—
Smoggy summertime. The early 1970s. A major transition in our lives. The L’Amour family—my father, mother, sister, dog, bird, and myself—are leaving West Hollywood for a new home in another part of town.
After many years of hard and constant work, Dad’s fortunes have changed. The new street is quiet and elegant, not far from the campus of UCLA, the opposite of the bohemian funkiness of our old neighborhood. Louis is ensconced in the new house, typewriter set up on a carpenter’s bench in a room just off the entrance hall. The boxes containing the books and papers he needs most are stacked around him. It will be a couple of years before the new house is fully furnished, before my dad’s new office is built. Right now the move and the stress of buying a bigger home is enough for all of us.
My mother and I trek back and forth across town. Packing Dad’s papers and books is not something she is willing to trust to the movers. She’s got a borrowed station wagon and a twelve-year-old kid, me, to help her haul a considerable amount of stuff. Dad stays home and works.
It’s not three or four trips we have to make, it’s dozens. There are nearly eight thousand books, most of them hardback. I have always wondered what the new owners of the West Hollywood house thought; every wall was covered in shelves. We had nearly been forced out of the house by the sheer volume of Dad’s books and papers.
The job takes weeks, moving from the echoing, dusty rooms of our old home to the new one, which, though larger, is rapidly filling with piles and boxes. To be sure, most of the boxes are full of books, but many contain papers, notebooks, and random stacks of manuscripts. It’s hard to believe Dad actually fit all this stuff in our old place.
For a few years after the move that “stuff” remained stacked in the living room of our new house, and I occasionally saw my dad sorting through it, searching for one thing or another. Later, after his new office was built, most of those materials migrated down there, and the new room was big enough for him to add exponentially to their number. I can’t say that the rest of us thought much about what this mass of papers contained. “Dad’s work,” or “Dad’s mess”—that was as far as we went with it. It was only after his death, over fifteen years later, that we discovered many unexpected things….
—
In the 1970s and ’80s, after paying his dues for forty years, Louis L’Amour was the rock star of the paperback-book business. No title he put his name on had ever gone out of print, and his books were translated into more than twenty languages. When he appeared to do a signing, lines stretched around the block. The movie business has given a name to that kind of success: blockbuster.
Critics and commentators were either swept away by his infectious writing style or they struggled desperately to explain away his popularity. If audiences had found his work to be no more than disposable, momentary entertainment, dismissing it would have been easy—but those readers kept coming back, not only buying every new book, but rereading the old ones until they fell apart and were purchased again. By 1980, Bantam Books estimated he had sold one hundred million copies. By the time he passed away in 1988, that number was topping two hundred million.
His success, though long in coming, was also limiting. Since the end of World War II, Louis had made his name writing Westerns. He loved the West, and he loved being successful and making so many people happy with the entertainment he provided…but he also felt trapped. Trapped in the Western genre. Trapped by his own success.
The Walking Drum, Louis’s epic twelfth-century adventure novel, was published late in his career. However, it was written in 1960, a time when no publisher wanted anything but a Western from Louis L’Amour. It was not his only attempt to break away into new territory during that era. All of them failed, at least in the short term, though the blow of not being able to expand his horizons was softened considerably by the increasing success of what he eventually began to call his “frontier” stories.
By the time the mid-1970s rolled around, Louis was a lot smarter about his approach to working in other genres…and he had become a good deal more successful, which made publishers feel less need for caution. Incrementally approaching the issue of change, he published The Californios in 1974, a Western to be sure, but one that included some strange and otherworldly elements. He followed that with Sackett’s Land, utilizing the characters of his popular Sackett family to open the door to novels set in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long before the classic “Western” period. By the 1980s, his publisher was happy to experiment with tales like Last of the Breed, a contemporary thriller about an American military pilot escaping from the Soviet Union, and Haunted Mesa, a science fiction novel that adapted elements of Native American lore. Like The Walking Drum, both of these stories were conceived twenty or even thirty years earlier. By the time of his death, Dad was finally able to sell stories in a wider array of genres than just the Western.
Certainly, what held Louis back, when it came to the more adventurous and interesting material that he dreamed of writing, wasn’t just the conservative nature of publishers or his core audience—his own limitations played a part, too. To complete many of the ambitious projects he envisioned, a great deal of planning and revision would no doubt have been necessary.
As you will see in this book, and contrary to popular myth, Louis did outline to a certain extent, and he did rewrite, or at least restart, stories that hadn’t taken off in that magic way that would carry him all the way through to the end. But writing was not as intellectual an experience for him as it may be for many writers; over the years it had become instinctual and reactive. To complete some of these projects, which in their personal nature and distance from the Western genre were more like his earliest work, Louis might have needed to relearn the planning and revision skills he had developed at the start of his career.
