R.W.W. Greene's Blog, page 5

Books for Writers: "Education of a Wandering Man"

When a local used bookstore went out of business a few years ago, I was saddened but I took advantage of the low, low prices to grab … well ... everything.

Among the finds was Education of a Wandering Man, Western writer Louis L’Amour’s memoir. Published by Bantam in 1989 (a year after his death), it’s L’Amour’s account of the life he led while learning to be a writer and, more importantly, the books that taught him about words and story forms.

As an adventure tale, Education of a Wandering Man lacks the drama of Into Thin Air and many other books about leaving the beaten path. L’Amour left home at sixteen to become a hobo, wandering hither and yon in search of work. The jobs (merchant seaman, bare-knuckle boxer, cattle skinner, mine minder) are not especially thrilling, and L’Amour doesn’t go into them in detail. Instead he focuses on the books he read along the way, listing them by title (when he remembers them) and talking about what he learned from them.

“Byron’s Don Juan I read on an Arab jhow sailing north from Aden up the Red Sea to Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson I read while broke and on the beach in San Pedro. In Singapore, I came upon a copy of The Annals and Antiquities of Rajahstan by James Tod.” (Education of a Wandering Man, page two.)

L’Amour committed poems to memory and recited them around hobo campfires to entertain his fellow travelers. In every port and town, the first stop he made was the local library. Eventually, after filling his head with words, he tried to write his own stories. His first published short story appeared in a nudie magazine. Then he broke into the pulps. In the end, L’Amour wrote eighty-nine novels, more than 250 short stories, and sold more than 320 million copies of his work.

There was no rhyme or reason to L’Amour’s reading. If he found a book, he read it. There’s a nice appendix in the back of Education of a Wandering Man where L’Amour lists all the books and plays he read from 1930 to 1935 and 1937. The list starts with Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana,  hops from The War in the Air by H.G. Wells to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and ends with The Checkered Years by Mary Boyrton Carody.

L’Amour left formal education early, but praised it for its ability to give people the tools they need for life-long learning. “[Education] should equip a person to live life well, to understand what is happening about him, for to live life well one must live with awareness.” (Education of a Wandering Man, page 5.)\

For a student, the memoir shows that education is something that must be pursued rather than gifted. Broadening the mind is an active process, one that can only happen through search and seeking, reading and reflection. For a writer, L’Amour’s story is a craft lesson in the importance of reading widely and well.

NEWS: I turned in the revisions for Earth Retrograde yesterday. It’s the second and final book in the First Planets duology (the first book is Mercury Rising). If you preorder from my local, Gibsons Bookstore, there’s a good chance you can get a signed copy when it comes out Oct. 24.

I’ll be in Calgary May 15-26 if anyone has ideas of book-related things to do. I’m also planning a cross-country road trip (Boston to Seattle) with my mother in August for my little brother’s wedding, and we’ll be doing book/literary/silly things along the way.

Peace, Rob

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Hot Dogs and Cool Cats

It was hard to hear clearly in a pet crematory. The burners roared like jet planes, and the carcasses crackled and hissed as they burned down from meat to ash. The dead weren’t quiet; but they rarely complained. 

So, when I heard the noise, I wasn’t sure it was real. It was barely at the threshold of audibility. High-pitched. Intermittent. A cry for help. I opened the trash cans and searched among the bodies. Nothing. There was a garbage bag on the stained concrete floor. I knelt to open it. It was full of puppies. 

The crematory at the Oak Veterinary Hospital (not its real name) was my responsibility once, part of a job I walked into during the fall of my sophomore year in high school. I’d worked plenty in the years prior -- mowing lawns, haying, raking blueberries, babysitting stock, pets, and kids -- but real jobs, ones you filed taxes for, were scarce in my home town, population 1,200 with twice as many cows. To get a real job, I had to go into the city.

The vet hospital was in the capital, across the street from a Chinese restaurant, fifteen long miles from home. The hiring process had been intense. The practice owners were a father-son team, I'll call them Drs Paul and Lincoln Sanders, and they both sat in on the grilling. 

“How are your grades?” they said. “Why do you want to work here?” 

