Tom Mcguane: `Blue Skies' And Green Vistas

It's hard to believe that Thomas McGuane, the sly, ironic, angry-young-author of the '60s and '70s, is 52 years old. He seemed only a little this side of a post-adolescent giggling fit as he sat in his Seattle hotel room recently and read aloud a New York Times story about Marlene Dietrich's first screen test.

"Now, listen to this," said McGuane, 6-foot-3 frame stretched half the length of the room, Irish eyes boring through half-moon glasses, grin cracking into a fractured laugh.

"Then she says, `What do you think you're doing, fella? You call that piano playing? I'm supposed to sing that junk? It belongs in a wash house, not here. Get it? Dope.' " McGuane almost cackles with delight: "Isn't that great?"

In fact, Marlene Dietrich would be right at home sashaying through a McGuane barroom, thumbing her elegant nose at the cowboys, insurance agents and car saleswomen who populate his portraits of contemporary Montana. While McGuane has long since quit drinking and settled into a happy marriage, more than a trace of the unrepentant barroom brawler remains in his new novel, "Nothing but Blue Skies" (Seymour Lawrence/Houghton Mifflin, $21.95).

In his tale of Frank Copenhaver, a small-town Montana businessman undone by the departure of his wife, McGuane continues to dip beneath the restless surface of the day-to-day, plumbing the depths of loyalty, irony and despair. Not to mention an almost pyrotechnic facility with language and humor - Saul Bellow once called McGuane a "sort of language star." Not to mention Montana.

McGuane was born in Michigan, the son of a successful auto-parts salesman. He has said that both his parents were alcoholics, and many of his novels feature both alcoholism and a troubled father-son relationship. In one interview, he described his father as "one of those guys who drank five big drinks after dinner and had a serious mood change. He would paralyze the whole family. He'd turn and say, `And you? What are you doing?' "

Nearly a quarter-century ago, he emerged with a string of critically acclaimed books, including "The Sporting Club," "The Bushwhacked Piano" and "Ninety-Two in the Shade." He became a sort of media star, a "psychedelic cowboy," in the words of one disaffected girlfriend. From South Florida to Montana, he ran amok with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Margot Kidder (to whom he was briefly married and with whom he had a child) and Jim Harrison, another acclaimed writer and one of McGuane's best friends.

He moved to Montana in 1968, long before the celebrity hordes moved in. But it was not until 1982, the year "Nobody's Angel" was published, that McGuane, in a manner of speaking, grew up.

At 41, after two failed marriages and the deaths of several family members, McGuane quit drinking. His marriage to Laurie Buffett, Jimmy Buffett's sister, has endured since 1977. Today he and Laurie run a cattle ranch and see to several children from their combined previous marriages. In alternate years, they each have claimed the title of champion cutting horse rider for Montana.

Today McGuane looks good - fit and almost boyish. Never a master of plot, his strength lies in his mastery of language and his bittersweet insight into the human condition. "Nothing but Blue Skies" advances the tale of Copenhaver, whose life McGuane sees as a metaphor for the 1980s:

"In some ways, he loved money; he certainly loved the sedative effects of pursuing it, and if that was all money did for him at this point, it had much to be said for it. The year he tried to escape into bird-watching, into all the intricacies of spring warblers and the company of gentle people, he had been forced to conclude that nothing got him out of bed with quite the smooth surge of power - as the Chrysler ads used to say - like the pursuit of the almighty dollar."

"I have this theory that we're always on some kind of drug, some kind of tear," said McGuane. After the '60s and the "Hotel California" hangover of the '70s, he said that "then came this wonderful drug, so officially sanctioned it was patriotic . . . a greed addiction.

"It ran its course," he added, "and we ended up where we ran with other drugs, with dissipation and a sense of spiritual collapse, and a refusal to discover that greed and other drugs cause people to mistreat and neglect the people who love them."

Frank Copenhaver, a borderline alcoholic, proceeds to create a series of acutely embarrassing situations for himself and his loved ones that, just as the reader thinks they can't get any worse, do just that. Along the way he begins to realize he is the loser by driving away his wife, Gracie.

Conservation is another McGuane preoccupation, fitting for a man who is nonpareil in his ability to communicate the beauty of the natural world. His description of a Montana stream:

"At the bend, the wild irises looked as if they would topple into the stream. The narrow band of mud at the base of the sedges revealed a well-used muskrat trail, and on this band stood a perfectly motionless blue heron, head back like the hammer of a gun. It flexed its legs slightly, croaked, sprang into wonderfully slow flight, a faint whistle of pinions, then disappeared over the top of the wall of grasses as though drawn into its mass."

In the new novel, a political-action group called Montana for Montanans aims to dam up all the streams so not a drop of water escapes to any other state. It's modeled on real-life groups, including the Wise Use movement, which advocates wide-open exploitation of the country's national forests and parks.

McGuane sees it from both sides: He's a member of the state stockholders' association as well as of a wildlife federation that champions the welfare of the grizzly bear. But he also faults the environmental movement for refusing to listen to the concerns of working people, the ranchers and the loggers.

"They've been driven into a corner they didn't used to occupy," he said. "I'd like to repair that schism."

Still, McGuane said conservation battles can get up-close and personal.

"There are county commissioners I'd like to strangle," he admitted. "You can't be on the sidelines. In Seattle, you'd just dial them out of your life."

McGuane's routine is to ranch in the summer and write in the winter. Seattle was the last stop on his book tour: This week he returned to his ranch to start all over again. Known for spare, tight prose, he said that his first draft may be 20 times the length of the final product.

"I have to go back and start a novel, and I have the same problems I did in 1966," he said. Well, maybe not all of them. McGuane said he's left behind a certain need to prove himself.

"When you're young," he said, "you think of yourself as terrific. You do a certain amount of `watch me write.' As you are shaped by events, the ego recedes. The intensity of interest in life itself drives you."