Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  Although in the preface Anderson remarks truly that ‘the hobo for all his simplicity, is still a phantom man, and Hobohemia still remains a realm too obscure to be interpreted vividly by any casual or occasional visitor,’ The Milk and Honey Route does not solidify the ghost.

  ‘No fictionist can explore the hobo’s province by riding across it as Stevenson traversed Europe on a donkey,’ declares Anderson, making doubtful extrapolations and also undermining his own case with them. The true reporter must be of the blood, and they of the blood are few. He knows the truth because he lives it … he becomes identified with the spirit of the wanderman, the Homer of ancient times, the Meistersinger of the Dark Ages, the roadside magic vendors and vagrant story tellers of every century and every clime.’

  What follows is precisely what Dean Stiff was railing against: a highly seasoned pudding of fact and fancy, anecdote and, fable, history and taradiddle. This is not to say that Anderson did not know his stuff. Probably more assiduously than any other American sociologist, he turned an inquiring and sympathetic eye upon the homeless man, yet he uses Dean Stiff as a sounding board for a colourfully whimsy opera bouffe.

  ‘The hobo is always born a hobo,’ the book begins. ‘The American hobo is born to the caste and finds his niche in it as the actor born to the stage finds Broadway or as the naturally endowed plutocrat finds Wall Street.’ From this series of breath-takingly disputable premises, it prances on: ‘If you have this hobo’s instinct, all you need to do is follow your nose and your feet will do the rest. Without this innate quality no amount of training will help you. Hobohemia will be nothing less than omnium gatherum, chaos and confusion. Possessing this prized instinct of the wanderman, you will find this realm as orderly as a psychological maze…

  ‘The hobo really floats… Because he floats and flows away you thought him a mystery, and perhaps you thought his a purposeless way of life … Hobohemia is American. It is a kingdom of he-men and hard men … that is why it remains the only earthly reminder of the Garden of Eden.’

  At the start Anderson in a waggishly jocular tone promises that he has advice to offer the ‘young man ambitious to become a hobo;

  it is an important calling and not to be entered upon too lightly. The arch vein is maintained: The good life that the hobo leads must not be married to insidious toil … The conditions he puts on work are the same as those of the aristocrat: which is quite logical, since he is the peer of the aristocrat. He lives the same simple self-satisfying life. He has the same aversion to pretension.’

  Anderson was speaking for those who rather disliked being told that the hobo worker had a trying time, which is why Anderson charged that Jim Tully ‘capitalizes the misery of his hobo days’ and wrote accusingly that Tully’s hoboes are not philosophers; they are a cross between a Gorki tramp and Tarzan of the Apes.’

  In fact even Tully was captive to an allure which is somewhat elusive in his drab catalogue of arrests and hunger and violence and cold. ‘I heard an old tramp say that once a tramp always a tramp,’ he writes, ‘and I wondered just how many ever left the road for good. In spite of all the hardships through which I had recently passed, I found a charm about the road that I had not known elsewhere.’

  There is in Tully - because the near-criminal degradation is baldly related - a greater conviction than in all of Dean Stiff’s roundelays, so a genuine emotion is conveyed. After a stay in hospital with fever this is Tully’s reverie: ‘The winter passed, and the warm winds of May made me long to wander again. The whistling of a locomotive on a still night had a lure, unexplain-able, yet strong, like the light which leads a moth to destruction.’

  He hops the blind baggage of a Big Four mail from Illinois Central, then onward toward Washington: The great headlights of the Fast Flyer Virginia swept over the rails. Aroused from the lethargy of dream, I was the rider to far places again, and my great iron horse was snorting on its way.’

  There are more frozen, empty-bellied rides; more arrests. One policeman, discovering that he is only fifteen, lets him go with the observation: ‘Well, well, indade. I have a lad yere age, an’ I’d hate to see him driftin’ ‘round the country like a lost sparrow.’

