Such books offer a valuable insight into social life as well as traveling conditions, the food being eaten, and what was imbibed in the taverns.
In re-creating the life of a time, it has always been my way to find the best possible sources—first person, if possible. There are many books of memoirs written by travelers, soldiers, sailors, merchants, and others which, if sought out, offer excellent pictures of their times.
One that I have found valuable as well as interesting is The Memoirs of Vincent Nolte, which was also one of the source books for Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, the first book I ever reviewed. The review was written for the Sunday Oklahoman of Oklahoma City when Professor Kenneth C. Kaufman was the book editor.
The Seamen’s Institute was an education in itself, and some of the most remarkable characters I have ever known I first met there. One, whom we called Old Doc Yak after a comic-strip character of the time, inspired a short story I was to write and publish many years later. Another story of mine grew out of the checkers games that were a regular feature of the place.
There was an old longshoreman who came nearly every night to play. He was a thorough student of the game and had memorized all the plays in the books. He played using bottle tops for his “men” and disdained any but a few who had proved themselves able to give him a contest. One of these was Oriental Slim, a particular friend of mine. Another was a marine engineer. Either of these might beat him on occasion, but the occasions were rare.
Then came Sleeth, a slim, dark man with a fantastic head for figures. I’ve seen him stand beside the tracks and memorize the numbers on the boxcars as they rolled by, and be able to repeat them in order. They always checked out.
Sleeth was ignored at first when he suggested a game with the old man, but after he beat Oriental Slim, he was considered a likely candidate. What followed was cruel, although not intentionally so.
Checkers was more than a game to the old longshoreman. It was his life, his very reason for being, and he was proud of his skill. Each move was studied with care and made only after much thought. Sleeth would carry on a conversation with bystanders, and as soon as the old man had made his move, he would, with scarcely a glance at the board, make his move.
And he would win every time.
Perhaps the sudden moves shook the old man’s confidence. Perhaps the conversation did. After a few such games, the old man did not come back to the Seamen’s Institute. Sleeth, like most of us, was a bird of passage, and soon he was gone too.
Often I would sit by the window in the game room and watch them, these men who came and went to and from all the seaports of the world. Every one was a character, and every one had a story. Some day I would write some of those stories, but at the time I was just another seaman on the beach, waiting for a ship.
And then one morning about four o’clock, I shipped off the dock on a freighter bound for the Far East. I took what used to be called, in sailing-ship days, a “pier-head jump,” signing on in the First Mate’s quarters by a dim light over his desk.
Back in the reading room of the Seamen’s Institute, I left a couple of good books unfinished.
UNFORTUNATELY, IN most of our schools the history of Europe and North America is taught as if it were the history of the world. The rest of the world is referred to only when Europeans or Americans were invading or trading. There has recently been a small change for the better but not nearly enough.
Not long ago, a distinguished historian was speculating on why all the great voyages of discovery began in Europe—which, of course, is not at all true. However, aside from the Viking voyages, which explored northern waters, most European exploratory ventures were toward the Far East.
The reasons were obvious. The riches of the Indies were known and had been known for centuries, and everybody was striving for easier access or a route they could control. Europe wanted the silks and spices of Asia, while Europe had nothing at all Asia wanted. Europe’s only exportable item at the time was religion, and Asia certainly did not lack for religions of her own.
The fact of the matter is that Asiatic waters had been explored very thoroughly by her own people, and a lively trade was conducted from northern China to Africa and all points between, often with larger ships than any sailing European waters. The Buddhist Jatakas speak of many voyages, and although the stories of Sinbad are fabulous, in many cases the islands and ports in his stories can be identified.
During the Vietnam War era, people were led into all sorts of foolishness by simple ignorance of a part of the world strange to them. Many believed that North and South Vietnam were one country divided, but such was never the case except briefly under French administration.
North Vietnam had originally been two countries, Annam and Tonkin, and their civilization derived largely from China. South Vietnam had formerly been known as Champa, and, like Cambodia’s, its civilization came from India. Before France moved into the situation, the two countries had been fighting for nearly two thousand years.
Champa had always been a rich agricultural region, its bountiful crops a challenge to less fertile northern countries. Both Annam and Tonkin, usually with assistance from China, had attempted to dominate Champa. The Vietnam War was simply another move in the same continuing effort.
A very good book on the history of the area is D.G.E. Hall’s A History of Southeast Asia, although there are a number of other good ones.
Acquiring an education has many aspects, of which school is only one, and the present approach is, I believe, the wrong one. Without claiming to have all the answers, I can only express my feeling that our methods of instruction do much to hamper a child in learning. Our approach is pedestrian. We teach a child to creep when he should be running; education becomes a task rather than excitement. Yet each of us can remember one or two teachers who made learning an adventure, which it surely is.
