Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) Read online

  Education Of A Wandering Man

  L’amour, Louis

  *

  We Are Often Told That We Are What We Eat. In Our World Since The Printing Press It Might Be More Accurate To Say We Are What we read. How each of us digests what we read is a mystery. And what people really read is sometimes as puzzling as what they really think.

  This book tells a surprising tale of the reading of the beloved best-selling writer Louis L’Amour. For his shaping wandering years were years of reading. When he left school in the tenth grade he began an earnest self-education stirred by a passion for books. These early working and wandering years, which took him around the world, were filled with days and nights reading. And with books happily encountered on shipboard or in the cabin of a mining camp, in Sumatra or on the China coast.

  He was a lone reader but somehow never felt lonely in the company of a book. This account of his reading reminds us that little of it was done in the company of other readers, or fellow students, or with the promise, which we enjoy in settled literary company, of a lively bookish conversation. He must have been an especially vigorous self-starter and an imaginative self-rewarder.

  There are quite a few surprises here for those who have only read his books but did not have the good fortune to know the lovable man himself. Anyone who visited Louis in his spacious study with its sixteen-foot-high ceiling with walls of specially designed bookshelves will not be surprised. For the bookshelves that Louis designed were much like the man himself. Each tall row of shelves made a kind of book-covered door that could be swung open to reveal another sixteen-foot set of book-filled shelves fixed to the wall behind. Louis was a modest man, slow to reveal what he really knew.

  While many of us are tempted to pretend to have read what we think we should have read, Louis was not that way. For most of us Mark Twain’s definition of a classic—“a book which people praise and don’t read”—is accurate enough. But certainly not for Louis. In conversation he was frequently reaching for the name of the author of that book that told him something which might interest you too. Louis had a prodigious memory, which usually brought up the full correct name of the author, the title of the work, how many volumes of it there were, and often even the date of publication. Many of his vivid memories were of multivolume works like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Sansom’s History of Japan.

  Not a gourmet reader, Louis was blessed with an insatiable literary appetite. He had a natural preference for books that had stood the test of time. His memory was so well stocked that he delighted in returning to browse in books that were rich in association with where he had first met them. He explains here that he does not write about sex because it is only “a leisure activity” while “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.” Although this kindly man found it hard to express distaste or lack of sympathy for anybody, he was troubled by what seemed to him the sexual obsessions and aberrations of our time. An indefatigable, skilled storyteller, he delighted in the broad effervescent currents of experinence, he remained untinged by the ambiguities of much that he read, and he kept his own values undented.

  Perhaps one reason why his book-memories were so vivid was that once his early “yondering years” were over, he traveled abroad very little.

  Still, he remained an avid reader. Jealous of any time not used for writing, he luxuriated within his walls of books. His remarkable memory left him little need to refresh himself about details. As he writes in this volume, he could call up exotic places he had visited or read about without revisiting. But for three weeks each summer he would reexplore with his family some Western lands, probably as much for love of the landscape as for any other reason. He had seen and done so much during those early years chronicled here that we can understand why he might have feared that another trip would be anticlimatic, or even dull some sharp early memories.

  A few years ago when I was at work on The Discoverers and trying to learn about Marco Polo, among others, I told Louis what I was about. At the time he was working on The Walking Drum and he came up at once with an astonishingly fluent and accurate critical bibliography—on the strengths and weaknesses of Yule’s edition of the Travels and of the later books on Marco Polo. Then I had the pleasure of seeing his ample, well-thumbed collection of Marco Poliana neatly shelved on the walls of his study.

  Still, as this volume reveals, Louis was anything but a systematic reader. A spec-tacularly serendipitous reader, he enlists us in the joys of random reading—from Schliermacher’s Soliloquies, Boswell’s Johnson, Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals, Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, Gregg’s Commerce of the Prairies to Roger Baldwin’s Liberty under the Soviets—with an occasional dip into George Santayana, Joseph Conrad, and Rabindranath Tagore and some frolics by the way in Baudelaire’s poems, Claude McKaye’s Harlem Shadows, Frank Dobie’s Longhorns, Polybius’ histories, and Voltaire’s Candide. Good, bad, or indifferent, fiction or nonfiction, classic or ephemera—all were grist for his mill! But unlike many self-educated men and other good storytellers, Louis was a good listener, as eager to learn from the spoken as from the printed word.

