And so it seems to have done. This is not to say that the book is
without emotion, only that emotions are events that happen within it,
and they occur with the same discreteness. The wildest display of passion
in the book is probably when Davies is rejected by the people to whom he
attempts to sell poetry, and ‘with the fury of a madman’ burns his own
copies. The next paragraph begins, ‘It was at this time that I came under
the influence of Flanagan.’ Ah, thinks the reader, Flanagan will have some
effect on his problems selling poetry. But Flanagan does not: the fact that
he is introduced at this point is simply because it was at the same time that
Davies met him. Davies’s fury at the indifference of the public to his work
has simply stopped at the end of the previous sentence. This lack of
continuity is reinforced by the way that emotions often do not appear at
the expected moment, either: when a kindly farmer offers to rescue him
from tramping and adopt him as his son and heir, Davies refuses in one
sentence and without reflection. On the other hand, he spends two-and-a-
half pages detailing his humiliation about once being caught cooking a
pancake in his lodging-house, although nothing appears to have happened
to him or the pancake as a result.^31
Although their material is similar, this lack of proportion also marks a
crucial difference between Davies’s work and its Open Road contempor-
aries. One can never be sure what will be important to theAutobiography:
indeed, Augustus John once remarked that ‘trifles did not exist in con-
nection with W H Davies. Everything that happened to him was signifi-
cant.’^32 Such inconsequential consequence makes its author difficult to
recognise, for the flow of events (and his emotions are part of those
events) is not interrupted, subordinated or organised by the pattern of a
particular personality. For example, the episodes in chapters 18 to 21 run
as follows. Bored at home, he decides to go to the Yukon. His compan-
ions on the boat reserve a table for themselves by fighting. He eats in a
worthwhile Salvation Army restaurant. He meets an old companion and
travels with him. He is under suspicion in jail for a crime he has not
committed. He loses a leg. The Canadians are kind to him in hospital. He
returns home and determines to go to London and write. The effect is
that for all his determination to become a writer, Davies’s life appears just
to happen to him: the last chapter closes with a series of assertions to the
truth of his account, ‘these have been my experiences’, as if he were merely
a witness to the events in his life. Typically, the last of these events is not
the expected climax of his fame and literary triumph, but about a
disagreement with a landlady a few months after his recognition by the
press. The result is that Davies’s story ends with an event that could have
The simplicity of W. H. Davies 137