 |
|
| Rebecca McCarthy (photo: Clara McCarthy) |
|
Rebecca McCarthy spent 21 years as an award-winning reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the American Scholar, and Fast Company, among other outlets. Norman Maclean: A Life in Letters and Rivers (University of Washington Press, May 14, 2024) examines Maclean's life and writing. His most famous work is A River Runs Through It, a beloved novella that was later adapted for the screen. McCarthy's book traces the role Maclean played in her life--she met him when she was 16 years old, while summering in Seeley Lake, Mont. She later became his student at the University of Chicago, and the two maintained a lifelong friendship.
This book has been 30 years in the making.
It wasn't a continual effort because I had a full-time job and a family. When Norman died in 1990, our mutual friend Gwin Kolb (his colleague and my former professor at the University of Chicago) told me I had to start interviewing colleagues in the English department before "they lost all their marbles," so I did. I never thought seriously about writing a book about Norman until Gwin insisted that I get busy.
How did you approach the material?
I gathered string on Norman as best I could--tracing his ancestors; his early years in Clarinda, Iowa; learning about early 20th-century Montana and Missoula; and Norman's time at Dartmouth, where he studied creative writing and later taught before going to Chicago.
You consulted with many who knew Maclean personally.
I would call and write to Norman's colleagues and friends and former students, all of whom would suggest other people to speak with, and I visited Chicago as often as possible to do interviews and later, to peruse Norman's papers at the University of Chicago Library. I also knew Maclean's daughter, Jean, and her husband, Joel, a professor at the U of Chicago. While writing the book, I talked with--and wrote to--them regularly.
How did this book end up being published by the University of Washington Press?
An editor from the University of Washington Press read an essay about Norman that I had written for the American Scholar and wrote to ask if I'd thought about writing a biography. Things moved rather quickly after that.
The book is a biography of Maclean and also documents your own personal experiences with him as a mentor and friend. What inspired you to structure the narrative to comprise both aspects?
I was a witness, and sometimes a participant, to pieces of his life. I realized the only way to let the reader see, hear, and get to know Norman was to show him as I saw him, living his life: mixing a hot drink, walking in Hyde Park and the forest preserves, laughing with good friend Larry Kimpton (chancellor at the U of Chicago and an administrator on the Manhattan Project in the development of the first atomic bomb), reading a poem, casting on a river.... His thousands of letters also reveal a lot about him--and they sound just like him.
You knew Maclean before and after his great literary accomplishments. Did success change him?
After A River Runs Through It and Oher Stories was published, Norman could think of himself as the writer he always wanted to be. Perhaps he got more fat-headed, but I always felt he was entitled to it.
Did you draw inspiration from any other published memoirs in order to write your own?
James Boswell's Life of Johnson is the greatest witnessed book about another person. My former professor Gwin Kolb recommended Writing Lives by Leon Edel. A great book is River of the Gods by Candice Millard--very inspiring, very meticulous, with a perfect tone.
What was the most difficult part of writing the book?
Finishing. At some point, you have to cut bait.
What was the most fulfilling part of the writing the book?
My husband converted a little-used screen porch into a small office for me so I could have a private, calmer place to work, away from children and animals.
That's a bonus! Were you surprised by anything you learned along the way?
I never realized how self-critical Norman was. Many of his colleagues reported how he was as hard on himself as he was on others. His research on Custer and Little Big Horn never yielded the book he wanted to write--he eventually set the project aside. I also learned he was intimidated by Ronald Crane, the literary critic who founded the Chicago School of Literary Criticism. Norman couldn't write the kind of stuff that Crane and his other colleagues at Chicago wrote; he had to devise a new genre and find his own way to write A River Runs Through It. I have to note: more people today read Norman Maclean than Ronald Crane.
The story of A River Runs Through It changed Maclean's life. How has writing this book changed your life?
For the last 10 years, Norman was a constant figure in my dreams, urging me to "Hurry up, Rebecca." I have a much greater appreciation for biographies because it's hard to make sense of one's own life, much less another's.
If there is an afterlife, describe what you might picture to be Maclean's idea of heaven and eternity?
I think it would be a classroom in Cobb Hall at U of Chicago, with adequate heat and chairs, filled with bright students from the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities, or from a Shakespeare course, and there's a very lively conversation going on with Norman talking a bit and listening intently. After class, he walks outside, and he's among the tamaracks in Seeley Lake, and his parents (Clara, his mother, has made huckleberry and chokecherry jam for him) and Larry and Mary Kimpton (life-long, dear friends) and Jesse (Maclean's wife) and their children and grandchildren are waiting for him... and Paul (his brother) is standing in the Blackfoot River, fishing. --Kathleen Gerard