Fishing for the Words of Life: Norman MacLean's "A River Runs Through It"

FISHING FOR THE WORDS OF LIFE: NORMAN MAC LEAN'S "A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT' by Walter Hesford* ?> ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW FISHING FOR THE WORDS OF LIFE: NORMAN MACLEAN'S "A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT" by Walter Hesford* "In our family," writes Norman Maclean, "there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing."1 In "A River Runs through It," he is faithful to family tradition. As he pays tribute to the art of fishing, especially as practiced by his younger brother Paul, he fishes with words for the words of life that his father, a Presbyterian minister, heard beneath the river's current. In so doing, Maclean is also faithful to the tradition of piscatory prose as established by Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. It is a generous prose, one that reflects and fosters a love for its subject, one that will not be hurried as it circles toward the synthesis of contemplation and action, piety and practice, and beauty and power which, both Maclean and Walton suggest, is the hallmark of genuine art and genuine religion. This is not to say that "A River Runs through It" strives to imitate The Compleat Angler in either stance or substance. Indeed, Maclean's father warned his teen-age sons against its influence: "Izaak Walton is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman" (p. 5). One suspects or hopes that this was intended to be humorous, though bait fishermen are consistently castigated in the story as unredeemably fallen mortals. Perhaps a more devastating criticism of Walton came from brother Paul, age thirteen or fourteen: "The bastard doesn't even know how to spell 'complete.' Besides, he has songs to sing to dairymaids." Norman, the future professor of English and writer, defends Walton: "Some of those songs are pretty good." Paul, unimpressed, asks, "Whoever saw a dairymaid on the Big Blackfoot River?" (p. 5). Clearly, western Montana, where the Big Blackfoot runs and where the Macleans grew up, sponsors a different aesthetic from Walton's seventeenth-century English "WALTER HESFORD, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Idaho, has published several articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and social history. While he has fished Maclean's river, he is more accustomed to dangling for flounder from Boston piers. 1. Norman Maclean, "A River Runs through It," A River Runs through It and Other Stories (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 1. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in my text. .,.VOL 34. NO 1 (WINTER 1980) MacLean's A River Runs Through It" countryside (though this countryside was torn by civil war, and not likely to give unmediated birth to piscatory pastorals). "A River Runs through It" does not shy away from the rough realities that encompass the author and eventually overcome his brother. As "preacher's kids," they seemed to find it necessary to play rough, to adopt a tough, irreverent stance in order to achieve independent status, a stance still evident in the style of the mature author, but tempered with wit, generosity, and wisdom. Maclean's witty assertion that his father "told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly-fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman" (p. 1) would certainly have shocked Walton, who took devout pride in his holy precursors.2 The reader, however, should not be misled into taking lightly Maclean's discipleship. His irreverence ultimately does reverence to his brother, whose keeper he proves, and keeps alive the faith of his father. He is thus truly pious, and as seriously committed as Walton was to exploring the religious significance of his subject. To give this significance a broader context, I would like to claim the privilege of all writers tracing piscatory themes and meander a bit. Maclean is not the first American to fish with words for the words of life. It seems worthwhile to look at the synthesis of contemplation and action worked out by an earlier American disciple in the brotherhood of anglers...