Personally, I believe children should be taught to see, to observe, and to subject what they have seen to analysis, and this in the earliest grades. Very young children will often learn a difficult subject easily unless someone tells them it is “hard.” To me it also seems obvious that a child should be taught some methods of reasoning, methods of scientific investigation. Children have an innate feeling for logic and, given the opportunity, would learn quickly.
Such instruction would be unthinkable in any country not a democracy, and if carried out in a democracy it might clear the air of a lot of loose thinking, loose public speaking, and the kind of questionable statements that fill the air during political and other campaigns. The first generation of parents who had such children would have a difficult time but would find their own thinking undergoing drastic change.
We do not at present educate people to think but, rather, to have opinions, and that is something altogether different. Many of the political ideas that have disturbed the world in the past fifty years could not exist in such an atmosphere.
Often I am asked if I would recommend my way of learning to others. I certainly would not. A young man once asked me that question and I told him that the first time he read fifty nonfiction books for fun, in one year, he could think about it. Most students require the disciplined atmosphere, the academic setting, and the guidance a good school can offer. The association and exchange of ideas are important also.
My way was suited to me. I have never been very good at taking instruction. I enjoy lectures, and have attended many, but mostly I prefer the quiet of a library and the freedom to go off in any direction that pleases me.
What I have learned is only a modest amount of what I should like to have learned, and I have read few books that I could not read again with profit, but there have been only a few to which I have returned.
I have never had to strive to graduate, never to earn a degree. The only degrees I have are honorary, and I am proud to have them. I studied purely for the love of learning, wanting to know and understand. For a writer, of course, everything is grist for the mill, and a writer cannot know too
much. Sooner or later everything he does know will find its uses.
A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in first.
I have studied a thousand things I never expected to use in a story, yet every once in a while these things will find a place.
I have read because I loved reading, and I have learned because I loved learning, yet all one needs cannot come from books. It can come from sounds, from music, from the play of light and shadow, from the people one meets or those one does not meet.
Much of my background reading has been in diaries written by westward-moving people, or in memoirs by people from this country and others. What I want to know is how people were living, what they were thinking, how they expressed themselves. One problem with some recent western movies is that the writer or director has tried to impose a late-twentieth-century viewpoint on a nineteenth-century situation, and it won’t work. A person or a situation can only be understood against the background of its own time.
One of the best pieces of writing about the American frontier is Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem The Ballad of William Sycamore. His American Names is another good example, the poem ending with that beautiful line which has since been used as a book title, “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.”
Benét is, without doubt, one of the very best American writers, best known perhaps for his John Brown’s Body, but many of his short stories about America and elsewhere cannot be surpassed. For example, “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” “A Tooth for Paul Revere,” and “Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer” capture a wonderful mood of a time now gone, which he invests with a quality all his own. Another Benét story, The Last Legion, tells of a time in ancient Britain when the legions of Rome were finally leaving that island, abandoning it to the invading barbarians.
William Rose Benét, who wrote much fine poetry (and was brother to Stephen), is responsible for a great favorite of mine, a poem I often read to my children, “The Skater of Ghost Lake.” His Merchants from Cathay is a delight.
Another favorite poem is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party.” This one I also often recited, after learning it by many rereadings. One must understand when I speak of reciting that I was doing this around campfires, in bunkhouses, and such places. I have no skills at performance, only a good memory. Such audiences are not inclined to be critical, but I often found a high level of appreciation among them, and many times requests would be made for poems by Wordsworth, Byron, or Tennyson, to name only a few.
Wandering men have always had a love for poetry, perhaps in part because it can be easily memorized and provide company on many a cold and lonely night. Wars also give birth to poetry written by the combatants, and the sale of poetry books goes up during most wars.
Often when standing lookout in the ship’s bow, I whiled away the time by repeating poetry that I had learned back along the way or, even more often, trying to compose some of my own. At the time I knew nothing of the various verse forms and would not have recognized an iambic pentameter if we had come face to face on the street. All I had going for me at the time was a feeling for rhythm and a love for words.
The writing of poetry is rarely an easy thing, although once in a while everything will fall into place. Poe, I believe, needed four years to complete the final version of “The Raven.” Of course, he was doing much else at the time. Goethe’s Faust was begun in 1808; the second part did not appear until 1832.
When I first began writing and was unable to sell a short story, I wrote anything I could sell for a few dollars: two-line jokes, jingles, small bits of poetry or verse, mostly nature pieces. But those days were still far off and away when I shipped out of San Pedro for the Far East.
