Education of a Wandering Man

by Louis L'Amour

  In talking with old-timers I learned very quickly that they read books, too, or heard stories from others who had. As I had read everything they were likely to know, I could recognize the stories as they appeared. I just let them talk, telling stories about Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok (his ancestors were once tenant farmers for William Shakespeare), or the O. K. Corral. I had taken the precaution of learning the names of a couple of local characters, perhaps an old-time cowboy, a rancher, miner or whatever. After letting the old-timer have his period of talking of things of which he thought only he knew, I would bring up the local character and immediately be treated to a flood of stories and memories. Others listening would chime in with their viewpoints. When that happens, you get the real stories, not watered-down versions of what somebody believed happened.

  Nowadays, when traveling in the West, I am often told about old-timers—who usually turn out to be younger than I am—who have stories to tell. Occasionally they are stories repeated from ones their fathers or mothers told, but too often they are partially digested, often-told stories that have been well written long before.

  There are so many wonderful stories to be written, and so much material to be used. When I hear people talking of writer’s block, I am amazed.

  Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will.

  OUR TRIP TO Oklahoma was taken at a leisurely pace. There was no reason for hurry, and we all liked to see the country. Occasionally we turned off the highway to visit an old fort or a ranch. At night I was reading Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, and Livy as well. Dipping into one and then the other, I found myself wishing I had Polybius. In the past I had read from him, and liked him better, I believe, than Livy.

  I was by no means a scholar, simply an interested reader with nothing to do but live and learn, traveling through what a few years earlier had been Indian country. Driving beside trails still rutted by wagon trains, I was getting history from two aspects: that of ancient times and those just past. It was a means of putting things in perspective.

  Each people is, I believe, inclined to believe it is the purpose of history, that all that has happened is leading to now, to this world, this country. Few of us see ourselves as fleeting phantoms on a much wider screen, or that our great cities may someday be dug from the ruins by archeologists of the future.

  Surely, the citizens and the rulers of Babylon and Rome did not see themselves as a passing phase. Each in its time believed it was the end-all of the world’s progression. I have no such feeling. Each age is a day that is dying, each one a dream that is fading.

  Someday, men—or some other intelligent creatures—will stand on the sites of New York or Los Angeles and wonder if anyone ever lived there.

  We know so little of the past, and what we have discovered is largely what lies above water. Yet once, sea level was lower, and no doubt there are cities of which we know nothing that once existed there. If something were to happen now, nothing might remain of our world but the faces on Mount Rushmore or the figures on Stone Mountain, and perhaps the foundations of some of our freeways.

  Of the hundreds of plays written by Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others, we have but a few. At least two hundred plays, whose titles we know, have vanished, and if so many plays, how many books on history, medicine, or other subjects, with probably fewer copies released at the time, are missing?

  I have delved deeply into the literatures of the world, yet what is available is scarcely a dusting of what must have been. Great libraries have been destroyed, and books or manuscripts are vulnerable.

  Books as books must be preserved. There is an effort now to preserve everything by mechanical means, but of what use will they be to a man who has no power? No means of reproducing the sounds or the words? A book can be carried away and read at leisure. It needs nothing but an eye, a brain, and the ability to read.

  If in some distant future, someone should come upon the remains of a library of ours, even if he could not read, he could through illustrations rediscover much otherwise lost. He would have no machine with which to play a tape; he would have no source of power.

  In my library of some ten thousand selected books, I have the means of reproducing much of our civilization. I have the five volumes of Singer’s History of Technology, which have much on the means of construction. There are other books on the building of watercraft, books on all manner of crafts and how they were done. From there alone, if all were lost, one might start again.

  Of the value of books I am myself my best example. If it were not for books, I should never have been more than a laborer, perhaps killed in a mine disaster, as some of my friends were. Yet the books were there, I could read, and had the will to read and the persistence to keep on reading. To date I have lectured in more than forty colleges and universities, and enjoyed every minute of it. I have been able in some small way to contribute to the entertainment and perhaps the knowledge of the world.

