W. H. Davies: Essays on the Super-Tramp Poet

By Anthem Press

This book brings together, for the first time, a collection of articles from leading scholars on the writing, and literary and social contexts, of the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist W. H. Davies (1871–1940). Though Davies is a well-known and unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and poems such as ‘Leisure’, which came 14th in the BBC’s search to find ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’, no other volume of essays, or other critical monograph, concentrates on his work. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context (as a Welsh writer, the ‘tramp-poet’, a prominent Georgian poet, and a disabled writer), but also sheds light on the many more central literary figures he encountered and befriended, among them Edward Thomas, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Sitwell, Alice Meynell, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad. The aim of the book is to reconsider the major works of the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist W.H. Davies, and his place in the literary and cultural milieu of his period. Davies spent several years in North America as a young man, traversing the continent and living mainly as a tramp, and losing a leg in the process, as he attempted to jump aboard a freight train in Ontario. These experiences are at the heart of his famous memoir, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), which was edited by Edward Thomas and introduced by George Bernard Shaw. Davies also established a reputation as a poet and was included in all five of the immensely popular Georgian Poetry anthologies between 1912 and 1922. He continued to write, in particular about his life, and later books include many volumes of poetry and memoirs such as: A Poet’s Pilgrimage (1918), which details a walking tour across southern Britain and the people he encountered; Later Days (1924), about the literary and artistic communities he had recently belonged to; and Young Emma (written in the late 1920s but not published until 1980), a thinly anonymised memoir about how he met his wife, almost thirty years his junior. They are unique products of a unique life.

This is the first book of essays to be published on this fascinating author, who has largely been neglected by literary critics, despite his centrality to British memoir, travel writing, and poetry in the early twentieth century. It puts Davies in his literary and cultural context, provides reassessments of the work, and considers his influence as a writer and personality. It will be useful to readers coming new to the author and wanting a critical overview, while at the same time putting forward many new research findings and much new thinking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785274589

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W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies

Essays on the Super-Tramp Poet

Edited by Rory Waterman

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2021 Rory Waterman editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940827

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-456-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-456-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Rory Waterman

Chapter 1Discovery and Rediscovery: W. H. Davies’s The Soul’s Destroyer in Context

David Mason

Chapter 2W. H. Davies and the Tramping Character in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

N. S. Thompson

Chapter 3 ‘More of Imagination’s Stars’: W. H. Davies, Becoming a Georgian

Rennie Parker

Chapter 4‘Not the Lingo of Fleet Street’: Davies and Periodical Culture

Rebecca Butler

Chapter 5‘From the Hills of Gwent’: The Other W. H. Davies

Katie Gramich

Chapter 6Damaged Bodies and the Cartesian Split: Unattainable Masculinity in the Prose of W. H. Davies

Emon Keshavarz

Chapter 7Women of Fashion and the Little Wife: W. H. Davies on Women

Eleanor Spencer

Chapter 8‘The One’: Self-Representation in W. H. Davies’s Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century

Helena Nelson

Chapter 9Scant Theologies: W. H. Davies and the Figure of Christ

Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Chapter 10‘Poisoned Earth and Sky’: W. H. Davies, between the Wars

Rory Waterman

Notes on Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

RORY WATERMAN

This book brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of essays from leading scholars on the writing, and literary and social contexts, of the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist W. H. Davies (1871–1940). Its aim is to reconsider Davies’s major works and themes, and reassess his place in the literary and cultural life of his period.

