BILLINGS — As a 25-year-old college graduate working three part-time jobs to afford living in Chicago in 1980, Jane Moses received an unusual offer for a fourth part-time task — to help author Norman Maclean type his handwritten notes for his book “Young Men and Fire.”
Although already working as a book jacket writer for the University of Chicago Press, and as bartender and a grader of correspondence school papers, she leapt at the chance. She was a huge fan of his first novella, “A River Runs Through It,” and remembers she gushed about the story when she bumped into him at the school, where he was an English professor.
The typing job for Maclean was fairly methodical.
“I would go to his house on a Thursday afternoon and read out loud to him about a dozen handwritten pages so I could make corrections,” Moses recalled. “Then I’d go back to my place and type it up and bring them back the next week.”
He paid her $1 a page.
RECALLING NORMAN
Moses was one of many people upon whom Maclean left a profound impression as a teacher and writer. That was evident at a recent Seeley Lake writing conference dedicated to a discussion of all things Norman Maclean. At the event, several people talked about things he had said or done that still resonated.
Moses recalls him as “really kind of an old-fashioned gentleman.” For Christmas he gave her a handkerchief. Yet he could also be gruff and often punctuated his speech with a variety of curses for people he held in contempt.
Maclean’s family still has a cabin along the shores of Seeley Lake, which dates to the 1920s. The nearby Blackfoot River is the setting for much of the tragic tale of his brother’s death in the poetic novella “A River Runs Through It.” That book, finally released as a film after Maclean’s death, was followed by the posthumous publication of “Young Men and Fire,” his research into the deadly blaze that claimed the lives of 13 smokejumpers north of Helena in 1949.
For Moses, a Billings therapist, Maclean is an unusual link in her family’s own story and collective history, and it all started those many years ago in Chicago.
CONVERSATIONS
“I’d go over when it was cold, and he’d always have a pair of LL Bean slippers for me to wear. His handwriting was really bad. The lines were mostly horizontal with a few bumps. So . I . would . read . like . this,” she said, emphasizing long pauses between each word.
As she read, Maclean would offer corrections.
“Darlin’, does that look like ‘smokejumper’ to you?” she said he would correct her. “Then I’d get flustered. ‘It’s helicopter,'” he’d say.
Then Maclean would jokingly ask if she was sure she had gone to college.
“We’d get done with this reading, which was exhausting for me, then we’d have dinner and a drink,” Moses said.
The dinner was often soup. The drink was Ancient Age bourbon. Maclean would ask Moses to mix the cocktails.
“He liked the idea that I would make the drinks,” she said. He liked a splash of water with some ice, telling her, “Don’t bruise it darlin’.”
One time, trying to make small talk, she asked Maclean if he’d read any good books lately.
“I don’t read books, I write ’em,” he responded.
So she stuck to safer topics, mainly fly fishing and Montana, basking in the warmth of the small talk with such a beloved author and poet.
Moses never finished her work on “Young Men and Fire.” Before the typing was finished, she moved to Montana, a place her family had spent summer vacations and where her parents had retired to live along the Stillwater River. But she did contact Maclean one other time, seeking a referral for a teaching job in Billings.
“I would have loved to have seen what he said,” Moses said. “Probably, ‘Jane claims to have gone to college.'”
THE PROFESSOR
Tom Tollefson was an 18-year-old undergraduate at the University of Chicago in 1967 when he enrolled in a Shakespeare class. The gruff professor was a chain-smoking part-time Montanan who “loved words.”
“We did a lot of reading aloud,” Tollefson said. “He was also very big on the structure of literature, like how he would take fly-casting apart (in his book ‘A River Runs Through It’). That’s what he would do with a poem, get to the underlying architecture.”
Tollefson, a former Billings Gazette city editor, remembers Maclean telling lots of Montana stories, to which Tollefson had no connection. Yet the professor was so well liked by his students that three times he won the university’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
“I thought he was a generous grader with undergraduates generally,” Tollefson said, recalling that he received an A in the course. But that wasn’t necessarily the case.
Years later, Tollefson met Maclean’s son-in-law, who had looked through some of his old grade books and papers. In the grade book there were lots of Cs, Ds and even Fs, Tollefson was told. On one essay, Maclean had written a stinging yet subtle rebuke: “Your vocabulary is mediocre and meager. It is more than adequate to express your idea.”
