Knowing Norman Maclean, biographer Rebecca McCarthy shares stories in Seeley Lake

Rebecca McCarthy got a call from Norman Maclean's daughter during an event at the Missoula Public Library. Based on the way Jean Maclean Snyder spoke on the phone, it could have been her father.

Maclean had a deliberate way of speaking, which translated to the way he spoke over the phone. Per McCarthy's memory it would go like this:

"Rebecca, dear."

Pause.

"How are you?"

She'd answer and Maclean would respond with a particular exclamation that sounded like, "Gaaaaaaawd."

That was the same way the conversation began with Synder during the public library event - minus the pause, as Synder didn't tend to mimic that pattern of speech - where McCarthy was doing a book reading of her biography of Maclean, which is a close look at the life of the professor, writer and fisherman with deep roots in the Seeley Lake area. McCarthy spoke in Missoula on June 5 and in Seeley Lake on June 6.

Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers chronicles Maclean's life through McCarthy's relationship with him, but also through the family, colleagues, students and friends that met Maclean throughout his life and with whom he shared many letters.

It begins with McCarthy meeting Maclean in Seeley Lake - where McCarthy was introduced to bourbon for the first time - and follows him through the publishing of A River Runs Through it and Other Stories and the prolonged endeavor of turning the main title story into a movie.

Norman Maclean also reminds readers of Maclean's other interests, like the tragic Mann Gulch fire and the history of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and George Custer, and the way in which writing A River Runs Through It and Other Stories helped in his grieving of his younger brother, Paul, who was murdered in Chicago. It takes readers through the loss of Maclean's wife, Jessie, and the reinvigoration he experienced before death in 1990, during which he worked hard on a story about the surviving Mann Gulch firefighters, published posthumously as Young Men and Fire. Maclean's ashes are scattered in the Swan Mountains.

McCarthy described her book as a "witnessed biography." Her reporting process included talking to the entire English Department at the University of Chicago that interacted with Maclean before anyone passed away, to his friends and colleagues, who would offer suggestions on who else she should speak with, to his students, who spoke of how Maclean changed their lives and she put a notice of her project in the University of Chicago's alumni magazine.

McCarthy also visited the University of Chicago special collections after receiving permission from Maclean's children to do so. Her husband dug into the upbringing of the Reverend, Maclean's father, and got as minute details as what people were fishing for in Nova Scotia - where the Reverend was born - in the 1880s.

These experiences and narratives came together to form the picture of Maclean that McCarthy was putting together, accompanied by her experiences learning from and being guided by the man.

"I was telling a story about Norman, not writing a biography per say," McCarthy said.

And through that formulation, the structure of the book took on a spiral shape. A reader, who was a classics professor, described the book to McCarthy as such. Some of the events are repeated throughout, but the reader gets more detail as they're reintroduced. McCarthy said she didn't choose the spiral on purpose, but found that in an earlier draft when she wrote the story chronologically, it felt clunky.

"I couldn't see him, I couldn't hear him, and I thought, no, it's no good. I had a deadline, but I knew I had to start over. So I took six months and wrote like crazy," McCarthy said.

His letters revealed him, McCarthy said. They put his sarcasm and brashness on full display, but by doing so, the reader gets a more realistic picture of what Maclean was like.

In the book, McCarthy writes that if Maclean carried a theme it was, "who the hell am I, anyway?"

"The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young," Maclean wrote. "It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does, it should tell you that you are dead."

McCarthy preferred the term guide over mentor as a way of describing what Maclean was to her. A great friend, somewhat of a protector, and a guide, McCarthy said. She said she learned a lot about the history of Chicago from Maclean and about writing with distinction and constructing effective arguments.

At the University of Chicago, the structure for most of the papers McCarthy wrote was thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which required a student to explore an argument from two sides and learn how to think and write critically.

One of Maclean's accomplishments was starting the Committee on General Studies and Humanities at the University of Chicago, which McCarthy said was a longtime dream of Maclean's.

"The committee was 'a place where a student can try the world on for size and see what of it fits him best, or, if he already knows, a place where he can take one last big look around,'" Maclean wrote, provided by McCarthy's book.

When he was running it, McCarthy said people were "stampeding to get in it." The committee required students - at the graduate level initially before undergraduates were allowed to enter - to begin their studies with a more general humanities focus before specializing, which was similar to how the University of Chicago operated as a whole. The university required first-year undergraduate students to take the Common Core, or required classes in social science, physical science, biological science and humanities.

"The social science course I took was Political Order and Change. We read Plato, Aristotle, Rosseau, Hobbes and Locke - who rules, how do you decide who rules and what justifies their functions and their roles; how do you obey the sovereign when it's at the expense of your own life. It was about authority," McCarthy said.

After finishing at the University of Chicago, McCarthy went on to fight fires for the Forest Service and was a journalist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, covering agriculture.

Before the book readings brought her back to Montana, the last time she was in Seeley Lake was for the 2015 Norman Maclean festival. She noticed the changes many Montanans do, like the houses that continue to pop up everywhere, but also the things - like the view coming into the Potomac Valley - that don't.

"There are certain views that haven't changed in years. It's just breathtakingly beautiful," McCarthy said. "I think Seeley Lake has many folks who want to be there and who appreciate it."