Education of a Wandering Man Read online

  Maxwell Anderson, I had read at intervals until I completed everything of his I could find. He had gone to high school in my hometown, where his father was an itinerant minister, and he had been on a debating team with my sister Edna. Edna and his sister corresponded for many years. He was gone from Jamestown before I knew it, so I never met him, although I enjoyed much of his work.

  At the time I settled down in Oklahoma to become a writer or else, the short story was the thing. There were many magazines publishing short stories, and many people reading them. To a writer the magazine field was divided into three categories. The so-called quality publications included Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury (edited by H. L. Mencken), Esquire, The New Yorker (to which I was a very early subscriber while working at the Katherine Mine in Arizona), and Story.

  The latter publication had begun as a mimeographed sheet published in Vienna, where Whit Burnett and Martha Foley lived at the time. It became the bible of the short story, publishing early work by William Saroyan, among others. Its pages were literally “who was who” in the writing field. If memory serves me right, the magazine published stories by five Nobel Prize winners in one year.

  However, they paid very little, and the number of people who could write quality stories for the above magazines far exceeded the market.

  Next in line for a working writer were the “slicks,” a number of popular magazines published on smooth paper, which included The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Collier’s. For a time, Liberty, Cosmopolitan, and Redbook also fell into that group. There were a half-dozen others of equal or lesser standing. This was the best-paying market.

  The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s were weekly publications, used a lot of material, and paid excellent prices, but selling to them was not easy. They had a number of regulars whose stories were popular with Post readers. One of these was Clarence Budington Kelland. During the course of a year the Post usually published several western serials, and western short stories often appeared there by writers such as James Warner Bellah and Ernest Haycox, for example, and somewhat later, Luke Short.

  Considerably later, a serial of mine called The Burning Hills appeared there (in five installments), as did several of my short stories.

  The third category of magazines were the pulps, so-called because they were printed on wood-pulp paper. There were many of them, dozens of western and mystery magazines, others publishing science fiction, sports stories, romance, war, and air stories. Two of the best were Adventure and Blue Book. Black Mask, one of the mystery magazines, was a breeding ground for such writers as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote as William Irish and was distinctly one of the best.

  This was the magazine market I faced as a beginning writer. There were many other magazines that bought articles or occasional fiction, and many of the writers for the quality publications were academics teaching at various colleges or employed elsewhere.

  For me there was no choice. Whatever else I did, I had to make a living from my writing, and that meant work and lots of it.

  Fortunately I had a wide range of experience and was able to move in more than one direction. And what I did not know, I could find out.

  Gustave Flaubert said once that “Talent is nothing but long patience.”

  No doubt that is at least partly true. Certainly, in the years when I was beginning as a writer, I met a number of young men and women with similar ambitions. Often they wrote things so brilliant that I envied them their facility with words and ideas, yet of the dozen or so I knew then, only one made it as a professional, and he became Sunday editor of a newspaper. The others all fell by the wayside, unable or unwilling to take rejection, and obviously incapable of that long patience of which Flaubert speaks.

  It was necessary that I sell stories, and to sell them they had to be written, so I wrote. No sooner was a story in the mail than I wrote another, and another. I like to tell stories. I have always enjoyed it, yet writing is always and forever a learning process. One is never good enough and one never knows enough. I cannot repeat that too often. No matter how good a writer becomes, he can always be better.

  During the course of writing any story, I always generate ideas for other stories and will often stop the first one to get something on paper about the second. Before that first story is complete, it may have developed a third and a fourth.

  Much of my thinking during this period was done on my evening walks, usually along the road but often into a small forest of blackjack nearby. It was a quiet place where nobody ever came. I have always enjoyed wild country, even so small a patch as this, which was, I believe, some three hundred acres.

  I continued to review books, which gave me a good opportunity to see what the publishers were buying and what was being read. I reviewed Young Joseph by Thomas Mann, Of Time and the River by Thomas Wolfe, Israfel by Hervey Allen (which I consider the best biography I have read on Edgar Allan Poe), and a good dozen other books.

  Additionally, I read several plays by Shakespeare, Persian Letters by Montesquieu, and works by Erskine Caldwell, John Millington Synge, and John Galsworthy.

  Of Time and the River impressed me, but I thought Thomas Wolfe more the poet than the novelist. His stories made up a long autobiography that no doubt many enjoyed, but his descriptions of train journeys, of October sweeping over the land from Maine to the Carolinas, were sheer poetry. In many ways he saw our country better than anyone else has and caught some moments every traveler has experienced. The chances are he might not have achieved success without the editing of Maxwell Perkins, but one shudders to think what must have been left out. Wolfe had a way of going on and on when touching on a topic he enjoyed, but his going on and on was better than many a writer’s carefully chosen words.

  Reviewing books also gave me a chance to read what was written when I could not afford to buy the books. The magazines for which I wrote did not want character so much as action, but as my stories became popular, I slowly injected new elements and began using a language different from what was believed by some to be the way western people talked.

