Young, Tough, Beautiful, and a Little Bit Crazy: The Forestry of Norman Maclean's Prose in USFS 1919: The Ranger, The Cook, and a Hole in the Sky

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• Young, Tough, Beautiful, and a Little Bit CrazyThe Forestry of Norman Maclean's Prose in USFS 1919: The Ranger, The Cook, and a Hole in the Sky
• Thomas Kaye (bio)

"It's a swell book. What I couldn't ever understand was what good the sword would do. It would have to stay edge up all the time because if it went over flat you could roll right over it and it wouldn't make any trouble."

"It's a symbol," Bill said.

"Sure," said Nick, "but it isn't practical."

—Ernest Hemingway, "The Three-Day Blow," In Our Time

This article will examine the "world of the woods" that has, for so long, been relegated to the furthest of backdrops in studies of Norman Maclean's writing (Maclean, "An Incident" 120). The novella USFS 1919: The Ranger, The Cook, and a Hole in the Sky will be the sole focus in this reading of Maclean's woods. It is a world best studied by analyzing the forestry of Maclean's prose. This term—"the forestry of his prose"—denotes both his writing about forestry and his craft of writing prose as an art akin to forestry. Forest ecologist Hamish Kimmins begins his definition of forestry by describing it as "the art, science and practice of managing forested landscapes" (49). By reading for the forestry of Maclean's prose, then, I will explore the art that has sprung from managing forested landscapes.

In an interview with Studs Terkel in 1976 Maclean said of this world of the woods: "everything was hand and horse . . . it was a world that was infinitely beautiful and very tough, and it's hard at times to tell the toughness from the beauty, it was a tough kind of beauty" (00:03:07—00: 03:45). In this evocation of "a world of hand [End Page 349] and horse" Maclean's appreciation of skilled labor captures in miniature the complex relationship between beauty and utility that is at the heart of Maclean's forestry and a key concern of this article. With beauty and utility in mind, it should be noted that the forestry of Norman Maclean's prose does not necessarily involve descriptions of trees, but rather the hands-on business of working in the forest: a world of labor and social relationships.

In contemporary ecocriticism it might seem jarring to discuss the beauty inherent in utilizing the woods. The statement Maclean makes in his speech "An Incident" that "just watching a sawyer at work in the woods is . . . an art experience" (120) could appear horrifying to someone suffering from what Aldo Leopold describes as "one of the penalties of an ecological education . . . that one lives alone in a world of wounds" (197). Surely the sawyer is inflicting another wound (just as surely as the tree has fallen)? Until recently, part of the problem has been, as David Fairer describes when making the case for the eco-georgic, that "the ecocriticism of the past two decades [1990 to 2010] has tended to view the georgic as peripheral, even antagonistic, to 'green' principles" (202). This was due in part to what Fairer describes as "the monopolising grip of Romanticism" upon ecocriticism (203). Thus, beauty in a text like USFS 1919 that is georgic in its fascination with (as Maclean states) "what men and women could do with their hands and heads in the world of the woods" becomes a contentious subject ("An Incident," 120).

In his introduction to A History of English Georgic Writing, Paddy Bullard offers a succinct definition of the georgic split into "two broad categories" (1). Bullard describes the first as "a category of genre, made up by imitations and adaptations of Virgil's Georgics," the poem that, as Bullard states, "has lent its title most often as a general label for farming literature" (1). The second category of georgic is defined by Bullard as "one of theme and mode, and it covers all sorts of literary texts, in poetry, prose and drama, that deal with life on the land in a practical way" (1). The georgic's most general conception as a kind of farming literature is useful to note when...