Henry Miller vs Louis L’Amour

I had the good pleasure of reading Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life the other day. Well, not all of it, but most of it. Published by New Directions when Miller was in Big Sur, I’m sure it did not sell well. Miller rambles on about love, life, and the discovery of books and authors at various pivotal junctures through the years. For the writer, books are indispensable. Not so for the casual observer and passer-by. Still the question applies. What to read and why? As The New Yorker critic Maria Bustillos laments, “faced with lifetimes upon lifetimes worth of books on entering even a small public library or a reasonably well-stocked bookshop [how is one to choose]?”

I don’t know how you feel about Miller but he seems honest, probably too honest. Tropic of Cancer, his best known work, has to rank up there with Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Kerouac’s On the Road as a landmark American publication. Like the other two, Tropic of Cancer has today become cliché, a kind of parody no longer to be taken seriously. It has permeated the culture too severely to be first order. As with other pop idols, think Picasso, Warhol, Pollock, the book will forever be confined to the ranks of adolescent enthusiasm. Yet there are passages that glisten with life, something the scholar or the critic will never muster. No, Miller, Kerouac, Pollock, and a thousand other renegades like them, are like people you’d meet in a bar. That weird neighbor that reads too much or watches too many movies. Friends that come to give it to you straight. No nonsense horseshit. Here it is! They are too honest and forthright, and therefore never to be trusted….

Miller goes all the way back to the beginning, to the boyhood stories of his youth that today’s reader cannot comprehend. The boyhood stories of Haggard, Harty, and Henty that, with some exception, nobody reads anymore. These are the impressionable years, the formative years, where what one reads will never again be experienced in that pure, prejudice-free state. Do you remember what those books or poems were? Hopefully you had a good teacher or a decent school that opened up the possibilities. I remember fondly reading through The Count of Monte Cristo and being absolutely thrilled at this remarkable story. I remember reading Shakespeare, A Tale of Two Cities, Brave New World, and 1984 seriously, critically in school. On my own I remember reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Who in their right mind, I ask you, reads D.H. Lawrence at 16? The notion to me is absurd. I haven’t read a thing by Lawrence since. He’s one of those authors that have mysteriously eluded me. More than any other Englishman, Lawrence is brought up and I simply have no referent. I remember wondering to myself what was so remarkable about him when we went to visit his gravesite in Taos, New Mexico. I couldn’t figure him out. The strange sexual stories, the silly little poems, the insane travel…. Another pilgrim explained it to me. It really wasn’t the fiction that set him apart, it was the lifestyle. Lady Chatterley’s Lover achieved that greatest of all accomplishments: the banned book. As with Miller and Joyce, nothing could have proved so pivotal as that grand designation. Unlike Miller, though, the work avoids parody and still maintains an air of civility and mystery, unlike most people you might meet in a bar…. It is first rate. Evidently Lawrence’s travel writing is without equal (I’m sure that’s no longer the case), and a hallmark in literary criticism is his Studies in Classic American Literature, where, significantly, Whitman, Melville, and Poe are acknowledged as masters for the first time. The only book I own by Lawrence is Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious published in the same volume. Ironically, he was anti-Freudian when it was all the rage, and most of his creative work follows the classical Freudian mode of sex, identity, and development.

Lawrence comes up in Miller’s retrospective frequently, obsessively. It’s funny how certain author’s haunt certain writers. It’s like Miller needs him, but can’t figure out how to acknowledge him. The same for Thomas Mann, another author whose work I’m completely unfamiliar. It is like a huge gaping hole in my own education, an embarrassment, which begs the question, what to read? Is there an actual quantity which sets apart intelligence, civility, cultural sophistication? Like if you read this many then you made it, you’re ok, or is it strictly quality? At what point are we considered fit for social and cultural engagement? Isn’t real life more important? Isn’t it better to combine the two – books and life? Is there anything worse than someone who has read too much? For the writer, the poet, there is never enough. One book leads to another. But for the average consumer, what exactly is sufficient?

Overall, Miller’s list works. It is the canon for better or worse. He is atypically anti-English, a quality which I have come to admire. There are a handful of gems I, for one, had not known like Blaise Cendares, Jean Giono, certain, specific works of Breton and Balzac. What came to mind reading Miller's meanderings was Louis L’Amour’s Education of a Wandering Man.

Never cared much for L’Amour. I remember seeing the spines of his books – hundreds of them – in drugstores as boy, but I never read one. I think my grandfather used to read them, and I saw a few scattered around his house here and there. One day, waiting for my wife in the doctor’s office I read through Hondo and was impressed by the small book. It was simple and straightforward, the story well paced and structured, and terribly melodramatic by today’s standards. That was all. I stumbled across Education of Wandering Man by chance and was impressed by the author’s passion for books and education, literary education. Here was an autodidact in the raw.

If anyone was qualified for the quintessential Western it was this man. Pursuing the Santee Sioux out across Dakota with the Sibley command, his great-grandfather was scalped and killed in the aftermath of the Little Crow massacre of 1862. An old time gunfighter by the name of Bill Tilghman taught him how to shoot. While baling hay in the Pecos Valley he met Tom Pickett, George Coe and Deluvina Maxwell, all of whom had known Billy the Kid. L’Amour is the last writer to have known people who lived the frontier life. In his early years he was a knockabout. He went to sea, worked in mines, lumber camps, and sawmills. For a while he was a boxer. L’Amour became Martin Eden incarnate. Most of what he wrote came from firsthand sources, by people who were there and experienced it. He was fascinated by how people worked and made their livings. He lamented that not enough people wrote about what they actually had to do to survive, that most writing was only a record of the privileged few….

The West is purely American. Thinkers have likened the Western proper to Greek tragedy. No other setting could be more mythic. No situation more exposed and telling of the human condition. On film and on paper it is a perpetual cornerstone for storytelling.

Around a campfire in Oklahoma an old-timer Peterson spoke up. Peterson had been raised as an Apache as a young boy. He believed he was almost seven when he was taken by the Apache, and five years later he rode on his first war party with Nana’s band.

They were going to ambush a stage at a strategic point near Stein’s Peak, which marked the entrance to what white men called Doubtful Canyon. The stage left Cooke’s Spring near Deming, New Mexico. By now Cochise and even the chief Mangas Colorado had gathered.

The Apache appeared when the stage entered the canyon. The Apaches shot one of the horses pulling the stage, and the stage ran into the horses and overturned. Men came out of the vehicle, 7 altogether, with rifles firing at once and made their way to a knoll on the side of the trail, the only defensive position. Apaches fell and withdrew. The men then pulled boxes equipped with pistols and ammunition from the stage.

The Apaches countered. One of the white men went down. The men in the stagecoach were the Free Thompson Party. They had thousands of rounds of ammunition but no food or water. No help would be coming. Military force had all been allocated east to fight the Big War. Soon the Thompson Party was down to 5. Still there were hundreds of Apache.

Midway into the third afternoon the shooting stopped. The Apaches made their way to the encampment. All 7 were dead. One of the last to die broke the others’ rifles so the Apache could not use them. The last one shot himself to avoid the torture the Apaches would have administered. Reports would later claim that 130 to 150 Apaches died in the three-day fight. Long after, in Chihuahua, Cochise was said to have declared the men the bravest he had ever encountered on the battlefield.

The fight of Doubtful Canyon is well known by many historians of the Apache wars, but the author heard it firsthand from someone who was there.

And this is the kind of thing that brings a story to life.