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Award Winning Louis L'Amour Interview
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LAST WEEK'S WINNER OF' "THE BEST ARTICLE ON THE WEB
AWARD" - Mar 6, 2000
Looking
Back On The Western Frontier: An Interview with Louis L'Amour
Jean Henry-Mead, author of MAVERICK
WRITERS, provides this rare insight into the best-selling author of the American
West...
Submitted by: Taylor Fogarty, publisher,
American Western Magazine - ReadTheWest.com
by Jean Henry-Mead
Louis L'Amour
1908-1988
Thanks for sharing this with our readers. I've always loved a
good Louis L'Amour.
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Louis
Dearborn L'Amour was not only the West's best-selling storyteller, he
was the consummate Western man, a pattern for the white-hatted heroes he wrote
about. Hardworking and soft-spoken, he was proud of his accomplishments, yet
despite rumors to the contrary, he was often shy in his remembrances. L'Amour
literally elevated himself by his proverbial boot straps, and in the process,
left footprints in the marketing landscape that few writers will be able to
fill.
Luck had nothing to do with his success, he said not long
before his death in 1988. "Nor have I had any connections or breaks that I
did not create for myself. I just tried to write the best I could about things I
knew."
There are realities that writers must consider, he was quick
to add. "No publisher is going to do anything for you that you don't earn.
They simply can't afford to. Once a writer proves he can make money, they will
often extend themselves. There's no magic, just hard work."
The work ethic was instilled in L'Amour as a child by his
parents in Jamestown, North Dakota. His father, a veterinarian and farm
machinery salesman, was involved in local politics. He served as alderman of
Jamestown's largest ward for many years as well as deputy sheriff, but he lost
his mayoral race. "People in small towns doubled in brass, you might
say."
Young Louie enjoyed playing cowboys and Indians, and
roughhoused in the family barn, which doubled as his father's veterinary
hospital. He did more than his share of reading, particularly G. A. Henty, an
Englishman who wrote of wars through the nineteenth century. L'Amour said,
"It enabled me to go into school with a great deal of knowledge that even
my teachers didn't have about wars and politics."
The L'Amour family library encompassed some five hundred
books, among them the works of Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, and Poe, as well as
popular American and English writers. The youngest of the L'Amour children,
Louie remembered reading a five-volume Collier's History of the World while he
was small enough to sit in his father's lap.
"I think all things you read influence your writing to
some degree. And if you don't learn anything else, you learn something about
living and the use of words."
His serious reading began at twelve with a collection of
biographies titled The Genius of Solitude. "The only one I
remember is Socrates, the first chapter, but I remember it well." A book of
natural history followed, which he tried unsuccessfully to locate years later
for his children. During adolescence, L'Amour immersed himself in books of
chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and the history of aircraft.
His concentrated self-education resulted in boredom with
school. "I was just spinning my wheels," he said, "so it was no
real hardship for me to leave. I had to go to work to find myself a
change." L'Amour left school and Jamestown at fifteen, after completing the
tenth grade. Since crop failures were common in North Dakota, and his father's
livelihood was linked to the farming community, he decided to find his niche
elsewhere. By hitchhiking and riding the rails, he arrived in Oklahoma City to
visit an older brother, who was the governor's secretary, but he soon moved on.
"By then I was broke and I got a job in West Texas
skinning dead cattle that died from a prolonged drought. They had been dead a
while. Some fellow was trying to save the hides and it was the most miserable
job, but I learned a lot." The young man's boss was a seventy-nine-year-old
wrangler raised by Apaches, who had ridden on war parties with Nana and
Geronimo. "He was a very, very, hard old boy but I got along with him fine.
He was the first to teach me about tracking and using herbs."
L'Amour left his odorous job, after three months sleeping on
the ground and staying downwind from passersby. He had helped skin 965 head of
cattle by staking their skulls and tying their hides to the bumper of an early
model pickup truck.
His next job was baling hay in New Mexico's Pecos Valley,
across the road from Billy the Kid's grave. He visited the Maxwell home where
Billy had been killed, and talked to the woman who offered the outlaw his last
meal. L'Amour remembered her as "a pretty sharp old lady who still had all
her buttons." He then talked to Judge Cole in Ruidoso, and got to know some
thirty former gunfighters, rangers, and outlaws in the area. He regretted not
knowing about a number of others.
While wandering about the West, he joined a circus in
Phoenix, leaving three weeks later in El Paso. He then hoboed his way to
Galveston, Texas, where he hired on as a merchant seaman. His first cruise was
to the West Indies, his second to the British Isles. He tried his hand at
writing during his travels, but his scribblings didn't include events as
familiar as his Western heritage.
