Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (16 page)

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.

Fighting four men may not be as tough as beating one really good fighter. Two will usually hang back, to come in at the finish when they will not get hurt, and the thing to do is destroy the first man who attacks or whom you presume to be the toughest aggressor. If one tough man goes down, all the steam can go out of an attack. Of course, this is not always the case.

In any event, I was not worried.

There came a day when I walked the three miles into town to mail a manuscript and while there discovered there was to be a baseball game at the high school. The quality of baseball played by the teams in that area had developed several major league players of real ability, so I decided to walk back and see the game.

As the game was winding down, three young local men came over to me and said they had heard I was a boxer. How would I like to put on the gloves with a local fighter?

It was the last thing I wanted. Already I had walked nine miles, had been on my feet a good bit of the time during the ball game, and was tired. Yet this was a chance to avoid future trouble.

So I agreed, and was introduced to a rugged youngster who looked good. As we started toward the gym, I said, "Are we going to kill each other or just give them a nice boxing match?"

He said, "I wasn't looking for this. They conned me into it."

From the moment I saw him, I liked him.

I had thought of going out and really doing a job on whomever I was asked to face, but once I saw him I changed my mind. This was a good kid, not one of the rowdy crowd.

We put on the gloves and boxed three light, fast rounds. He moved well, was tough, and he could punch. He also had a very bad habit of knocking down a left-hand lead with his left hand, exposing his jaw to a right.

It was a nice bout and I enjoyed it. More than that, I liked him, and he had what it took to make a fighter. After we took off the gloves I heard no more about anybody laying for me on my way home, but as we parted I suggested we should get together, that I would like to train him.

In the next few months I developed a Golden Gloves boxing team of four to eight boys, and three of them, including the above fighter, won novice championships in their divisions. The boy I had boxed first had to share his title with his brother, rather than face him in the ring. They had cleaned up all the opposition.

Often I am asked if any writer ever helped or advised me. None did. However, I was not asking for help either, and I do not believe one should. If one wishes to write, he or she had better be writing, and there is no real way in which one writer can help another. Each must find his own way, as I was to find mine.

My way may not be for anyone but me. In fact, I doubt it is. After many rejections I sat down on the porch one night where I worked, looked off through our growing plum trees, and decided that all the editors who rejected my work could not be mistaken. Something was basically wrong with what I was doing.

From my shelves I took several stories by O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and Conan Doyle. From popular magazines I took several that I had liked, and I settled down to study them, to see what those writers were doing that I was not.

Later, I added stories by Maxim Gorky and Robert Louis Stevenson.

About that time I received a note from Professor Kaufman suggesting that I visit him at the University. It was on that occasion that he introduced me to a number of his friends and when I met Professor Walter Campbell, who also wrote as Stanley Vestal. (sometime later he, in conjunction with a former pulp-fiction writer, Foster Harris, started a short course in professional writing, where I was to appear eight or nine times as a lecturer on writing the short story.)

Campbell had published a number of books on a variety of subjects, but most were connected with the opening of the West. He had written or was writing a biography of Sitting Bull, and as I had grown up in Dakota, where the Custer story was still on everybody's lips when I was a child, we talked about it occasionally.

Although no one in Professor Kaufman's group was making a living by writing, all had published books and written a good bit for the journals. Most of them also reviewed books for the same page on which my book reviews appeared. They were a friendly, easygoing crowd and I made some good friends among them.

Above all, they were writers, the first I had actually met.

Shortly after my visit, I placed my first story for publication. It was a hobo story, submitted to a magazine that had published many famous names when they were starting out.

The magazine paid on publication, but that never happened. The magazine folded after accepting my story and that was the end of it.

Meanwhile I had published some poetry in small journals, one of them published at Emory University, where former President Jimmy Carter now teaches. This sonnet was to appear later in my book of verse, Smoke from This Altar.

That book, incidentally, was dedicated "To Singapore Charlie, Who Couldn't Read." So he would never know. Charlie would have done well in Hollywood or as a professional wrestler. On second thought, not as a wrestler. He took his fighting seriously.

I met him first at the Straits Hotel, not the one by that name now, but one that existed before.

He was about five feet nine and weighed 250 pounds. Without doubt, he had the largest bones and was the strongest man I ever knew.

When we met he was working as Bo'sun on a trading schooner in the East Indies and doubling as engineer in handling the auxiliary engine on the schooner. He was a man of no education, but was a skilled engineer and mechanic as well as a fine seaman.

