Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (17 page)

Writing as a craft varies much from individual to individual. Probably no two writers write in the same way in any respect. Some write very slowly, like Gustave Flaubert, who needed seven years to complete Madame Bovary. On the other hand, William Shakespeare, Honor`e de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope (to name a few) wrote with considerable speed. Some writers are prolific; some are not. It has nothing to do with the quality of their work; the speed or frequency of their writing is a matter of personal inclination or temperament.

Shakespeare, who was a working actor during most of his life, and during all his writing years, wrote swiftly, completing in most years two plays while appearing in others.

In his time it was the customary thing for his company to offer two plays each week, one old and one new, and the latter undoubtedly required some rehearsal or at least a run-through. His writing was done backstage, in taverns, in the homes of friends, or in his own quarters. As he was usually assisting in the management of the company and later of the theater, his time was well filled.

Writing is not an easy profession and many go reluctantly to the desk. This has never been a problem for me. I have found many stories to tell, although my first novel was never completed due to the coming of World War II. It lies on a shelf now, but would need considerable work.

People are always interested in how a writer works, as if that made a difference. Some imagine a writer must have complete quiet, or some special atmosphere. The fact is, a professional writer can write anywhere, although some environments are undoubtedly more favorable than others. Some excellent writing is done these days by newspaper people working in a bustling, busy newsroom.

Personally, I prefer my study or my bedroom at the ranch. In the first place, I am surrounded by my library, where I can check any fact that requires it. At the ranch I have a view of the timbered mountain ridge at the back of my property, or I can look up a valley in the hills where the elk and deer come down to feed in the evening. Forty or fifty can be there at once, as we do not allow hunting, and they are beautiful to watch.

However, I began my writing in ship's fo'c'sles, bunkhouses, hotel rooms-- wherever I could sit down with a pen and something to write on.

Because we know so little of how people worked, we often do not know if they had machines beyond the simplest of water wheels, wagons, and such. But recently an astrolabe was found in an ancient ship, and that intrigues me. Here was a scientific instrument, a sort of computer, if you will, built of gears similar to the inner workings of a watch. Certainly this was not one of a kind, and the same principles, gears, and such must have been used for other things. One such machine does not come from nothing. But how many other such machines or instruments might have been in use at the time?

If our civilization should be destroyed now, or should simply die, in five hundred to a thousand years nothing would remain but a few stone carvings. All of our vaunted machine civilization would have rusted or eroded away and nothing would be left to indicate what we had been and what we had done. Gold alone lasts; silver disappears, as was discovered in the ruins of Ur of the Chaldees.

I continued my reading: The History of the Conquest of Mexico and The History of the Conquest of Peru by William Prescott, The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle, A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne, To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway, a good bit of John Dos Passos, Union Square and The Foundry by Albert Halper, and that utterly delightful book by Leonard Q. Ross (leo Rosten), The Education of Have-You-More-A-Not Knowledge-A-People-Like-A-N.

By this point I had also read The History of English Literature, in four volumes, by Taine, and particularly enjoyed his comments on Shakespeare and his picture of the English theater of the time.

Meanwhile I also continued to review books, including The Story of Dictatorship by E. E. Kellett, The 101 Ranch by Ellsworth Collings, Discovery by Admiral Byrd, and Letters from Iceland by W. H. Auden and Louis Macationeice. In that one year I reviewed twenty-two books.

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.

Usually 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.