Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

TWO FROM ANDREW YOUNG

 

This may come as a surprise to some readers, but there are those times when I can find nothing profound, interesting or topical to say in these “Something Thoughtful” slots. On such occasions I resort to my old wile of presenting you with a poem or two that I admire or find appealing. So here we go again.

I first discovered the poetry of Andrew Young when I was a rookie teacher, using as a class tetbook an anthology of modern British poetry, Poetry 1900 to 1965,  compiled in the late 1960s by the critic George MacBeth. Amidst the selections from Yeats, Eliot, Auden and other luminaries, there was a modest selection of the poems of Andrew Young, of whom I had never heard before. MacBeth’s brief introduction to Young told me that his poetry was often mistaken for mere Georgian pastoralism, but that it actually grappled with religious issues, almost in the manner of the Metaphysics.

Thus it appeared to me once I began to read it.

A little further research told me that Andrew Young (1885-1971) began writing poetry as a serious young Presbyterian Scot, and was ordained as a minister of the very conservative branch of Presbyterianism, the Free Church of Scotland. But his theological views gradually changed over the years and in middle age he was accepted into the Anglican church and became a canon of Chichester Cathedral in England.

Young’s poems have a deceptive simplicity. You think you are dealing only with landscape, and then you get bitten and understand where Young is really taking you.

So here are two of his poems.

I like the first simply because of its clever inversion. Our human sense of how the world should be interpreted is turned upside-down. But then, of course, that calls into question our place on the Earth in the first place.

A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?

But the poem by Young that really hooked me was The Fear. There can be few people who, on a solitary walk, haven’t imagined that something or someone is following them. We turn around and see… nothing. That is where Young begins, but read closely and you see he takes us to reflexions on body and soul; this life and a possible afterlife or other-life. Some part of us will always feel alienated from the physical world that we inhabit – that strong sense of being in, but not fully of, the world. Indeed it is this impulse that is at the heart of rationalist (as opposed to empiricist) thought. And lest anyone be annoyed at the religious sense of what I’ve here written, may I point out that another Scotsman, that sturdy Marxist atheist Hugh MacDiarmid, also wrote a poem about the alienation of human mind from physical nature. His poem is a long, discursive piece, running over many pages and with much obscure vocabulary, called “On a Raised Beach”. A worthy effort, but somehow Andrew Young got there more concisely and more memorably.

The Fear

How often I turn round

To face the beast that bound by bound

Leaps on me from behind,

Only to see a bough that heaves

With sudden gust of wind

Or blackbird raking withered leaves.

 

A dog may find me out

Or badger toss a white-lined snout;

And one day as I softly trod

Looking for nothing stranger than

A fox or stoat I met a man

And even that seemed not too odd.

 

And yet in any place I go

I watch and listen as all creatures do

For what I cannot see or hear,

For something warns me everywhere

That even in my land of birth

I trespass on the earth.

 

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.  

“WANTING TO TELL YOU EVERYTHING” by Elizabeth Brooke-Carr (Caselberg Press, $NZ24:99); “NOWHERE IS TOO FAR OFF” by Peter Bland (The Cuba Press, $NZ25); “MY HONEST POEM” by Jess Fiebig (Auckland University Press,  $NZ24:99); “THE SAVAGE COLONISER BOOK” by Tusiata Avia (Victoria University of Wellington Press, $NZ25)

 

 

            Occasionally a collection of poetry, published by a small press, falls into your hands and suddenly and unexpectedly you realise that you are reading very good poetry. “Who is this poet I have never heard of before?” you ask. So you read all the notes surrounding the poems and you find out.

This was my experience when Elizabeth Brooke-Carr’s Wanting to tell you everything, a collection of 36 poems, was sent to me by Caselberg Press. As it turns out, this is not only the first published collection by Elizabeth Brooke-Carr, but it will possibly also be the last. Brooke-Carr died in 2019, aged 79. She had been writing poetry since the 1980s and some of her work had appeared in newspapers and magazines. Friends expected a collection to appear, but it was only after her death that a group of five women friends and fellow-poets got together, searched through her poetry folders, and assembled the poems that make up Wanting to tell you everything.

What is the special impact of these poems? At the very least, they all present a mature and experienced view of life, bearing in mind that Brooke-Carr was already in middle-age when she began writing poetry. As far as I can see, the women who edited these poems arranged them in three broad sections.

The first eight poems deal with childhood and family.

