Education Of a Wandering Man (1990)

by L'amour, Louis

  Amazing things can happen, and I know of a case where one individual has almost succeeded in changing history because of his strongly held opinions and his ability to convince others (two of whom have written books) that he is right.

  In this case, this gentleman read accounts of the Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming, and when he found it to be other than he expected, he decided the facts were wrong. He had a mental picture of its being a small opening, while, as a matter of fact, the Hole is over a quarter of a mile wide with a good creek flowing through.

  This was the Hole-in-the-Wall where rustlers drove herds of stolen cattle through and vanished into the country beyond, then drifted from ranch to ranch until out of the country. For years, no posse attempted to go through, as a couple of men with rifles up on the sandstone ridge could make passage impossible or costly.

  Not finding what he expected, the gentleman ordered that a search be made; a difficult horse trail, over which cattle could hardly be driven, was discovered. This trail was used only a few times by the outlaws and at least once by Marshal Joe LeFors, who mentions it, and its difficulty, in his own book. But every old-timer knew the real Hole-in-the-Wall was the wide opening referred to above.

  The authors of both books should have checked their sources more carefully. The Hole is the only real opening in the Wall for thirty-five miles or so, and the area beyond it was inhabited by rustlers or those friendly to them. (or if not friendly, in no position to make enemies.)

  My careful study of the short story and how it was written paid off. As I had many stories to tell, I sold quite a few, although the prices were low and one had to write a lot to make a living.

  My one wish was to make my work increasingly better, and here and there I tried to change some editorial beliefs. For example, for some ungodly reason it had long been an established policy that “y” be written in a western story as “yuh.” This irritated me and I began to insist on “you.” As my stories were increasingly popular, it was usually allowed to stand.

  There has been comment from time to time, usually by people with little discernment, on the lack of sex in my stories.

  It is very simple. I am not writing about sex, which is a leisure activity; I am writing about men and women who were settling a new country, finding their way through a maze of difficulties, and learning to survive despite them.

  Sex in the time before World War I was a private concern, and there were, supposedly, only two places for it: in the bedrooms of married people and in whorehouses. A woman who transgressed was soon known and found herself cut off from society, accepted nowhere. If she did not become a prostitute, she lived on a back street, kept by somebody and isolated from most of society.

  There were, of course, sad cases where women for one reason or another acquired a false label, and their lives were ruined by it.

  Attitudes toward sex can change very quickly and what may be accepted in one generation is condemned in another, or vice versa.

  My stories are not concerned with sex but with entering, passing through, or settling wild country. I am concerned with people building a nation, learning to live together, with establishing towns, homes, and bridges to the future.

  Those unfamiliar with the world’s literature might find it interesting to realize that sex, except in its romantic sense, has little to do with seventy-five percent of what has been written.

  My greatest complaint with present-day sexual writing is that nobody seems to be having any fun. Sex is an ordeal, or it is rape, or an athletic endeavor. Only the French find it amusing—as it certainly is.

  Many of those who choose it for subject matter linger on the most unpleasant aspects or treat it like a discovery. Actually, they needn’t. It’s been here all the time.

  Most people who are familiar with my work think of me as a novelist, but actually I began with short stories, poetry, and a few articles and essays. My apprenticeship as a writer was in the field of the short story, however, and my first novel was written only after selling more than a hundred short stories.

  The first novel I had published appeared in England and was called Westward The Tide.

  It did not appear in this country until Bantam Books acquired the rights from me many years later.

  Usually I am characterized as a western writer. I do not mind the term, but it is not strictly correct. To me, and to many others, I am a writer of the frontier, not only in the West but elsewhere. Wherever there is a frontier, I am interested; wherever there is a frontier, I am concerned. Much of my writing has to do with men on the western frontier, even when that frontier was east of the Appalachians, as in Sackett’s Land, To The Far Blue Mountains, and The Warrior’s Path. (two of these stories begin in Elizabethan England, incidentally, as does Fair Blows The Wind.)

  The frontier is that line beyond which man has not been, or where he is only beginning to go. I am, for example, concerned now (as I have been since I was twelve) about the frontiers of outer space, and I have appeared several times as a speaker on programs connected with the space movement. This is the final frontier, the frontier without end, and those who explore it will be heroes of the future. There are endless frontiers out there, each one difficult, each one offering fresh discoveries, unexpected challenges, and rewards beyond belief.

  My novel The Walking Drum is the story of Kerbouchard, a young man seeking the frontiers of knowledge, seeking his fortune as well as wisdom in a rapidly changing world. The twelfth century was one of impending change.

  The Renaissance had not begun but all the elements were there, and the world in the West was about to burst with creativity like the sudden opening of a flower.

