Never Too Late

I love the natural world, and I have fished; but for a long time now, I have felt there should be no more writing about fly-fishing. So often these passages have a self-congratulatory tone; seem only to demonstrate the sensitivity of the author. But one would have to have a heart of stone not to admire Norman Maclean, and the fly-fishing scenes in his modern classic “A River Runs Through It and Other Stories.”

To be good at writing about the natural world, the author must see both it and the human world reflected in each other. This Maclean does, effortlessly. He was an old man when he began to write, and to read him is to hear an authentic voice from the last century, when--let’s face it--life was better. His world was the Hemingway world of lumberjacks, of stern fathers, loving mothers and whores--of the real family values--but transfigured by his humorous tone, which makes you see how much better Hemingway would have been if he’d been able to make you laugh once in a while.

Maclean’s work makes me think of a river, too: of the river of wind which blows out of high mountain valleys at the end of the day, when the sun-warmed air flows downhill, into the darkness and cold rising from below. He did what we all really want to do--lived it completely, waited until he was old and wise, then wrote it all down, finishing just before the night closed in.