The burden of not belonging

     "Rio," he said at last, "maybe this isn't where we light, after all. Maybe this is just one more stop on a long, long trail." The horse twitched his ears, stomped a foot and blew through his nose, all of which might mean anything or nothing.

    The trouble was that he did not want any more long, long trails. Not at least without having somewhere to come back to, or someone. There had been too many of those long, lonely trails, too many empty nights, too many places where he did not belong, where he had no one or nothing.

(from Where the Long Grass Blows, by Louis L'Amour)

A cull is a cull

 Her husband had been a dashing young bohemian who could quote enough Spencer, Marx, or Freud to prove any point. Unfortunately, for all his obsession with the working man, he could not seem to hold a job. What she had mistaken for intensity turned out to be self-obsession, and the wild ways that she once thought were delightfully liberated proved to be simple self-indulgence.

(from "By the Waters of San Tadeo," by Louis L'Amour)

Never try to read a woman

     He drew up and turned in the saddle to look back. Levitt was gone. "I wish I knew what he has on the Venables." He scowled. "You don't suppose she really likes him, do you?"

    Mabry shrugged. "Sometimes I can guess what a steer will do, and I've even outguessed a wild bronc or two, but keep me away from women. I never could read the sign right, and every time I think I've got one figured, she crosses me up."

(from Where the Long Grass Blows, by Louis L'Amour)

Cool, clear water

    He dropped his war-bag, and a young man standing in an inner doorway walked to the desk and turned the register around. "Room?" His was a pleasant smile.

    "The best you've got," Canavan said, smiling back.

    The clerk shrugged. "Sorry, but they are all equally bad, although reasonably clean. Take fifteen, at the end of the hall. You'll be closer to the well."

    "Pump?"

    "What do you think this is? New York? It's a rope and bucket well, but it's been almost a year since we hauled the dead man out. The water should be pure enough by now."

(from Where the Long Grass Blows, by Louis L'Amour)

Quite a horse!

     "That horse you see me riding has been hard used, but don't look down upon him. He's carried me into and out of much trouble, and time and again we've been to the wars. Let me put a loop over anything that walks, and that buckskin will hold it, whatever it is.

    "In the saddle of that horse I'd not be afraid to rope a Texas cyclone, rope and hog-tie it, too. He'll climb where it will put scare into a mountain goat, and one time when a man holed me with a Winchester slug, he carried me fifteen miles through the snow, then pawed on the stoop until folks came to the door to take me down.

    "You can call me a dog if you will, sir, but you speak ill of my horse and I'll put lead into you."

(from Ride the Dark Trail, by Louis L'Amour)

Any place there is money to be made

 Rome, London, Paris - all of them sprang from river crossings, and usually there was some bright gent around who was charging toll to cross over. Any time you find a lot of people who have to have something you'll also find somebody there charging them for doing it. When people stop at a stream crossing they camp and look around, and you can bet somebody has set up store with things for them to want.

(from Ride the Dark Trail, by Louis L'Amour)

Education from various places

"Folks who have lived the cornered sort of life most scholars, teachers, and storekeepers live seldom realize what they've missed in the way of conversation. Some of the best talk and the wisest talk I've ever heard was around campfires, in saloons, bunkhouses, and the like. The idea that all the knowledge of the world is bound up in schools and schoolteachers is a mistaken one." (from Ride the Dark Trail, by Louis L'Amour)

This opinion is expressed by a character in a book of fiction, so we don't know whether or not it was the opinion of the author. However, I suspect that it was, since similar thoughts are expressed in other books of his. His point is well taken - up to a point. All useful knowledge is not to be found solely among academics, who frequently know little of life: that much certainly is true. However, wisdom would dictate that one should be careful as to where he looks for wisdom. Those who are engaged in unwise or immoral activities should not be considered founts of wisdom, and L'Amour seems to overlook that qualification.

L'Amour does make one very profound point, however, that much wisdom is communicated through conversation, and just because a person is not well-versed in a formal academic education does not mean that he has not imbibed much that is true. After all, mankind knew how to think before they knew how to read.

High and beautiful

 This was my kind of country. I'm a high-line man. I like the country up yonder where the trees are flagged by the wind, where there's sedge and wild flowers under foot and where the mountains gnaw the sky with gray hard teeth, flecked with a foam of snow gathered in the hollows

(from Ride the Dark Trail, by Louis L'Amour)

Subliminal communication

    "Talon was a man - all man. He walked strong and he thought right, and no man ever left his door hungry, Indian, black man, or white. Nor did he ever take water for any man."

  

  "He was a judge of land," I said, "and of women."