L'Amour's family history is rich in frontier adventure. His
maternal great-grandfather was scalped by the Sioux while a member of the Sibley
Expedition, following the Little Crow Massacre in Minnesota. Both his
grandfathers served in the Union army during the Civil War, and his maternal
grandfather taught him military tactics by drawing battle plans on a blackboard.
The novelist was especially proud of his mother's ancestry,
beginning with Godfrey Dearborn, who arrived in this country in 1638, an
antecedent of General Henry Dearborn, who marched with Arnold to Quebec. He also
took part in the second Battle of Saratoga, Monmouth, Sullivan's raid on the
Iroquois villages, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, and the surrender of Cornwallis,
among others. Some of the general's diaries were published, and he and his wife
corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, exchanging garden seeds.
General Dearborn's son, of the same name and rank, published
half a dozen books, but L'Amour was only able to locate one of them, a biography
of William Bainbridge, commander of "Old Ironsides." The book was
published posthumously by Princeton University Press.
L'Amour stressed the fact he had never taken a creative
writing course, and that his post tenth-grade education had been earned from
voluminous reading. While in Oklahoma City, L'Amour assisted Foster Harris and
Walter Campbell in their creative writing courses after he began to publish. He
later lectured at more than forty institutions of higher learning, principally
the University of Oklahoma. He was also a featured speaker for the National
Convention of Genealogists in San Francisco.
"I get many questions about people mentioned in my
stories—people looking for relatives or family histories—or about conditions
at the time, or to clarify some point on which they lack understanding. Few
people realize how much language and word usage have changed. Half the nonsense
written about Shakespeare would not have happened if people knew more about the
language and customs of the time. For example, they write of Robin Hood and his
Merry Men, which in those days meant bawdy men."
L'Amour's constant research turned up the little known fact
that Wild Bill Hickok's ancestors were tenant farmers on the property owned by
Shakespeare. He insisted that credit for the factual unearthing go to English
writer, Joseph Rosa.
The novelist's first published story sold to True Gang
Life, and a few of his poems were featured in The Farmer's Stockman,
an Oklahoma-based magazine. He also wrote boxing articles for a newspaper, sans
payment, after meeting two pretty young news reporters in Oregon, who gave him a
byline. He was fighting professionally at the time, and knocked out thirty-four
of fifty-one opponents during his light heavyweight career. He first stepped
between the ropes at age sixteen, and fought more heavyweights than those in his
own weight division.
His first short story sales concerned the West Indies,
football, rodeo, "detective yarns," and a few Westerns. "I'd
grown up in the West and absorbed live background, but I was too close to it. I
wanted to write about something far away, you see." He spent ten months in
China, and bicycled across India during his twenty years in the merchant
marines.
L'Amour's first big sale was Hondo, originally
published in short story form by Collier's Magazine. "Dick Carroll
of Fawcett Books asked me to come in, and he said, 'There's a novel here, and
I'll buy it.' So I wrote it, and he bought it. Then John Wayne made a movie of
it, and suddenly, everyone wanted Westerns."
The writer had an important decision to make. "Westerns
have always been regarded in this country as second rate literature. I didn't
agree with that. I never have. The paperback book was regarded as third or
fourth rate, and I didn't agree with that either. So I sat down and had a very
serious talk with myself. "Do I take the ball and run with it, or do I stay
the same course I'm on?
"I decided to hell with it, that I was going to write
damn good Westerns and I would make them accurate. I would show them that
Westerns could be history, that they were important. Because to me, this was the
most important phase of American history. The Western period, the pioneer
period, did more to form American character than anything else done in this
country. It should be taken seriously, and more attention should be given to
it." The main difficulty he encountered was Eastern prejudice—those in
the publishing business raised in the East, with little understanding of life
west of the Mississippi River.
L'Amour did not come into his own as a writer until mid-life,
much like English novelist Joseph Conrad, who also spent years at sea before
settling down to write. While L'Amour lived in Oklahoma City, he realized
"there was something drastically wrong" with his writing. "The
short stories I sent out came back like homing pigeons. So I got a bunch of
short stories and studied them to see how they were written. I found what I had
been doing wrong and that's when I began to sell."
L'Amour's long-term association with Bantam Books began after
his disillusionment with Fawcett, his first publisher, which only produced one
of his novels a year. He said, "I have had, all the way along, to lead my
publishers, sometimes by the nose. It hasn't been easy."