  At Cairo, a tri-state town on the borders of Missouri, Kentucky and Illinois, snow is falling and thirty lost sparrows are huddled around the water tank, some carving their monikers on the red-painted pine boards, other talking of the road, ‘always the road.’ They are ‘the disheveled of the earth.’

  Again Tully reflects upon himself as outcast and rover: ‘At times I cursed the wanderlust that held me in its grip. While cursing, I loved it. For it gave me freedom undreamed of in factories, where I would have been forced to labor.’

  In a whistle-stop town he looks at the unpainted houses, the scruffy lawns, the ugly streets, and again feels ‘glad that I was a hobo on the long free trail.’ Farther down the line, wild rain is falling upon a jungle, whipping through the shack built of railroad ties. ‘The clothes, of the shivering tramps dripped with water. Miserable men they were, the shabby tricksters of life. But they endured, like stoics, with a smile. They took what life, or the elements, sent them. They fought and they drank; they begged and they robbed. But this can be written to their everlasting credit above the stars in the farthest sky - they did not whine.’

  In his final chapter Tully performs the familiar cartwheel of producing an eleventh-hour epilogue of condemnation of the roving life, but with more qualifications than is customary. At least ‘some great pugilists have been developed on the road. Jack Dempsey, Kid McCoy and Stanley Ketchell, three of the greatest bruisers that ever lived, were youthful hoboes for several years.’ And he reminds the reader: ‘Always he hears voices calling in the night from far away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay … Traveling a brutal road, his moral code becomes heavy, and he often throws it away. Civilization never quite restores all of it to him, which, of course, may not be as tragic as it sounds.

  ‘Gorky, the brilliant ex-tramp, returned to the road again for a year. Few people understood the reason. I did. It was the caged eagle returning to the mountains of its youth for a last look at the carefree life it had known. It remained a year, and found that the vast and lonely places were the same, but the blood had slowed around the eagle heart, and it flew back to the valley again, wearier than before - the last illusion gone…

  ‘All of the philosophical stuff written about tramps should be taken lightly. The non-producers of the nation are tramps in one sense or another.

  ‘The prattling parasitic club woman, the obese gambler in bonds, the minister in a fashionable church, all are tramps who happen to have beds and bath, and the economic security that men go mad to obtain. In fact, the tramp is merely a parasite who has not been admitted to society.’

  21 Men without allegiances

  There is no revolutionary situation in America. Factory

  girls wear silk stockings but have no class consciousness –

  capitalism is in blacker and more complete control than

  anywhere else on earth.

  Robert Wolf of The New Masses to the Communist Academy, Moscow, 1927

  Anderson’s comparison of the hobos Tully knew to a Gorky tramp, and Tully’s own reference to the ‘brilliant ex-tramp’, are quite strikingly apt when examined. The parallel between America and Russia, these two nations so distant geographically and in spirit, does reward examination because they are the only two countries to have produced a distinct and large tribal society of detached workers - and they did it simultaneously with economic patterns which were dissimilar in origin but which converged in result.

  In America capitalism had filled a vacuum, air empty of commerce and mass population; in Russia, modern capital development and nascent industry crashed in through the old agrarian-feudal system.

  But Russia’s new financial houses and manufacturing companies were of a mushroomy brittleness, and bankruptcies and failed ente
rprises went in chain detonations through the 1870s and 1880s. Peasants released from serfdom in 1861 had swarmed into the towns to form an industrial proletariat, and were promptly cast off in the series of slumps spreading unemployment into an already distressed countryside. Workless artisans fled back to the deserted farmlands, while rural paupers migrated from their villages to try their luck in the cities: a criss-crossing futility which was becoming institutionalized across the other side of the world.

  There was another ludicrous resemblance. In 1881, when the infestation of homeless vagabonds throughout Russia had reached five millions, the authorities set up The Society for the Improvement of Public Work, the code of which was circulated to municipalities thus: The bitter experience of other countries has convincingly demonstrated that the lack of protection, poverty and ignorance of the masses make them readily receptive to every kind of Utopian doctrine … Therefore it is essential to teach them now the right kind of productive labour … to encourage their moral and religious development on the basis of reasonable and honest work.’