 The opening poem “Upright” is one of the poet’s very best. In six blank-verse stanzas it represents vividly a way of life now gone, depicting specifically a child doing homework at the bulky, square family table, but with the child’s mind wandering and seeing images in surrounding furniture. It is the precise observation of the child’s surrounding that makes it the powerful poem it is. There are childhood memories of the poet’s father ( “Many breakfasts since”, “Take as required”) and an attempt to reconstruct her brother as a child (“Memory of snow”). There is a childhood car journey and the dislocation of moving from one house to another (“A spot on the map”) and an affectionate memory of an old Clydesdale pulling a single-furrow plough, but years later replaced by new technology (“Nobby and Joseph”). “Geometry lesson” is a severe memory of high school. But “When bright red was eclipsed by silver shoon” is a more tender memory of the classroom. Brooke-Carr’s younger self is enchanted by hearing a teacher reading Walter de la Mare’s poem about the silver moonlight. Perhaps I am partial to this poem because, although considerably younger than the poet, I am of a generation that still heard regularly de la Mare’s poems recited by English teachers. I warm to the detail in Brooke-Carr’s poem where she admits that her young Kiwi self did not recognise all of de la Mare’s English vocabulary: “Your teacher is swaying a little, peering this way / and that as she reads. You know she’s walking / with the moon, and soon you catch up. / You’ve never heard of shoon, or casements, / but now you see them, glistening, reach out, / touch silver fruit on silver trees, step around / the sleeping dog, look up to doves.”

The next twenty-one poems concern art and the poet’s grown-up experiences.

 There are reactions to a famous painting by Goldie (“Monday afternoon with Ina”) and to a famous sculpture (“Pieta”) and to classical music (“Bethoven’s ghost”, “Demidenko’s fingers”) and to playing croquet (“Croquet”) and to romantic meetings with her husband or maybe with earlier boyfriends (“Out of the glare”, “Bannockburn sluicings” “Sparrrow antics in Arrowtown”). Often she reconstructs journeys through a precisely-presented South Island landscape with a glimpse of the Remarkables (“Thank you, fog”) or southern landscape seen from the air (“Whisky Echo Tango”) or the burial of culled wild geese (“All that remains is pressed flat”) or the straightforward image of “Quoin Point Road”. For some readers, the best sense-of-place poem will be the prize-winning “All this”, depicting a wild sea shore. Even in these poems, however, there is a strong sense of old age catching up. “Poolburn” is about visiting their “crib” (what most New Zealanders would call a bach) in a remote part of Otago. Brooke-Carr declares “All the days of our youth are behind us, / dust spiralling back along old roads / traversed; beneath seat belts clicked / across our chests there are years / we carry close”. Interestingly, this second section of poems includes a touching vignette of woman in decrepitude, suffering borderline senility (“Harsh Light”).

The final seven poems deal with the cancer that was killing Elizabeth Brooke-Carr and the death that she knew was approaching inevitably.

It is amazing how she can almost be witty while facing this situation in “On discovering your oncologist is a travel agent”. This poem, like “Upright”, the opening poem of the collection, in structured in neat, four-line, blank verse stanzas [or paragraphs] giving solidity, even solemnity, to statements even as the poet jests. The poems about her final experience in hospital have a hard realism to them in “Exhibit ABH1615”; or “The vein whisperer”, about an efficient nurse, or “Buzz cut”, where she feels the anguish of having her head shaved. In  “Black beret” she turns herself into a machine where “In High Dependency, dual wheels turn / and turn, labouring. A needle wavers, / traces an arc across the speedometer dial / on my brain’s febrile dashboard; / pumps deliver oxygen through slack fuel lines; / tubes loop to and from this bed / where I binge on bags of saline.” The title poem “Wanting to tell you everything” is the very last poem in the book, symbolically admitting the impossibility of saying everything before one dies.

Not only is this a very impressive collection, but it displays extraordinary nerve in the poet to be able to face debilitating disease and death with such clarity and imagination.

 

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Peter Bland, the poet who has spent half his life in New Zealand and half in England, is now in his late 80s.  His trim new collection Nowhere is too far off is the latest of the 21 collections he has produced since the early 1960s, not to mention his Collected Poems 1956-2011 (reviewed on this blog 21 January 2013). Bland here favours lean, short poems (one phrase per line) but also produces four prose poems and a few in more traditional forms.

Peter Bland is an old man. It’s not surprising that so many of his poems are about age and transience. The opening poem “Starting out” (p.10) is almost optimistic as it speaks of bright beginnings that happen again and again; but the very next poem “Holes in the story” (p.11) tells us of “Those journeys / that come back / to haunt us, / those settings-out / without a map. Such / urgencies! But why / the panic? It was / always in the grief / of our pauses / that something more / was going on…” The course of life is uncertain, and as one ages, one perhaps recognises opportunites that were missed.