LIKE SHAKESPEARE
Wearing a baseball cap that reads “Raven Lunatic,” accompanied by the black form of a raven, Pete Dexter settled into a hardback chair to chat. His recollection of dates is fuzzy. That could be because in the course of his 72 years he’s survived a baseball-bat beating, a dog bite that led to an infection and 10-week hospitalization and a surgery to remove precancerous tissue from his head.
So what year it was that he first landed a newspaper job as a reporter isn’t clear. He knows it was the 1970s and a time when the young women working at the Florida newspaper wore white boots. He had no experience in the field.
His new editor handed Dexter a list of issues he would be covering, his beat included tomatoes, and that was no euphemism. But Dexter said he had no idea what a beat was.
“I sat there for three weeks. I thought it was an initiation test,” he said.
It was an inauspicious beginning for a man who would rise to the top of his profession. In 1981, while a columnist for The Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter got the chance to write a profile in Esquire magazine about author Norman Maclean. It was a writer his brother had introduced him to a year earlier and who Dexter compared to Shakespeare for the poetic nature of his prose.
“It was a thin book, two long stories divided by a shorter story, on the back a picture of an old man who obviously takes no prisoners, looking at you as if you’d just invented rock ‘n’ roll,” Dexter wrote in the article. Now he says the only reason he read the book was because it was “the right size,” meaning short.
“‘A River Runs Through It’ was published in 1976, when (Maclean) was seventy-three, and the first 104 pages of that book — the title story — filled holes inside me that had been so long in the making that I’d stopped noticing they were there,” Dexter wrote in Esquire.
‘MOST OF THEM ARE STRANGE’
Now Dexter is the guy in his 70s, a successful author of several award-winning books such as “Paris Trout” and the invited guest speaker for the Norman Maclean writing festival at Seeley Lake.
To write the Esquire article, Dexter said he spent time with Maclean at his rustic Seeley Lake cabin.
“I’m always uncomfortable staying at someone else’s house,” he admitted, “especially if they have a shower with no hot water.”
But he enjoyed spending time with the author, partly because he said he now knows that “so many writers are people I don’t want to be with. To put it kindly, most of them are strange in a lot of ways and have been through some stuff.”
Not so with Maclean. He liked him, a lot.
“People that absolutely mean everything they say or try to, they’re pretty rare people,” Dexter said. “His sincerity always came through, and it made you like him.”
So when Dexter’s editor at Esquire called Maclean after the article had been published, she expected the magazine to be “deified” and praised for Dexter’s insightful prose. Instead, Maclean told her he hated the story.
“I don’t blame him,” Dexter said. “I hated it, too.
“If he had gotten his hands on me, he would have lived longer than me.”
THE CIRCLE CLOSES
At the Seeley Lake conference honoring, discussing and dissecting Maclean’s writing, Dexter was the keynote speaker. In the crowd was Dexter’s brother, Tom Tollefson, who had first given him the book “A River Runs Through It,” noting at the time that it was written by his former Shakespeare professor. Accompanying Tollefson was his wife, Jane Moses, Maclean’s former typist and drink mixer.
To have so many disparate ties to an individual in one family spread out across several years seems to defy the odds. Yet one of the fundamental forces of nature is gravity — the attraction between physical objects with mass. In astrophysicist terms, Maclean had a lot of mass in the writing world, where Dexter circulated, and at the University of Chicago, where Tollefson and Moses met Maclean, as well as each other.
Across the years, Maclean’s writing still resonates with readers from around the world. Lines like this from “A River Runs Through It”:
“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them — we can love completely without complete understanding.”
For one of her birthdays years ago, Moses’ parents purchased a beautiful hardback copy of “A River Runs Through It” illustrated with photos. They mailed it to Maclean and asked him to sign it. The inscription survives, although Moses’ now-deceased dog chewed up much of the book’s cover, her bite mark perfectly preserved on one of the inside pages.
In his leaning cursive dated January 19, 1983, Maclean wrote, “To Jane Moses: Who rose up and left the University of Chicago Press to settle on the banks of the Stillwater. May she and her tribe flourish — and increase.”