We recently reviewed a graphic novel
based on the work of Louis L’Amour
(1908-1988), and we have certainly read many of his novels in the past. But … we knew precious little about the man
himself. So, it was a delight to come
across his memoir, Education of a
Wandering Man, revised and published in 1989. It is a remarkable book.
It puts us in mind of the old
Chinese legend about tests: the student sits down and simply writes down everything he knows. L’Amour doesn’t quite do that, but he does
create a fascinating account of his own intellectual development, and his deep
and passionate engagement with reading.
If you are at all interested in the effect that reading has, and what a
tool it can be to enlightenment, then certainly read this fascinating book.
L’Amour’s engagement with reading in
his early life is not surprising when one looks at his major characters. The typical L'Amour hero was a strapping
young man in his late teens or early 20's, a romantic, nomadic figure dedicated
to self-improvement. His character Tell Sackett carried law books in his
saddlebags; Bendigo Shafter read Montaigne, Plutarch and Thoreau; and Drake
Morrel, a one-time riverboat gambler, read Juvenal in the original Latin.
Much like L’Amour, himself.
L’Amour looked like one of his own literary
creations – big, ruggedly handsome and self-contained. He was born Louis Dearborn L'Amour on March
22, 1908, in Jamestown, ND. He was a son of a veterinarian who doubled as a
farm-machinery salesman, grandson of a Civil War veteran and great-grandson of
a settler who had been scalped by Sioux warriors.
He quit school at 15, roaming the
West working as a miner, rancher and lumberjack before taking off for the Far
East as a seaman. By the time he was 20, he had skinned cattle in Texas, lived
with bandits in Tibet and worked on an East African schooner. He managed to survive a walk through Death
Valley on his own with little water, and rode the rails as a hobo. He worked as a longshoreman, a lumberjack, an
elephant handler, a fruit picker and an officer on a tank destroyer in World War
II. He had also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea,
been shipwrecked in the West Indies and been stranded in the Mojave Desert, and
won 51 of 59 fights as a professional boxer.
And all the time he was on the road, he was reading: Shakespeare, Byron,
Wilde, Ibsen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Sheridan, Bacon, Tolstoy … and many, many
others too numerous to mention. L’Amour
provides his reading list during the period at the end of the book and,
frankly, it made me deeply ashamed of my own profound failings as a reader.
I
read Balzac, Victor Hugo and Dumas before I ever read Zane Grey, he said in an interview. His first book was not a Western, but a collection
of poems, published in 1939. But despite
his immense erudition, L’Amour could not reconcile the disdain the literary
elite had (and has) for novels about the Western experience. If you
write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River,
then it's a historical novel. If it's
west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense
to it.
Here is L’Amour writing about
talking to people of the Old West during his wanderings in the 1930s: Yet
there was no better time to learn about what the West had actually been. Many of those who lived it were still alive,
and as the years of their future grew fewer, they were more willing to talk of
what had been. Old feuds were largely
forgotten, and time had given the past an aura.
The
old cowboy might appear to be as dry as dust, he might scoff at some of the
stories, but he was a figure of romance in his own mind (although he would
never have admitted it) or he would not have become a cowboy in the first
place. As the years slipped away, he
began to want to tell his stories, and I was often there, a willing listener,
knowing enough to sift the truth from the romance.
In
every town there was at least one former outlaw or gunfighter, an old Indian
scout or a wagon master, and each with many stories ready to tell.
One
story engendered another, and sitting on a bench in front of a store I’d tell
of something I knew or had heard and would often get a story in return,
sometimes a correction. The men and
woman who lived the pioneer life did not suddenly disappear; they drifted down
the years, a rugged, proud people who had met adversity and survived. Once, many years later, I was asked in a television
interview what was the one quality that distinguished them, and I did not come
up with the answer I wanted. Later, when
I in the hotel alone, it came to me.
Dignity.
This is great stuff, one step
removed from prose poetry. We here at
the Jade Sphinx (having recently moved our own library from the East to West
Coast), sympathize with L’Amour’s acute bibliomania: A
wanderer I had been through most of my early years, and now that I had my own
home, my wandering continued, but among books.
No longer could I find most of the books I wanted in libraries. I had to seek them out in foreign or
secondhand bookstores, which was a pleasure in itself. When seeking books, one always comes upon
unexpected treasures or books on subjects that one has never heard of, or heard
mentioned only in passing.
Now
I know what I wished to learn and could direct my education with more
intelligence.
Slowly
I began to place on my shelves the books I wanted. When the shelves were first installed, one
workman doubted they would ever be filled, yet a few years later they were
crammed with books, filling every available niche.
What I find most refreshing here is
L’Amour’s own determination to educate himself, his active engagement with his
own intellectual development, and for the breadth of his knowledge. Here is a wonderfully prescient passage: If we had only Greenwich Village as an
example, it would tell us nothing of the rest of America, yet often one
discovers a writer, or several of them, giving just such a narrow picture. One should tread warily when using the
life-style of any group as an example of the thinking or practice of a people.
This is a warm, wise and essential
book. Highly recommended.
