‘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. He became her mentor (‘I had never had an adult take me so seriously’) through her college years at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many decades, and though she was clearly devoted to him, this book – a blending of their two stories – is by no means a hagiography.

As a boy, Maclean was tutored by his father. He then attended Dartmouth College (the future Dr Seuss was a classmate), where he was taught by Robert Frost, but developed a lifelong mistrust of social privilege. His long career in the Chicago English faculty was not accompanied by much in the way of academic publication, but in the classroom he became a formidable teacher: wiry, sardonic, combative, inspirational, puffing on Lucky Strikes and with a trademark hiss of disapproval.