Tom McGuane on Ranching, Writing and Rattlesnakes

By Hal Herring, 7-10-06

Montana writer Tom McGuane lives on a 3,000-acre ranch in the Boulder River Valley, not far from the old post office at McLeod. On the drive south along the river, the vast wall of the 10,000 foot Beartooth Plateau dominates the eye, until you've become accustomed to it, and can relax in the intense green of the foothills, thickets of aspen glowing, amid stands of darker lodgepole. Snowmelt fed creeks, buried in low growing willows, are everywhere on the hills like an anatomist's diagram of the vascular system of the earth. If it seems like a long way from the smoky bars of Livingston and postcard scenes of the Yellowstone where the legendary wildness of McGuane and his friends played out in the 70's and early 80's, stamping an entire generation's perceptions of the place and the state, that's because it is.

Tom and his wife Laurie, the sister of musician Jimmy Buffett, run cattle and raise and train cutting horses. Their children are grown up and moved away. Although Laurie was sidelined by a horseback wreck last year, she and Tom have long been successful competitors on the cutting horse circuit, traveling to competitions, or "cuttings" from Montana to California and Texas. At 66 years old, Tom stands straight as a rifle barrel, with the natural grace of an athlete who has never really left the arena, and seems, as he walks with long strides across the yard, as if he has avoided the kind of injuries that plague every other lifelong horseman I've ever met.

The McGuane ranch is operated as a business rather than, as real estate agents like to say, "an amenity ranch." News anchorman Tom Brokaw is a near neighbor, and as I drive up the valley there is a megamansion under construction near the river, but the feel here is still regular cattleman's Montana, even with the spectacular scenery. The McGuane's home is a strong and functional old log home on the edge of the cottonwood bottoms of the Boulder. The outbuildings and barns and corrals lie a bit downriver, between the bottoms and the edge of an irrigated hayfield. When I get there, at ten in the morning, everybody is working, and looks like they've been at it quite awhile.

This far from the mountains, the grasslands are dry and rocky, and according to McGuane, rattlesnakes abound. "Every one of our dogs has been bitten at least once," he told me, as we walked into the enclosed porch of the house, passing a movie poster of Tom Horn, for which McGuane wrote what is considered his best screenplay back in 1980. The dogs -- a group of at least five, from a proud Kelpie who works the cattle, to a hyper-fit white pointer who greeted me so effusively that her whole body wagged, seemed to have survived the bites with great style. All of them, as they discretely monitored the new visitor, seemed preternaturally happy and easeful. A dog named Ella tossed a small bone at my feet. The Kelpie maintained the casually watchful air of a dog with a job. They all followed us into the kitchen, where an entire wall is devoted to framed photos of family, children, old people, friends, an amazing and rich array of connected humanity.

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Tom McGuane's writing on a generation of readers who dreamed of Montana as a place of anarchic freedom, of fast rivers and trout, the prime example of the un-bounded life promised by the American West. That promise, and its illusory, deceptive reality, remains a hidden engine in most of his work. He is the author of nine novels and two books of short stories, one of which, Gallatin Canyon, has just been published and Allen M. Jones reviewed here at New West. His tumultuous foray into the movie business produced the cult film Rancho Deluxe, in 1973, featuring the Paradise Valley and a team of pot-smoking rustlers, a film of his novel 92 in the Shade, in 1975, then the 1976, big budget film The Missouri Breaks, with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. Tom Horn, with Steve McQueen in the title role, was the last of those major productions. If that chronology sounds like an unsustainable outpouring of creative energy, it was, and it became part of the legend of those times, which has been too well chronicled elsewhere. It might be sufficient to say that, on a voyage through the 1970's, with siren songs of every stripe echoing from Montana to Key West and back again, McGuane seldom, if ever, tied himself to the mast. The results are chronicled in the metaphorical 1978 novel Panama, which critics disliked but most fans, myself among them, consider one of his best books.