  The moral and religious development urged in that Russian ‘McGuffy’s Reader was however inaccessible to those such as Maxim Gorky, at the age of eleven pitched into ‘the back-alleys of life’. His companions and heroes, as described in Makar Chudra, Old Izergil and Malva, were the Black Sea coastal boat nomads and uprooted farmhands. He isolated something which was being created by these implacable turbulences, a new man, individually doomed but collectively puissant, whose contempt for the society which had cast him adrift was an expression of Pushkin’s early poetry, was Byronic in its hauteur and was revolutionary in its political intuition.

  Gorky’s stories began, just as did Jack London’s in America, to place the new man. The bossiak, meaning literally barefoot tramp, was in Gorky’s usage a word as charged with philosophical and political meaning as hobo or Wobbly. These were ‘men without allegiances but also without fetters’. Failed students, displaced peasants, outsider nihilists, outlawed unionists, pariah poets, workless teachers, rebel soldiers, footloose peasants, declasse drifters - these were the ‘superfluous men’ in the twilight zone of the cellars, dosshouses and ruined buildings of Odessa, the readymade cast of The Lower Depths, produced in 1901. It was the first kitchen-sink drama, the fountain-head of Beckett’s dustbins and O’Neill’s Bowery purgatory. It was a sensation and a triumph.

  His bossiaks, like his petrel, the small black seabird which is the rider of the storms, presaged the coming revolution: they had stepped out of the old life to prospect for a new. With personal experience as errand boy, ragpicker, bird-catcher, bricklayer, railway man, stevedore and as cadger of rides on Moscow goods trains, Gorky wrote: ‘ … living among the lower middle class and seeing around me people whose only object was to turn other people’s blood and sweat into kopeks, I came to hate fiercely the parasitic life of those commonplace people.

  ‘Tramps for me were “uncommon people” … “declassed” men who had cut loose from their class or had been repudiated by it and had lost the most characteristic traits of their class.’

  As Jack London in America was just a little later to do, Gorky held up a looking-glass in which a multitude of intellectuals without bearings and workmen without outlets could recognize themselves and their constellation. It is doubtful that, as Richard Hare says, ‘the spreading swarm of hungry tramps threatened the whole structure of Russian society’, although it is perfectly believable that the Russian bourgeoisie, like their American counterparts, feared that they did.

  In his own apartness from organized society he distilled the spirit of the destitute and desperate, ‘strong-willed moral men, impetuous and unreflective, yet proud and self-reliant, masters of their own fate’. What he admired in them, what chimed with his own revolutionary drive, was ‘their anger with life, their mocking hostility to everything and everybody, and their carefree attitude to themselves’.

  Contemporary critics denounced Gorky’s writings as a menace to decency and sound citizenship: ‘Hooligans are his only heroes, and most of them are psychopaths … and so long as a beast is young, vigorous and insensitive, all Gorky’s sympathies are on the side of the beast.’ His portrait-gallery made the first distinction between the new-type vagabond and the old nomadic Asiatic Russians, and not all his heroes were ‘hardened men of action, reckless dreamers or tough guys’, but In The Steppe examines the very blurred hair-line between the bossiak and the professional criminal. Gorky’s attitude was not all that different from London’s reverence for the ‘blond-beast,’ and indeed in My Universities he says: ‘Among the longshoremen, hoboes and drifters I felt like a piece of iron thrown into the midst of redhot coals … My past life drew me towards these men, arousing a desire to immerse myself in their corroding depths.’

  Augier’s la nostalgie de la boue was strong in Gorky but it does not surprise at all that in that passage he should continue: ‘Bret Harte and other fiction of adventurers and outcasts helped to arouse further my sympathies for-this life.’

