Jan. 26, 2012Best known for his Westerns, Louis L'Amour actually wrote stories and novels set in a variety of times and places. Like his Westerns, though, all of these tend to feature strong heroes who are macho but moral (and he well understood that these aren't contradictory qualities!), and who face physical and other challenges not unlike those that might have arisen on the Western frontier. The grist for these yarns came mainly from personal experience (though he also read voraciously): after leaving home at the age of 15, driven by a desire to travel and broaden his experience, L'Amour led a strenuous, highly masculine life as a young man, which included seafaring around the world, a successful boxing career, and service as a naval officer in World War II.In Yondering, the author collects 13 of his non-Western short stories (plus one short poem), and provides each one with a brief introduction. (Although one introduction serves for three stories, which share a setting in pre-WWII Shanghai.) So far, I've only read the first one, "Where There's Fighting," a stark, compactly-written, gripping tale of a few British soldiers (and one Yank, with a colorful backstory) stuck in the mountains behind enemy lines during the German invasion of Greece and facing a vast column of oncoming troops. But I expect to be revisiting this book at various times in the coming year. So, more later!April 24, 2012Over the weekend, I read the poem and six more stories, and my appreciation for the book and for L"Amour as a writer is definitely growing! "Let Me Forget..." is an excellent example of successful formal (it's not rhymed, but is metered) poetry, using a linkage of beautiful images to suggest a serious idea without explicitly stating it. (In this case, the idea is the tension or conflict between his wanderlust and the need for a sedentary time to practice his craft as a writer.) It's short, 13 lines in two stanzas, but says everything that needs to be said. L'Amour published a book of poems in his own lifetime (Smoke From This Altar); I suspect that a more thorough acquaintance with his poetry would earn him recognition as one of America's better 20th-century poets --or, at least, would earn it if we had a critical community that wasn't prejudiced against him.Every one of the six stories read in this round are winners: crafted to perfectly accomplish the author's purposes, written in good clear prose, well-conceived and polished to shine like jewels. (Three of them feature a sailor-drifter narrator, known only by the nickname "Duke" if he's named at all, who might be an alter-ego for L'Amour himself.) One of these is profoundly tragic; but like the characters, we as readers feel it to be tragic because we've come to care, and this capacity for caring gives us something enduring at the price of the tragedy. (Something like the Tin Man's line in the old Wizard of Oz movie: "Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking.")One story, "The Dancing Kate," is a vintage example of the type of yarn readers probably expect from this author: a simple, direct tale of danger, intrigue and adventure, with a hero on a mission, a fortune in gold at stake, and a need for courage and quick thinking (and a quick draw). But it's a well-done example of its type, and set a notch above many similar stories from that era by the positive treatment of non-white characters. Each of the other five, though, all surprise the reader --sometimes by the endings, but more importantly by showing probably unsuspected facets of the author's creativity, because they have plots wholly unlike the action-adventure we associate with him. "Shaghai, Not Without Gestures," for instance, is the sort of nuanced story of male-female social interaction that Katharine Mansfield might have written. (It's also a real indictment of the miserable position of an unemployed, destitute woman in that time --which hasn't improved any today!) "The Man Who Stole Shakespeare," on the other hand, reminded me of Evelyn Waugh. I don't suggest, though, that L'Amour slavishly imitated either of those writers; the personal touch on these stories is all his own. My own favorite from this batch is "A Moon of the Trees Broken by Snow: A Chrismas Story" (the title translates an Indian name for the month roughly corresponding to our December), the last selection in the book. (As usual, I'm reading these somewhat out of order.) It's set in the 1300s in the world of the North American cliff dwellers, who have never heard of Christ or Christmas, but as the title says, it's a Christmas story. How, you ask... well, you'll just have to read it!There are six stories still unread here. So, more later!June 9, 2012In the last few days, I finished the remaining stories, and didn't find a clunker in the bunch. Strictly speaking, of course, "Author's Tea" is more of a sketch than a plotted story, and probably the most autobiographical of the bunch. Dugan, the protagonist of "The Dancing Kate," appears here as an author of tales drawn on his experiences, stuck with attending a literary social function where he's surrounded by writer-wannabes with very little clue as to what writing is really about and very little understanding of the kind of fiction he writes nor of the kind of lifestyle that produced it. One could feel L'Amour venting some of the frustation he must have felt in many very similar settings! I'm guessing that the character "Duke" mentioned above is a nickname for Dugan, and that the single character is definitely modeled on the author himself.Although I recommended this collection (in part) for fans of adventure fiction, as I implied above, not ALL of the stories here are of that sort. Out of the six stories from this go-around, "Old Doc Yak" is another example of one that's not. Straight-up mainstream fiction, it's a sensitive character study (with an undercurrent of implicit social commentary), set in a Depression-stricken West Coast seaport, where out-of-work sailors struggle for day-to-day food and shelter, and to preserve their own self-respect.The other four selections each have more of the adventure component we probably expect from L'Amour. There's also a significant note of social criticism in "Survival," where the sole surviving crew member of a shipwrecked vessel (which might not have wrecked if not for the shipping company's negligence and indifference to safety) recounts the harrowing tale of survival --or not survival, for some-- in an open boat in the Pacific, to landlubbers including a company hack who'd like to make him the scapegoat. "Glorious! Glorious!" (the title in the table of contents has the word twice, but above the story itself the word only appears once) is set in Spanish Morocco in 1921, during the war between Spain and the Riff Berber tribe. It's a grim, violent tale that focuses on four disparate soldiers of the Spanish Foreign Legion (the counterpart of the more famous French one), part of a doomed garrison in a written-off outpost facing imminent annihilation. (The title comes from a drinking song, but there's definitely nothing glorious here --nor, L'Amour implies, in war in general.) In "Dead-End Drift," the author draws on his mining experience to spin a story of four trapped miners, buried alive by a sudden cave-in, who have no realistic hope for survival --or do they? Finally, "A Friend of the General" gives the reader a glimpse into the milieu of Chinese war lords and arms dealing. It's a world of decidedly self-serving people, where ethics aren't a matter of much consideration, a world characterized by high stakes, danger, double-crosses and assassins --but despite all that, it's a story that has an undercurrent of humor.Some of the stories use nautical or mining argot that uninitiated readers (me included!) won't completely understand; but you can work around this to get enough idea of what's going on, in context, that it doesn't interfere with enjoying the story. L'Amour is my wife's favorite writer; and he's well on his way to becoming one of mine as well!
A collection of short stories from the life of Louis L'Amour, the preeminent author of western fiction in America. These are word snapshots of different experiences in his life that give the reader a better understanding of what made him tick, and what went into the cooking pot that made him who he was. I was especially touched by his story titled "The Man Who Stole Shakespeare." He spoke of following a man whom he had observed to shoplift a book in a small bookstore, only to discover that he was illiterate, but loved books deeply. He spent much time while stranded in that foreign country visiting with the "man who stole Shakespeare" from time to time to read to him from the many books he had acquired, but didn't know how to read. Man of the other stories from LL's life are just as interesting. 7/4/11 - Back for a re-read. Worth re-reading.