    "We had it good together," Em said quietly, "we walked in a quiet way, the two of us, and never had to say much about it to one another." She paused. "I just looked at him and he looked at me and we knew how it was with each other.

(from Ride the Dark Trail, by Louis L'Amour)

Defending the Empty

     She was old now, and tired. The long, wakeful nights left her trembling, yet she was not afraid. When they came after her in the end she hoped but for one thing, that she would awaken in time to get off a shot. Nothing had frightened her in the old days, but then Pa had always been close by, and now Pa was gone.

    Slowly her tired muscles relaxed. Thunder rumbled out there, and the heat lightning showed brief flashes through the cracks of the shutters. She must take another look soon. In a little while.

    Her eyes closed . . . only for a minute, she told herself, only for one brief, wonderful minute.

(from Ride the Dark Trail, by Louis L'Amour)

Talus

Louis L'Amour seemed to use the term "talus" a great deal in his novels. One definition refers to an ankle bone, but the one that L'Amour no doubt intended was "a slope formed especially by an accumulation of rock debris," or "rock debris at the base of a cliff." It is synonymous with "scree."

Undertaker for the reckless

 Nothing in his life gave him reason for a sense of security, nor had he ever been a reckless man, nor one given to taking unnecessary chances. He had, even as a boy, often been accused by the more foolhardy of being afraid to take chances, and the very idea of taking a risk that was not demanded by circumstances was repugnant to him. Yet much of his life had been lived where caution was the price of survival, and being the man he was, he had survived. He did not take chances, but he had helped to bury men who did.

(from Radigan, by Louis L'Amour)

Crooks can be beautiful

 They went out, and the girl didn't look back. I felt sorry for her, but that might have been because she was pretty. She did not look like a crook, but then, who does?

(from "Stay Out of My Nightmare," by Louis L'Amour)

He was UGLY!

 Toni glared sidewise at me. Weren't you kind of sweet on her?"

"Me?" I shrugged, and glanced at her with a lot of promissory notes in my eyes. "I like a smart dame!"

She took it big. I'm no Clark Gable or anything, but alongside of Caronna I'd look like Galahad beside a gorilla.

(from "The Impossible Murder," by Louis L'Amour)

THE WORKS OF DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN

 

One of the penalties for living a long life is that those who are younger generally will ignore what you have gleaned from those years, and now that I have passed my threescore and ten I suppose that I will be no different in that regard from anyone else. Each new generation tends to assume that it has arrived at all truth, but it may be regarded as a truism that that man who refuses to learn from the lives of his predecessors is among the biggest of fools, for that method of learning is vastly less painful than trial and error. There is no need for us to be insulted because of this neglect, however, for in that respect we are no different from any other generation. What follows is merely a suggestion, but it is one whose benefit I have personally experienced.

 During the brutally hot and dry summer of 1980, I received an advertisement from the History Book Club. If you agreed to buy two more offerings, you got the first one free, which seemed to be a good deal to me. One of their books was R. E. Lee, the four volume Pulitzer Prize-winning biography written by Douglas Southall Freeman. I chose it, and I readily confess that the reading of those four volumes was one of the most powerful character-development projects that I have ever undertaken. General Robert E. Lee was in every respect a remarkable man.

 Douglas Freeman went on to write a three-volume follow-up to the biography of Lee entitled Lee’s Lieutenants, which established him as the preeminent military historian in the country, and led to close friendships with United States generals George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Freeman’s final work was his biography of George Washington, for which he won another Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

The biography of Washington is in seven volumes (the final volume written by his associates). I own and have read all fourteen volumes of Freeman’s major works. My copy of George Washington is an original edition.

 Even as much as from the biographies themselves, I gained much from the reading of these monumental works of Dr. Freeman (he received his Ph.D. in History in 1908). Not only was he the Editor of The Richmond News Leader, in which position he wrote an estimated 600,000 words of editorial copy every year between 1915 and 1949, but his twice-daily radio broadcasts made him one of the most influential men in Virginia. Between 1934 and 1941 he commuted twice weekly to New York City to teach journalism at Columbia University. He also taught as a lecturer at the United States Army War College for seven years.

 Suffice it to say that Dr. Freeman did not suffer from idleness. In fact, his work ethic was legendary. When at home, he rose at three every morning and drove to his newspaper office, saluting Robert E. Lee's monument on Monument Avenue as he passed. Twice daily, he walked to a nearby radio studio, where he gave news broadcasts and discussed the day's news. After his second broadcast, he would drive home for a short nap and lunch and then worked another five or six hours on his current historical project. He was in great demand as a public speaker. In 1937, the peak of his labors in that field, he spoke eighty-three times to various audiences.