The roads to knowledge are many. One of the greatest for me began in a very unexpected way. We were coming up to the mouth of a jungle river and there were scattered islets in the approaches. On one of these I saw what appeared to be an interesting ruin and later, when I had some time, I hired a boy with a boat to sail me out there.
The ruin was not interesting, but the boy was. He wore a turban, a baju (short jacket), and a sarong, and was, he told me, an Arab.
Surprised, I asked him how an Arab happened to be in what was then the East Indies and is now Indonesia. He gave me an odd look, then replied that Arabs had been in those islands for four hundred years. Determined to overcome my ignorance (which was probably shared by many educated Westerners), I plied him with questions. He could answer only a few, but he had opened wide a door that never closed and led to years of exciting reading and much speculation.
Nobody aboard ship knew anything about the settlement of this part of the world, until one night at the wheel I mentioned it to the Second Mate. He remembered a book on the subject by an author named Warmington. Years later I found the book and it now sits on the shelves of my library.
I think the greatest gift anyone can give to another is the desire to know, to understand. Life is not for simply watching spectator sports, or for taking part in them; it is not for simply living from one working day to the next. Life is for delving, discovering, learning. Today, one can sit in the comfort of his own home and explore any part of the world or even outer space through books. They are all around us, offering such riches as can scarcely be believed. Also, I might add, having done both, it is better to sit in comfort with a cold drink at hand and read the tale than to actually walk out of the Mohave Desert as I did.
The armchair adventurer has all the advantages, believe me. As I have said elsewhere, and more than once, I believe adventure is nothing but a romantic name for trouble.
What people speak of as adventure is something nobody in his right mind would seek out, and it becomes romantic only when one is safely at home. It is much better to watch someone riding a camel across a desert on a movie screen than it is to be up on the camel’s back, traveling at a pace of two and a half to three miles per hour through a blazing hot day with the sand blowing.
A beachcomber we picked up in Shanghai, as we were short of hands, a man we knew as Russian Joe Smith (though I don’t believe he was Russian, Joe, or Smith), proved unexpectedly helpful. He had come aboard with some of his gear and I was showing him where he would bunk and telling him a little about the setup. He noticed some books on my bunk and asked, “What’s them?”
“Just some stuff I’ve been reading,” I told him.
“You like books? I’ll bring you some.”
To be honest, I was not expecting much, as Joe was obviously a rough character whose reading was probably confined to the sports pages or crime news of the daily paper, yet I was surprised when he showed up with two well-worn volumes by George Borrow, Lavengro and Romany Rye. The two books are an account of Borrow’s time among the Gypsies and what he learned there, and I was delighted.
“There’s more,” he said. “Once I leave they’re for grabs.”
Smith’s story was a sordid one. He had jumped ship at Taku Bar in northern China, and had been on the beach there as well as in Shanghai. In the latter place he had picked up an alcoholic woman in a bar and she had taken him home. Apparently they had cared for each other for several months. She was an educated, intelligent woman whose husband, distressed by her drinking, had gone away into western China with no intention of returning. He had taken everything but about thirty books. Just one week before I met Joe, she had died, and her relatives showed up, ordering Joe off the premises. As it happened, he had paid her rent for the past two months. So he simply gathered everything of hers that was worth anything and left.
“Had money coming to her,” Joe said. “They couldn’t have cared less while she was alive.” He glanced at me. “She was too good a woman for me, educated and all that, but she liked me an’ I took care of her.”
“Were you working? How did you pay the rent?”
“Panhandled. You ask a man for the price of a meal in Shanghai and he’s so surprised to see an American on his uppe
rs that he’ll give you fifty bucks, maybe. I know guys on the beach here who can panhandle enough in one day to keep them drunk for a month.
“All the jobs I could do were done cheaper by the Chinese, but I didn’t want to leave her, she being alone like that.
“I’m goin’ back one more time and I’ll bring some of those books.”
When he returned he brought twelve books, all he could carry with his own gear. Of the dozen, I recall but three titles: The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter; To Have and to Hold by Mary Johnston; and one I have read several times since, and which for me was a real discovery.
It was Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad.
*
Whoever would make of himself a distinctive individual must be keen to perceive what he is not.
—FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER
*
ONLY ONE WHO has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
He knows so well the limits of his knowledge and how much lies waiting to be learned.
What had men thought? What had men believed? How did they come by those thoughts and beliefs? How had men learned to govern themselves? Were the processes the same everywhere?
Did man build cities because of an inner drive, like that of the beaver to build dams? How much of what we do is free will, and how much programmed in our genes? Why is each people so narrow that it believes that it, and it alone, has all the answers? In religion, is there but one road to salvation? Or are there many, all equally good, all going in the same general direction?
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read.
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