Louis L'Amour

Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

—Sir Richard Francis Burton

Once, while I was living in California and wondering what to do with myself, I asked my father about shipping some of my cattle out from Texas. I owned two dozen head or so: I had earned them by my labor. My father pointed out that this was impossible—there was an interstate quarantine on at the time—and, anyway, he admitted, he had sold most of them. So I never did go back into the cattle business.

But that occurred at the same time I discovered Louis L'Amour, and in my accustomed style had purchased about 30 of L'Amour's paperback westerns and read them back to back. I also took to wearing boots again, real boots that looked fine, and not the work boots I always wore at the ranch, which I would kick off for school (where I wore penny loafers and white socks).

Much later, when I was teaching at Wharton, and had gone out to dinner with some of my Japanese students, one of them leaned over and whispered to my girlfriend what he apparently considered a deep, dark secret: "He wears boots to class."

I remembered this while sitting in a Lebanese restaurant, smoking a shisha, where I cracked the cover of a memoir by Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, which I found in a bookstore here in Dubai on the shore of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf.

L'Amour left school in the 10th grade, so he could get an education. And when his high school class graduated a couple years later, around May 14, L'Amour was in Singapore. (L'Amour remembers the date, because he happened to write it inside a book he was reading at the time; I first took note of May 14 one year when I suddenly discovered, by looking through some old notes, that I coincidentally seemed to meet future girlfriends on May 14.)

L'Amour tells how a hobo on a train introduced him to Little Blue Books, and I had to laugh. Once, when I had run away from home, and after having been arrested for vagrancy in Vernon, Texas, and had gotten out of that, I ended up at the train station where I read a Little Blue Book entitled Einstein's New Space-Substance Theory while waiting for the train. (The only other Little Blue Books I remember having read as a teenager are Yoga Philosophy, an Outline of the Secret Hindu Teachings by Hereward Carrington, and A Hindu Book of Love [The Kama Sutra].)

L'Amour tells of his wanderings, itinerant jobs, boxing, going to sea. And always reading—whatever was available, whether the fiction in Amazing Stories, the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, or a book explaining why the plays of Shakespeare were really written by Christopher Marlowe ("arrant nonsense," L'Amour notes).

Left utterly alone as the caretaker of a mine for three months, L'Amour found that:

The loneliness of the mine never affected me, for I had many companions: Hopalong Cassidy, Hamlet, Sancho Panza, and Ulysses were with me. I worked at the assessment job, sat on the muck-pile and read for a half-hour or so, and then went back to the pick and shovel. In between times I walked on the hills with one or another of the dogs.

L'Amour tells of being stranded at a mine in California's Death Valley, and walking the 70 miles back to Barstow, and surviving. At one point a rattlesnake competed for the same rocky shade L'Amour was using, but L'Amour shooed it away with showers of pebbles.

Rattlesnakes were ubiquitous where I grew up in Texas. After we came home one day and found a rattlesnake greeting us in the hallway, just inside the front door, for weeks I couldn't go to sleep at night without first carefully checking my room for rattlesnakes, especially under the bed.

My first encounter with a rattlesnake was in our backyard, when I was very young. My father wasn't around at the time, so my mother came out of the house with a 12-gauge shotgun, which lay conveniently at hand on the mantlepiece, and introduced that rattlesnake to a weapon of mass destruction. Later she showed me the large bruise left by the shotgun on her right shoulder. It was a number of years later, after I first fired a 12-gauge, that I realized the problem was she hadn't held the stock tightly against her shoulder, and hence the recoil had driven the stock into the muscles of her shoulder instead of the energy being dissipated throughout her body.

When L'Amour finally arrived back at Barstow, "The town was suddenly there, and I remember crossing a bridge into town and walking up the street to a cafe. I dropped down on a stool and asked for a Coke.

The waitress said, 'Man, you look like you've been through it. What happened?'

The Coke bottle felt cold and wonderful in my hand and there was ice in the glass. 'I just walked in from Death Valley,' I said.

A man on a stool near me turned and stared. 'You walked in? You got to be crazy.'

L'Amour displays a love of history, saying "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 are invading or trading." He uses Vietnam as an example:

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, Agnam 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.

In all his seriousness of purpose, L'Amour is not without humor:

In Klamath Falls, I had worked for a time as a laborer in building the Weyerhauser Mill, working there for several months at various jobs. Each of us was expected to fill out a small slip saying what we had been doing each day. On one occasion they had me simply walking about, picking up tools, stacking spare lumber—a number of little things that needed doing—so, when I filled out my slip that night, I simply wrote: "Removing obstacles in the path of progress."

The next morning the timekeeper stopped me to ask, "What the hell are you doing, anyway?"

In time, one of my older brothers would spend a summer working at the mill which L'Amour helped build.

The Second World War interrupted L'Amour's budding career as a writer, and after returning from Europe, L'Amour settled into writing about what would sell, the American West. He settled for authenticity. "Readers wish to believe the printed word, God help them, and I believe when we deal with history or anything factual, it should be with care. We may be the only source they have for such information."

While best known as a western writer, L'Amour says he was primarily interested in frontiers of all types, including space. "The frontier is that line beyond which man has not been, or where he is only beginning to go. I am, for example, concerned now (as I have been since I was twelve) about the frontiers of outer space . . . This is the final frontier, the frontier without end, and those who explore it will be heroes of the future."

And with any frontier comes the fringe. "Those who have never ventured away from the security of their cities, their diplomatic corps, or their business relationships must understand that there is a half-world out there, a place that lies beyond the pale of law or fringing it: a world of people who move about, cross borders, lose themselves in crowds; a half-world that knows where illegal papers can be obtained, visa, licenses, whatever is necessary."

Ultimately every writer writes for himself. But he faces the common and classical questions: "It seems to me that every written word is an effort to understand man's place in the universe. What is he? What is he becoming?"

As one who lives on the frontier fringe, at the south end of a pond whose northern boundary will be soon engulfed by war, I often ask myself those same questions.

It you want to be a writer, take care to do your homework. L'Amour notes: "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." Which perhaps explains why university Master of Fine Arts programs produce such shitty literature.

I highly recommend this book if you want an education, or want to be a writer, or just if you've been there.

J. Orlin Grabbe is the author of Keys and other short stories located here. His home page is located at: http://orlingrabbe.com/ .