The following is an excerpt from Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers. In the first biography of one of Montana‘s most celebrated writers, author Rebecca McCarthy draws on their long friendship as well as stories from friends, family, colleagues, and others to reveal the forces and events that shaped the author-educator and formed the bedrock of his beloved stories.
Use promo code WSPRING24 at checkout on our website for 40% off and free shipping through May 31, 2024.
When Norman and his father stepped off the train in Hanover, New Hampshire, they found themselves in a small New England village of clapboard buildings and white picket fences. A walk around town confirmed that Hanover was a fraction of the size of Missoula. Where Hanover ended, Dartmouth College began. Its buildings bordered a long, open expanse called “the Green” that had been part of the school for more than 150 years. It was a small, all-male college in an isolated town. The winters were sure to be long, cold, and dark.
A notation in his high school yearbook shows Norman had listed as his college choice Washington and Jefferson, a small liberal arts college south of Pittsburgh founded by Presbyterian missionaries in the late 1700s. But he changed his plans. Norman told me Harvard had accepted him and that he thought about going, but he eventually decided not to, a decision his father seconded. Norman chose Dartmouth, he told his interviewers, because it was “the only outdoor college in the country,” and he assumed the woodsy setting would remind him of Montana. All too soon, he learned he was wrong. In Missoula, which sits at the confluence of five valleys, he had been able to see mountains wherever he went. In Hanover, elms and maples hid the vista. The White Mountains were far away. Most of his father’s family was in Boston, more than an hour south on the train.
At Dartmouth in the 1920s, the majority of students were privileged, white, wealthy young New Englanders. Some of their fathers and grandfathers had attended Dartmouth. They knew little about the Rocky Mountains and less about Montana, other than childhood tales about George Armstrong Custer and history lessons on Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Norman felt they looked down on him because his family wasn’t rich. I later learned that the clubby atmosphere had choked Norman, who told his friend Gwin Kolb that he felt “like an uncouth kid from Montana.” While many of his classmates were learning to sail and play polo, Norman had been fighting forest fires and leading pack mules in the Bitterroot Mountains. And though he spoke and wrote well, he was constantly having to explain himself, his hometown, his lineage, and his reasons for coming to Dartmouth. Doing so had exasperated him.
Even in his later years, Norman failed to resolve his antagonistic attitude toward the affluent. “He had a hatred of big money in the abstract,” said his son-in-law, Joel Snyder. “He could be very difficult, but at the same time, he could be very gracious with wealthy people.” [His wife] Jessie’s attitudes were clearer. She had been a fan of the International Workers of the World, the radical Wobblies, and she later became and remained, like Norman, an unreconstructed Roosevelt Democrat.
The most memorable figure in college for Norman was former Dartmouth student Robert Frost, then in his late forties. The poet was an occasional teacher at the college and had a free hand in instructing his students. Norman said Frost “talked straight to you, and often poetry was there, or something close to it.” Classes met once a week, in the evening, in a “great big basement room with a wonderful fireplace.” The subject was creative writing, but Frost apparently never bothered to read his students’ papers. Instead, he would pace back and forth in front of the class, talking and talking. There were never any questions in Frost’s classes, Norman said, and “nobody ever stopped him.”
Norman studied hard, later claiming he read a book a day, but he realized he would have to suppress his sardonic sense of humor in class. He became a C student—an accomplishment, given his meager high school education and his many extracurricular activities. He found ways to thrive outside the classroom. He joined Beta Theta Pi and promptly began relieving his fraternity brothers of their money around the poker table. A friend visiting from Montana was astounded that the college boys “didn’t know not to draw from an inside straight.” In a local gym, Norman boxed with fraternity members and men from the community and enjoyed knocking down opponents. He became a staff member of the Dartmouth Bema, a literary magazine, and the Aegis, the Dartmouth yearbook. He was selected for Sphinx, the oldest of Dartmouth’s many secret societies. He was on the board of governors for The Arts, “a clearing house for the ideas and opinions of those interested in the fields of literature, drama and music.” Among the writers coming to campus during his senior year were journalist and critic Rebecca West and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. How he felt about meeting and hearing these women, we don’t know, but I do know he liked Millay’s poetry.
