To Read
NORMAN MACLEAN: A LIFE OF LETTERS AND RIVERS
By Rebecca McCarthy
$30, University of Washington Press
2024
Available on Amazon
Reviewed by Tom Tomlinson
“I want to know just who the hell I am, darling,” Rebecca McCarthy recalled Norman Maclean saying to her countless times. She took up Maclean’s challenge “to figure out who the hell he was.” The result of her “figuring” is her tightly written and insightful biography of the author of A River Runs Through It. As the title of her recently published work suggests, she sought to understand how he navigated life as a Montana tough guy—fishing, hunting, fighting, and cussing his way—while also thriving in the intellectually rigorous world of Chicago and its namesake university, where he spent his entire career as a professor of English from 1928 until his death in 1990.
McCarthy brought considerable credentials to her work. To her personal knowledge of Maclean as a classroom teacher and mentor, she added her skills as a journalist, writer, and researcher. She first met him in the early 1970s at age sixteen, while spending a summer with her family at Seeley Lake, north of Missoula, Montana. Maclean, as was his lifetime habit, was summering in a neighboring cabin built by his family in the early 1920s. Retired from nearly fifty years as a professor of English at the University of Chicago and mourning the death of his wife, Maclean was writing and editing the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories.
At Seeley Lake, Rebecca encountered the avuncular Maclean who, always the teacher, guided her on the finer points of drinking whisky—what to drink, when to drink it, and how—as well as advising her on her college plans. When she told him she was considering the University of Montana, he lauded her poetic talent but cautioned: “You can’t stay here, Rebecca. You would end up married to some piss-fir [sic] Willy with too many children and no time for poetry. I decided to leave Montana by asking myself, ‘Who would you talk to if you stayed here? And what would you talk about? Fishing?’ I would have died. I need to live in the world of ideas, and so do you.” Rebecca followed his advice, graduating from the University of Chicago in 1977 with a degree in English.
In addition to interviewing Maclean, McCarthy also spoke with two generations of the Maclean family, as well as numerous former students, faculty, administrative colleagues, and members of the University of Chicago Press. She also explored university archives, most notably the Maclean Collection at the University of Chicago.
At Chicago, McCarthy quickly became aware of Maclean’s celebrated reputation as a remarkable teacher. From his arrival on campus in 1928 as a teacher and graduate student, he won the first of three undergraduate teaching awards—voted on by students. His students admired and often feared him as a tough professor who sought to bring out the best in them, just as he demanded the best from himself. Maclean believed a good teacher was “a tough guy who cared deeply about something that is hard to understand, yet [the best teacher is able to convey his love for the subject].” For Maclean, toughness was as important in the university classroom as it was in the rugged Montana of his youth.
Among the aspects of Maclean brought to the fore by McCarthy is the writer’s joust with his writing craft, a central aspect of his life. While at Chicago, it took him twelve years to finish his doctoral dissertation. His ten-year project on Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn remained incomplete, as did his Mann Gulch manuscript during the last decade of his life. A team of writers eventually revised the latter for publication as Young Men and Fire (1993) by the University of Chicago Press. Writers know the cliché that hard writing makes easy reading; but sometimes hard writing is just too hard.
There is in McCarthy’s book an agreeable memoir-like quality, one that only she could provide, portraying Maclean as both a tough and sensitive man. While she admired the teacher Maclean, she also described a mentor and a man who could be quite prickly, short of patience, and judgmental of others.
After reading McCarthy’s biography, one recurring theme emerges: unfinished work—both manuscripts and personal relationships. The closing line of A River Runs Through It, “I am haunted by [Montana] waters…” echoes as a lament for unspoken words to those who matter and for unfinished manuscripts. For me, it is the unfinished—the unspoken words to the most important people, the Pauls of our lives—that haunt us most deeply.