  Actors, politicians, and writers—all of us are but creatures of the hour. Long-lasting fame comes to but few. Turning the pages of my notebooks, I see so many names, once well known, now all but forgotten.

  I am thinking of Count Hermann Keyserling, who wrote among other things The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. I have not heard his name mentioned in years, yet he wrote well and entertainingly. Another is one who considered himself the glamour boy of his time. I refer to Gabriele D’Annunzio, who wrote The Flame of Life but is probably best remembered as a lover of Eleanora Duse.

  Speaking of her, I shall repeat a story no doubt most have heard, but I love it. Sarah Bernhardt, another great actress of her time, finally got a chance to see Duse on the stage and, overcome with the greatness of the performance, wrote a very quick note to send backstage. It said: “Sarah Bernhardt says Eleanora Duse is a great actress.” Busy changing costume for the next act, Eleanora Duse had no time to compose a reply, so she picked up a pen and added two commas to the note and returned it. Now it read: “Sarah Bernhardt, says Eleanora Duse, is a great actress.”

  We stopped one night at a ranch where the people were known to me. Originally, I had come to the place riding the grub-line with a cowboy who used to work on the ranch. We had stayed, told stories, and generally enjoyed ourselves, so I thought we would stop by and say hello. My father, who was a veterinarian, took time out to fix the teeth on a couple of horses at the ranch, and in the evening, as we sat on the porch, I happened to comment that an uncle of mine by marriage had known Butch Cassidy.

  The rancher commented that Butch had been through not long before, driving a Dodge, and had swapped a couple of tires for a saddle.

  Butch was supposed to have been killed in South America but a lot of people in Utah and Wyoming knew better.

  Butch had always been a cheerful, friendly man and nobody was ever killed in a holdup in this country in which he was involved. Having been a working cowboy himself, he understood his people. Most cowboys and many others would cheerfully join a posse for the fun of it, and would pursue an outlaw not too closely, but if that outlaw had killed a man with a family, it was a different story, and it was no longer a chase for fun. Yet even the officers who pursued Butch liked him personally. If he had enemies other than the Pinkertons, I have never heard of them.

  After the others had gone to bed, I sat up by a coal-oil lamp reading of the decline of Hannibal’s fortunes, from his great victory at Cannae to his defeat at Zama. At the critical time when Hannibal might have destroyed the power of Rome, the peace party in Carthage refused support, and he was eventually defeated and Carthage destroyed.

  When I finished the chapter I was reading, I remember walking out on the porch and sitting there in the darkness, listening to the coyotes talking to the moon. It was dark and still, the voices of the coyotes seeming to emphasize the silence. I remember sitting there for a long time, thinking of what I had
read and of the many wagons that had passed this way bound for California and Oregon.

  Livy, I had read before, and a bit of Mommsen, but I had only dipped into Tacitus. I was not to read him until, during World War II, a lovely young lady sent me, at my request, a copy of the Modern Library edition. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall I had read in pieces here and there but never the entire work, but I would soon. Rome was interesting to me not only for its own exciting history but because of its great contributions to law, organization, and the civilizing of Europe. Even during the dark days of Nero and Caligula, the Roman Empire was governed well. The terrors they brought were largely spent on their associates at court; the administration in the provinces was only slightly affected, if at all.

  Further along on that trip I read a volume of poetry by Swinburne, Castle Gay by John Buchan, and The Prince by Machiavelli. My father was driving, and often when we’d be passing through a wide-open area where there was not much new to see, I would read while riding. Many times I read aloud, as I was to do later when traveling with my children. We always had a book going.

