The Autobiography of a Super Tramp 1

The Autobiography of a Super Tramp 1

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

 

Author: William H. Davies

 

PREFACE

 

 

I hasten to protest at the outset that I have no personal knowledge of

the incorrigible Super-tramp who wrote this amazing book. If he is to

be encouraged and approved, then British morality is a mockery,

British respectability an imposture, and British industry a vice.

Perhaps they are: I have always kept an open mind on the subject; but

still one may ask some better ground for pitching them out of window

than the caprice of a tramp.

 

I hope these __EXPRESSION__s will not excite unreasonable expectations of

a thrilling realistic romance, or a scandalous chronicle, to follow.

Mr. Davies' autobiography is not a bit sensational: it might be the

Post Office Directory for the matter of that. A less simple minded

supertramp would not have thought it worth writing at all; for it

mentions nothing that might not have happened to any of us. As to

scandal, I, though a most respectable author, have never written half

so proper a book. These pudent pages are unstained with the frightful

language, the debased dialect, of the fictitious proletarians of Mr.

Rudyard Kipling and other genteel writers. In them the patrons of the

casual ward and the dosshouse argue with the decorum of Socrates, and

narrate in the style of Tacitus. They have that pleasant combination

of childish freshness with scrupulous literary conscientiousness only

possible to people for whom speech, spoken or written, but especially

written, is still a feat to be admired and shewn off for its own sake.

Not for the life of me could I capture that boyish charm and combine

it with the _savoir vivre_ of an experienced man of the world, much

less of an experienced tramp. The innocence of the author's manner and

the perfection of his delicacy is such, that you might read his book

aloud in an almshouse without shocking the squeamishness of old age.

As for the young, nothing shocks the young. The immorality of the

matter is stupendous; but it is purely an industrial immorality. As to

the sort of immorality that is most dreaded by schoolmistresses and

duennas, there is not a word in the book to suggest that tramps know

even what it means. On the contrary, I can quite believe that the

author would die of shame if he were asked to write such books as Adam

Bede or David Copperfield.

 

The manuscript came into my hands under the following circumstances.

In the year 1905 I received by post a volume of poems by one William

H. Davies, whose address was The Farm House, Kennington S. E. I was

surprised to learn that there was still a farmhouse left in

Kennington; for I did not then suspect that the Farmhouse, like the

Shepherdess Walks and Nightingale Lanes and Whetstone Parks of Bethnal

Green and Holborn, is so called nowadays in irony, and is, in fact, a

dosshouse, or hostelry where single men can have a night's lodging

for, at most, sixpence.

 

I was not surprised at getting the poems. I get a gift of minor poetry

once a week or so; and yet, hardened as I am to it, I still, knowing

how much these little books mean to their authors, can seldom throw

them aside without a twinge of compunction which I allay by a glance

at one of the pages in the faint but inextinguishable hope of finding

something valuable there. Sometimes a letter accompanies the book; and

then I get a rapid impression, from the handwriting and notepaper as

well as from the binding and type in the book, or even from the

reputation of the publisher, of the class and type of the author. Thus

I guess Cambridge or Oxford or Maida Vale or West Kensington or Exeter

or the lakes or the east coast; or a Newdigate prizeman, a romantic

Jew, a maiden lady, a shy country parson or whom not, what not, where

not. When Mr. Davies' book came to hand my imagination failed me. I

could not place him. There were no author's compliments, no

publisher's compliments, indeed no publisher in the ordinary channel

of the trade in minor poetry. The author, as far as I could guess, had

walked into a printer's or stationer's shop; handed in his

manuscript; and ordered his book as he might have ordered a pair of

boots. It was marked "price half a crown." An accompanying letter

asked me very civilly if I required a half-crown book of verses; and

if so, would I please send the author the half crown: if not, would I

return the book. This was attractively simple and sensible. Further,

the handwriting was remarkably delicate and individual: the sort of

handwriting one might expect from Shelley or George Meredith. I opened

the book, and was more puzzled than ever; for before I had read three

lines I perceived that the author was a real poet. His work was not in

the least strenuous or modern: there was in it no sign that he had

ever read anything later than Cowper or Crabbe, not even Byron,

Shelley or Keats, much less Morris, Swinburne, Tennyson, or Henley and

Kipling. There was indeed no sign of his ever having read anything

otherwise than as a child reads. The result was a freedom from

literary vulgarity which was like a draught of clear water in a

desert. Here, I saw, was a genuine innocent, writing odds and ends of

verse about odds and ends of things, living quite out of the world in

which such things are usually done, and knowing no better (or rather

no worse) than to get his book made by the appropriate craftsman and

hawk it round like any other ware.

