‘I am haunted by waters’: Norman Maclean and his lyrical ‘little blue book’

Although in his later years Norman Maclean was renowned for his nuanced and often lyrical autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It (subsequently filmed by Robert Redford, and known in angling circles – with mixed feelings – simply as ‘The Movie’), by all accounts he could be forbidding and ornery in person. He informed one Hollywood shyster: ‘When we had bastards like you out west we shot them for coyote bait.’ The novelist Pete Dexter once described him as ‘an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock’n’ roll’ – and that was only from a photograph.

There are indeed some moody photos in the journalist Rebecca McCarthy’s agreeable and trenchant memoir of this interesting author, though she deftly reveals a compassionate nature behind that Calvinist scowl. They first met in 1972 in Montana – Maclean’s homeland was Missoula, where his stern father was a Presbyterian minister and fervent fly-fisher; she was a teenager and he an ageing academic, beginning to write fiction.