Of course there are many poems here verging on the elegaic. Three poems are dedicated to Bland’s late wife Beryl. The poem “The visitor” (p.47) is about his deceased 1950s fellow poet Louis Johnson. Old friends are liked for their familiarity even if their jokes are corny (“Help” p.12), but they are a dying breed. The chimes at midnight are heard in poems like “The roadside camp” (pp.18-19) where “There’s / a hint of thunder / not too far off / as if the gods / are quarrelling again / or armies gathering. I suspect / it’s almost time to move on.” But as death nears one is “Beyond regrets” (p.29) where “It’s / like living in / an abandoned movie / full of lost horizons / and old hotels…”

I’ve laboured this point a little too much. Peter Bland is not full of lamentations. Age and death are accepted and there’s room for wit and fond reminiscence. A clutch of poems, beginning with “America”, reflect a love-hate relationship with the USA where Bland can see all the huckster crassness, but is still  half-besotted with the myth of the wide-open Wild West and a ghost town in Nevada and the sunset in Orange County where he embraced Beryl. Then he digs deeper back to his English roots and Fulham and Putney and later three poems, vignettes of being a child in England in the Second World War.

Of the prose poems, “Walkabout” is a comprehenive account of being old on Dominion Road and some of its indignities. But the real gem is the quietly happy one “On turning into a tree” which calls unobtrusively on mythology to illuminate that sleepy back-porch moment when you feel as fixed as a tree, as resigned and as blessed.

This collection is as familiar as household words and as comforting as a favourite old coat.

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            “My Honest Poem” is the poem that closes Jess Fiebig’s debut collection, listing facts about her 28-year-old life. But choosing My Honest Poem as the title of the whole collection suggests that this book is going to be a candid, truth-telling work – an account of personal experience unvarnished. And indeed a superficial reading might suggest that it is just that. But when read more closely, it is perhaps not as candid as it appears to be.

Jess Fiebig’s poetry is very much in the genre of confessional verse. Nearly all poems are narrated in the first-person, and in loose free-verse, as if being wrenched from a mental diary of personal experience. She divides the collection into three parts.

Part One, titled  “I have no sense of direction”, opens gruellingly enough with “Maternal Distance” where, aged 9, the poet watches her mother drinking to the point of vomiting. Her mother is described (p.3) thus: “Life adorned her body; / stretchmarks creeping silver vines / around her abdomen, / freckles on her back / from too much time stoned…” So we are at once in a dysfunctional home, with threat of abuse from single mum’s partner. This is the childhood section of the collection, and it is not all dismal and negative. The poet remembers some tender things and writes a wistful poem “For Kelly” (p.15) about a girlhood friend who is also the dedicatee of this book.

            Part Two, titled “I get lost in lovers” moves into much upset in adolescent and young adult years. There are some references to a lost father and easy lyricism in poems about beach and caves and rendezvous and camping, and often a sense of relief at being away from home.. But there is also a coke-sniffing party in Riccarton and apparently a miscarriage and in “Saturday Night in the Emergency Department” (pp.63-64) self-harm or possibly attempted suicide . Boyfriends or lovers pass through her life or desert her and she experiences much depression. “Amitriptyline Dreams” conjures up visions brought about by taking a strong anti-depressant. At one point she suffers “Concussion” in the poem of that name. “Duck Hunting” tells explicitly how a lover cheats on her; and then there is  “The Night I Knew I Had to Leave My Man” (which almost sounds like the title of a c.-and-w. song). Through many of these traumas, the milieux Jess Fiebig describes graphically tend to be mould-covered poverty-signalling flats and other grotty digs.

            One theme that seems to run through all this is the lack of connectedness with family, or the reality of not having a supportive family. “What a funny thing it is / to share blood and not much else” she says in “Calling Hours” (p.54) while contemplating a physically-impaired aunt and remembering seeing her grandfather’s corpse in a casket

            Finally Part Three, called “I enjoy listening to sad songs”. Most of these closing poems are a little calmer, more reflective and wistful. They are the domestic aftermath, sometimes (as in “Dead Man’s Point” p.87) morphing into a more traditional landscape lyricism, even if there is still a sense of absence. There are attempts to reconstruct the man who left her in  “What I Would Say to Him, Now” (p.89) with its closing lines  “How did I go from everything  / to nothing at all?” So there is no solace, no closure. “Twenty-Seventh Christmas” (p.92) has her on valium and more-or-less thinking of suicide

            After all this, how dare I say this collection is not as candid as it might first appear?  Partly because of the emotive definition of poetry Fiebig gives in “This is Poetry” (p.12) : “This is poetry, to feel emotions like hot iron / pressing on my skin, / burning to decribe the most / complex parts of myself / as simply as I can, / that someone might understand / how scared I am to be alive, / how happy I am to be alive, how confused I am / when words fly out / of my head…” While it may sound visceral and spontaneous, the reality is that the poet (like every other poet) consciously selects and organizes the experiences she is putting on paper. Experience is not so much conveyed as interpreted. And in this case it often tends towards the pathetic fallacy of personal feeling. The poem “Waiuta” (p.48) opens with a convincingly bleak landscape and becomes a lament for the hard times that miners used to suffer long ago. But in a later  poem “Panic” (p. 57) Fiebig uses the same imagery of mining as a metaphor for her own body. The external world becomes solipsism, being no more than an extension of the self.