  Here is the two-way traffic in action: Gorky, the estranged Russian bourgeois infected by an American’s luridly dramatic sketches of the lawless, gold-crazed frontier rabble, drifters with Raphael faces, college graduates gone off the rails, sullenly tense gunmen and gamblers ‘with the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet’, all pitched into an overheated closeness against the aloof and terrible loneliness of the Sierras, and so again to recur and echo back in London’s writing about Gorky’s 1900 Foma Gordyeeff.

  De Crevecoeur’s observation toward the end of the eighteenth century was: ‘The rich stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the poor that emigrate.’ This had continued to be so. Either poor and desperate or poor and ambitious, the ‘crucial image’ in the American mind has been that of a vast continent ‘to be discovered, explored, cleared, built up, populated, energized; which has not excluded the image of a continent to be rifled, despoiled, much of it wasted.’ Nor has it excluded the capacity even in those participating to rue what was being done to the continent.

  The men who despoiled and discovered at the same time wrung those destroying hands. During his first trip as a harvest worker in the early 1900s, a decade after the frontier had been declared closed, Chaplin lamented in this poem:

  The ‘blanket-stiff’ now packs his bed

  Along the trails of yesteryear -

  What path is left for you to tread?

  Your fathers’ golden sunsets led

  To virgin prairies wide and clear -

  Do you not know the West is dead?

  Your fathers’ world, for which they bled,

  Is fenced and settled far and near -

  Do you not know the West is dead ?

  Your fathers gained a crust of bread,

  Their bones bleach on the lost frontier;

  What path is left for you to tread -

  Do you not know the West is dead?

  Hundreds of thousands of johnny-come-latelys, catching at the hem of the dream, found that the farmland was behind rails, the timber stands razed, the minerals tapped and expropriated. So they became not the rich rancher or gold-shipper they had imagined but other people’s helots - but, also, always renegades from an unendurable status.

  ‘The freeborn American working man had become surplus labor for giant industrial combines,’ Lomax writes. ‘Viewed from a bed in the cinders along the railroad tracks, the American system was not working any more.’

  That was not entirely the case. The tough and frugal life which their predecessors had accepted as a temporary stage on the way up had for the rearguard hardened into permanence. Yet the illusion of having his own sweet way could be sustained if the casual labourer who would not answer to that title went on roving from job to job, and wrote an individual Declaration of Independence to go with it. That the West was dead may have been physically true but it was not metaphysically. The root-and-branch hobo contrived to survive beyond the frontier, at least outside the pale of standard
ized life. If Gorky was the catalyst in Russia, his exact opposite number in America was London. He not only made the written definition of the new man but himself became the symbol of, in Arthur Calder-MarshalPs words, The emergent twentieth-century man, romantic, tough, courageous, ranging the continents of the earth, the freeman of all classes -and yet the champion of the underdog: a Robin Hood of letters, the man who put heart back into the exploited earth and hope into the hearts of the exploited workers.’ London always believed that man had the choice: he could be either ‘felon or tramp’, he could ‘learn a trade’ or ‘roister and frolic over the world’, he could take his decision ‘between money and men, between niggardliness and romance’.

  The choice London made, and continued to flaunt even when making the blackest theatre out of its grim necessities, gave expression to an entire mode of American thought and feeling. London may have failed to produce ‘a Moby Dick of the boxcars’ but his effect by being more diffuse has also been more powerful. When London made up his mind that ‘the thought of work was repulsive’ and ‘headed out on the adventure-path again’, naturally it was to the railroad he went, his own pathway in his ‘search for the lost epic virtues of America’ and that of millions of humble men.

  Part Three

  The Great Harp

  Oh, babes,

  Oh, no-home babes.

  22 Feet got to rolling like a wheel, yeah, like a wheel

  My sister wrote a letter, my mother wrote a card -

  ‘If you want to come an’ see us, you’ll have to ride the rods.’

  Leadbelly: The Midnight Special