Davies is a unique literary figure of the early twentieth century, most famous now for The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and poems such as ‘Leisure’, which came 14th in the BBC’s search to find ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’.¹ His reputation, 80 years after his death, is otherwise modest, and most of his other work is now out of print.² He was, however, one of the most widely read and admired poets of his time, the author of several once-popular and unique memoirs about the tramping life, a novelist, an occasional editor and critic, and a playwright – albeit with differing levels of finesse and success. Moreover, he was well connected with a considerable number of writers and artists. Indeed, for scholars and students he is an important and often overlooked counterpart to figures such as Edward Thomas, George Bernard Shaw and Walter de la Mare. This book not only provides a reassessment of Davies, putting him in his literary and cultural context (as the ‘tramp-poet’ and memoirist, a prominent Georgian poet, a Welsh writer and a disabled writer), but also sheds light on several of the more central literary figures in his milieu.

Davies was born the second of three children in Newport, a large and then rapidly expanding, overwhelmingly working-class Welsh port on the Severn Estuary, eight miles from the English border.³ His mother’s family was Welsh. His paternal grandparents were English, and his grandfather was a former man of the sea, who had become landlord of the Church House Inn. When Davies was 2, his father Francis died and his mother Mary remarried. She remained in Newport, but was forced to leave her first three children to grow up with their father’s parents. The two grandparents had very different influences on the young boy: Lydia was a devout Baptist, whereas Captain Davies was outwardly gregarious, beer-swilling, and full of stories of the sea. Davies left school at 14, around the time his grandfather died, and the following year began a five-year apprenticeship to a picture-framer. This came to an end in 1891; Davies moved to London for a few hard months, and soon began working at his new profession in Bristol, where he showed little fondness for work.

The death of his grandmother provided an escape route. She had invested in property, and her will specified that the rents should be shared between her three grandchildren. This gave Davies a small private income of ten shillings a week. By June of 1893, he had negotiated a 15-pound advance and set sail for the United States. After a short period in New York, he travelled into Connecticut where, according to his own account in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,⁴ he asked a man on a town park bench how he might reach Chicago. This man was Brum, who introduced Davies to the concept of ‘beating’ one’s way: hitching free rides on freight trains by running alongside them as they pulled out of stations or goods yards, jumping aboard, and hiding.

His travels between then and 1898 took him across much of the United States. In Chicago, he briefly worked on digging the Chicago Drainage Canal. He sailed south along the Mississippi from St Louis. He contracted malaria and was treated in a charity hospital in Memphis. At other times he was in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana – all the while travelling on freight trains and usually staying at beggars’ camps, with occasional return trips across the Atlantic working on cattle boats. In the summer of 1898, he was employed as a fruit picker in Illinois, then travelled to Baltimore, and eventually worked his way home on a ship. On this occasion he decided to stay, and arrived back in Newport later in 1898, where his mother and relatives were somewhat surprised and delighted to discover that he was still alive.

Unsurprisingly, Davies seems to have had some trouble readjusting to life in a port town in south Wales. He soon grew bored and depressed and started drinking heavily, rapidly eating into his accumulated rentier’s income. Within two months he had set off to London with half-hearted plans to open a bookshop, though he had no idea how to go about doing so. Walking through Trafalgar Square in early 1899, he spotted a newspaper report about the Klondike gold rush in north-western Canada. Within days, he had set sail for Saint John, New Brunswick, from where he travelled to Montreal to see the long winter out before heading across the continent. He was travelling west through Ontario with a tramp called Three-Fingered Jack, whose disability does not need further clarification, when an event occurred that would alter Davies’s life dramatically – and lead to one of the most famous chapters of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908). Beating a ride from Renfrew, Ontario, Davies apparently did the honourable thing and let Jack jump aboard first; Jack clambered up the steps but did not move out of the way very quickly, and by the time Davies could jump himself, the train had gathered pace. He slipped, and his right foot was severed beneath a wheel, as the train benignly trundled on towards the West. Maybe Jack made his fortune; Davies, in any case, spent some time in hospital in Renfrew, where his leg was amputated below the knee, then returned again to Wales. His North American tramping days were over.