            After reading My Honest Poem, my most fervent wish was that the poet will be able to move beyond her unhappiness.

 

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            As a white Pakeha male in my 60s, should I even be reviewing Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Book? The last statement in the book, “Some notes for critics” (p.91) seems to tell me and others like me to back off – as well as assuming that we will say some ignorant things or talk in lit.crit. clichés. Still, I’ll forge ahead.

            Award-winning Samoan poet Tusiata Avia has the wit to know that her title can be read in two ways. The “savage coloniser” can mean “the coloniser of savages”, which is what the coloniser probably thought he was; or it can mean “the coloniser who is savage”, which is more in the spirit of this collection. Much of The Savage Coloniser Book is diatribe against white colonisers of the Pacific. The poem “250^th Anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand” has modern Pasifika girls saying to Cook “we’re gonna FUCK YOU UP FOR GOOD BITCH”. In “Burnt Australia Fair” the continent of Australia says “Cook, you bastard / we’ve been hungry and angry and murdered for a long time”. “The Pacific solution” is about white Australians putting refugees on Manus Island. “BLM” sees police brutality against blacks in the USA as the result of an ingrained white sense of racial superiority, so that “Crushing the head of a black man / This is my God-given white”.

            One of the longer poems, “Massacre”, is a kind of chronicle of the Christchurch mosques massacre. All whites and colonisers are indicted and held responsible. Thus, when the moques massacre happens, “we, Queen Victoria – made of stone – who stares into the air / past every kind of massacre, rise / we, far right, we rise / we, skinheads, we rise / we, the white supreme, we rise / we are the white ghosts and we rise up out of the swamp.” Tusiata Avia pointedly rejects Jacinda Ardern’s statement that the terrorist who committed the massacre “isn’t us” and draws attention to Parihaka and Ruatoki and massacres committed by Pakeha soldiers in the nineteenth century.

            It is angry and forthright statement.

            This doesn’t mean that Tusiata Avia can’t also see the funny side of things. “Poly Kidz r coming “ is an assertion of the liveliness and creativity of Polynesian kids, but it’s written like a playground chant or the type of barracking you might get at a sports match. It’s more fun than warning. As for “How to be in a room full of white people”, one of the last poems in the book, is both rawly funny and very, very chastening. And there are the three repetitive and rhythmic “FafSwag” poems, more in the nature of insistent chants and written for a Queer Indigenious dance collective

            Avia has other interests, including a group of poems about sex, beginning with “We talk about sex poems”. How confessional they are, I don’t claim to know. Likewise, are the poems about epileptic seizures autobiographical? One of them has a

strong surrealist content. They too segue into candid reflections on sex and, later, the sombre historical poem “How to get an abortion”. As for “Covid in the time of Priminiscinda”, it gives pretty much the same reflections on the inconveniences of lock-down that anyone of any ethnicity or social group would have.

            The Savage Coloniser Book s a wild rollercoaster ride, with much deft wordplay. But it is the angry accusation that dominates.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SUPER-TRAMP” by W.H.Davies (written in 1907; first published in 1908)  - and sundry other prose works by the same author.

 

            There are some books that live an odd sort of afterlife. They were once huge bestsellers and admired even by some of the literati. They were praised for their style. They might have been set as texts suitable for schoolchildren. Then their time passed, they were no longer mentioned in manuals of literature, and they entered their afterlife. They became “cult” books, still in print, still admired by some readers, but no longer regarded as serious literature. All these things are true of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by the Welshman W.H. (William Henry) Davies (1871-1940) which, for reasons I’ll make clear later, would certainly not now be set as a text for schoolchildren. The internet tells me that The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is still in print, but not as frequently as it once was. I have a very battered copy of the book, dated 1928, which tells me that it had been reprinted at least 23 times since it first appeared in 1908.

Some background: Davies used to be a well-known, but minor, Georgian poet, best remembered for his simple jingle called “Leisure” (“What I this life so full of care, We have no time to stand and stare” etc.). He’s still anthologised occasionally but, as I found when I tried to read more of his poetry, he has dated badly. He wrote some few effective poems but his childish simplicity and forced prettiness soon pall and degenerate into doggerel. He really does belong to the very junior classes of school. Before he got going as a published poet (he had had one slim volume published at his own expense), Davies had lived a vagrant life and washed up in a dosshouse in London’s East End where he wrote his memoirs of being a tramp. In the 1890s, when he was in his twenties, he had been a hobo in America and England. Knowing nothing of the publishing world, he sent a copy of his manuscript to a famous writer to see if he would help him get it published. This was George Bernard Shaw, who was impressed by the book’s clear and uncluttered prose style, its apparent candour and the tramp’s nose-thumbing at respectable society. GBS agreed to write a preface, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp was published and it was an instant hit. Edwardian and Georgian readers saw it as a great lark, a delightful excursion into bohemia.

