A River Runs Through It

I am haunted by the waters.

This sentence closes “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean. I read the novella this afternoon, for a class I have on Monday. The waters that Maclean speaks of are life itself; the metaphor that blossoms at its close is that underneath these waters are words. But it isn’t the words that haunt a writer, it is the life that washes over them.

The novella is so much better than the movie. That sounds like a cliché, because it is. Movies just don’t have the transformative powers of books. Books develop a vocabulary through use, nuancing the meanings slightly, deflecting them, transforming metaphors into containers of meaning that last far beyond the two or three hour limit of a movie. And they gesture back to other texts, building on the avalanche of meanings that centuries of culture have proposed and refined. I particularly liked Maclean’s gesture at Wordsworth:

Poets talk of “spots of time,” but it is really fisherman who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.

While I’d argue with Maclean on this point, it is the weight of Wordsworth’s influence outside this text that provides the compressed signification of this scene of a fish lost in a tree. It is a fitting allusion for a retired English teacher who only began to write fiction at age 70. It is natural that a man with this experience to refute the poet who felt that childhood was the peak of life, by arguing with one of his youthful discoveries. Leave it to a fisherman though, to make the loss of a fish have the bittersweet power of an orgasm. It makes me wonder though why the memory of an orgasm is so fleeting. Perhaps this amnesia is nature’s way of telling us that we need to have another; there can never be enough orgasms in this life.

One of the funniest scenes in it was the discovery of Neal and Old Rawhide on the beach, asleep and face-down in the sand after their drunken reverie. Old Rawhide has two letters on each butt cheek, and they first think they are initials. But then they dismiss the idea:

“Well,” he said, they don’t fit because she has LO tattooed on one cheek of her ass and VE on the other.”

I told him, “LOVE spells love, with a hash-mark in between.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said, and backed away and started to study the situation all over again.

She jumped straight up like a barber pole. She was red, white, and blue. She was white where she’d been lying on her belly in the sand, and her back completed the patriotic color scheme, red into her hair except for the blue-black tattoo. Somebody should have spun around her and played “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Now that’s my idea of patriotism.

I can’t wait to finish the rest of the stories in the collection.