You may know him as the author of “A River Runs Through It,” a story about trout-fishing in Montana on which the hit 1999 film was based. (Brad Pitt starred, Robert Redford directed.)
To me Maclean is the role model extraordinaire for the older memoirist.
Maclean (1902–1990) was a beloved professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he was ensconced teaching Milton and Shakespeare for 45 years. (That’s him in the photo, circa 1970.) After his retirement in 1973, having written only academic works on English literature, Maclean undertook to put down some “reminiscent stories.”
His reasons for doing so are interesting to me, as well as a small piece of advice he offered a friend in a letter.
“I turned to writing stories of my own life,” he wrote, “to fill a gap left by my retirement and the death of my wife.” Maclean’s beloved wife Jessie died in 1968, five years before he left the University. This is, of course, a most natural and human reason for writing: to give meaning to time suddenly empty of what gave life meaning.
My grandfather may have been doing the same thing when, in about 1965, he started typing out his memoirs with two fingers on a manual typewriter. The Cream of Wheat Company, which he had helped raise to prominence, had been sold and moved away five years before; and his second wife, who also happened to be his long lost childhood sweetheart, had recently died.
Granddad’s humble effort was my inspiration for Memoirs Unlimited, which I founded in 1988.
Maclean shared another motive, common to my memoir clients. “I began to write reminiscent stories, ” he wrote, “because my children wanted me to . . . ”
I have found so often that an older person will set down the story of his or her own life, not for their satisfaction but for those who come after them. The older memoirist is a bridge to the past. Many realize that once the bridge is down, the past will be lost.
But Maclean had still more reasons:
“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.” Memoir-writing, then, is a form of self-appraisal and life-review.
And more: “In my stories so far I always have a second intention—that of giving a historical representation of how we once did things that we now do very differently, and, importantly, how it felt to do them. The historical part is not supposed to be just background. I believe that how things were done and how we felt doing them should be in the story, should be part of the story.”
In another piece, Maclean elaborated beautifully on this desire to capture a lost time and its lost arts:
“I meant these stories in part to be a record of how certain things were done just before the world of most of history ended—most of history being a world of hand and horse and hand tools and horse tools. I meant to record not only how we did certain things well in that world now almost beyond recall, but how it felt to do those things well that are now slipping from our hands and memory. I meant when I said we fished with an eight-and-a-half-foot rod weighing four and a half ounces that it was a rod and not a pole and that it was four and a half ounces and not four, and if it had been four ounces it would have been an eight- and not an eight-and-a-half-foot rod; and I also meant that when the rod trembled in our hands our hearts trembled with it.”
When I was growing up there was much talk of identity, and of the identity “crisis” that was said to be common in youth. “The problem of identity,” Maclean wrote in his great posthumous work Young Men and Fire, “is always a problem, not just a problem of youth . . . The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.”
Finally, in a letter to a friend, Maclean offered advice for anyone who wants but hesitates to write their life story: “Just keep pegging away until your are 73 and try not to ask questions. For the next 3 years after 73 God might take care of you.”
Maclean brought A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories to fruition in these years from age 73 to 76. If you haven’t read it, or him, do so.
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