Education Of a Wandering Man (1990)

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.