Finally McGuane's essays on sport -- everything from moto-cross to flyfishing to horses and big game hunting, are considered among the finest examples of their kind anywhere. His lifelong friend Jim Harrison, himself one of America's most respected poets and novelists, has said that McGuane "is the best fishing writer, ever." That point may raise arguments. But this one will not: McGuane is the first writer to bring such a powerful and precise prose to the pursuits of fishing and hunting and horsemanship. The essays are collected in An Outside Chance, which was expanded and republished in 1990, Some Horses, 2000, and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing.

In talking to McGuane, I tell him I got a late start coming to visit him because I was reading some of the stories in Gallatin Canyon. This begins a few snippets of our conversation:

I really like what I've read so far, I say.

McGuane: "I'm glad to hear that. I feel pretty comfortable with it. Three of the stories in it were picked up by the New Yorker, and since its been out in Europe, it's been nominated for the Frank O'Conner Award. I'm hoping to get on the final short list for that."

Why the return to the short story form, any particular reason?

"I just love short stories when they are powerful. It's about, you know, le mot juste, the right word. Way long ago I finished the Frank O'Connor story Guests of the Nation and recognized the potential of the form. It's just not currently fashionable…look at the New York Times picks for the best books of the last 25 years. They chose Beloved, and Don DeLillo's novels, but one of only two short story books on the list was O'Brien's The Things They Carried."

And those stories are all interconnected, like a novel.

"That's right. But I'm different than a lot of other writers, in that I have other ways of making a living. I remember something that Jimmy Buffett said once, when he became a rocker, that the day of the singer-songwriter is gone. I think that carries over into literature, too. Publishing used to be committed to literature, but those boundaries have blurred into entertainment -- publishers want to make that money, too."

Do you think that there are less readers now, for serious, or any other kind of literature?

"There is a kind of pessimism among younger people, they are skeptical that other people -- writers -- can offer them that transformative experience. I still find that potential in sports -- you'll find these young hockey players who worship some older player in Russia or somewhere…I was accepted into the Cutting Horse Hall of Fame this year, and to show a colt well seems more important to me now than say, the Nobel Prize. (laughs).

"In riding cutting horses, all you can do is cut your cattle and do the work that is in front of you -- this idea works across the board for me, all the way to how my books are received. The Cadence of Grass was so blasted by critics that now people are coming to it to defend it. The literary world has come to discourage risk-taking, but as a writer you often have to try things that are obviously a bad idea… bad reviews used to get me, but you could say now that my give-a-shit is broke. I have always tried to write as well as I could."

Does that mean that you feel like literature is less important to you, given all the other passions in your life: fishing, cutting horses, cattle, birdhunting, etc.?

"Literature is still the source of my greatest excitement. My prayer is that it is irreplaceable. Literature can carry the consciousness of human times and social life better than anything else. Look at the movies of the 1920's, watch the Murrow broadcasts, you can't recognize any of the people. Now, read Fitzgerald -- that's it. That is the truth of the times. Somebody has to be committed to the idea of truth. Remember how people depicted suburbia, and life in the suburbs, that idealized vision? Then Cheever wrote the stories, wrote how weird it really was."

Does Western writing accomplish that, too?

"I'm not too interested in the Kabuki Theater style of western literature, where the action is placed on a kind of stage -- "the West" -- while all the things behind it, the real life, doesn't even enter into it… a lot of Montana, as being accepted here, is like water rights, its about prior appropriation. And so much of the literature now is about claiming that…. (laughs) I must have won the Montana State Cutting Horse Championship ten times before anybody would admit that I knew what I was doing. Also, what is this idea that people here have that you are owed a job twenty feet from where you were born, and that somehow the out-of-staters and outsiders have cheated us out of that? It doesn't make any sense. Most people grow up assuming that they will have to move somewhere else to find a decent job."

Coming from Alabama, where a stranger will engage you in deep conversation in a grocery store line, I've always thought of Montana as a non-story-telling culture. Has being a storyteller in a non-story telling culture affected your work?

"My parents came from poor stock in New England, but it was a rich life, a culture of storytelling and comedy. When we moved to the Midwest, my mother was horrified. She called those blank people "Nordic schnooks." Every chance she got, every holiday, she took us home to this kind of tenement in New England, to be around her people.