His father had been a Portuguese Negro who married, I believe, a girl of mixed Chinese and Malay ancestry. Around each wrist and ankle Charlie had a rope tattooed, and everything in between was covered by some stylish artistry, the best the tattoo parlors of the Far East could offer--which was very good, indeed.

My favorite bit, however, was on his neck.

Around it was tattooed a dotted line and the words Cut on the dotted line.

We worked together for a while and Charlie was awed by the fact that I was forever with a book. He could not read, as I have said, but somehow he had great respect for anyone who did. From time to time, circumstances demanded I go into some very tough places, and I always took Charlie with me.

Beyond everything else, the man had presence. When he walked into a tough waterfront bar, the crowd just opened before him.

As a younger man he had been a noted bolo fighter--an event where disputes are settled by tying the fighters' left wrists together while each of them takes a bolo knife in the right hand. After the first few fights Charlie found no takers; his strength was simply too great.

He disappeared somewhere during the war in the South Pacific, but I am sure he did not go gently into that good night.

In 1935, I sold my first short story for cash--a very small bit of cash indeed, for a short-short called "Anything for a Pal." It was a gangster story, published in True Gang Life, and I was paid $6.54.

My next story was bought by Leo Margulies, whom any pulp writer of the time will remember. Leo was to buy many stories from me in the years that followed and to become a good friend. For a writer he was an angel in disguise, for in those rough years when I was living check to check, Leo always paid quickly. I could send him a story and know I would have a check within two weeks, often sooner.

My first stories were not of the West, but of the Far East or of the prize ring. My toe was in the door I had so long wanted to see open before me, but as for my education, it was only beginning.

When I wrote my first western story I do not remember, but I was writing many stories on many subjects. The West was where I had grown up. I knew the people, the land, and the work they did.

It was an easy step for me to write about the West.

I am probably the last writer who will ever have known the people who lived the frontier life. In drifting about across the West, I have known five men and two women who knew Billy the Kid, two who rode in the Tonto Basin war in Arizona, and a variety of others who were outlaws, or frontier marshals like Jeff Milton, Bill Tilghman, and Chris Madsen, or just pioneers. I hear from some of their relatives from time to time, and it is always a pleasure.

Although I saw Bill Tilghman on only two occasions, I knew his widow quite well.

Zoe Tilghman was herself a writer and we appeared on programs together.

My reading continued--Francis Bacon, Plato, Tolstoy, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Spencer, and a dozen plays by Shakespeare, whom I had read intermittently over the years. He was the ultimate professional, a writer who knew what he was doing all the time.

I also read the work of a black poet who wrote in dialect and so, I suspect, is frowned upon today, but not by me. Paul Laurence Dunbar was a good poet with a grand sense of humor. I liked his poetry then and I like it now.

There is a tendency, I believe, sometimes to judge the life-style of a whole people by what we know of a group. Writers and artists are inclined to life-styles different from those of artisans or farmers, merchants or soldiers.

Most of what history we have was written by people who did not labor for their bread, or if they did, like Socrates, they often courted or associated with a different kind of people from their fellow workmen. We know all too little of how work was done in times past, as such things were deemed beneath notice, a matter for slaves or other laborers. Most of our pictures of ancient life are offered us by an elite group, concerned with themselves and their way of life.

Here and there we have been fortunate enough, as in the case of the Egyptians, to have some illustration of how things were done, but histories such as we have from ancient times deal largely with wars, kings, and orations. Occasionally there is a book such as The Journal of My Life by Jacques-Louis Menetra--a glazier of the time prior to and during the French Revolution--which provides a picture of how a working man lived, worked, and played. Such books are all too rare.

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 the practice of a people.

Beginning in 1931, I read all of George Bernard Shaw that was available, including his novel about the bare-knuckle fighting days, Cashel Byron's Profession. Shaw knew a surprising lot about boxing, understanding among other things that a taped and bandaged fist inside a glove strikes with much greater force than a bare fist. There never was such a thing as a punch-drunk fighter until the boxing glove was invented, and increasing the size of the gloves has not protected the fighter more, only made boxing less scientific, as it now takes a larger opening for a punch to get through.

Shaw's knowledge of boxing was not surprising in an Irishman, though it was surprising in one whom James Huneker described as "a wingless angel with an old maid's temperament."

Shaw was a many-sided man, not easily understood--and not wishing to be understood--as a person. At least, such is my impression.

He left school at the age of fourteen and educated himself, eventually becoming a music and drama critic in London. His novels, and he wrote half a dozen, were not successful.

In later years he said he remembered them only as five brown paper packages that kept coming back marked Postage Due.