A Keen Precision

It is a pleasure to have another collection of Norman Maclean's delightful prose, and his family, the University of Chicago Press, and the editor, O. Alan Weltzien, deserve thanks. Readers, even those who have known Maclean's work from the beginning, will be grateful too for Weltzien's thoughtful introduction. Fly fishermen, English professors, and preachers have closely read the title story of Maclean's first collection, A River Runs through It. All sorts and conditions of readers have admired the vivid clarity of his carefully wrought sentences and have been moved and instructed by his attempt to come to terms with the murder of his younger brother Paul, "one of the great fly fishermen of his time." Writers as distinguished and diverse as Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, Nick Lyons, and Annie Proulx have recorded their admiration for this collection. Posthumously Maclean reached another audience with the publication of Young Men and Fire, his account of the Mann Gulch fire that killed twelve Forest Service smoke jumpers on August 5, 1949, and its aftermath.

And now we have The Norman Maclean Reader, which contains selections from the earlier books, some previously unpublished material, including a wonderful selection of letters, and some incidental essays that are hard to find. It contains five of the ten essays collected in 1988 by Ron McFarland and Hugh Nichols in Norman Maclean, a volume in the American Authors series. That book also includes essays on Maclean and his work. Those essays and Marie Borroff's excellent "The Achievement of Norman Maclean," published in the Yale Review in 1994, give readers a sense of the man as well as a critical evaluation of his writing. The work that Weltzien has gathered is not as loose or random as my summary might suggest. The Reader presents a remarkably consistent and coherent view of the aesthetic and philosophical foundations of Maclean's work. We now have, if not absolutely all, nearly all of Maclean's work; and we can with some confidence set about evaluating his accomplishments.

In a letter written in 1974 to the National Parks Service historian Robert M. Utley, Maclean comments on his writing career: "Shortly before my retirement I began to write reminiscent stories. My children wanted me to, and I also wanted to. I felt it was important as one grew old to clarify himself about his life—to see if it ever took on patterns or form and, perhaps more important, to clarify one's attitude about life, especially about his own." Reminiscent stories and nonfiction memoirs at their best find order and sense in the apparent chaos of our daily lives, and in looking back on his life Maclean saw "moments when it took on the beauty of art." Order is not imposed on memory so much as it is discovered in those events preserved from oblivion, events that at a distance can present a coherent way to understand our lives. In his introduction to the Reader, Weltzien puts it this way: "Maclean wants to see literature rescuing life from randomness, above all the unfathomable chaos found in the 'problem of defeat'—madness in old age [a reference to King Lear], self-destructiveness in youth, or the premature arrival of death for elite young men." In this way Maclean's work approaches what the Thomist Ralph McInerny calls natural theology. In Characters in Search of Their Author McInerny writes, "For us it is all but inevitable that, however momentarily, we feel ourselves to be part of a vast cosmic drama and our thoughts turn to the author, not merely of our roles, but of our existence."

Maclean's life was shadowed by the murder of his younger brother, Paul. With the exception of a few occasional essays everything Maclean wrote is touched by the shadow of Paul's death and by his nagging sense that he should have been able to help. In a passage from Young Men and Fire included in the Reader the connection of the Mann Gulch disaster...