For Louis, the key to almost every story was the beginning. He was both renowned for and proud of how he started stories. Using action or mystery or a particular turn of phrase, he would propel the audience into a situation in a way that made them lean forward, eyes leaping ahead to the next sentence. Getting himself to react to that moment was a trick he used to unlock the story. If the narrative “took,” then he went with it, forging ahead until he had followed his characters through to the end. After a certain point he rarely looked back, and the story wrote itself in an unstoppable stream of the unconscious.
One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter—who was a child at the time—asked me, “Daddy, why are you writing so fast?” And I replied, “Because I want to see how the story turns out!”
Working all day, every day, for decades on end had pretty much programmed him to write this way; having a story in the back of his mind for months or years before he put it down on paper allowed him to work out many of the details unconsciously. Once he started work, he really had little idea what was going to come out, and that kept his approach and the reader’s experience consistently fresh.
Although he was occasionally accused of writing in a formulaic manner, by the 1950s Louis found it difficult if not impossible to accept any influence imposed from the outside. Whatever his formula was, it was based on some internal and little-understood aesthetic. This made working under the direction of publishers and movie executives nearly impossible. A number of the stories that you will read within these covers were victims of those limitations. At times of financial stress, or in moments when he dreamed of doing something different, Louis would hammer out a treatment (a “treatment” is much like the description of a story, rather than the story itself) and then try to get a publisher or movie studio to pay him up front for executing the final, finished story.
However, if he was lucky enough to receive that advance, he would soon become frustrated by corporate executives’ attempts to get him to conform to their “creative” expectations or their schedules. It is true that very few writers of any sort like writing treatments, and even fewer do them well. In Louis’s case it was so antit
hetical to the way he liked to work that on a number of occasions I remember him returning the money, regardless of how much we needed it, and going back to the methods he came by naturally. Writing a treatment was nearly always a recipe for disaster; if Louis was lucky enough to work out the story all the way through to the end, he was not very interested in doing so again when the time came to write the finished version. He knew what was going to happen. He was ready to move on to something else.
—
The day after my father died, I walked down into his office. It was shuttered and dark; for the previous four months, Dad had rarely left the second floor of the house. The room was more than four times the size of the space he had worked in in our old house in West Hollywood. The walls were lined with double bookshelves, twelve feet tall, the outer set mounted on huge hinges to allow it to swing out of the way, like a giant pair of doors, in order to access more books behind them. Few of these could be opened, however. The floor, his desk, and a sofa at the far end of the room were all stacked two to three feet high with papers and books and odds and ends of various sorts, left over from the different aspects of Dad’s life.
—
The new office. Louis L’Amour surrounded by his work. (Nancy Ellison © 1985)
In the preceding decades, the mess, like an occasionally rising tide, had moved up the hallway and into my mother’s dining room. It happened a couple of times a year. We have never been able to prove that the expansion of that great mass of Dad’s papers was connected to the phases of the moon or to solar weather, but sooner or later Mom would put her foot down and tell him to clean it up. His work space always looked like a disaster area, but she kept the rest of the house squared away in a manner that would have made the navy envious. If she had taken on the job of cleaning up his office after his death, it would have been both horribly emotional and completely exhausting on top of the crushing weight of settling his estate and renegotiating our publishing contracts. I knew this particular job was going to be up to me.
It was literally tons and tons of material, thousands and thousands of pages, and the sorting and copying had to be done with extreme care. Eventually, after two or three years, all that was left was our dining room table, piled high with random unidentified manuscript pages, some with numbers, some without. None were titled. The challenge was to match them to existing stories by recognizing the name of a character, or finding the continuation of a sentence at the top of a page or the beginning of a sentence at the bottom of another, in this way we pieced together unfinished and unknown manuscripts, all going into their own individual folders, the pile of which grew larger and larger. By this time a number of friends and family had joined in the effort, and it was like a giant game of literary Concentration.
—
It had never been easy to keep track of what Louis was working on. He kept lists of everything: what he had sold, what he planned on accomplishing in the next six months, what physical exercises he did and how many repetitions, his weight, what books he had read and the ones he planned on reading. He made several journal entries a week. And he made hundreds of pages of notes on unlined paper with a felt-tipped pen. He outlined speeches and articles and even jotted down jokes and poetry. The number of pages he generated was substantial even before adding the things he considered to be his actual work. A great many of the projects in this book had been hidden from us by the avalanche of paper he was constantly producing.
Somehow, even with all that and the novels that actually got published every year, he managed to write quite a few treatments and start scores of stories we had never heard of. In addition, we found partial manuscripts where Dad had made several different attempts to start many of his now well-known works, and piles of notes relating to that same successfully published material.
