape to quite a few things that we do in our life. So I’m very, very careful. I don’t want to be cheating; I want to get the design as exactly as I can, in itself, not from me.
So you see it as something outside of yourself?
I want to. I’m not always able to. I have to admit that I’m not always sure there is a design and shape to things. Sometimes I think I must be the cause of the designs of things, but I don’t really think that is always true. I think that there have been designs and shapes in my life, and I’ve been almost apart from them. I was a character of them, but I wasn’t the author of them.
So in what sense are your stories true? Do you tell them exactly the way they happened?
No, I always allow myself a literary latitude. Often things don’t happen fast enough in life. Literature can condense them. I wrote the story on the Forest Service as if it happened all in one summer. But it happened in two or three summers. I didn’t consider that a violation at all.
Everything in the story happened to me in the Bitterroots. In the story I have a big fight. The fight was actually in a Chinese restaurant, but in the story I had it in the Oxford, a restaurant and gambling joint in Missoula. It’s been there for sixty or seventy years and a lot of us Missoula guys were brought up in there. And they said, “God, how could you put the Oxford up there in Hamilton?” I don’t think it made much difference in terms of the story. I felt at home in the Oxford, and I didn’t feel at home in Chinese restaurants. Little things like that, mostly for the sake of hastening the story on, of sharpening it.
But you’re still true to the spirit of the stories?
I hope so. As I told you, I’m engaged now with several others in trying to make a script out of “A River Runs Through It.”
They’re always saying, “You make it too tragic. A movie audience, unlike a literary audience, won’t accept that much tragedy.” It’s just too bad if they won’t. I didn’t ask to write this script. It wasn’t my idea. I’m unbending about this, just totally unbending. I’m not going to compromise.
How was your education in Montana different from the one you got back East?
It wasn’t a very good education. In 1920 when I was going to go to college neither my father nor I had a very high opinion of the University of Montana. The state was still dominated by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company [ACM]. You had to watch what you said about them and about politics. They owned the whole state and they’d just crush you out of existence if they didn’t like you.
At the time I worshipped the chairman of the English Department at the University of Montana. His name was H. G. Merriam. The ACM was out to get him night and day, but never did. He came to be recognized as a kind of martyr, sacred to the history of Montana.
I wanted no part of being a sycophant for rich companies, and the education was not very good at the time. Now I think both state universities in Montana are fine schools.
What sorts of things did you learn in the woods as compared to the things you learned in school?
I learned what little math and science I know, in surveying. The only branch of mathematics I remember anything at all about is trigonometry, the thing that we needed in surveying. In respect to biology, I learned a good deal of what I know in a very wonderful kind of way—through direct observation. I suppose fishing, as much as anything, helped me, the close observation about what fly should be used. In a backwoods kind of homey way we were good naturalists. Although home-spun observation has big gaping holes in it, it also has rich parts that you hardly get anymore. If you didn’t know a caddis fly when you saw one, and you didn’t know whether they spawned in shallow water or deep, you just weren’t going to get any fish on certain days. And you developed from that a sense of their beauty. It’s odd, but insects are an important part of life to me.
Did you have a hard time getting adjusted to the East Coast?
I suppose so. I don’t know if I ever did get really adjusted. But they were very kind to me. I think the East is very different from what most Westerners think it is, at least the Westerners of my time. They thought of the Easterners as socialized jerks, snooty, kind of removed from life.
I didn’t find that at all. They were very kind to me. They were very interested in me, much more so then than now probably, because I was one of the early guys from the West going back East. So I was supposedly kind of an oddity from the high brush. But they were better than I ever thought they would be.
Why did you come back to Montana?
Because I didn’t want ever to leave, and never left. Very, very early I formed this rough outline in my mind of this life I have led. I love Montana with almost a passion, but I saw I couldn’t live here really if I was going to be a teacher; I’d have to be degraded and submit to views that I couldn’t accept. I felt that this was imposed upon us from the outside—that wasn’t our true nature. I tried to figure out a way to continue this two-world thing that I had begun by going East.
And that’s probably the chief reason that I quit teaching and then went back to it. I figured teaching probably was the only way I could live in the two worlds. I could teach in the East, and that would give me a chance to come back a fair number of summers and retain a permanent footing in a homeland that I knew so well. I thought that out as I was doing it. I just didn’t stumble on the life I have lived.
Did you come to like Chicago?
I love Chicago. My wife was very wonderful in helping me come to feel that. I was very provincial in a lot of ways. She was gay and loved life wherever she lived. She really worked me over in our early years in Chicago. I was insolent and provincial about that city. She made me see how beautiful it was, made me see the geometric and industrial and architectural beauty.
You can’t look for Montana everywhere. There are all kinds of things that you should be looking for. There’s no architectural beauty in any big city that equals the modern architectural beauty or the industrial beauty of Chicago. You see this great big crane, a giant in the sky, picking up things as gracefully as a woman picks up a child. So that’s the way our early married life went. She tried to get me to see many kinds of beauties.
In a lot of ways I think that helped me immensely in writing about Montana. I think many Montana stories are limited by being too provincial. They’re about roundups and cattle rustlers and whatnot. That isn’t even up-to-date.
I was concerned when I wrote about Montana to write with great accuracy about how it really was, but at the same time to show fundamental concerns with universal problems of existence: here is a member of a family who doesn’t always abide by the rules and regulations of his society, and he’s living something of an underground life and he’s getting desperate about it and he needs help. Can’t we do something to help him? And you can’t find anything that will help him.
I received over 100 letters about that story, saying, “I
have a brother just like that, and I can’t find anything to do that will help him.” From New York City, Jewish girls in New York City.
Seeing the kinds of problems that run through the hearts of sensitive and intelligent people, no matter where they are, will give an enrichment and enlargement to those problems present in any region.
Chicago is very much a home to me, too. I probably couldn’t do without either home; my life depends on both of them. I don’t feel that because I love both places I’m living the life of a schizophrenic. I feel that they work for each other. I can see more about each one, because of the other.
Why do you like living in the mountains so much?
There’s something about mountains that does strange things to us mountain people. We were brought up in the mountains and always looked at people from the plains as deformed. We took mountains to be the natural state of affairs. I still do. I look at plains and I think, “Christ Almighty, once there were mountains here and then something came along and knocked them over. How could something like this be a natural product of the universe?”
I remember the first time I got disabused of that. When I was up here one summer at Seeley Lake, an old farmer from the Dakotas came out here to visit. He’d never seen the mountains before. This poor old bastard had been living out on the flat plains all his life, hadn’t really seen any good country. He lasted about two or three days here before he hurried back home. He was terrified of the mountains. He was afraid they were going to fall on top of him and kill him. As he hurriedly left, we were stumped. We thought we were doing him a favor showing him this country.
Did the stories in A River Runs Through It help connect your life in Montana with your life in Chicago?
Often the way things that seem disparate and different are unified is by art and beauty. When you see it and are moved by it, you are about as close as you can get to putting the whole shebang together. Somewhere it says all things merge into one and a river runs through it.
Is there a prejudice among East Coast publishers against Western stories?