Saul David, a Bantam Books editor, told L'Amour he could
write three books a year, but it took some persuasion on the writer's part, who
liked "to write fast." He admired David's courage and his ability to
"swim against the tide. If you told him something could not be done, he'd
do it."
L'Amour maintained the schedule he had worked for years until
just before his death, at 81. "I'm not rigid about it," he said.
"I work every day, seven days a week, and that's not a problem. However, if
something comes up and I want to take a little trip, I do it. I come back and go
to work again."
Rising at 5:30 or 6:00, he'd read two Los Angeles newspapers
and The Wall Street Journal before breakfast. His work day then began. At noon
he sometimes stopped for lunch, often meeting friends at a restaurant. He said
he occasionally went alone at an off-hour to make notes for a forthcoming novel,
although he was rarely known to use them. "But, I can discuss it with
myself, and the direction the book will follow."
He usually returned to his IBM Wheelwriter after lunch for an
hour, or he used that time to read. He would also file mounds of research
material crowding his large office. Three-foot stacks of paper neatly flanked
three sides of his desk. He had no secretary and didn't want one, because
"it would keep me busy finding work for her to do." Only he knew where
to file research material so that he could find it. He also answered his own
mail, but only a small percentage of some 5,000 letters that arrived annually.
His personal library contained more than 10,000 books, with
hinged bookcases revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the visible ones. He
also left behind map drawers, much like those on ships, with geographical charts
of every country on earth. The world was literally at his fingertips.
Little physical research was done during his latter years
because he had already been there. "Usually I write about places I've
been," he said. "I knocked around the world for twenty years, and one
of the things I did was file a claim on a mining camp where I had to do a
hundred hours work a year to hold it. Sometimes I hired somebody to do it, or
miss out on a good job."
Although he only two-finger typed one draft, he admitted to
rewriting on occasion. "Usually if I find something wrong, I rewrite the
whole page. Occasionally I reread the previous day's work, and that's only when
there's been a break in continuity. My feeling is that if one plans to rewrite,
one is careless, figuring to pick it up the next time around. I wrote for the
pulps and to make any money, one had to produce a lot. I drilled myself in
getting it right the first time."
His wife Kathy proofread his work, checking for typos and
redundancies. She rarely found misspelled words and no one changed his work,
"not even editors. They never have, not since that first sale when the
editor sent my story back and said to cut 1,500 words. I thought, 'Ah baloney, I
just don't know how I could possibly do that. I hate it." Chuckling, he
added: "Now when I look at it, I wonder where all the words went."
During the mid-1980s, his novels crowded book store racks
along with adult Westerns that he hated. "Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, the
Brontes, Checkov, Thackeray, and many others, who used sex, did it with wit and
charm," he said. "Sex in current books is clumsily done, indicating
that most writers really know very little about it. They write like a bunch of
small boys out behind a barn. They are crudely lewd. There's no fun in their sex
and nobody appears to be having a good time."
L'Amour advised fledglings to read and write "everything
you can. Keep writing, putting words on paper and learn to express yourself. One
difficulty I find of people who write is that they don't read enough. And our
schools aren't giving enough background in American literature. I think you
should have a pretty good idea what's been done before you try to do it. And you
can learn some valuable things by writing. I really learned how to write from
Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant."
A sentimentalist, L'Amour adopted a white dove before his
first novel sold. The dove had taken up residence in the novelist's garage and
was brought into the house and named Rama-Cita after two deities of East Indian
mythology. The name was later shortened to Rama when the bird was found to be
male. The dove could be heard throughout the L'Amour's large Spanish-style home
as though in an echo chamber, and outlived most of its species as the writer's
"good luck mascot."
Louis L'Amour was visibly proud of his children. His son
Beau, at the time of the interview, was a film producer's creative consultant,
who wrote in his famous father's wake. His pretty younger sister Angelique also
writes. Both L'Amour offspring planned at the time to produce biographies of
their father, in addition to the one he was writing at the time of his death.
L'Amour wanted to be remembered as a storyteller—a man who told the American
story, or one version of it."
Among his legion of books, Walking Drum, a twelfth
century adventure, was the most fun to write. When asked which had been his
favorite, he said, "I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that
I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the
next one, you see, and make it a little bit better.
"The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm
just now getting to be a good writer. Just now."
Copyright © 1989 & 2000 Jean Henry-Mead. All rights reserved. This interview excerpted from Maverick Writers by Jean Henry-Mead (The Caxton Printers, Ltd, 1989). Reprinted here by permission of the author.