  Kerbouchard is himself an instrument in that change. He goes into the Arab world, which holds the center of the world’s intellectual activity, and he returns to what is still Dark Ages Europe, talking, listening, relating. He gives a book to a student in Paris, a rare and wonderful gift where books of any kind were rare. He expresses dissenting ideas, and it is no matter whether they are important, simply that they offer a different viewpoint and so are an incentive to thinking.

  The merchant caravans of which he is a part are also a piece of what is happening.

  Traveling from country to country, bound by no boundaries, they carry ideas as well as the goods they sell, and ideas bring questions. Those who have witnessed the rich intellectual lives in the Moslem world are no longer content with the world in which they live. They have looked upon beauty and they wish to create beauty for themselves.

  Too often reviewers approaching one of my stories think “he writes adventure stories” and so they see nothing else.

  This book began as an account of how I educated myself, but it has often wandered far afield. Yet I have ever been a wanderer, drifting through fields of books and finding blossoms wherever they might bloom. Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.

  That most fabulous of instruments, the human mind, has never realized its potential in any man, coming closest perhaps in Leonardo da Vinci or Avicenna. The memory, which is now often replaced by computers, notebooks, or whatever, has never been so useful since the Middle Ages, when any Arab (by that I mean anyone, of any nationality, who was a part of the Arab civilization) author could recite the contents of his entire list of books, verbatim. Each author had the text of all of his books committed to memory and would dictate when a book was needed. Druid priests and storytellers everywhere had fabulous memories, for there was no other way. (to those who might question this, I refer them to The Arabic Book by Johannes Pedersen as the quickest of many references.)

  Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all you have read, and I believe there is much truth in that.

  As I worked in one field, I continued to reach out to others. My short story “The Admiral” appeared in Story and received some favorable comment. Edward J. O’Brien, who at the time put together collections of The Best Short Stories each year, listed sever
al of mine in his Index of Distinctive Stories. Few saw these listings and fewer cared, but they were important to me. Moreover, they were seen by publishers, and several wrote suggesting I might have a book.

  Of course I had a book. I have always had a book, but nothing then on paper.

  Some correspondence followed and the future looked bright. Then the War came.

  It had been going on, of course, and I had followed developments with interest. In my book reviewing, I had handled most of the military and naval books and several on foreign affairs. Our military leaders were admirers of German might, and many were suggesting victory in Russia. I knew that was impossible.

  Charles XII of Sweden and Napoleon had both failed, and the Germans had failed to take Leningrad, one of the most exposed cities in the world. The conclusion was obvious to me. When the Russians wished to make a stand, they could and would.

  German supply lines stretched out and out and were vulnerable to guerrilla attacks. More men and equipment were needed to supply the fighting men than Germany could get on the line. The Russians had again traded space for time, and moved factories back into Siberia. They were waiting when the Germans arrived, and at Leningrad they stopped them.

  Several years before, we in the United States had put on the first mass parachute drops and had promptly done nothing with them; in France a colonel named De Gaulle had written a book on The Army of the Future in which he outlined a mechanized army which was to be adopted, with minor changes, as the panzer division. Major General J. F. C. Fuller had written Field Service Regulations III in which he laid down the plan for blitzkreig warfare. The French were committed to a war of position and did nothing with De Gaulle’s motorized division; the British had other ideas and ignored Fuller’s concept. The Germans saw the value in all three ideas and used them.

  (a Frenchman—a correspondent, I believe—who was in Germany during the early days of the Hitler takeover heard much talk of a French military genius. He was surprised, as he did not know they had one, and the Germans told him of De Gaulle. Returning to France, he made queries and located him for an interview.)

  Having considerable knowledge of what is now Indonesia, Malaysia, and the China coast, I tried for Naval Intelligence. It was there I believed I might be most useful, and that was what I wanted most. However, without a college degree, I was turned down.

  Often when one hears of war memories, one would believe the teller of the stories directed his own destiny. None of us did. We went where we were told to go and did what we were told to do, and that is the way with armies. I did many things, but only twice, for brief periods, was I in a position where my experience was useful, and neither lasted long.

  My basic training was in the Infantry at Camp Robinson, and from there to Officers’

  Candidate School at Camp Hood, Texas, in the Tank Destroyers. For a time after graduation I was involved in various training activities, more or less routine stuff, until several of us were sent north from Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, to the northern peninsula of Michigan as instructors in winter survival.

  This was one of the jobs for which I was thoroughly equipped. Growing up in North Dakota, I understood cold, and several times in Oregon I had taken a rifle or a shotgun and gone into the woods in the depth of winter to spend a week or more just knocking about and camping out. Such forays had taught me a great deal about survival in the cold, so I was well equipped as an instructor.

  However, it was on my military record that I had been to sea. Whether it was for that reason or not, I never knew, but I was shipped to San Francisco to become, briefly again, a cargo control officer.

  Again, this was a job for which I was equipped.