Not only did the accident nearly kill him, and destroy his slim chances of making a fortune in the Klondike, it also took away some of his much-prized physical prowess. However, Davies took the incident as a spur. Compelled by temperament to find another scheme to make money without the grind of a day job, he set out to become a writer. Writing his way to financial comfort may have seemed a quixotic plan even by Davies’s standards; ultimately, of course, it worked.

The road to success was circuitous, however. Immediately upon his return to Wales, Davies started writing poems and submitting them for publication, but without success. In the late summer of 1899 he moved to London, living in cheap lodging-houses. Existence was hard, but he stayed for several years as his writing life began in earnest. His earliest unpublished works included a blank-verse tragedy called The Robber, which nobody wanted to publish and which was soon lost to posterity, and a sequence of one hundred sonnets. He decided to print a few of his poems on sheets and hawk them door to door, but found almost nobody willing to part with pennies for his poetry wares – leading him to burn the lot in a fit of resentment and anger. His was not the usual poet’s apprenticeship.

Nonetheless, he persevered with the grand plan. It is worth remembering that, though his private income may have been tiny, it obviously set him apart from the vast majority of the people he met and with whom he associated. Compared to George Orwell, of course, whose time in similar London establishments a quarter of a century later is recorded in Down and Out in Paris and London, Davies certainly lived a life of genuine destitution – but he nevertheless might have escaped much of that poverty had his literary pipe-dream not got the better of him. His dedication to making a literary life for himself is not in question. In the autumn of 1902, he registered as a hawker in an attempt to save money towards the self-publication of his first volume of poems and set off north with a stock of pins and shoelaces, walking arduously through the West Midlands on a wooden leg that had been acquired from the Surgical Aid Society.⁵ Poor weather ruined his goods, but Davies refused to resort to ‘standing pad’: capitalising on pathos by begging passively. Early in 1903, he returned to London, to a lodging-house called The Farmhouse, from where he sent his manuscript of poems to the printers Watts and Co.: they had agreed to publish it in an edition of 250 copies, on the condition that he put £25 towards the costs. This forced him back to Newport, to negotiate another agreement for a lump sum with the trustee of his grandmother’s estate. The agreement he reached was that his income would be accumulated for six months, then at the end of that period double the amount would be added in a loan (and he would forego regular income for another year), giving him the required sum. This meant he had to leave The Farmhouse and once again take to the road as a beggar. At the end of 1904, the loan came through, and early in 1905 his first collection, The Soul’s Destroyer, was printed.

Unfortunately for Davies, initial sales were woeful, and another period of depression and heavy drinking soon followed. But he was nothing if not resourceful and determined. His next ploy was to post copies to eminent literary figures from Who’s Who, on a sale or return basis – the cost being 2s 6d, or half a crown. George Bernard Shaw received one of these bizarre packages, sent Davies a pound (eight times the requested sum) and enclosed a list of further names and addresses of influential people who might be interested. This put the entrepreneurial author in touch with, among others, the journalist and future poet Edward Thomas. Davies soon became a bit of a cause célèbre: in July, an article appeared in the Daily Mail, titled ‘A Cripple Poet: Realistic and Whimsical Word Pictures, Curious Life History’, and many further reviews and articles followed.

Davies was again living at The Farmhouse, working on his second collection, when Thomas, in the capacity of journalist for the Daily Chronicle, paid a visit. Thomas came quickly to admire both Davies’s spirit and his poetry, and thus began a long friendship that would last until Thomas’s death at Arras in 1917. Thomas nurtured and championed Davies’s writing, gave him rent-free use of a cottage in rural Kent near to where the Thomas family lived and arranged for the local wheelwright to make him a new wooden leg, commissioning it as a novelty cricket bat in order to save the future user’s blushes. He also introduced Davies to friends in the London literary scene and encouraged him to write the first book that would make him a proper income, the aforementioned The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, which related much of his rather fabulous life story.