  The pulp magazines never realized that cowboys came from everywhere, and that the West was a great melting pot of drifters, soldiers of fortune (five of the men who died with Custer had been members of the Vatican Guard, including Captain Keough), and adventurers, the bulk of whom were Anglo-Saxon and Irish, as were the pioneers.

  Yet I learned much. A pulp story had to start fast and it had to move, and above all, you had to have a story to tell.

  I have told many, yet when I go down that last trail, I know there will be a thousand stories hammering at my skull, demanding to be told.

  And I am amply repaid when any old-timer, and there have been many, can put his finger on a line and say, “Yes, that is the way it was.”

  *

  No choicer gift can any man give to another than his spirit’s intimate converse with itself.

  —SCHLEIERMACHER

  *

  IN PURSUING MY education, I had been reading approximately one hundred books per year. By that I mean books completed, and it says nothing of those I dipped into or simply referred to from time to time. Yet I was continually disturbed by the fact that our histories seemed to begin with Egypt and Mesopotamia and to progress from there to Greece, Rome, the rest of Europe, and then North America. The remainder of the world seemed only marginal and of no interest.

  Rich as our Western literature was, I wished to learn more about Asia and Africa. My travels had made me realize how much there was to learn. Wherever I could, I would find students who would give me sight translations of books or simply relate the stories of their people. In this way I first heard some of the many chapters of the Shah-nama, Iran’s great Book of Kings. The entire epic contains much of the history of Iran (Persia) as well as some of its fabulous folk tales. I now have in my library the Reuben Levy translation, which I believe to be the best.

  Us
ually finding such students was a simple matter of locating the coffeehouses they preferred and getting to know them. They were excited by my interest and they enjoyed telling the stories. Of course I bought the coffee. It was a cheap tuition for all I was learning.

  There were many translations from Asiatic works, but as a rule they did not fall into the path of the average reader, nor were they studied in school. The works of Confucius, Mencius, and some of the other philosophers and poets could be found. Early on I had read Harold Lamb’s biographies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, which were available in most libraries and had a good readership (as did most of his books), but they were exceptions.

  The tales of the Shah-nama are still told along the caravan trails with some minor variations here and there, as are stories of that other hero of Central Asia and Tibet, Kesar of Ling. The man who first told me of Kesar was a murderer and a thief, a bandit by choice, occasional employee of archaeological expeditions, and a good friend when I needed one.

  Within the past few years, we in the Western world have benefited (if we would have it so), by one of the greatest works any man or group of men ever attempted. I refer to James Needham and his associates, who have put together the multivolume Science and Civilization in China. Although I have every volume published thus far, I have not read them all, nor, to be frank, am I anxious to. I much prefer to dip into them here or there and follow some particular idea or theme. Each book is a treasure, astonishing in its breadth and scope, and I find myself trying to make each one last. I have felt this way as well about the books of Joseph Rock, who made many Far Eastern expeditions for National Geographic.

  The fiction of China is well worth reading. Tso Hsueh-chin’s Hung Lou Menq, known in English as Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of China’s finest novels. It is perhaps the best picture of Chinese life and society that one can find. Outlaws of the Marsh, written of twelfth-century events and translated by Pearl Buck in a somewhat abbreviated version as All Men Are Brothers, is one of the most exciting. The Sidney Schapiro translation is the one I prefer.

  Two Chinese classics which I liked very much were The Scholars and The Romance of Three Kingdoms, and I found the Travels of Lao Ts’an a delight.

  The world with which Americans must deal in the future will no longer be confined to that small area called Europe, although its importance will continue. We must take heed of India and China, of Pakistan and Southeast Asia. The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture. The people of China have ever been intelligent, inventive, and industrious, and if they can cope with their population problem, they will again be the power they once were.

  Due to the narrow vision in many of our schools, few of our people have any knowledge of or appreciation for the culture of Asiatic nations. There has been a slight change for the better in recent years but our people are still relatively uninformed. Too many believe nothing was known of China until Marco Polo returned with his stories.

  As a matter of fact, Seneca had made fiery speeches in the Roman forum protesting the adverse balance of trade with India, and the vast sums in gold that were being sent to purchase Indian goods. Some historians have even gone so far as to suggest it was one of the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Certainly it was for some years a contributing factor.

  There were several ports on the Red Sea coast of Egypt where ships were constantly sailing for India—at the rate of one per day in the 120-day sailing season, when winds were favorable. Ships in those days in most places did not come alongside a dock to discharge cargo, but were run ashore at high tide and unloaded when the water receded. At Myos Hormos, one of those ports, the old foundations still exist.

  Ambassadors were sent by Rome to the courts of India and China, or in some cases people represented themselves as such. Troupes of acrobats and actors had traveled from Rome to China, and plays were performed in Greece using phrases from the language of Ceylon. And there is good evidence that an entire Roman legion sold its services to the Chinese and served as mercenary soldiers in many of their wars.

