The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
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PRAISE FOR THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP
“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. . . . Though it is only in verse that he writes exquisitely, yet this book, which is printed as it was written . . . is worth reading by literary experts for its style alone. . . . [A]nother effect of this book on me is to make me realise what a slave to convention I have been all my life. When I think of the way I worked tamely for my living during all of 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.”
—from the Preface by George Bernard Shaw
“The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, published in April 1908, has seldom been out of print since, and with good reason. . . . Davies and Kerouac are so similar it’s like they have had the same illness. They kept searching, longing, moving: they couldn’t stop because they didn’t know why they started. They are mesmerising narrators. . . . [Davies’s] story has the tension and suspense of a man whose life and soul is in jeopardy.”
—The Times [London]
“From Jack London to Ted Conover, authors of firsthand reports from the world of destitution have nearly all been amateur paupers, visiting the foreign land of poverty much as other adventurous writers have taken off for Patagonia. . . . The great exception to these investigative costume dramas has been, until now, W.H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.”
—Jonathan Raban, author of Bad Land: An American Romance
“[He] does not flinch from the most horrible subjects that any writer could deal with.”
—George Orwell
“[I]n their directness, their (sometimes faux) naivety and their Blakean indignation on behalf of the poor, the best of his poems still resonate. And with The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and Young Emma he produced two minor classics of life writing, both worth retrieving from their burial place.”
—Blake Morrison, London Review of Books
“He can write commonplace or inaccurate English, but it is also natural to him to write, such as Wordsworth wrote, with the clearness, compactness and felicity which make a man think with shame how unworthily, through natural stupidity or uncertainty, he manages his native tongue. In subtlety he abounds, and where else today shall we find simplicity like this?”
—Edward Thomas
“He combines a vivid sense of beauty with affection for the homely, keen zest for life and adventure with a rare appreciation of the common, universal pleasures, and finds in those simple things of daily life a precious quality, a dignity and a wonder that consecrate them. Natural, simple and unaffected, he is free from sham in feeling and artifice in expression. He has re-discovered for those who have forgotten them, the joys of simple nature. He has found romance in that which has become commonplace; and of the native impulses of an unspoilt heart, and the responses of a sensitive spirit, he has made a new world of experience and delight. He is a lover of life, accepting it and glorying in it. He affirms values that were falling into neglect, and in an age that is mercenary reminds us that we have the capacity for spiritual enjoyment.”
—citation by W.D. Thomas accompanying an honorary doctorate awarded by the University of Wales, 1926
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP
W.H. DAVIES (1871–1940) was born in Newport, Wales, the son of a toolmaker who died when Davies was two. Raised by his pub-owner grandparents, he was caught shoplifting and severely caned by a teacher when he was 15, and quit school shortly thereafter to begin a life of tramping. He traveled widely in England and America, taking occasional, seasonal jobs, and spending what little he made on carousing. But in 1899, in Canada on his way to the Klondike gold rush, he was injured while jumping a train and his right leg had to be amputated. “All the wildness had been taken out of me,” he wrote later. Returning to London he lived in doss-houses, and began writing poetry, which he sold door-to-door. In 1907 he self-published a collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, and sent copies to people listed in Who’s Who; the effort eventually led to a trade publisher picking up the book. A year later Davies sent his memoir, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, to George Bernard Shaw, who was smitten and offered an introduction to the book and literary society. Davies’ 1911 poem “Leisure”—“What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare . . .”—cemented his fame, and he became the toast of London. He moved to a flat in Bloomsbury previously occupied by Charles Dickens, appeared often on the BBC, and gave readings with Yeats and Pound. But society life was not for him, and in 1923, at age 50, he married a 23-year-old prostitute named Helen Payne and moved to rural Sussex. They would remain happily married until his death in 1940.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856–1950) was a Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright and co-founder of the London School of Economics.
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY
I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP
W.H. DAVIES
PREFACE BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP
Originally published by A.C. Fifield, London, 1908
Design by Christopher King
First Melville House printing: September 2011
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-61219-024-2
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp
About the authors
The Neversink Library
Title page
Preface by George Bernard Shaw
1. Childhood
2. Youth
3. Manhood
4. Brum
5. A Tramp’s Summer Vacation
6. A Night’s Ride
7. Law in America
8. A Prisoner His Own Judge
9. Berry Picking
10. The Cattleman’s Office
11. A Strange Cattleman
12. Thieves
13. The Canal
14. The House-Boat
15. A Lynching
16. The Camp
17. Home
18. Off Again
19. A Voice in the Dark
20. Hospitality
21. London
22. The Ark
23. Gridling
24. On the Downright
25. The Farmhouse
26. Rain and Poverty
27. False Hopes
28. On Tramp Again
29. A Days Companion
30. The Fortune
32. At Last
33. Success
34. A House to Let
Other titles in this series
PREFACE
BY GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I hasten to protest at the outset that I have no personal knowledge of the incorrigible Supertramp 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 expressions 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 doss-house 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 doss-house, 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 doss-house; 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 des
cribe 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.