Shaw was right to praise the clarity of the prose, but an alert modern reader quickly understands that under his account of a lively life on the road, Davies is in fact masking, euphemising or minimising many sordid things.

As a young man Davies left Wales after getting involved in boozing and petty theft. He scarpered from his small town and took a ship (cheapest ticket) from Liverpool to the USA. He fell in with a bum called Brum who taught him how to ride the rails (even if guards with billy-clubs were ready to knock bums off speeding trains) and how to panhandle most efficiently. He fell in with other hoboes like Baldy and Australian Red.

In Michigan and other states, they taught him the art of getting arrested for petty misdemeanours so that they could be safely locked up in jail for the winter and get food and a bed for free. Apparently some small-town judges were perfectly aware of how the bums managed this, but they’d worked out a corrupt scheme to make the temporary incarceration of hoboes pay. (All this reminds me of O.Henry’s contemporaneous short story “The Cop and the Anthem” about a hobo trying to get locked up for the winter.)

 Occasionally Davies and his chums had to do honest work, like picking berries in harvest time. He joined a gang digging a canal near Chicago. He went down South in a houseboat and spent some time working on the levees of the Mississippi, but he had a bout of malaria. For a while he begged on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee. But it is clear that as soon as he had much money in his pocket, he would go on titanic benders, get smashed and return to panhandling. Sea-ports were especially the places for easy pickings and a big piss-up, and Davies headed for Baltimore.

Some of the most vivid chapters in the book concern the time he spent working, with fellow vagrants, on cattleboats sailing between Baltimore and Liverpool. He records the rough treatment that was given to the cattle, the way they were tethered in small pens, their bellowing, and the fact that sheep (kept on a different open deck) were often washed overboard in heavy seas. But – his euphemising kicking in – he nowhere mentions what must have been the stench. Interestingly, in Liverpool the crude and underpaid American cattlemen and hoboes were appalled at how much poorer their British counterparts were.

After five years of bumming in America, Davies went back briefly to his Welsh home to see his aged mother who (he says) had clairvoyant powers and foresaw his unannounced visit. He returned to North America, still drinking heavily, and thought he’d try his luck in the gold-rush then going on in the Klondike. But his luck ran out when he was crossing Canada. He tried to jump on a moving train, fell, and had his right foot sliced off by the wheels. He had to have the whole leg amputated.

So he returned to Britain, slowed down, but still being a tramp. As often as not, though, he now depended on going from door to door in England as a pedlar, selling essentially worthless goods. He at least implies that his injury enabled him to win some pity when he begged. The chapters set in England are neither as raucous nor as eventful as those set in America. Davies was twice arrested unjustly in cases of mistaken identity, when he was taken to be a notorious thief who was doing the rounds. He does report how, when he was in London, he sometimes tried to sleep standing up, when he had nowhere to doss, as police always hustled on tramps who lay down and slept in public places. (This system is also described in Jack London’s account of London’s lower depths, The People of the Abyss). A number of times Davies expresses contempt for Salvation Army shelters and their brisk ways with vagrants when they dish out charity. He also locks horns with a charity organization which won’t give him a hand-out. (I wonder how much GBS warmed to this as he had already written a critique of the Salvation Army in his play Major Barbara. ) There are some colourful and some unsavoury characters whom he meets in doss-houses and shelters, such as the fraudster who tricks people out of their money by claiming he has an inheritance coming his way. There are also notes on the varieties of tramp –there are “gridlers” who deliberately sing loudly and badly in the hope that people will pay them to go away, and there are “downrighters” who are unashamed about begging without doing anything else. The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp fades out on Davies beginning his literary career and taking his first stab at settled respectability.

While much of this may sound like a rough-house, unbuttoned, frank account of a life, there is something that stands as a barrier between the text and a reader over a century later. Davies’ language is always restrained and polite. Of course four-letter-words and basic Anglo-Saxon-isms couldn’t be printed in 1908, so we can’t blame Davies for being euphemistic. Even so, when his fellow bums and hoboes are given dialogue that sounds just like the way the author himself writes, we sense that something is not quite right. It’s not as if Davies wouldn’t have known how to swear a blue streak. He confesses that, when he was put under chloroform as his leg was being amputated “I have a faint recollection of struggling with all my might against its effects, previous to losing consciousness; but I was greatly surprised on being afterwards told that I had, when in that condition, used more foul language in ten minutes delirium than had probably been used in twenty-four hours by the whole population of Canada.” (Chapter 20) Later he tells us of his own linguistic fastidiousness when he describes a doss-house acquaintance thus: “I have become accustomed to foul language from one man to another, but his bold way of directly addressing his blasphemy to his Maker, stiffened the laughter on my lips, and shocked me, in spite of an indifferent faith.” (Chapter 25) Then there are those moments when he appears to write a very softened version of what hard men actually said. Here is the