  Obviously there are advantages to programmed reading that cannot be secured in any other way. Louis, by force of circumstances and from a passion for books, sought and found other advantages. He enjoyed and was stirred by countless unprogrammed juxtapositions—the fate of the Incas and of the Roman Empire, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Jack London’s tales and Plato’s dialogues. He could quote Robert W.

  Service and William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Oscar Wilde in the same breath. For he was utterly without intellectual snobbery or cultural pretensions.

  So Louis never worried about whether a book “fitted in” to his reading program.

  To be a book gave it dignity enough—a claim on his time and attention, and on his patience for the author’s weaknesses.

  The love of books made him—like any other lover—sometimes excessively charitable to his authors. And this, too, made him rare among copious readers. In this volume you will find enthusiasm, excitement, and gratitude to the whole miscellany of authors ancient and modern, East and West. That was Louis’s way —to find or squeeze something of value from every printed page.

  He was lucky in his times. It happened that the 1930’s, which he chronicles in this volume, was an especially fertile time for American publishing—F. N. Doubleday, Max Schuster, Alfred Knopf, Bennett Cerf, among others, not to mention the Haldeman Julius little blueback books and the Modern Library. The Book-of-the-Month Club and The Literary Guild and others were disseminating good books in new ways, the Great Books were filtering down. It was an age of serious best sellers, a good age for desultory reading.

  Louis gives us a lesson—too seldom offered by academic or professional critics —in open-mindedness and literary charity. And he encourages us, too, to become Wandering Readers, joining his search for the joys and surprises in the pages of books.

  *

  It was May 14. In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore.

  The date is one of the few I know from those knockab years, simply because I had the good sense to write it on the inside cover of a book I bought at the shop of Muhammed Dulfakir on the corner of High Street.

  The book was Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, and my reason for buying it was that I had forgotten a line or two from a poem I liked to recite, “The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding House.”

  During those years I often recited poetry in bunkhouses in mining
or lumber camps, and in ship’s fo’c’sles. It was usually the verse of Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling, but there was a lot of poetry floating around written for, and often by, the kind of men we were, occasionally printed but usually passed from memory to memory.

  On that day several of my shipmates had gathered around a table or two in the Maypole Bar, a place no doubt long forgotten. Such men as “Hans, the blue-eyed Dane” of Kipling’s poem would have known it, and probably British soldiers stationed in town. It was a nondescript bar, convenient to the waterfront.

  This is not the story of how I came to be in Singapore. That will be told elsewhere. This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions. The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

  Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week’s supply of gasoline.

  Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?

  Byron’s Don Juan I read on an Arab dhow sailing north from Aden up the Red Sea to Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson I read while broke and on the beach in San Pedro. In Singapore, I came upon a copy of The Annals and Antiquities of Rajahstan by James Tod. It was in the library of a sort of YMCA for seamen, the name of which I’ve forgotten but which any British sailor of the time would remember, for the British had established them in many ports, for sailors ashore.

  At that time I could no more than skim the James Tod book, reading only a few chapters before I was off to sea again. But a few years ago I located a secondhand copy in a bookstore in Greenwich Village and it now rests on a shelf in my own library, a source for several planned books.

  A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

  My life may not be great to others, but to me it has been one of steady progression, never dull, often exciting, often hungry, tired, and lonely, but always learning. Somewhere back down the years I decided, or my nature decided for me, that I would be a teller of stories.

  Decisions had to be made and there was nobody but me to make them. My course altered a number of times but never deviated from the destination I had decided upon. Whether this was altogether a matter of choice I do not know. Perhaps my early reading and the storytelling at home had preconditioned me for the role I adopted.

  Somewhere along the line I had fallen in love with learning, and it became a lifelong romance. Early on I discovered it was fun to follow along the byways of history to find those treasures that await any searcher.

  It may be that all later decisions followed naturally from that first one.

  One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.

  And there have been many such.

  Right here I wish to say that what follows is not an autobiography, although no doubt these materials are a piece of the final picture, which I hope to undertake later.