At last, by 1908, Davies was living in comparative comfort, and enjoying the acclaim that being a writer brought him. His books of poems came out on something approaching an annual basis; in 1911, he was granted a Civil List pension of £50 per annum (which was later raised to £100, then to £150); and in 1912, he had the good fortune to be included in Edward Marsh’s hugely successful anthology Georgian Poetry 1912–13 (also known as Georgian Poetry I). He would go on to be included in all five of the Georgian Poetry anthologies over the course of the next decade, making him one of the handful of most prominent Georgian poets – guaranteeing a regular and sizeable readership for his verse at the time, if also helping to ensure that his poetic reputation would ultimately sink when that movement grew unfashionable in the early 1920s. His prose books were initially almost as frequent as his poetry collections. In addition to the Autobiography, these included Beggars (1909), a book of essays on tramping life, and The True Traveller (1912), a slightly more risqué companion to the occasionally bowdlerised account in Autobiography, as well as the semi-biographical novel A Weak Woman (1911), the hero of which is a glorified Davies: an artist with a damaged limb who sails down the Mississippi, contracts malaria, jumps trains, and fights his way out of trouble. A Poet’s Pilgrimage would appear in 1918, and present as a literary man’s journal of a long walk from South Wales, via Newport, and through south-central England.⁶

The autodidact tramp-poet had come a long way and seen a lot of things, by anybody’s standards. Certainly, he had lived a life vastly at odds with that of his literary acquaintances, or the overwhelming majority of the British reading public. While the mainstay of his poetry modulated towards fashionable – then unfashionable – depictions of nature, his best work, in both verse and prose, is in some ways as alert, brash, worldly and authentically plainspoken as the first Clash record. He sticks up for the poor, the destitute and the kind-hearted, and appears to present them as he had known them. However, at times he demonstrates a naive tendency to accept received wisdoms and resort to stereotypes and oversimplifications. In 1915, the Welsh author Caradoc Evans angered many in Wales with My People (1915), a collection of short stories harshly critical of the Welsh peasantry, with portrayals of violence, madness and even incest; the title page of Evans’s first edition stated that ‘the justification for the author’s realistic pictures of peasant life, as he knows it, is the obvious sincerity of his aim, which is to portray that he may make ashamed’.⁷ Evans’s intention was fervently political, for he wanted to shock the Welsh from complacency at their national condition. But just three years later, Davies was noting in an aside, and without any apparent motivation other than to foreground his own minor narrative, that ‘the poorer classes in Wales have very few interests besides singing, football and fighting’.⁸ The Scottish fare little better. In the same book, he expresses surprise that an ale which has made him want to laugh was produced in Scotland, ‘where there is supposed to be a lack of humour’.⁹ And the first chapter of Beggars shows Davies turning his bold generalisations on almost every race and nationality he had encountered, and perhaps a few more besides.¹⁰ There seems to be no irony in these wide-eyed comments. Far more shockingly, in the Autobiography, this champion of underdogs describes the mob lynching of a black prisoner in the Deep South, then concludes that the victim’s crime meant he deserved it, without stopping to question its racist context, even though he must’ve understood that to some extent. Davies appears to those who discover him now as a quasi-mythological figure of unparalleled unadornment, for good or ill: a complex melange of ignorance and wisdom, uncouthness and sophistication, ugliness and beauty – in his life, his attitudes and his work.

In January 1914, Davies moved from rural Kent up to London, partly to be among his growing circle of literary friends. He settled in a bedsit on Great Russell Street, and remained in the capital for eight years. He appears to have brought with him a fierce sense of his own self-importance, of the kind that often accompanies those with imposter syndrome, and though he delighted some literary acquaintances, such as Edith Sitwell, others – perhaps unwittingly demonstrating their own class-consciousness – found his egotism insufferable. Robert Frost, whom Davies visited in Gloucestershire, wrote to a friend in 1914 that Davies’s ‘is the kind of egotism another man’s egotism can’t put up with. He was going from here to be with [Joseph] Conrad. He said that would be pleasant because Conrad knew his work thoroughly. […] We asked him if he knew Conrad’s work thoroughly. Oh no.’¹¹ Davies’s view of himself as one of the country’s finest writers was, at least ostensibly, unshakeable, but he evidently feared losing his success as quickly as he had eventually found it, which only served to exacerbate his apparent self-regard. It also prompted jealousy of poets more successful than himself, among them de la Mare, John Masefield, Henry Newbolt and W. B. Yeats – and some of this would later come across in his 1924 memoir centred on London literary life, Later Days.