supposedly strong language used by a labourer who can’t get any sleep in a noisy dosshouse: “Give over, will yer: when are you coves going to sleep? I ain’t done any labour for three weeks, and now as I’ve got a chance at four in the mornin’, blow me if I ain’t robbed of my slumber. Take care I don’t set about you at once, yer blooming lot of bleeders. “ (Chapter 21). “Give over”? “Coves”? “Blow me”? “Yer blooming lot of bleeders”? My guess is the the annoyed labourer is more likely to have said “Shut up you ********. F**k me you ******ng ****ers. I’ll **** you if you don’t shut up.”

            And, apart from its antiquity, what of the parts that would now have The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp banished from the classroom? Again, we can’t blame Davies himself for the attitudes and assumptions of his own age. Even so, the memoir’s casual racism is hard to ignore. Reporting negatively on a fellow hobo who has been stingy and greedy, Davies declares “Scotty, to our unfeigned disgust, acted the Jew in this matter of trade…”  (Chapter 14). Later, travelling in steerage, he notes

 “the disgusting, filthy habits of the great majority, who were a low class of Jews and peasantry from the interior of Russia… haters of soap and water [who] jabber and wildly gesticulate…” (Chapter 18).

This is mild, however, in comparison with his attitude towards blacks in America. South of the Mason-Dixon line, he gives a very ambiguous account of the lynching of a black man which he watched as if it were almost a public entertainment. He adds “Many a sheriff, I believe, has surrendered his prison keys to the lynchers and the lawless mobs, forgetting his duty in disgust at the exhibition of fear in one for whom he is responsible. And many a sheriff would lay down his life to protect a criminal who with cool nerve faces his cell, callous and indifferent” (Chapter 8). After travelling down some of the Mississippi looking for work, he stops at a camp on the banks where there are both black and white casual labourers. This is how he describes what is clearly a race riot:  “Unfortunately the ill feeling which invariably exists between these two colours, came to a climax on the first day of our arrival. The negroes, insulting and arrogant, through their superiority of numbers, became at last unbearable. On which the white men, having that truer courage that scorned to count their own strength, assembled together, and after a few moments’ consultation, resolved to take advantage of the first provocation.” Eventually the “black murderers” are chased away. (Chapter 14). Later, when he sees a black man dragged from a jail, quivering with fear and begging for mercy, Davies says it aroused him “more with disgust than pity”(Chapter 15)

Finally, there is something that is not mentioned in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp but which I think is now a glaring absence. Again, of course, it is something that could not be published in 1908. Every historical account I have read of American tramps, bums, hoboes and vagrants in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries tells me that their world was a very homosocial world – a world of men only. And much of this homosocial world was also casually homosexual. Put simply, older hoboes would often entice younger men to come along with them by promising the easy life with no hard work, but with a sexual relationship in mind. Probably the best-known American song about hoboes is “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”, which was first sung in the 1890s. Over the years it was bowdlerised (as in Burl Ives’ famous – and very enjoyable – 1950s version) and finally demoted to being a children’s song with completely sanitised lyrics. In the kiddie version even the “cigarette trees” became “lollipop trees”. But the original version was the frank lament of a young hobo who has been led astray by an older man who promised him the fantastic pleasures of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. It includes the chorus

“I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore

And I'll be damned if I hike any more

To be buggered sore like a hobo's whore

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”

In his introduction to The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, George Bernard Shaw says “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 even know what it means.” This seems a polite way of saying that there is no hint of sexual activity in the book. To his credit, Davies does show that the tramps and hoboes are not necessarily a merry band having only innocent adventures. There is no honour among thieves, and the bums he describes often steal from one another and cheat one another. He also recounts sheer criminality, with a gang of hoboes near Chicago waylaying and murdering employed labourers for the pay they might be carrying. I am also not suggesting that Davies himself necessarily had sexual exploits of any variety – though it is tempting to wonder what a wandering young man in his twenties might have been up to. Even so, in the early 21^st century, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp seems like a book designed for an earlier, and perhaps more innocent, readership than now exists. Heigh-ho for the open road and let’s not emphasise the sordid realities too much.

 

            *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Just to show you how much I care for you, dear readers, I did something that very, very few people ever do. I read other prose works by W.H.Davies to make sure I wasn’t underestimating the man. Perhaps other accounts he wrote of his rambles would be more forthcoming and more attuned to modern sensibilities. Years ago, I used to be a regular visitor to second-hand bookshops, and I bought odds and ends in the hope of one day getting around to reading them. I am now at the age when I am slowly emptying my shelves of books I know I will either never read, or will never read again. Among books so purchased were three obscure works by W.H.Davies, which I’ve only recently got around to reading. Here’s my report on them.