My grades were fine, I said. As for why I came to the Sanders for a job, I blamed James Herriot, the pen name of a writer/vet in northern England. I’d read all of Herriot’s folksy books about his life as a country veterinarian, and watching the show on public television Sunday nights was a family pastime. I was already a certified dairy-cow judge through the 4-H Club, and I loved animals. It stood to reason my skills might lend themselves to the veterinary sciences. 

After the interview, Doctor Paul gave me the tour. We hit the ward first, rows of two-level steel cages filled with sick or boarding animals. My role there would be to feed the dogs and cats twice a day, exercise them in shifts, and clean and disinfect the cages. The next stop was the washroom, where I would bathe the ailing and befouled. 

The exercise room looked like a prison yard, rows of concrete-block runs topped with chain-link and shut tight with steel gates. The vet showed me the safety pole I could use to move potentially rabid dogs around. I remembered the final scene of Old Yeller, where Travis tearfully guns his faithful hound down, and nodded understanding. The hydrophoby was not on my to-do list. 

The last stop on the tour was the crematory. The door was at the end of a dark hallway and led to a long, tunnel of dirty, white-washed cinder block. The roof was made of translucent green fiberglass panels; the light they let in was flu-like.

The corridor sloped to a space about the size of my bedroom back home. On one side was a claw-foot tub on blocks with a grate across the top of it. That’s where the messy carcasses went — autopsies, road kills, and rabies suspects — to drain. On the other side were a row of plastic garbage cans. All the animals that fit went in there. Doctor Paul lifted the lid of the nearest one. 

Inside the trash can was a tumble of fur and paws, dogs and cats locked in a stiff embrace they never would have allowed in life. At the very top, a gray-haired terrier snarled, his pale lips and yellow teeth locked in a final grimace of defiance against the reaper. Some intangible part of me whimpered and fled, tail between its legs, and never returned.

Doctor Paul showed me the burner controls. There were two: one for the top burner, one for the bottom. “You’ll want to light it up as soon as you come in,” he said. “Put the smaller animals in first. Once it gets hot, you can put the bigger ones in. Don’t let it smoke.” 

If it smoked, we’d get complaints. The Chinese restaurant would call and report the smell of roasting dogs and cats was overpowering the food. If the wind was right, the smell would carry across town to the supermarket, and we’d hear from them, too. 

“Check the smokestack,” Doctor Paul said. “If you can see the smoke, they can smell it.” We went back to his office, and the doctor went over the benefits of joining the team. I’d work Saturday, Sunday, and the major holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Independence Day). On holidays, I’d make triple time. On regular days, I’d make $3.65 an hour. As a bonus, I’d get a fresh turkey for my family’s Thanksgiving dinner. 

“How about it?” he said. 

“Sounds good.” 

After my father dropped me off for my first day, Doctor Paul handed me a brown lab coat to wear, and I went right to the crematory to light the burners. With the oil burners roaring away, I checked the trash cans. The day before had not been a good day to die, apparently, as there were few animals to burn. Most of the stuff in the cans was actual trash: wrappers, boxes, bio waste, and used hypodermic needles. In the bathtub, though, was the headless body of a Saint Bernard who’d been suspected of rabies. The only way to a sure diagnosis was to cut off the animal’s head and send the brain to the state lab. The Saint Bernard was nearly as big as I was and stiff as a board. 

I hustled away to the ward to feed the animals, taking careful note of their dietary requirements. Most just needed a scoop or two of food, but some were on special diets. One dog, a cocker spaniel whose owner was on vacation, ate only chicken and rice from a Tupperware container in the fridge. 

After the feeding, I went back to the crematory to put the first few animals in. I chose a small beagle-looking thing and two cats to start with. I watched the flames lick their fur for a moment or two then heaved the heavy hatch shut. 

I put the first wave of dogs into the exercise yard and cleaned their cages with a pressure hose and disinfectant. The cats moved to clean quarters while I made their cages sparkle, then moved back. By the time the first dogs were back in their cages, the runs re-disinfected, and the second wave barking and scratching at the exercise yard, it was time to check the crematory again. 