Davies’s literary response to the Great War was at first almost to ignore it, though the poems he published about war in 1916–18 are among his most successful, and signalled a discernible if in some ways short-lived shift in his poetic temperament. Certainly, he never fell into any of the exuberant and naive jingoism that overwhelmed other often younger poets, including his fellow ‘Georgian’ Rupert Brooke. He did take part in elaborate reading evenings in London, however, which raised money for the war effort. These cannot have been an unmitigated joy for him: he was alert to the fact that many in fashionable literary London regarded the ‘tramp-poet’ as a quaint curiosity, which he hated. By 1921, the year Davies turned fifty, he was tiring of London and its literary bunfights, and keen to find a wife and move to the country. After a few missteps, he eventually met Helen Payne, a woman almost three decades his junior. She quickly became his mistress and housekeeper, and soon his wife, though not until she’d almost died after miscarrying the child of a previous partner, and he’d almost died from venereal disease (also from a previous partner). In 1922, they moved to the small rural town of East Grinstead, Sussex, 30 miles south of central London. Then, in 1930, they left the capital’s orbit altogether, for the small town of Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, where they would remain – close to Davies’s native south Wales without being in it, and within striking distance of his relatives in Newport.

His poetry had settled back into a very familiar pattern by the later 1920s, however, and the Georgian poets were by this time wholly out of favour. Moreover, his later prose works, which he still produced at a fair rate, generally suffered from a lack of new raw material or original concerns: his second novel, Dancing Mad (1927), is little more than an overtly fictionalised version of parts of his earlier prose memoirs, and his prose books My Birds and My Garden (both 1933) display very little knowledge about either. Contentment was good for Davies’s soul, of course, but bad for his art. Nonetheless, he still found himself in demand for articles and other short prose pieces, such as his introduction to an edition of Moll Flanders (1929), and in 1926 he was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Wales. In 1930, he edited an anthology for Cape, Jewels of Song, and in 1934 Cape published The Poems of W. H. Davies: A Complete Collection. Davies returned to Newport in September 1938, for the unveiling of a plaque in his honour, which was accompanied by an address from his friend John Masefield, the Poet Laureate. However, Davies was by then unwell, and this would be his final public appearance. The last year of his life was characterised by a stroke and a series of heart attacks, as well as the outbreak of the Second World War, which depressed him greatly. He died in September 1940, at the age of 69.

Complete Poems of W. H. Davies, with a preface by Daniel George and an introduction by Osbert Sitwell, appeared from Cape in 1963, the same year in which Richard J. Stonesifer’s W. H. Davies: A Critical Biography was published. This was followed in 1980, the year after Helen Payne’s death, by a surprise addition to Davies’s canon: Young Emma, an autobiographical account of meeting his wife. Davies believed the book had been destroyed; Cape had kept a copy, and waited until the Davieses were both dead before making it available. There has been some renewed critical interest in Davies in the past two decades, which have seen the appearance of three short critical biographies of Davies by Lawrence Normand, Barbara Cooper and Michael Cullup.

The first section of this book focuses on Davies’s major works in prose and poetry. Professor David Mason provides a reassessment of his unusual literary debut, The Soul’s Destroyer, with close readings from the volume, and a consideration of its influence and significance. He separates the ‘work of derivative enthusiasm’ in that volume from the ‘poems that touch reality more freshly