RIVER SONGS: MOMENTS OF WILD WONDER IN FLY FISHING
By Steve Duda
$25, Mountaineers Books
2024
Reviewed by Nick Blixt
“To a swallow, the earth is a mere springboard. The wind is for tricking. The water is for teasing. Swallows are not content to just swim through the sky, they swim through the sky to make the sky better.”
– Steve Duda’s River Songs
At face value, the lifelong journey of an angler might be marked by simple currency—inches of fish, stamps on a passport, a blurry photo that may or may not tell a thousand words. But among all these markers of growth, experience, and understanding, I’d make an argument for the words themselves.
Looking back twenty years to the start of my own journey, what left its mark wasn’t the first crappy Woolly Bugger on the vise or trout on the line—it was David James Duncan’s seminal work, The River Why, that first introduced me to the spiritual and poetic universe beyond a simple pursuit of feathers and fins. Since then, many books, articles, and stories have made their mark, some in such a bright spark that I mark them as major chapters in my own life. Steve Duda’s River Songs is one of those.
Released this past fall by Mountaineers Books, Rivers Songs compiles a portion of Duda’s finest stories. Each short piece is interspersed with a “song” that only enhances the rhythm and harmony of the moments he captures, as well as a corresponding woodblock print from artist Matthew DeLorme. Though fluid in time and setting, the stories connect effortlessly, each offering a glimpse into a world that, while grounded in fly fishing, extends far beyond that. We witness love, loss, and hope, each grounded in context that both anglers and non-anglers alike will find equally relevant.
Throughout all his stories, Duda demonstrates that masterful ability to identify and articulate universal meaning through small moments in fly fishing and life. It’s one of his greatest gifts. Post-it notes fill my own copy of River Songs, bookmarks and reference points that reflect the number of times I find myself reading passages that feel intimately familiar. Hundreds of thousands of words have attempted to capture the grit that goes hand in hand with pursuing steelhead. Duda manages to do this in just 100 words in “Steelhead as a Fragrance,” listing in alphabetical order and perfect staccato the smells that many will recognize immediately–“armpit, ash, ass,” to start.
In “Cue the Tango Seen,” Duda lands in Argentinian Patagonia to a springtime setting that feels more reminiscent of Bozeman and the American West, minus the billboards and truck stops. It’s a phenomenon many Americans who have traveled to the region have felt—a landscape and ecosystem different in so many ways, yet eerily echoing of home. Duda captures the insight amidst one of the funniest short stories I have read to date, which includes a visual of underpants drying over a traditional asado and the revelation that bananas are bad luck even across international borders.
Though many stories find themselves weaving through Duda’s life, others find him far from their center. In “Gather White Stones,” we bear witness to the final days of the Klamath River dams. Duda traces the injustices that led to a river on the brink while also celebrating the Indigenous voices that fought so hard to free it. The history of the Klamath and the people who call the region home is not a short one. Still, in just fourteen pages, Duda manages to capture a specific moment when the stakes had never been higher and everything felt possible.
If I had to make an argument for why this book might be an equally appropriate recommendation for both anglers and non-anglers, I would point you to the River Song “A Long Run with a Tight Crew.” There might be no more universal feeling of loss than that which follows the departure of a good dog. Duda captures the moment with unfiltered emotion, two pages and change encompassing tears, laughs, and everything in between. It’s a eulogy that might be one of the most poignant looks at the author himself, and it may be the one I reflect on most. You would be well-advised to take his words as guidance for yourself. “Tell someone you love them and that you feel lucky to be a part of their tight crew.”
To Listen
FLY FISHING PIONEERS & LEGENDS OF THE NORTHWEST
By The Adipose Podcast, Wild Steelhead Coalition
In this first episode of their new podcast series, Fly Fishing Pioneers & Legends of the Northwest, Wild Steelhead Coalition Board Chair Ed Sozinho sits down with writer and historian Jack Berryman to discuss the history and pioneers of steelhead fishing and the role anglers have played in preserving and restoring wild steelhead along the Pacific Coast.
– The Editors