  Not only had I gone to sea and studied cargo stowage, but I had worked as a longshoreman, and was personally acquainted with some of the waterfront bosses. It was a job where I could get things done, and I was scheduled after some brief time on the San Francisco waterfront to go out to the Pacific islands in that capacity.

  What I wanted was action. When I chose Tank Destroyer school over Infantry school it was because it promised action and movement. At Kasserine Pass and elsewhere there had been a heavy loss of personnel, so men were needed. Yet I had to admit that what they planned for me was something I could do and, due to previous experience, knew I could do well.

  I took my shots, packed my gear, and got ready to return to the familiar waters of the Pacific. I knew the people out there, knew the islands, knew I could be useful.

  So what happened?

  A group of officers were scheduled to go east to join various units, and one of them fell ill. The officer who had been planning my future was off duty, a sergeant in charge put me on the list, and paid no attention to my protests.

  My arguments failed to sway him and he could find nothing that implied I was to ship out to the Pacific. His orders demanded so many officers, and as I was available, I was to be one of them.

  My protests did no good, so I relaxed. Perhaps the man was saving my life.

  Maybe the destination for which I was headed in the Pacific would be destroyed by an enemy attack. One pushed his luck just so far, so I bent with the Army wind.

  As it turned out, my time overseas was spent in the European Theater of Operations. I did what I was given to do and they gave me four Bronze Stars for doing it reasonably well.

  I spent time in England before Do-Day, traveled in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany and made some good friends in France who are my friends still.

  There was no time for writing during the war, but one could always think, and one could observe and remember. The beach at Brignogan from which Kerbouchard was taken into slavery I first saw at this time, with its white sands and stark black rocks. On a brief vacation, one of the few times when I was free, I visited a castle in the forest, now a ruined castle of stone, but in The Walking Drum it was built of timber, as most of them were. This was the castle where Kerbouchard killed his enemy Tournemine and from which he took his body to dump it into what was believed to be the mouth of Hell.

  There were places and people to be seen and remembered, there were stories to be heard, and I was hungry for them all. Ours is a rich and wonderful world, and there are stories everywhere.

  Nobody should ever try to second-guess history; the facts are fantastic enough.

  The Armed Services editions of books in paperback were sent along with rations, and I read many. Our company put on a show at one time in which various soldiers did takeoffs on the officers, most of them remarkably good. The big fellow who did me came onto the stage with his pockets stuffed with books.

  Earth has not anything to show more fair:

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty:

  This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

  All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

  Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

  Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

  The river glideth at his own sweet will:

  Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

  And all that mighty heart is lying still!

  —William Wordsworth Composed upon Westminister Bridge The war was over in Europe and many of my outfit had gone home. I had been switched to another company temporarily and had put in for emergency leave. Surprisingly, it came through and I was directed to Le Havre to return on the U. S. S. Boise, a light cruiser.

  Several officers from various services were also aboard and we were pleased. The Boise usually made the crossing in four to four and half days, I heard, and we would be home in time for Christmas of 1945.

  I should have known better. Maybe there is something about me that attracts large storms at sea: on my first voyage we went through a hurricane in the West Indies. Later, I endured two typhoons in the China seas
, and was aboard a small ship off the Florida coast when the hurricane ripped Miami in 1926.

  The storm the Boise encountered was the worst in many years and we needed sixteen days instead of four and a half to make the crossing. An aircraft carrier had to put into the Azores with damage aboard, and the only other vessel to cross during that storm was the Boise’s sister ship, the U. S. S. Reno.

  When paid off and out of the Army, I called Leo Margulies. He was giving a party and I was invited. It was mostly a publishing crowd and somebody—perhaps it was Leo —asked me what I planned.

  “To write, of course. I’ve got to make a living.”

  “You know the West. Write some westerns and I’ll buy them.”

  Before I left for the Army, I told him, several publishers had wanted books from me and I expected to try that market. Having left the country with everything looking good for me, I expected and hoped to find the situation unchanged. I should have known better.

  One editor whom I had known had gone into the foreign service (or so I heard), another into the Navy. The entire regimes at some publishing houses had changed completely and I was to find that nobody knew anything about me.

  Certainly there was no reason why they should, for I had published only a scattering of short stories, most of them in magazines not rated for their literary quality. The few who had shown interest had moved on. In any event, the interest had been tentative and nobody had promised me anything.

  Although I had saved a little money during the war, I knew it would not last long. To write was imperative, and not only to write but to sell.

  There was a market for western stories, and I had grown up on them. I had worked on ranches, in mines and lumber camps, and had covered a lot of the western country in one way or another. I thought I knew the West, but I had much to learn.

  To those who have not researched the field, it is difficult to grasp the extent of factual written material available. Moreover, there are photographs of cowboys themselves, of trail herd crews, saloons, western streets, ranches, line cabins, anything you might wish to see.