  As can be guessed from the title, this book is about education, but not education in the accepted sense.

  No man or woman has a greater appreciation for schools than I, although few have spent less time in them. No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.

  If I were asked what education should give, I would say it should offer breadth of view, ease of understanding, tolerance for others, and a background from which the mind can explore in any direction.

  Education should provide the tools for a widening and deepening of life, for increased appreciation of all one sees or experiences. It should equip a person to live life well, to understand what is happening about him, for to live life well one must live with awareness.

  No one can “get” an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.

  If it does nothing else, it should provide students with the tools for learning, acquaint them with methods of study and research, methods of pursuing an idea. We can only hope they come upon an idea they wish to pursue.

  In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.

  Education depends on the quality of the teacher, not the site or beauty of the buildings— nor, I might add, does it depend on the winning record of the football team, and I like football.

  It is constantly reiterated that education begins in the home, as indeed it does, but what is often forgotten is that morality begins in the home also.

  It also begins in the car seat, where many a budding criminal career is born when the child not only watches his parent repeatedly break traffic laws, but hears him lie about it when caught. The example is not, supposedly, expected to influence the child.

  My own education, which is the one I know most about, has been haphazard, a hit-and-miss affair that was and continues to be thoroughly delightful.

  I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning.

  When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.

  Due to circumstances, it was essential that I go to work and try to support myself. This was no sacrifice, for it had been uppermost in my mind for some time. Several factors contributed to my discontent.

  My first job was as messenger boy for the Western Union, a good job for a boy in my hometown. I got the job when I was twelve, and it was in the telegraph office that I first began to type. I cannot say that I learned to type—I began with two fingers and work with them still. It has been called the hunt-and-peck system, but over the years my fingers have become so used to the typewriter that I hunt very little and peck a lot.

  Also, I was growing rapidly. At twelve I was the size of most other boys; at thirteen and a half I was my present height, which is six feet and one inch. The very effort of growing left me often tired. Through the first six grades my own grades were good, always at the top or close to the top. As a matter of fact, I was usually second, third, or fourfor in the class, except in math. In my sixth grade, where we had a teacher who loved math, I several times made an A, or what corresponded to it.

  Moving into the seventh grade, I discovered I had several compulsory subjects in which I considered myself qualified, at least to the extent provided by the school text. It was essential that I take a semester in ancient history, and I had already done much reading in the area.

  I wished to skip the subject and take modern history, of which I knew very little. I also wished to skip general science and take chemistry. At the time I had helped build several crystal radio sets and had done some electroplating. At the library I had read from books on botany and geology.

  Actually, the book on general science I read in the city lib
rary was much better, as well as much more interesting, than the school text, but the rules made no provisions for exceptions. I did not look forward to spending time studying subjects already covered.

  Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We grew up with the names of H. G.

  Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Jack Dempsey as familiar to us as those of our own family, right along with Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse.

  The Apache wars of which I was to write later occurred far away to the southwest, but the Sioux were close by. They had killed and scalped my own great-grandfather while he was with the Sibley command, pursuing the Santee Sioux out across Dakota in the aftermath of the bloody Little Crow massacre of 1862.

  My education in domestic and foreign affairs began at home. My sister Edna was attending Jamestown College, and my two older brothers and a second sister were in school, constantly discussing and arguing about schoolwork, reciting poetry, and talking of books they were reading.

  How many books we had in our home I do not remember, and doubt if anyone ever counted.

  We had collections of Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Emerson, as well as the Stoddard lectures on travel. All of us had library cards, and they were always in use.

  Reading was as natural to us as breathing.

  When I moved on from children’s books and fairy tales, one of the first books I read was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

  I had begun reading earlier than most, because my sister Emmy Lou, no doubt to keep me from bothering her, decided it was easier to teach me to read stories to myself rather than to read them to me, as she had been doing.

  What books I read immediately after that, or their progression, I do not remember, but certainly they were for a time the simplest of children’s books. I do know that when I was in the fifth grade my father told me he would give me a three-volume History of the World if I would read it. The books had come as a premium with a subscription to Collier’s magazine, if I recall correctly. For the next few months, when my father came home I would sit on his knee and tell him what I had read during the day.