But there are storytellers here in Montana. There are people who are funny and will tell the stories. It is different. The Deep South is full of characters everywhere you look, and then as you cross into Texas, that "Don't Mess with Texas" stuff, it gets bleaker and bleaker…But a lot of that is learned, too. I remember watching old western movies in the theater, listening to the dialogue, and the only people in the audience who believed a word of it, who thought people really talked that way, were the cowboys."

How did you first come out to this country?

"I came to Wyoming when I was in high school. My girlfriend was from there. I was pretty gaa-gaa about the West."

And you've remained so, I'd say.

"Yes."

There is a question that I have always wanted to ask you, about your writing. When I was about twenty years old, living in New Orleans, sometimes I'd pick up 92 in the Shade and just read a few paragraphs, almost as a way to jumpstart or set the tone for the day.

"Oh, for Pete's sake."

No, it wasn't a big deal, it was just, there was a clarity in that prose, a kind of compressed energy, that was unique. I always wondered whether you did that on purpose or were aware of it when you wrote it or read it?

"Maybe what that was, was just enthusiasm for what I was writing. You know as well as I do that you can't write anything well that you aren't enthusiastic about. A writer needs a kind of GPS system, lining up on what you are most enthusiastic about in the first place. John Cheever said that writing is 90 percent improvisational, and the less you tax your brain the better. 92 in the Shade was written almost purely spontaneous.

"But I always assume that a reader has a lot of other things to do (than read my books) as well. I like to look at a page of my prose and find what is there that's not doing any work… The only thing that keeps this job from sucking is the chance to do something inspirational. Otherwise, you might as well be working at GM."

So much of your work -- fiction and essays, is based on, or rooted in, your love of the natural world, and in fishing and rivers. Do you spend a lot of time worrying about what is happening with the environment and the politics of that?

"There's still just too much out there to love. I think of Jim Harrison's poem, that says, in effect, ‘No matter who is in charge, it's a beautiful world.' I believe that. And I have a great time, just going down to the scale, weighing cattle and bullshitting. One thing that has happened in our equestrian work is the new presence of Christian fundamentalism. There's all these prayers over the loudspeaker at the start of the competitions, and you'll see people down on their knees, praying by their horse trailers."

What are they praying for?

"To win money, I guess"

Are you competing in a lot of cutting horse competitions these days?

"Almost every weekend. I'm trying to decide whether to leave today to go to one in the Bitterroot at this new place. Laurie decided she didn't want to go, and it's a long way to drive by yourself. But it's a chance to win some money, too. A lot of time, I think I should be sitting down quiet, reading and writing, but I don't do it. There was a time, about ten years, where I didn't do anything but work. One day Russell Chatham came over and stood around, finally said, ‘I could never live like this,' and left. And that was not a particularly productive time for me. This year, I've already been tarpon fishing twice. So many of my friends have gotten old and just fish for a little while and they're ready to head in. I still like to fish from, as my rancher friend Buster Welch in Texas would say ‘from can't see to can't see.' I know that one of the reasons I'm so compulsive about my fishing and my cutting horses is because I feel like I don't have as much time as I used to… But at the same time, writers have such long careers nowadays. I was just reading Phillip Roth's new novel."

Following the idea of the productive aged, McGuane tells a fast-paced story about how Buster Welch, whom he has described in his essay collection Some Horses as one of the world's finest horsemen and trainers, was dealing with a bout of paralysis brought on by a stroke. We go outside to look at the river, and Ella the aged bird dog looks over the remains of a pigeon that has been killed by a raptor or a barn cat outside the office. "We were all out here one day," McGuane says, pointing to the cliffs on the other side of the river, "And there was a lion up there on that ledge, watching us." He mentions that he plans to fish for a while this afternoon, because the heat is about to bring the snows down from the Absaroka-Beartooth, and the river will be rising fast. "My inability to stay inside has always been a problem," he said. [End of article]