The beagle compatible and his cat pals were curled and black, their guts thrusting out of their bellies and roasting alongside. It smelled like barbecue. I put in another dog and went back up to clean more cages before lunch. 

I was eating my peanut-butter sandwich in the break room when Doctor Paul dropped by. “I’ll give you a hand with the big one down there,” he said. 

I nodded.

He waited. 

I set my sandwich aside and followed him down to the fire. I took the back end of the big dog, and he took the front. The dog had shit itself and pipes of feces fell around my feet as we shuffled it toward the furnace. The doctor’s end leaked blood but less than I expected. Together, we heaved the carcass through the hatch and dropped it on top of the burning meat. 

“He’s not going to fit, is he?” the veterinarian said. The Saint Bernard was too big for the hatch, and all four of his paws were sticking out. “Grab that shovel over there.” I handed him the shovel and watched as he used it to break the dog’s legs. They folded easily after that, and I tucked the big paws in with the rest of the body. “Keep it hot,” Doctor Paul said. “He’ll take the rest of the day to burn down.” I threw the rest of my sandwich away, and punched back in early. I had three cats to bathe and a dog to cover with an oily goop that combated mange, and, after that, I had the second round of feedings and cleanings. 

In days to come, I learned the job end to end. The ward was lit with germ-killing ultraviolet lights, so I had a constant low-grade sunburn. The smoke got into my clothes, even though my protective lab coat, which had a tendency to drape into the fire and catch. I learned how to clean the crematory out and went home with ashes in my hair. On Sundays, the hospital was closed to new business, and I could take an hours-long lunch break if I wanted. I usually walked downtown for a pizza and a stack of comic books and sat at the front desk to enjoy both. 

In time, I bought myself contact lenses and paid for my driver’s-ed classes and driver’s license. I triumphantly brought home my turkey and shared it with my family for Thanksgiving. I had a real job. Sixteen years old with responsibilities and money in the bank. 

The puppies in the bag were dead, of course, and they were young enough that their eyes had never opened. They were mutts, part Rottweiler, maybe, and someone hadn’t wanted them. For $15 a pop, one of the doctors had injected them with a drug cocktail that looked exactly like Windex and put them to sleep. I’d seen it done dozens of times. The doctors had shown me how to hold the dogs’ front legs to best expose the big vein inside their elbows. I’d hold the dogs as the needle went in, and they slipped bonelessly into death. It was quick. Easy. The dogs barely noticed it was happening. 

I heard the whimper again and dug deeper in the bag. One of the pups was still alive, snuggled up to his dead brothers and sisters. I pulled him free, the only warm body among the cold and held him to my chest. I already had three dogs at home, two of them rescued from the doctors’ needles. 

The foundling squirmed in my arms, trying to get closer to my heart. He was probably hungry. He missed his mother. Likely she was missing him, too, wondering what had happened to the litter she’d spawned. He yawned, flashing his pink tongue and untried teeth. 

I carried the pup up the white corridor, through the scarred door, and up the dark hallway. I shouldered open the door to the treatment room where Doctor Franken, a woman new to the practice, was working on an unconscious Labrador with a dislocated shoulder. “You missed one,” I said. I held the puppy up. 

“Ohhh,” her mouth twisted in sympathy, “he’s a little fighter.” She rubbed one of the pup’s silky ears between her fingers. “Hold him a minute.” 

A few minutes later, I laid the pup back down among his chilly siblings. They’d all be warm enough soon, but it took a while to get the chill out of my bones. 

That summer I worked full time and moved up to $3.90 an hour. The morning of my second Christmas in the ward, I’d walked into a full kennel, dozens of dogs and cats barking and scratching for my attention. I couldn’t hear myself think, and the stench was incredible. I fled to the quiet of the unlit crematory. The animals there weren’t asking for much. It’s hard to disappoint the dead. The living, though ... 

I gave notice later that day, deciding I wasn’t cut out to be a vet.

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And, I Quote ...

I am reading Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger, burning through it like I have a deadline. Again, I marvel at his skill with dialog and moody character. Again, I rage at his refusal to use quotation marks. Why, Cormac? Why do you and so many other so-called “literary fiction” writers opt not to use proper punctuation?  The answer I expect these writers would want me to settle on is “genius,” but I believe it’s really “affectation.”

