Education of a Wandering Man Page 9

  I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.

  Once, when hitchhiking, I was picked up by a professor from some small college. He noticed I carried a book in my coat pocket, and was curious. It was a Modern Library edition, in the limp bindings they used to have, which sold at the time for 95 cents. This one contained Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, and The Birth of Tragedy.

  The professor was a pedantic man of limited imagination and seemed almost offended that I was reading such a book. (I suspected after a few minutes’ conversation that he had not read it himself.) He plied me with questions. Obviously I did not fit some category in which he decided I belonged, and when he dropped me off in town, I suspect he was relieved to be rid of me.

  He kept asking me why I wanted to read such a book. At first, he doubted I was reading it. Where had I heard of Nietzsche?

  When I told him I thought it was in the preface to a book on Schopenhauer, he was even more disturbed and probably believed I was lying. Fortunately, there seem to be few of his kind, and my subsequent friendships with university professors have proved exciting, stimulating, and fun. Perhaps I was fortunate in that the first group I met was at the University of Oklahoma in the 1930’s. At that time I met Kenneth C. Kaufman, Ben Botkin, Walter Stanley Campbell (who also wrote as Stanley Vestal), Carl Coke Rister, Paul Sears, and others. Sears had just written Deserts on the March, one of the very first books on ecology, when that word was scarcely known. I believe also that the book was the first best seller to come from a university press. Stuart Chase followed it a bit later with Rich Land, Poor Land, also on the subject, in 1936.

  Having been over a lot of country I had seen what was happening to the land, and was pleased to get a chance to review Sears’s book for a farm magazine. Ecology had been getting into some of my stories, principally one titled “Merrano of the Dry Country.” It appeared in a pulp magazine and dealt not only with proper usage of the land but with the race question. That story first appeared about forty years ago, or a bit more.

  The lists of books I read in my earlier years have largely been lost, but my memory for some is clear. It was a knockabout time for me: of going to sea, working in mines, lumber camps, and sawmills, doing whatever was available to make an honest dollar. Many of the activities of young men of the time I missed entirely, or in part. Either I was working, traveling from one place to another, or else I did not have the money to afford it.

  At the time I thought that I might make a career of fighting. My early training had been good, and in knocking about the country I had picked up a few dollars here and there in small-town boxing rings. For that reason, among others, I never smoked and rarely had a drink. The idea that it might be fun to get drunk never appealed to me, for I had come to believe I could cope with any situation that might arise if I had my wits about me. There was one night in Shanghai when I was in more trouble than one man could handle. Three drunken British sailors pitched in to help, and help they did, but at bitter cost to themselves. Had they been sober, with the right coordination and reflexes, I think they would have made it.

  Several times while traveling in Asia I hired students to read sight translations of books unavailable, so far as I knew, in English. On occasion this took place on a riverbank. Several times it was in coffee-or teahouses, where we never failed to pick up an interested audience. In one case a rather violent argument developed between the reader and a listener over a line from an Indian poet, Bhartrihari. I thought the Indus River was about to flow with fresh blood, but after a good deal of shouting and waving of arms and flashing eyes, the listener strode away. When he was well out of hearing, my reader said, “He may be right, at that.”

  (It was Bhartrihari, incidentally, who said of a woman: “She talks to one man, looks at a second, and thinks of a third.”)

  One book always led to another and occasionally my discoveries led to a whole succession of books, but there was no intent in my reading except to learn and to know. Later, when I actually began doing research on various eras of history, from curiosity or because of something I wished to write, all that changed.

  I read Crime and Punishment while in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I had heard much of Dostoevsky but was surprised by this book—surprised and very impressed. Several times I turned back to reread sections of the book. At the time I was working in a sawmill, off-bearing on the green chain. And that, my friends, is purely hard work.

  When a log is cut into planks, those planks (in this case three inches thick and twelve inches wide) are green, fresh-cut lumber, and heavy. One takes a plank from the chain and puts it aboard a truck standing nearby. Meanwhile, the chain from the saw is bringing more planks, and more and more. If one is strong, reasonably agile, and gets his timing right, he can put in an eight-hour shift without too much trouble, but for hours at a stretch those planks keep coming. That is one description of off-bearing on the green chain.

  (It has been years since I have been in a sawmill, and it is probably all done by machinery now, as are most of the jobs I used to do. I feel very sorry indeed for any young man without an education in these days, for there is literally nowhere to go.)

  Also while on that job I read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, as well as Plain Tales from the Hills and Kim (for the second time), both by Kipling.

  We hear a lot of talk these days about violence, but we forget the many generations that have grown up on stories of violence. The bloodiest of all, perhaps, were the so-called fairy tales, but I would have missed none of them and doubt if I did, yet I see little difference between Jack killing a fabled giant and Wyatt Earp shooting it out with an outlaw.