  Nations are born, they mature, grow old, and almost die, but after some years they rise again, and we in this country, as in all nations, need leaders with vision. Too few can see further than the next election and will agree to spend any amount of money as long as some of it is spent in the area they represent. H. G. Wells wisely said that “Men who think in lifetimes are of no use to statesmanship.”

  Now, with the vast distances of space opening before us, and the length of the journeys into outer space, we must begin to think in terms of generations and centuries rather than in years. Even with increased speeds and ease of travel, many of the exploratory journeys will be long.

  It may also be important to consider trying to return some of the planets to livable worlds. We have many plants on earth that live in extreme deserts or on the fringes of icecaps, surviving under seemingly impossible conditions. Such plants might be given a trial in likely spots—and leave the rest to time.

  There is evidence that there once was water on Mars, and very likely there are ice caves in some of the lava beds, just as we have on this earth.

  As I have said elsewhere, I believe that all that has gone before has been but preliminary, that our real history began with that voyage to the moon. Progress at first may be slow, but man will not be held back. There will always be those few who wish to push back the frontiers, to see what lies beyond.

  As much time as I have spent in cities, walking and working among people of all kinds, I liked the wild country the best. Again and again I returned to the desert or the mountains, seeking out the lonely water holes, studying the wild life, learning to exist on the outer margins. Given paper with which to write and a typewriter, I can be happy anywhere.

  When writing of the American West, we need take nothing for granted. Gunfighters, buffalo hunters, Indians, Army officers, and all manner of pioneers have told their stories, and not a few excellent books have been written by women or about women in the West.

  During the Roosevelt administration the Federal Writers’ Project sent out people to interview old-timers and gather what material they could. Most of this material lies in Historical Society archives, uncatalogued and unused. The interviews vary in quality, but some are excellent and most contain information important to history.

  Joseph McCoy’s Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest is an excellent book and one of the basic books on that aspect of the west. J. Frank Dobie’s The Longhorns is another, but it is difficult to begin to list authoritative sources, for there are so many.

  There are some years where my reading record is incomplete or nonexistent, but nonetheless I was reading, especially books that took place at sites I was visiting. My wife often says she has driven every back road in the West, and certainly she has driven many of them, roads often taken on a moment’s whim. Each was a voyage of discovery, offering new views of the country.

  Little by little, I was finding my way into foreign literatures and finding them rich and rewarding. Long before the appearance of samurai films in this country I knew their stories, and that, too, happened in a strange way.

  One night in Kobe, Japan, several of us had come ashore. It being too late for me to seek out more interesting places, I was having a beer with my shipmates in the bar.

  The owner (or perhaps the manager) was present, friendly, and seated with us. One of the seamen who had come ashore with us was a mean, disagreeable drunk, and for some time he had been muttering to himself about one of the waiters. After a moment he stood up and shoved him so that the man fell. When the owner objected, the seaman hit him with what is often described as a bolo punch, a looping right hand to the groin, and the owner, a much smaller, slighter man, fell to the floor.

  We all objected to what had happened and I expressed my feelings in no uncertain terms, so he attacked me. The man was no fighter and what followed could not be described as a fight. The seaman i
n question was foolish enough to throw a punch at me, but a wild one any child could have avoided. I did so and kicked his feet from under him. When he tried to get up, I pushed him down again and told him to stay until he could behave himself.

  He did so, but about that time several very husky young Japanese men came in, and the owner later told me that, had I not coped with the man myself, those young Japanese were prepared to do so.

  Finally, I let him get up and he went away, stopping at the door to say, “Some day aboard ship, I’ll get you.”

  As I am writing this many years later, it is obvious that he didn’t.

  However, the brief difficulty led to a discussion of judo, kung fu, and the various martial arts. That led to a tour of some of the places where they were taught, and I heard for the first time the story of Musashi, said to be the greatest Japanese swordsman.

  The owner was very well versed in Japanese history and several times in the next few days we spent time discussing the history of Japan, of bushido,*4 and what it meant to be a samurai.

  The story of Miyamoto Musashi, as told by Yoshikawa in the Charles Terry translation, is recommended to those interested. There is much material on the samurai period, and perhaps the best history of Japan is the three-volume study by George Sansom. Those who read these lines must understand that I do not claim to be an authority. I simply record what I have found to be interesting, informative, and historically accurate.

  Although my time in Japan was all too brief, I did form some interesting contacts and was fortunate to find, in the bar owner, one who was versed in the history of Japanese martial arts, and in the legends of the samurai and the bushido code.

  One thing I have discovered about research: Let people know what you are looking for. Often the best information will come from the least likely sources. On one occasion when I was seeking information, and official sources had nothing to offer beyond a few sentences, the porter in my hotel introduced me to a man who had all the facts, and was one of the people whom I was investigating. Had I depended upon official sources or libraries, I would have left the country knowing nothing more than had been printed for years. As it was, a door was opened for me and I learned a great deal.