The Homer of the Oater
By J.D. Reed
LONELY ON THE MOUNTAIN by Louis L'Amour; Bantam; $2.25;paperbound
Dwight Eisenhower passed on his dogeared copies to Secret Service men; former Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman is an avid fan; so is Ronald Reagan's campaign press secretary, Lyn Nofziger. Tom Landry packs a volume with his Dallas Cowboys playbook for road trips; Country Star Willie Nelson has a coveted signed edition. Straight through the heartland of America, truck drivers pass up the centerfold magazines at diesel stops to buy a copy of his latest paperback; thousands of folks from Santa Fe, N. Mex., to Savannah, Ga., line up for his autograph on his frequent tours.
Louis Dearborn L'Amour may be the most famous obscure author in America. He hardly ever makes the bestseller lists, nor is he yet a darling of the literati, like Mystery Writer John D. MacDonald. But today over 100 million copies of his frontier and western novels are in print. Moreover, he and his publishers have done it without full-page ads or talk-show hype. The latest of his 77 volumes, Lonely on the Mountain, is the 16th episode of the long and winding Sackett saga, tracing the fortunes of a frontier family from the 17th century up to the 1890s.
L'Amour has also written a dozen volumes about the Chantrys and the Talons, two other hard-riding families linked to the Sacketts by marriage. The latest L'Amour western omelet is highly seasoned and full of natural ingredients: the proud, individualistic Sackett brothers, Tell, Orrin and Tyrel, drive a herd from Colorado to Canada, answering an urgent call for help from Cousin Logan. On the winding trail they deal with Indians (mostly good), women (aggressively virtuous), rustlers (as mean as copperheads), plus a menagerie of grizzlies, wolves, giant mosquitoes and the customary herd of bison. In addition, there are two elaborate fistfights and a six-shot denouement.
Narrator Tell Sackett is illiterate and speaks with a clanking formality that sounds like John Wayne's movie lines ("It is a hard land, ma'am, and we'll have no truck with those who come with idle hands"). The Duke, in fact, played the title role in Hondo, from the novel of the same name, one of more than 30 L'Amour books bought for the screen.
L'Amour heroes like Tell don't chew, swear, swill redeye or hang around dance halls, and they don't go with girls who do. Horseplay and gunplay are surprisingly infrequent. The Sacketts are courtly coffee drinkers who never draw first and fight only when their bedrock belief in the perfectability of mankind has been violated. They hardly rate a PG.
However, they have little time to be anything but virtuous. Up in the mountains or over on the butte, the cowpokes constantly deal with hunger, flood, stampedes and illness. Their trials are immediate and personal, and in overcoming them they create a kind of cactus morality play that readers want to see repeated.
That desire has made L'Amour a millionaire. Like one of his protagonists, the novelist lives virtuously, if not primitively, with his wife of 24 years and their two teenage children. Their Spanish-style mansion in Los Angeles, just off Sunset Boulevard, contains a reference library of some 8,000 volumes within its walls. L'Amour is secretive about his age; published estimates put him in his early 70s, but he has the look and vigor of a man much younger, turning out three novels a year with metronomic regularity. He shuns the Hollywood party circuit.
A native North Dakotan, the rugged, soft-spoken L'Amour feels that his popularity comes from the same wellsprings that brought Ronald Reagan to prominence: "They say the cowboy is a dead, romantic figure. But there's a little cowboy in all of us, a little frontier. People don't want to go back to those days, but they want to go halfway back. Their problems are too big now, they can't solve them, people want action, positive values. If you think about it, that was what they were saying on Nov. 4. Those are the people I write for."
L' Amour long ago deciphered the ways of Establishment critics. Philosophy has taken the place of bitterness. As he reckons it, "If a man is in bed with an other man's wife, that's literature. If the subject is the opening up of half of our country, that's not. It's absurd. Those guys seem to write just to excite each other up there on Martha's Vineyard."
Other western writers have been known to seek higher literary sources; Max Brand once locked himself in an El Paso hotel room and read Sophocles rather than researching the locale. Not L' Amour. He has little use for the main stream of English lit. Or American.
"Hemingway? I don't like his novels much, except that one about Spain." In stead, the author pores over maps, diaries and histories. In addition, he regularly does field work in Durango, Colo., so that he can be close to the land he writes about. If L' Amour is not praised as a prose stylist, he is applauded for lore that is accurate down to the last lariat.
"An editor once omitted one of my foot notes," he recalls. "It explained that a certain type of gun -- a scraper -- was only made in a test model. I got thousands of letters from frontier buffs and gun people." L'Amour's factual asides have been treated with greater respect ever since.
Yet it is not simple fidelity to detail that has made L'Amour's novels excep tional bestsellers. His popularity keeps growing because, in an epoch of prose experiments and self-conscious narrative, he has never forgotten to spin his yarn. "My books are meant to be read aloud," he says. "I'm a troubadour, a village taleteller. I'm the guy at the end of the bar or in the shadows of the campfire." In the past decade, he has become a kind of Woody Guthrie of fiction, a conservative populist who believes the myths he creates. And his audience rides with him, attracted to simple writing about simple times.
It would do a disservice to make extravagant claims for this Western man; he is hardly a Whitman, voicing our collective unconscious. But L'Amour does create a relief map of current American desires in the heartland. New readers of the Sackett novels can discover the beliefs of the silent, moral or just plain nostalgic majority -- and have a rip-roaring time in the process.
And if they get hooked like millions of others, they can relax. On his desk, L'Amour has outlines for 34 more books.
Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles
With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles
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