  It often appears that violence is bad unless it is cloaked with enough tradition. There is much violence in the Bible, and the story could have been told in no other way. Many of Shakespeare’s plays end with nearly everybody killed or dead by suicide. If we were to eliminate violence from our reading, we would have to eliminate all history, much of the world’s great drama, as well as the daily newspaper.

  What many people do not understand is that a child in growing up repeats within his early years much of the life history of man upon the earth, and it is necessary that he or she do this to become a human being.

  At first a baby is simply a small animal that eats and sleeps, but there will come a time when he will want to build a shelter, to find some place he can crawl into, even if it is only a blanket over a chair or a table. Then there will be a time when the child plays capture games, wants a bow and arrow or perhaps a spear or other weapon. By acting out those early years of mankind’s history, children put that history behind them. Most violent criminals are cases of arrested development where, for one reason or another, they never grow out of that period.

  A girl, of course, will play with dolls, playing at being a mother, making a home, and what goes with it. All this is an essential part of growing up, of learning to be a human.

  Much of this early violence can be sublimated through reading. In my own stories, there is no violence for the sake of violence. I tell it as it happened and my books are all thoroughly grounded in history. What so many of us who abhor violence often forget is that we have peace and civilized lives because there were men and women who went before us who were willing to fight for our freedom to live in peace.

  It is always well to remember that many of us sleep safe at night because there are people out there cruising the streets and on call to keep it so. As many have discovered, violence is with us still, and no one is immune to a sudden strike in the night.

  One of the questions a writer is most often asked is “Where do you get your ideas?” If a person does not have ideas, he had better not even think of becoming a writer. But ideas are everywhere. There are ideas enough in any daily newspaper to keep a man writing for years. Ideas are all about us, in the people we meet, the way we live, the way we travel, and how we think about things. It’s important to remember that we are writin
g about people. Ideas are important only as they affect people. And we are writing about emotion. A few people reason, but all people feel.

  The raw material is not important. It is what the writer does with the material. One writer will make you laugh, another can make you cry, and a third might write a horror story.

  At least once a week I get a letter from someone who has material he wants me to shape into a story (wanting, of course, a piece of the action). But a writer builds a readership because those readers like what he does with a story, not because of the material.

  There are only a certain number of plots, and they are very basic. When Ray Long was editor of Cosmopolitan years ago, he gave the same plot to six different writers, and they came up with six vastly different stories.

  Plots are nothing devious. I have heard some literary or dramatic critics talk of plot in ways that indicated they had no grasp of the idea at all. A plot is nothing but a normal human situation that keeps arising again and again. Shakespeare’s work has lived as long as it has because he dealt with normal human emotions—envy, ambition, rivalry, love, hate, greed, and so on. These are basic drives among us humans and are with us forever.

  Because I have traveled widely it is often suspected I traveled for the purpose of gathering material. That was not the reason. Material is wherever you find it, or can see it. Some of the greatest novels have been written about small areas. Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner, for example, wrote about country districts they knew well. The Brontë sisters (whose name was originally Prunty) wrote about the part of England in which they lived.

  It is not necessary to travel in order to write good stories; it is only necessary to see, to understand, to reveal.

  What few realize is that no writer is free to write exactly as he might wish. He is guided, to a great extent, by the tastes of readers and by the choices of editors. Of course, one can write whatever one wishes, but unless it conforms to the tastes of the public at the time, it will stay right on the author’s shelf.

  All manner of weird conjectures have grown up around Edgar Allan Poe, for example, but few have ever understood that he was writing what the public wanted to buy. In the first half of the nineteenth century, over in Europe, Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein and Baudelaire was writing his macabre poetry and prose, while in this country Hawthorne was writing “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and Washington Irving was writing The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. And this has been true in every age and time.

  For a while I worked in the big timber but could not bear to see the big ones come down. I topped trees for a time, cleared brush, did whatever was available, but the times were growing worse. When the crash came in ’29, we who were on the road hardly noticed the difference.

  Yet it was a time for decision and I had made mine. If I was ever to get an education beyond my haphazard reading, it must be now.

  THROUGH SOME BOXING friends I found a job in a veneer plant in Portland, Oregon. At first I was off-bearing on a saw; later, grading veneer. We were making doors, desk tops, tables, radios, all manner of wood items, but the Depression was on and occasionally there were not enough orders to warrant a full shift.

  In a second-story hotel two blocks from the library I found a room. It was a very long distance from work but close to the library and that was where I wished to be.

  At the time there were two magazines, published by the same company. One was called The Thinker; the other, Popular Biography. Unfortunately, neither magazine lasted very long, perhaps because of the material, though more likely due to the Depression itself. I believe I read every issue of each, and they guided me into some areas where I might not have ventured. I carried each issue in my pocket as it came out and read them on the long bus rides to work and back.

  About this time, I stumbled upon Candide by Voltaire, and it was a revelation. I loved it, rereading it at once. I loved the wit and the satire but above all the sense that the author himself was having a wonderful time, writing something he thoroughly enjoyed.