  Behind me lay many cities, many seaport towns, many men of all kinds whom I had met and known. Reading the Odyssey by Homer, I often thought how like some of his characters were men whom I had met. As I have said elsewhere, there is a kinship between men who have lived in the dynamic periods of history, and Achilles or Ajax would have been perfectly at home at the Alamo or the Battle of Adobe Walls, and Davy Crockett or Jim Bowie could have walked a quarter-deck beside Ulysses or Sir Francis Drake. All were men of action and of driving ambition and would have understood one another with no problem.

  We arrived at last at a small white house in Oklahoma, seated on ten acres of land that soon became twenty, part of it in blackjack (a kind of scrub oak) and badly scarred by erosion.

  My intention was to see my parents settled and then go on to New Orleans and the sea. It was still in my mind to work for a Third Mate’s ticket and stay at sea until I had written a book or two.

  It was not to be. I had no way of knowing I had reached a destination, and when I left there at last, all was changed and my life was well set on the course it was to follow until now.

  We unpacked and walked out to look at the land. In the worst of the eroded gullies, we packed some old barbed wire and some dead branches to catch and hold debris during the rains, built a few small dams, and started planting trees—mostly plum trees, as I recall.

  We had two horses on the place and one of them took to following me like a puppy, especially when I was rabbit hunting. Killing rabbits was almost the price of survival if one wished to raise a garden, either of vegetables or of flowers. I had a .22 rifle and had always been a good shot. I preferred using a pistol but I noticed that our neighbors looked on me with some suspicion when I wore the pistol, but not when I carried the rifle. My small war against the rabbits was as much for the neighbors as for ourselves. It was a war I never won, but I did reduce the odds.

  The Great Depression was in full swing and there was no market for produce. People were living on what they could raise, and although many were good farmers, their crops often rotted in the fields. Several times I went away, to fight in various towns or to make a brief trip to sea, always returning, for I had settled down to become a writer.

  For years I had written, publishing a bit of poetry for no pay, contributing an article or two to newspapers, writing a few boxing stories (like the one in Klamath Falls, written for two girl reporters who had never seen a fight). I had always been able to put words together in a readable fashion. I did not know what a story was, although, like everybody else, I believed I did.

  My brother had been sent an advance copy of Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen, and I wrote a review of it and sent it to the Sunday Oklahoman. As I mentioned earlier, the book editor was Kenneth C. Kaufman, a professor of romance languages at the University of Oklahoma. He was also one of the editors of Books Abroad, an international quarterly that reviewed books in several languages. Kaufman published the review, in which I predicted the success of Anthony Adverse, and later sent me two more books for review, one of which was The Memoirs of Vincent Nolte, a real character who was Anthony’s good friend in the novel. It has proved to be a very valuable source book for me, also.

  In the meanwhile I had read a number of plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Molnar, and Robert E. Sherwood, as well as the novels The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Penguin Island by Anatole France, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and a half-dozen books by Gustave Flaubert, including Madame Bovary. Slowly, I was learning what had been written and how writers approached their various subjects, while always I was trying to get my own work published, first with poetry, then with articles and stories. But they got nowhere at all.

  There was a steady flow of rejection slips. Once in a while, a handwritten word, Sorry, appeared on the slip. I was grateful for even that bit of attention.

  My secret was that no sooner did I put something in the mail than I wrote something else and sent it off. Each rejection was cushioned by my expectations for the other manuscripts. Too many writers put their all into one script, and when it is rejected they are devastated.

  Having no rhyming dictionary, I made one myself in a small notebook, on the back pages, while on the reverse side I listed my submissions and their fate. The notebook shows page after page of rejections with, after a while, an occasional acceptance from one of the little magazines that did not pay for material. There were then, as now, a number of such ventures, some of them published at universities, some by daring individuals with little capital and much hope.

  Often the magazines faded into the sunset before they got beyond the wishful stages, and my work faded with them—which, as I remember some of it, was just as well.

  In the meanwhile I continued my defensive war against the rabbits, faithfully followed by our horse, who would hang his head over my shoulder and, when I fired, would run forward, smell the dead rabbit, toss his head and roll his eyes, but follow me eagerly when I went out again.