Quotation marks are, among their other roles, used to “enclose a person's spoken words or unspoken thoughts.” (Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker). End of story, right? Seeking confirmation, I opened The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. Elements showed me how to use quote marks, etc., but did not dictate when to use them. 

It did say,“Prefer the standard to the offbeat” (Page 81), which I’m taking to mean ‘don’t get clever just for the sake of looking smart.

James Joyce, in his autobiographical novel A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, used the long dash instead of the lowly quotation mark. It's something he apparently borrowed from the French -- an affectation by an Irish lad who wanted to make himself seem fancy. 

Kaye Gibbons — lauded by talk-show magnate Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times Book Review and others — did not use a single quotation mark in her 1987 book Ellen Foster, nor in the 2006 follow up The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. 

In a 2008 article for the Wall Street Journal, author Lionel Shriver said abandoning quotation is a sign that literature is becoming pretentious and less approachable: “Some rogue must have issued a memo, 'Psst! Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore' to authors as disparate as Junot Díaz, James Frey, Evan S. Connell, J.M. Coetzee, Ward Just, Kent Haruf, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Dale Peck, James Salter, Louis Begley and William Vollmann.” (“Missing the Mark,” WSJ, Oct. 25, 2008)

Lionel Shriver

Shriver writes that the reason behind the banishment of quotation marks is an attempt at “a minimalism that lends text a subtlety and sophistication.” However, the result, he believes, is to leave popular fiction, which still uses quotation marks, more attractive to readers, and literary fiction as an ever-more dusty slog up a difficult road.

“To the degree that this device contributes to the broader popular perception that 'literature' is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior, quotation marks may not be quite as tiny as they appear on the page.” (“Missing the Mark,” WSJ, Oct. 25, 2008)

Shriver goes on to say the practice creates confusion between the characters’ interior and exterior lives as “when the exterior is put on a par with the interior, everything becomes interior. … When thinking, speaking and describing all blend together, the textual tone levels to a drone. The drama seems to be melting.” (“Missing the Mark,” WSJ, Oct. 25, 2008)

This blend or creation of the drone may be the point of some of this. Frank McCourt did not employ quotation marks in his memoirs ‘Tis, Angela’s Ashes, and Teacher Man, and the decision enhances a narrative that is clearly part of a past dusty and dim even to the writer. When Joyce Maynard does it in Labor Day, there’s a similar feel, that of a character looking back to a not-quite clearly remembered history. If, as in journalism, quote marks are used to delineate the exact speech that a source utters, is there a need for them if the dialogue is only half remembered, its blanks filled in through context clues, and only heard at the distance of years?

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road also has a feeling and tone of things gone past and only vaguely recalled. The dialogue is more paraphrased than precisely captured.

He cried for a long time. I’ll talk to you every day, he whispered. And I won’t forget. No matter what. Then he turned and walked back out to the road. ( The Road , page 286)

I thought I might be onto something but when, several summers ago, I asked Joyce Maynard about her quotation-mark aversion in Labor Day, her answer boiled down to aesthetics; she likes the way the page looks without them. When Oprah Winfrey asked McCarthy about his punctuation peculiarity, his answer was similar: “You shouldn't block the page up with weird little marks. If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate." But, at the same time, "You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks to guide people, and write in such a way that it won't be confusing as to who is speaking." (Flak Magazine, June 18, 2007)

So, no plan. Just prettiness. An affectation. The abandonment of quotation marks speaks more of the author’s desire to look  “literary” than of the needs of the work. Misuse of them, or their abandonment, shows me a writer who thinks he or she is too cool for school.

But I’m still reading Cormac McCarthy.

NEWS: I attended the Boskone Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention this past weekend, and the high point was signing a copy of Mercury Rising for a real live astronaut. It was pretty cool. I may have geeked out a little. I sort of thrust the book upon her in panic, and she was groovy enough not to recoil.

The second and final book in the First Planets duology, Earth Retrograde, will be out in October 2023.

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