In some cases, he tried to start over and over. Often he would produce nearly identical drafts, each attempt allowing him to forge a few pages—or sometimes just a few words—further. Other times he would explore whether a completely different beginning, or different characters, would get a story to take off. On occasion he even considered changing a story concept from a novel to a TV series or even a play in order to see if he could make an idea work. Dad never seemed to agonize over anything, yet as I explored the materials he left behind, I realized that his writing was a much more laborious process than I had ever imagined. Possibly it was a more laborious process than he would even admit to himself! Working through these mysterious fragments of stories made us all realize how much we had taken for granted.
However, as this book will show, some of his most interesting material came to a halt after a few pages or a few chapters. In some ways, this is the archive of his most ambitious work…and, of course, that is why it was difficult to write. In my opinion, what Louis was unable to complete is often more revealing than what he did complete.
Because of the unfinished nature of some of these manuscripts, I am sure that reading this book will be a frustrating experience. For many readers, I suspect two particular questions will come up over and over. I will answer them as best I can right now….
The first: “Yes. That is really where that story ended.” Sometimes materials in this book will end in the middle of a sentence or thought. Louis either knew what he was going to write next and so didn’t need to hint at what it would be, or he didn’t know what he was going to write next and he ripped the page out of the typewriter and moved on to something else.
The second: “No. With a possible few exceptions, we are not going to have anyone finish these manuscripts or otherwise change them from what you see here.” We are intentionally leaving this as the final form for many of Louis L’Amour’s unfinished materials.
I believe deeply that, at its best, fiction is a partnership or collaboration between the author and the audience. Even with a finished work, a good writer hints, suggests, and directs, but then allows the reader to complete the scene, or the character, or the plot, or the meaning of the story. Imagination is the gift that you bring to the work and there is plenty here for you to imagine. In the end, however, Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is not so much about what these treatments and fragments of stories might have been, but what they tell us about their creator.
I find myself to be content with the unknown, and recognize that what you see (or don’t see) here were the mysteries that Louis confronted too, the uncharted waters of unrealized imagination, the ideas that lurked, misty and half-formed, in the terra incognita of his mind.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Here There Be Dragons….
JEREMY LOCCARD
* * *
The First Four Chapters of a Western Horror Novel
CHAPTER I
At the top of the rise Duro Weaver pulled in his team to let them catch their wind…He pointed with his whip. “She lies right yonder, young feller, and I envy you none at all.”
The valley was several miles wide at that point, and the tiny huddle of buildings seemed lost in the vast expanse. On their left the valley narrowed into the pass, and beyond the pass lay the Mojave Desert, stretching into infinite distance.
“Twenty Mile Station they call it,” Weaver said, “and it’s a good twenty mile from the last stage stop. In any direction but along the trail it’s more’n a hundred mile to anywhere else at all.”
The mountains loomed dark and ominous in the late evening shadows. “Them mountains,” commented Weaver, “are better left alone. There’s deer in them, and bear, too. Almighty big ones…grizzlies. But that there ain’t the reason. The Injuns tell queer stories…mighty queer. You just fight shy of them.”
Jeremy Loccard shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I’ve spent most of my life at sea, and we’re used to strange stories.”
“Mebbe,” Weaver spat. He was skeptical of tales from other worlds. He preferred his own. “Mebbe so. But don’t you get to thinkin’ the West is all Injuns and fellers huntin’ gold. This here’s a strange, wild country, with queer tales aplenty.
&nbs
p; “You ever hear tell of the Frog People? Injuns got their tales about them, and they’re said to live yonder in the mountains. Or the Little People? If you figure all the ha’nts is in old castles you got another think a-comin’.
“You just walk them mountains alone. Or down in the desert yonder, an’ you’ll feel them. You’ll feel watched. Yes, sir. You surely will. You won’t see nothin’ but you’ll know they’re there.
“Somewhere around here there’s a canyon full of writin’ on the rocks…only this here is dif’rent writin’. I mean real dif’rent. No Injun will even look at it.
“A few years back some fellers I knew went off into that desert. Everybody was findin’ gold an’ these fellers decide to have a try at it theirselves. They’d heard tell of that canyon and decided there must be gold there, so they set out huntin’.
“Those who claimed to know said it was deep an’ narrow and couldn’t be seen until you stood right on the rim. Mebbe some folks couldn’t see it at all.
“One night they figured they was close, so they went into camp. Come daylight they’d scout around. Johnny Haskins…an’ I knowed him well…he was huntin’ firewood when he come on a trail. The others said it could wait until daylight, but it still lacked a mite of bein’ dark an’ Johnny was impatient. He taken off into the desert.
“Mornin’ come an’ no Johnny. They come on his tracks, but the trail petered out in the desert yonder. Johnny was gone.
“They told the story their ownselves. I never did see Johnny after, but I heard tell of him.
“He come back, all right. On the mornin’ of the fourth day they woke up to see Johnny settin’ by the fire. They seen him plain, although his back was to them. They knowed it was Johnny, all right, because he had a funny white scar right back of his ear.
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 2