Despite its twee title, Davies’ A Poet’s Pilgrimage, published in 1918, has a certain, limited amount of charm. It is Davies’ account of spending a month or so tramping around Wales and a small part of the west of England before catching the train back to London. Here, given that he always has money in his pocket and is already a minor celebrity, he is not so much a tramp as a tourist on foot, attempting to keep up his image as a gentleman of the road. It is all very self-conscious. He is at his best when he is away from the cities (Swansea, Cardiff). He says many negative things about the dirty Welsh children in the cities and how Welsh workmen are overpaid anyway and how sheep near coal-mining towns are covered in soot. He prefers enjoying country pubs where, apparently, Welshmen all spontaneously burst into song and there are always colourful characters. He likes quaint inns, well-built country houses and picturesque hills. In short, he peddles the picture-postcard image of the country. He resents these new-fangled motor-cycles and motor-cars that are ruining the pastoral peace. As in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, many of the conversations he records as if verbatim sound suspiciously formal and bowdlerised. By the time we are given the lengthy confessions of wandering eccentrics it is hard to see them as anything more than fiction. There are a handful of anecdotes worth remembering – the old sea-dog from the days of sail who rails against steamships; the tramp who is obsessed with hunting for fleas; the accordionist who has delusions about being a virtuoso. But the good anecdotes are few and far between. A Poet’s Pilgrimage is a bland exercise in trying to maintain a reputation.

Later Days, first published in 1925, is even worse, being little more than self-puffery. Each chapter begins with a piece of sheer doggerel. Davies is always ready to invite praise while pretending to denigrate his own work (“If my poems are remembered” etc. etc.)  He tells a few inconsequential anecdotes he left out of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, relates a tale of walking from London to Bristol, complains about eccentric and annoying neighbours in London during the Great War, and tells us hastily that he has recently got married. But Later Days swiftly sinks into a series of name-dropping anecdotes about the literary and artistic celebrities of his day whom he has met. So on come pallid tales of meeting Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, Edward Garnett, W.H.Hudson, Hilaire Belloc, Joseph Conrad, GBS, Alice Meynell, Rupert Brooke, Ralph Hodgson [and his dog], the political and social grandees Lady Cunard and ex-prime minister Balfour, and the artists and sculptors Sickert, Epstein, Rotherstein and Augustus John. Only one tale he tells of these people has any punch – and it is a rather snarky put-down aimed at him by Max Beerbohm. So little does Davies say about any of these people one is left with the distinct impression that they all really saw him as a “character” to be humoured rather than as an intellectual equal – a colourful old former tramp who could be painted or sculpted. (And, says one source, despite his limited literary achievement, he was one of the most painted and sculpted figures of his day). Later Days is a really vacuous piece of work.

When I began reading The Adventures of Johnny Walker, Tramp, first published in 1926, I thought that at last W. H. Davies was going to indulge in frankness. The very first chapter has him entering a brothel in America. But he quickly tells us that he was there by accident, not knowing what the establishment really was, and having only been told that it was the best place to get soup for free. And that is all he says about it. This book is a re-hash of left-over bits and pieces. Davies’ preface tells us that he simply put together and re-wrote what could be salvaged from two earlier books that had not found an audience. The title apparently comes from an English tramp’s joke that he was an employee of “Johnny Walker, the road surveyor.” Included are improbable tales about American hoboes admiring the greater begging skills of Cockney tramps; the boldness of American tramps in approching the homes of the rich to beg; and the way real tramps look down on “stiffs”, meaning part-time tramps who sometimes actually work for a living. Dirty navvies, we are told, are not real tramps. “Narks” are semi-permanent residents of workhouses and doss houses who make life difficult for real tramps. Tramps sometimes play nasty tricks on one other and steal one another’s food when they’re in lodgings, and some tramps practise various frauds, such as pretending to collect money as workers forced out on strike. And that, really, is as much as you will get from this book, where Davies stretches the little he has to say as far as it can possibly be stretched.

Having read these three additional books, all I can see is a man flailing around desperately trying to repeat the success of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, but simply not having enough interesting material to do the trick.

I have saved you the bother of hunting for these forgotten books in second-hand bookshops, or reading them. Shortly I will be throwing them out.

 

 

Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

RIDICULOUS MISCELLANY 

I’m sure you’re used to those clever lists of one-liners and wise sayings that are often presented in magazines. Usually they have been plucked by their compilers out of dictionaries of quotations, the same source that is often plundered by speechmakers who wouldn’t know their Candide from their Republic but who will say airily “As Voltaire said…” or “As Plato said…”, as if they have been deeply immersed in such literature. Compiling quotations and one-liners in this way can be fun, but it often results in only the more familiar, glib and brief quotations getting an airing.  