  *

  Thoughts are like flowers; those gathered in the morning keep fresh the longest.

  —ANDRÉ GIDE

  *

  MUCH OF THE first poetry I wrote was composed while walking in the evening, looking for rabbits but not really hunting. If a rabbit was so unfortunate as to come my way, that was one thing, but I was not looking. The evenings were quiet, twilight lasted, and it was pleasant walking along the country road (at that time unpaved).

  About a quarter of a mile from our house, perhaps a bit more, there was a larger house setting not far from the main road. On this evening as I came along, a farmer was picketing a calf on the grass in front of the house. I greeted him and stopped to pass the time of day. Noticing a book in my pocket, he asked what it was.

  Earlier, I had been reading Charles Baudelaire’s Poems and Prose in a limp cloth edition and when I started on my walk simply thrust it in my back pocket. That led us to a discussion of books and reading, and I found the man, whose name was Gillespie, a very erudite gentleman with a face that reminded me of pictures of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  If I remember correctly I believe he told me he had been one of the editors of the Kansas Socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason. At least there had been some connection. As he grew older he had moved a little more to the right side of the political spectrum, but not much.

  He invited me in, and we sat down in the living room of the old house. I looked around. Obviously he was a bachelor and not too concerned with housekeeping. A couple of old coats hung from a hook on the wall, some crinkled boots lay on their sides, but there was a good table, a fine lamp, and several bookshelves overcrowded with books, as mine always are.

  He had Karl Marx’s Capital, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a volume by the English economist David Ricardo (the title of which escapes me), along with much poetry and history.

  During subsequent months we were to have many long c
onversations on books, writers, history, and all subjects pertaining to any of them. He was a gentle, thoughtful man, a pipe smoker and a good farmer who gave most of his produce away.

  On that first visit I borrowed from him History of the Intellectual Development of Europe in two volumes by John W. Draper, a very good history that deserves more attention than it ever received. It was in his home, too, that I first encountered the Introduction to The History of Civilization in England by Henry Buckle, and later borrowed and read the first volume of a two-volume The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon.

  About that time I read Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay, one of several very good black poets being published then.

  I also read books by Lion Feuchtwanger, D. H. Lawrence, Maxim Gorky, Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Freud, by Molière, France, Turgenev, Victor Hugo, Wilde, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, George Eliot, and Goethe.

  Aside from Gillespie, we had no close friends among our neighbors. We knew a few of them but there was no visiting. From time to time, I heard rumors that many thought I should be out rustling for a job instead of staying at home. Every day I put in hours at the typewriter but, aside from Gillespie, these were not people to take that seriously.

  There were in the nearby town several young men who devoted their time to sitting along the curb and drinking an occasional beer. They did not know me except that I came to town, mailed manuscripts, and drank coffee. A druggist from whom I bought magazines warned me once that I should be careful.

  The warning was not needed, for I had been a stranger in too many towns not to read their faces, but I had also sized them up pretty well. They were loafers and talkers, soft around the middle, probably knowing little enough about fighting, and I was not worried. Aside from the boxing I had done, I had served my time in mining and lumber-camp fights and in some brutal waterfront fighting, where utter savagery is the rule, so I was not disturbed.

  Having lived and worked here and overseas, I knew they were not equipped for the kind of fighting I understood. (Karate and kung fu, incidentally, were relatively unknown in this country before World War II and the Korean War. At that time many G.I.’s learned something of the martial arts and brought them home.) Those of us who had lived along the waterfronts of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taku Bar, Singapore, and other such places had picked up a bit here and there. None of us would have qualified for a black belt, although two brothers who gave me instruction at one time were masters, not only of the above martial arts but of several others no longer taught. Unfortunately many of the Oriental masters kept their secrets to themselves or for special students, and if one died, his knowledge might be lost forever.