Scottish Child Rearing Practices

Childhood Used To Be Tougher
    Six years ago I wrote a piece about John Muir and in it I quoted a section from his autobiographical, The Story of My Childhood and Youth. It is not a pretty story and you learn that times were tough for a child in mid-19th century Wisconsin. The Muir family had moved there from Dunbar, Scotland. If you have children or grandchildren, or perhaps even adult children, who are whining all the time, go to "School Days and Labour Days" and read them the short description of young John digging a well for months and almost dying in it. 
   I have just read about the experience of another young child who was the offspring of a Scottish Canadian who migrated to Montana from Nova Scotia. Like Muir's father, Norman Maclean's was both very religious and very demanding. Prayers were said on knees after breakfast and dinner and church was attended on Wednesday evenings and four times on Sundays. The father preacher was also the teacher and his pedagogical methods were a bit more stringent than those followed today. Here is a sample day:

   After breakfast, the Reverend Maclean would read aloud from Wordsworth or Milton or the Bible; then came three hours of instruction, during which Norman was made to write an essay while his father worked on his sermons. After forty-five minutes, Norman was summoned to see the Reverend, who spent fifteen minutes criticizing the essay before sending the boy away with a mandate to make it shorter. Those same events occurred the next hour and the one after that—except that, at the end of the final hour, the essay was thrown in the trash.
   The method was unconventional, the instructor was unforgiving, and the pupil sometimes spent nearly as much time crying as writing. “I cannot tell you,” Maclean later wrote, “how much of life 15 minutes can be when you are six, seven, eight, nine, or ten years old and alone with a red-headed Presbyterian minister and cannot answer one of his questions.” The saving grace of these mornings was that, when the time was up, Norman was free to grab a rifle or a fishing rod and head outdoors. About the only thing the two halves of his day had in common was the expectation that the boy would rely on his own resources and answer for his own behavior, which in the wilderness mostly just meant staying alive. 

Like John Muir, Norman Maclean survived such experiences and both went on to live productive lives and seemed not to have suffered from any of the acronyms or initialisms found in the latest version of the DSM.

   The father was tough, but his teaching appeared to work since Maclean produced "fly fisherman's prose, spinning in glittering circles overhead before landing exactly where it must..." You likely know him from the book he wrote at the age of 73, or from the movie based upon it: A River Runs Through It: and Other Stories. Those stories and Maclean are discussed by Kathryn Schulz who turns to the writing of Maclean when she is having trouble with her own (see: "Casting a Line: The Hard-bitten Genius of Norman Maclean, The New Yorker, July 8 & 15, 2024.
   

Maclean taught English for years at the University of Chicago and apparently his expectations were as high as his father's. One doubts that any of his grades were inflated.
   He did not write much academically and chose to head back to Montana to fish during the summers. He did not think the world needed "another article on lyric poetry."
   As a reader of MM you will know that I have many posts about university presses and the University of Chicago has one and had one when Maclean was looking for a publisher. They were unwilling to publish Maclean's A River..., however, since it was a work of fiction. They finally agreed to do so and it has now sold over a million copies, just in English. If you go to the University of Chicago Press website today, you will find two editions. The one from 1989 is more elegantly produced than the more recent one which has an introduction by Robert Redford who directed A River Runs Through It.

   

   If you have seen or read A River Runs Through It, you will recall that Norman had a handsome younger brother, Paul, played by Brad Pitt in the film. You will also remember that Paul was frequently drinking, fighting and in trouble. In the book he dies in Montana. 
   In real life, he was having trouble in Montana, so his older brother invited him to Chicago. One can also find trouble in Chicago and in early May, 1938, Paul was found murdered in an alley after attending a White Sox game.

Paul Maclean

    Sources:
   The New Yorker piece mentioned contains some remarks about this new book:  Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, by Rebecca McCarthy. It is published by the University of Washington Press which is covered in MM in, "Environmental Books."
  Locally, the London Public Library has, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River, by John. Maclean, but not A River...
  The Western Libraries has an e-version of A River... , and in storage a recording of the motion picture sound track. 
   For addtional posts about John Muir in MM, see, "John Muir" for information about his time in Meaford, Ontario, and "Working Wonders With Wood" for examples of Muir's wooden inventions.