Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on March 18, 2017 By Patty Limerick
In an encounter with the makings of legend, a very famous cowboy and an entirely unknown schoolmarm met in a showdown between romance and realism in the American West.
This confrontation — between a popular novelist beloved in the heartland and a Harvard-based member of the liberal elite — seemed certain to produce far more antagonism than congeniality.
In 1980, when the writer Louis L’Amour and I converged in a radio studio, the contrast in our circumstances was stunning. He had written and published dozens of Western novels, and the sales of his books had soared past the adjective “astronomical.”
Louis L’Amour wrote nearly 100 novels during his career, most of them Westerns.
Associated Press file
Louis L’Amour wrote nearly 100 novels during his career, most of them Westerns.
By contrast, I had written dozens of seminar papers and a dissertation, and had crept to a Ph.D. Mr. L’Amour had been on hundreds of talk shows, and our listening audience was well-stocked with his fans. This radio show was my maiden run as a public intellectual, and I lived an entirely fan-free life.
Rattled as I was, I still came out swinging. When Mr. L’Amour said that most Western pioneers were skilled with firearms, I was quick to respond with facts: Many emigrants were unused to guns and rifles, resulting in a significant number of self-inflicted wounds on the overland trail. So it went for an hour, me nattering about factual errors in Mr. L’Amour’s novels, and Mr. L’Amour responding with variations on his thought-provoking assertion: His novels were “100 percent accurate, except for the plot and main characters.”
And, during the commercial breaks, Mr. L’Amour would punch me in the arm, in a manner that conveyed an unstinting recognition of gender equality, and declare, “This is fun. Keep it up!”
With his enormous advantage in reputation and cultural power, Mr. L’Amour nonetheless chose to treat me with tolerance and generosity. As a veteran of innumerable talk shows in which he had been treated with kid gloves, he apparently experienced my feistiness as an agreeable change of pace. Early in life, he had, after all, competed as a professional boxer, and he had his own reasons for finding value in an energetic rival.
A hardy and self-confident person, Mr. L’Amour had no imaginable reason to feel threatened or defensive when I challenged him. He had herded cattle and worked on farms and in mines and sawmills. Meanwhile, my knowledge of those activities came from sitting at a desk and turning pages in books. As one more indication of his stature as a good sport, Mr. L’Amour refrained from calling attention to this comical disparity in experience.
To prepare for our interview, I had been a good sport myself and read a couple of his novels. Immersed in a story of a widow and her son struggling to maintain a cattle ranch, I traveled into a world where the only thing that mattered to me was the fate of that brave pair. Before I entered the radio station, I had made my peace with Louis L’Amour by accepting his gift as a storyteller.
In 1980, he and I converged in celebrating the compatibility between disagreement and a good time. If Mr. L’Amour, who died in 1988, has fans who would like to follow in his footsteps (bootsteps?) today, I stand ready to pick up the conversation where the cowboy and the schoolmarm left off.