 

Evidently, then, a poor man. It horrified me to think of a poor man

spending his savings in printing something that nobody buys: poetry,

to wit. I thought of Browning threatening to leave the country when

the Surveyor of Taxes fantastically assessed him for an imaginary

income derived from his poems. I thought of Morris, who, even after

The Earthly Paradise, estimated his income as a poet at a hundred a

year. I saw that this man might well be simple enough to suppose that

he could go into the verse business and make a living at it as one

makes a living by auctioneering or shopkeeping. So instead of throwing

the book away as I have thrown so many, I wrote him a letter telling

him that he could not live by poetry. Also, I bought some spare

copies, and told him to send them to such critics and verse fanciers

as he knew of, wondering whether they would recognise a poet when they

met one.

 

And they actually did. I presently saw in a London newspaper an

enthusiastic notice of the poems, and an account of an interview with

the author, from which I learnt that he was a tramp; that "the farm

house" was a dosshouse; and that he was cut off from ordinary

industrial pursuits by two circumstances: first, that he had mislaid

one of his feet somewhere on his trampings, and now had to make shift

as best he could with the other; second, that he was a man of

independent means--a _rentier_--in short, a gentleman.

 

The exact amount of his independent income was ten shillings a week.

Finding this too much for his needs, he devoted twenty per cent of it

to pensioning necessitous friends in his native place; saved a further

percentage to print verses with; and lived modestly on the remainder.

My purchase of eight copies of the book enabled him, I gathered, to

discard all economy for about three months. It also moved him to offer

me the privilege (for such I quite sincerely deem it) of reading his

autobiography in manuscript. The following pages will enable the world

at large to read it in print.

 

All I have to say by way of recommendation of the book is that I have

read it through from beginning to end, and would have read more of it

had there been any more to read. It is a placid narrative, unexciting

in matter and unvarnished in manner, of the commonplaces of a tramp's

life. It is of a very curious quality. Were not the author an approved

poet of remarkable sensibility and delicacy I should put down the

extraordinary quietness of his narrative to a monstrous callousness.

Even as it is, I ask myself with some indignation whether a man should

lose a limb with no more to-do than a lobster loses a claw or a lizard

his tail, as if he could grow a new one at his next halting place! If

such a thing happened to me, I should begin the chapter describing it

with "I now come to the event which altered the whole course of my

life, and blighted, etc., etc." In Mr. Davies' pages the thing

happens as unexpectedly as it did in real life, and with an effect on

the reader as appalling as if he were an actual spectator. Fortunately

it only happened once: half a dozen such shocks would make any book

unbearable by a sensitive soul.

 

I do not know whether I should describe our supertramp as a lucky man

or an unlucky one. In making him a poet, Fortune gave him her

supremest gift; but such high gifts are hardly personal assets: they

are often terrible destinies and crushing burdens. Also, he chanced

upon an independent income: enough to give him reasonable courage, and

not enough to bring him under the hoof of suburban convention, lure

him into a premature marriage, or deliver him into the hands of the

doctors. Still, not quite enough to keep his teeth in proper repair

and his feet dry in all weathers.

 

Some flat bad luck he has had. I suppose every imaginative boy is a

criminal, stealing and destroying for the sake of being great in the

sense in which greatness is presented to him in the romance of

history. But very few get caught. Mr. Davies unfortunately was seized

by the police; haled before the magistrate; and made to expiate by

stripes the bygone crimes of myself and some millions of other

respectable citizens. That was hard luck, certainly. It gives me a

feeling of moral superiority to him; for I never fell into the hands

of the police--at least they did not go on with the case (one of

incendiarism), because the gentleman whose property I burnt had a

strong sense of humour and a kindly nature, and let me off when I made

him a precocious speech--the first I ever delivered--on the

thoughtlessness of youth. It is remarkable what a difference it makes,

this matter of the police; though it is obviously quite beside the

ethical question. Mr. Davies tells us, with his inimitable quiet

modesty, that he begged, stole, and drank. Now I have begged and

stolen; and if I never drank, that was only an application of the

principle of division of labour to the Shaw clan; for several members

of it drank enough for ten. But I have always managed to keep out of

the casual ward and the police court; and this gives me an ineffable

sense of superior respectability when I read the deplorable

confessions of Mr. Davies, who is a true poet in his disregard for

appearances, and is quite at home in tramp wards.

 

Another effect of this book on me is to make me realise what a slave

of convention I have been all my life. When I think of the way I

worked tamely for my living during all those years when Mr. Davies, a

free knight of the highway, lived like a pet bird on titbits, I feel

that I have been duped out of my natural liberty. Why had I not the

luck, at the outset of my career, to meet that tramp who came to Mr.

Davies, like Evangelist to Christian, on the first day of his American

pilgrim's progress, and saved him on the very brink of looking for a

job, by bidding him to take no thought for the morrow; to ask and it

should be given to him; to knock and it should be opened to him; and

to free himself from the middle class assumption that only through

taking a ticket can one take a train. Let every youth into whose hands

this book falls ponder its lesson well, and, when next his parents and

guardians attempt to drive him into some inhuman imprisonment and

drudgery under the pretext that he should earn his own living, think

of the hospitable countrysides of America, with their farm-houses

overflowing with milk and honey for the tramp, and their offers of

adoption for every day labourer with a dash of poetry in him.