“I am haunted by waters.”

Those evocative words close both the movie and novella of the same name – A River Runs Through It.

The majority likely heard those words in Robert Redford’s 1992 drama, which featured a career-making performance by a young Brad Pitt.

A much smaller number have read the novella by Norman Maclean on which it is based.

And even for those who read the novella, few know much about Norman Maclean. Mention his name and the likely only associations would be fly fishing and Montana.

But he was so much more.

While Norman was born in Iowa and grew up in Missoula, Montana, he attended college at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. As he said later, he needed to get out of Montana to get out from under the control of Anaconda Mining that ran the state.

While he valued his education at Dartmouth, he was a harsh critic of the entitled atmosphere. The rich college students spent summers learning to sail and play polo, while he was back in Montana working as a forest firefighter or leading pack mules.

At the same time, he made good friends with students like Theodor Geisel (Doctor Seuss) with whom he was a co-editor on the student humor magazine. He also had the good fortune to attend creative writing classes taught by Robert Frost; yes – that Robert Frost.

His contempt for the eastern establishment extended beyond Dartmouth.

He had no use for New York City – and hated the Orvis company (owned by a previous set of owners – not the current Perkins family). At the same time, he loved clothing from L. L. Bean.

While little explained – he likely saw Orvis as catering to rich sportsmen while Bean sold outdoor gear to people who actually had to work in the outdoors.

Whether his contempt was due to was his Scotch heritage, Presbyterian upbringing or a sense of class consciousness he never explained.

After graduating from Dartmouth, and a brief time as an instructor there, he took a job teaching at the University of Chicago – where he spent the remainder of his career and life.  He started as a graduate student, earning his PhD in 1940, before joining the faculty.

He returned to Montana only during the summer – to Seeley Lake and the cabin his family owned while he was growing up. He and his wife and children spent summers there, and he continued to spend summers there long after the death of wife Jessie and after his children had grown.

And while he had many opportunities to fish elsewhere, the only places he picked up a fly rod where on the lakes and streams of Montana – to honor his father, mother, and brother and all that fly fishing represented of them and Montana.

He was a tough but respected professor of English – with students overflowing through the door when he was giving lectures.

As he explained: “A good teacher is a tough guy who cares very deeply at something that is hard to understand.”

One of his students, who took a poetry class from him, was John Paul Stevens, a future Supreme Court Justice,

Another of his students in the early 1970s was a high school poet from the South who met Norman through her brother, who was working for US Forest Service and lived at Seeley Lake. He took an immediate liking to her, promising her parents he’d look after her if she attended the University of Chicago. That friendship and mentoring extended past her time at as a student.

That student, Rebecca McCarthy, tells the story of Norman in her newly published Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers.

I am envious of one of his first recommendations to her – “choose the professor, not the courses.” His reasoning was that if you had the right teacher, you’d learn something of value no matter the subject.

Through his long tenure, he eventually won three teaching awards and rose to become the William Rainey Harper Professor of English – teaching both the Romantic poets and Shakespeare. (At the same time, he had long scholarly interest in studying the Battle of the Little Bighorn – and lectured on it.)

There is a good amount of discussion about the academia aspects of Norman’s life at the University of Chicago. But none of it lacks interest and a good deal of it is fascinating.

She details some interesting recollections of other students that illustrate the degree of academic discipline that was once a hallmark of U.S. education.

English Department PhD students had to pass an oral examination called the “75 book exam” in the 1960s and 1970s. The books covered every genre from Aeschylus to Orwell. During the exam, faculty members could drop in and ask them anything.

McCarthy tells his story with love and respect, but with honesty. Norman wasn’t a perfect man, could be cranky and intolerant to those he saw as lazy.

And he was indeed haunted.

His brother Paul was murdered on May 2, 1938 in Chicago, when Paul was 36 years old.

What Norman didn’t discuss in the novella was that it was he who had invited his brother to move to Chicago, with the urging of their father, to get Paul away from his fighting and drinking in Montana – Paul was a bigger wild man than even Brad Pitt depicted.

It took Norman almost 40 years to deal with his guilt and be able to discuss in fictional form the story of his brother Paul.

And also understand what it had cost him and his parents. Friends of his parents said they aged quickly in the years following Paul’s murder – their father died only three years later.

By the time he was able to write his novella – all those he had loved were gone, including his beloved wife, Jessie.

While he long analyzed and taught literature, he had long doubted his own ability to write it.  As a child, he had labored to write themes for his minister father, who would return his work with harsh assessments until it met his father’s standards (who would then toss it away). As a result, he was more demanding of perfection of his own work.

But that he succeeded with his written work is beyond the doubt.  Some of his sentences are poetic, and made poignant by understanding what lies behind them.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”

A very interesting and highly recommended read – even if you have no interest in academia or fly fishing.