Before Norman graduated, in June 1924, Dartmouth English professor David Lambuth asked if he wanted to return to campus and teach freshman composition. Lambuth had had Norman in a few of his classes and was impressed with his writing ability and his sensitivity to language. Norman accepted the offer, telling an interviewer the class “was full of some poker buddies of mine, and I figured it would be a good way to pay back some debts.”
Norman went home to Montana to work for the US Forest Service, gathering some of the experiences he would later turn into stories. He had spent most summers working for the Forest Service, except for part of 1921, when his father [Reverend Maclean], [brother] Paul, and he worked on a log cabin on the shore of Seeley Lake, on land leased to them by the federal government. Norman returned to the halls of Hanover in the autumn of 1924 as an instructor of introductory English, and his brother went with him to start on his Dartmouth degree. The Reverend couldn’t afford to pay for two sons to attend private school at the same time, so Paul had taken classes at Montana State (later renamed the University of Montana) in Missoula for a year before heading east.
Bravig Imbs, one of Norman’s contemporaries, offers a glimpse of some events in Norman’s life while he was an instructor, in The Professor’s Wife. The professor and the wife are based on Lambuth and his wife, Myrtle. Imbs worked as a butler for the Lambuths, which gave him a bird’s-eye view of their lives. Norman makes an appearance in the book as the character Douglas MacNeil, “an exceptional person” with a sensitive and crooked smile, who comes to write in the couple’s study. The David Lambuth character says Douglas’s poetry “had the streak of genius” and that a novel he was working on was the best poetic prose he had read.
In addition to his own writing, Norman was busy teaching undergraduates how to construct sentences. He told the story of an “observer” visiting his class one session, a redheaded Scotch atheist he admired, Professor James Dow McCallum, whose lectures on Victorian writers were very popular. Weeks passed with no feedback. Norman at last went to McCallum’s office. The professor was surprised to see him. Norman asked McCallum how to improve his teaching, and McCallum told him to wear a different suit every day of the week. When Norman said he couldn’t afford so many suits, McCallum suggested he wear a different necktie. He followed this advice through his long teaching career at Chicago.
For Norman, the occasional amusement provided by his struggling students—one wrote that the primeval forest was “where the hand of man had never set foot”—failed to compensate for Dartmouth’s caste system. Maybe he was struggling with his own writing or tiring of the décor in Mrs. Lambuth’s study. The problems Norman had faced as an undergraduate now only worsened. The stratified society of the English department, in which instructors were socially segregated from tenured professors, added to the sense of moneyed clubbiness and made a lonely Montanan long for the West. Norman’s brother, Paul, had already gone home to Montana, skipping the 1926 spring semester.
Norman squirmed in the dinner jacket he was required to wear to departmental functions. Even the everyday clothes worn by the students set Norman on edge: the pullover sweaters and black-and-white saddle shoes of Joe College.
In June 1926, after two years as an instructor, Norman rode the train out of Hanover to Missoula and back to a job in the woods. In the fall, as the time came to return to New Hampshire, his father helped him realize he wasn’t bettering himself by teaching at Dartmouth. Alone, Paul boarded the train, heading east. Norman wrote to Professor Lambuth, telling him that he wasn’t coming back and asking if someone else could take his classes. He didn’t return to Hanover for decades.
He never wore a tuxedo again.
About the Author
Freelance writer, editor, and poet Rebecca McCarthy spent twenty-one years as an award-winning reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has written for the New York Times, Fast Company, the Bitter Southerner, and the American Scholar, among other publications. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, where she was a recipient of the Norman Maclean Scholarship for an Outstanding English Student. She worked for the US Forest Service in Region 1 as a forest fire fighter and a timber beast.
Upcoming Author Events
May 22, 2024 | Athens, GA | Athens-Clarke County Library in partnership with Avid Bookshop, 7:00 pm EST
May 23, 2024 | Spartanburg, SC | Hub City Bookshop with John Lane, 6:00 pm EST
May 30, 2024| Chicago, IL | Seminary Co-op with Alan Thomas, 6:00 pm CST
June 3, 2024| Seattle, WA | Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum with Jonathan Evison in partnership with Elliott Bay Book Company, 7:00 pm PST
June 5, 2024 | Missoula, MT | Missoula Public Library with O. Alan Weltzien in partnership with Fact & Fiction Bookstore, 6:00 pm MST
June 6, 2024| Seeley Lake, MT | Alpine Artisans Open Book Club, 7:00 pm MST