Which brings me the ridiculous miscellany of quotations I am about to unload on you. Always eager to find material for these “Something Thoughtful” sermons, I have often copied out quotations and passages from books I am reading or reviewing. My aim was to make any such quotation the nucleus of one of my longer musings. But recently I looked again at some of the passages I had compiled and thought – why not just let each of them be read for itself, with minimal commentary? So here we go [noting that the highlighted titles refer to books that have been reviewed on this blog].

 

Take this offhanded remark, made in A.Alvarez’s treatise on suicide, The Savage God, : “The Anatomy [of Melancholy] is an addict’s book, like the Faerie Queen, more or less unreadable to those who have not joined the club.”

I hooted with laughter as I read this. As one who has never read The Faerie Queen and who has only dipped into Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (though both books sit accusingly on my shelves), by reading this I felt absolved of the necessity to read either book.

 

            Now for a similarly inconsequential statement. In Unconditional Surrender, the final novel in his Sword of Honour  trilogy, Evelyn Waugh lets rip at the way some people, even if they have apparently fine aesthetic tastes, can switch their allegiances rapidly if their masters tell them to. In this case he is referring to doctrinare left-wingers who condemned avant garde art in the 1930s, because they admired the Soviet Union, which insisted on “socialist realist” representational painting. But the situation changed in 1939. Hence “… the Ministry of Information in the early days of ‘Survival’, before the Russian alliance, had pointed out that since Hitler had proclaimed a taste for ‘figurative’ painting, defence of the cosmopolitan avant garde had become a patriotic duty in England.”

 

Okay, if the specific historical context of that one didn’t mean anything to you, try this, which is a little more testing for the brain. In his incredibly eccentric treatise on clothes SartorResartus , Thomas Carlyle comments on how his fantastical character Herr Teufelsdrockh grew mentally in a small town setting and interpreted the world in terms of it. Stick with it, and you will see this statement is an intelligent reflection on the persistence of early impressions in the way we imagine the world:

“These things were the Alphabet whereby in after-time he was to syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the World: what matters it whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to read it?”

Not too cryptic for you, was it? 

 

Now for something rather more straightforward, as is my reason for preserving it.  David Coventry’s debut novel The Invisible Mile (2015), is set in 1928, exactly ten years after the end of the First World War. In it, the young narrator visits what were battlefields a mere decade previously. He is surprised at how peaceful and gentle the landscape now is, and has to force himself to picture what a terrible scene it would have presented when the war was in progress. To put it simply, that is exactly the reaction I had myself when, three or four years ago, I looked over the placid Flemish countryside where the Battle of Passchendaele was fought.:

“It’s the gentle rolling hills that get me, the undulations that seem quite unlikely to hide armies and artillery and guns. I grew up with the name of ridges and towns inked into memory: Messines, Vimy, Verdun, Flanders. I had imagined great rising lands, precipices to conquer and fortify, but I am reminded that their part of the war was a front of gentle mounds on the apron of some poor farmer. It was desperation that made these hillocks into mountains, these gentle rises into great ridgebacks on which life was fought and held.” 

 

And here is something I preserved simply for its accuracy of observation in its description of an octopus, its awareness on our essential incommunicability with another species, and perhaps also for its strong sting in the tail. It comes from Richard Hughes’ classic A High Wind in Jamaica :

“When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one’s respect, yet one’s feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy. One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like a silly painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and infinitesimal mobility of the large and toothless mouth, which accepts as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your life’s sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large, his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small baby can conjure up at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.”

Also from A High Wind in Jamaica, I enjoyed this brilliant reversal of the reader’s expectations:  “Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.”

 

Then there is this interesting observation from Oliver Schreiner’s melodramatic, preachy and very imperfect 1883 novel TheStory of an African Farm. It nevertheless says something truthful about the retention and priority of early childhood memories:

“The year of infancy, where from the shadowy background of forgetfulness start out pictures of startling clearness, disconnected, but brightly coloured, and indelibly printed in the mind. Much that follows fades, but the colours of those baby pictures are permanent.”

 

I will end this ridiculous miscellany with two quotations which do not come from anything reviewed on this blog. First, the opening lines of “Beauty”, a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618-1667). Does not this poet, over three hundred years ago, rightly perceive what is now a commonplace – to wit, that ideas of what beauty is are different in different cultures, and there is no one universal cultural measure of what beauty is? Behold:

“Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape,

Who dost in ev’ry country change thy shape!

Here black, there brown, here tawny, and there white;

Thou flatt-rer which compli’st with every sight!”

 

And of course, to round off this pointless bookish ramble into which I have heartlessly drawn you, let me end with the ultimate comment on books, the wise words of Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 in the RSV translation. The second sentence is, of course, my own reaction to much that is placed before me:

“The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails fixed firmly are the collected sayings that are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh”.