 At the beginning of Volume Six of the Washington biography, Dumas Malone wrote a preface entitled “The Pen of Douglas Southall Freeman,” from which we learn several interesting facts about the biographer. Freeman’s father was a Confederate veteran who was at Appomattox at the surrender.

 After accuracy, the quality that Freeman most valued in newspaper writing was brevity. “Don’t gush, and don’t twitter,” he told his juniors. “Play it straight.” Above his desk was a sign that read, “Time alone is irreplaceable. Waste it not.”

 One of the reasons that Freeman was able to accomplish so much as a biographer was because he held himself to a strict standard. From 1926, when he began keeping tabs upon his work on R. E. Lee, until 1933, when he finished it, he spent a total of 6100 hours on that work. In 1936, he began work on Lee’s Lieutenants, and spent 7121 hours on it. Two weeks after his 58^th birthday, Freeman began the Washington biography, which occupied his attention for the rest of his life, and upon which he spent 15,693 hours. According to Malone, he wrote the Washington biography in longhand, “having concluded that his typewriter by its very speed led him down false trails that had to be retraced and into inaccuracies that had to be painfully corrected.” Freeman described his work on Washington as “the most delightful intellectual experience” of his life.

 Malone finished his preface thusly: “National heroes can be cast from their pedestals by unholy hands and the ideals that patriots lived by can be dishonored. Unlike stones, literary monuments have life within them and they often prove more enduring. The creators of noble books about noble men are public benefactors, and such a creator was Douglas Southall Freeman.”

 Much of my reading of Dr. Freeman’s works was late at night after my wife and children were in bed, but I have not regretted either the time nor the sleep that it cost me.

Story ideas

Story ideas can come from anywhere and everywhere, but one must be quick to perceive them. They can be derived from a chance remark, a happening, a word, a place, or a person. To become successful as a writer one must become story-minded, that is, he must become able to perceive the story value of what he sees, hears, or learns. An idea that offers riches to one might be useless to another. Hence the idea is less than what the writer brings to the idea.

(from the Foreword to The Hills of Homicide, by Louis L'Amour)

A writer is a writer

 The Hills of Homicide is a special collection that I have put together of my detective and crime stories. They were written in the so-called "hard-boiled" style for magazines that also featured the work of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Although I am best known for my fiction about the American frontier, there's no reason why a person who is known for stories about one area cannot write successful stories in another. Good storytelling can be applied to any area at any time.

(from the Foreword to The Hills of Homicide, by Louis L'Amour)

Hide the swag

 "Ah, Stilton," I said, and, what is more, I said it airily. The keenest ear could not have detected that the conscience was not as clean as a whistle. One prefers, of course, on all occasions to be stainless and above reproach, but, failing that, the next best thing is unquestionably to have got rid of the body.

(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

It is all relative

     "You didn't get his consent in writing?" I asked, as he concluded.

    "Well, no," he admitted. "It never occurred to me. But if what is in your mind is that he may try to back out of it, don't worry. You have no conception, Bertie, literally no conception of the chumminess which exists between us. Hands were shaken, and backs slapped. He was all over me like a bedspread. Well, to give you some idea, he said he wished he had a son like me."

    "Well, considering he's got a son like Edwin, that isn't saying much."

(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The evil eye

 There was a pause, during which he tried to catch my eye and I tried to avoid his. Stilton's eye, even in repose, is nothing to write home about, being the sort of hard blue and rather bulging. In moments of emotion, it tends to protrude even farther, like that of an irascible snail, the general effect being rather displeasing.

(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

There are tiffs, and then there are TIFFS

     "D'Arcy Cheesewright," she said, getting right off the mark without so much as a preliminary "What ho, there," "is an obstinate, mulish, pigheaded, overbearing, unimaginative, tyrannical jack in office."

    Her words froze me to the core. I was conscious of a sense of frightful peril. Owing to young Edwin's infernal officiousness, this pancake had been in receipt only a few hours earlier of a handsome diamond brooch, ostensibly as a present from Bertram W., and now, right on top of it, she had had a falling out with Stilton, so substantial that it took her six distinct adjectives to describe him. When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six if big stuff.

(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

I thought she expressed herself rather clearly

    "How did it all end?"

    "Oh, I got away with my life. Still, what's life?"

    "Life's all right."

    "Not if you've lost the girl you love."

    "Have you lost the girl you love?"

    "That's what I'm trying to figure out. I can't make up my mind. It all depends what construction you place on the words, 'I never want to see or speak to you again in this world or the next, you miserable fathead.'"

    "Did she say that?"

    "Among other things."

(from Joy in the Morning, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)