  Shortly afterward, I went into the Reference Room of the Portland Public Library and settled down to some serious reading. From that time on, for months, I was there nearly every waking hour that the library was open and I was not working. Often I would go in at ten in the morning and not leave until ten at night. During those months I was eating only occasionally. After payday I ate rather well for a time but we were not working full shifts, and rent, transportation, and other expenses used up my money.

  I had no friends at first, only acquaintances; later, working at the plant, I met a wonderful Irishman who is still a friend.

  I had asked when payday was, and it was still several days away. I commented that I hoped it would come soon, because I was broke. Some time later a truck, one of those used to move stacks of lumber around inside the plant, pulled up alongside me and a tall, lean young man stepped down. He said, “They tell me you’re broke until payday.” He handed me $20 and said, “Pay me when you can.”

  That was fifty-eight years ago and that man is still my friend. We have kept in touch, off and on, all down the years.

  We were working the late shift, beginning some time in midafternoon, and we got off late, so I was rarely back at the hotel before 2:00 A.M. That was, of course, when we worked a full shift.

  One day in the library an elderly gentleman leaned over my shoulder and asked what I was reading. I had seen him around for several days, and in fact we were the only regulars in the Reference Room. Others came and went, but we were there every day. He was referring to many books, taking copious notes, and writing a lot. At the time he spoke to me I was deeply engrossed in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies, and he commented that he rarely saw a young man reading philosophy.

  We talked a little there, and later had coffee together. One day he brought me a manuscript which he hoped to publish. Limited as my publishing experience was, I could see he had almost no prospect of success. His paper was a brilliant piece of Socratic-type dialogue between a Citizen and a Senator, and his subject was that the Preamble to the Constitution was not intended as a Preamble but as an integral part of the Constitution.

  This is the stand that Franklin Roosevelt took when he became President and which he used as authorization for some of the dramatic moves he made to turn things around. As my friend had mailed copies of his dialogue to several senators, I have often wondered if Roosevelt himself got the idea from that old gentleman in the library.

  He was, like Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman.

  Meanwhile I was working out in a small gym, hoping to make some money fighting. I would leave my hotel, go to the gym, get my lunch fixed at the counter in the poolroom above the gym, and go on to work.

  My reading followed no pattern. I read a dozen plays by Eugene O’Neill, two by George Bernard Shaw, three by Racine, and others by Oscar Wilde, Molière, John Drinkwater, Ashley Dukes, Ferenc Molnár, and Carlo Goldoni.

  In philosophy I read four books by George Santayana, three by Nietzsche, one by Schopenhauer. I read several books by H. G. Wells, at least two by Joseph Conrad, several by Rabindranath Tagore, and a real delight, Black Sparta by Naomi Mitchison.

  Each book gave me much to think about, and on my long bus rides I frequently went over what I had read. For a while during this period I lived on one sandwich a day so I could save the money to buy three books of which I had read reviews. They were Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell, Liberty Under the Soviets by Roger Baldwin, and Men and Machines by Stuart Chase.

  The subject of the influence of the machine was much under discussion at the time, as evidenced by Eugene O’Neill’s play Dynamo and other works. Although written more than a century ago (1872), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is still one of the most provocative on the subject.

  The paperback book, which has done so much to revolutionize reading, did not exist at the time, and hardcover books were expensive for one in my position.

  Bookstores were fewer than today, when paperback books are everywh
ere. There were many wonderful old bookstores operated by people who both knew and loved books, and to browse their shelves was and is pure delight.

  It is not uncommon today to find no one working in a bookstore who reads anything but the current best sellers, if that much. In the days I speak of, bookstores were usually operated by book lovers. Now they are run by anyone who can ring up a sale. Yet there are exceptions, and to come upon them is always a pleasure.

  The work I was doing offered no chance for standing around, had I been so inclined. The plant was a noisy, busy place and we all fell into a rhythm that made the hours pass quickly, yet when the shift was over I was tired and often slept halfway back on the bus.

  One night, not having bus fare, I walked back to town. I believe it was about seven miles and through a dark, deserted area along the river. Walking along, half asleep, I was suddenly startled by a man who stepped out from behind a signboard and told me to “Get ’em up.”

  I hit him.

  It was not an intelligent reaction, nor a brave one. I was a fighter and I reacted. My punch landed solidly and he went down, the gun flying from his hand. I grabbed the gun in midair and ran at least a block before it dawned on me that I had the gun.

  Whoever the man was, his tactics were bad. Had he come up behind me, he could have had whatever I had, which was only a few cents, but he startled me into an instinctive reaction.

  However, he was a benefactor. Back in my room I checked the pistol. It was a .38 caliber, fully loaded, but for some incomprehensible reason the barrel had never been cleared of Cosmoline or some such substance. Had he attempted to fire it he might have blown his hand off. I cleaned up the gun, took it to a pawnshop, and sold it for six dollars.

  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.”