happened to anyone (and often does), rather than what was unique to
Davies. Making no difference between the two means his life is described
in the sequence in which it occurred, rather than shaped according to the
principal features he feels have moulded his personality.
This lack of balance, proportion or shaping – life-shaping, self-shaping
- is quite the opposite of that of the tramp-enthusiasts. Davies’s rival in
tramp literature was Bart Kennedy, whose books are as amoral in their
approach to labour as Davies (‘the secret of life – to live healthily without
work’), but whose lifestyle was one of loud self-declaration: ‘I was glad to
be here with my mates. I was glad to talk with them and eat with them
and get drunk with them and to fight with them. I was glad to listen to the
throb of the engine as it pulled up the cage.’^33
Such self-dramatisation is appropriate to the Nietzschean subtext of
Kennedy’s idea of tramping as a kind of physical training for becoming the
U ̈bermensch. ‘This whole civilisation is the sinister fruit of stay-at-home
cowardice’ he booms, and enthusiastically cheers the rise of ‘the primal and
consonant laws that lie within’ and ‘the glorious and beautiful men
and women dowered with the magical powers that now lie dormant’.^34 After
such a promise, Kennedy’s adventures in Birmingham pubs and factories
seem a little tame, although his autobiography appears as evidence of squalid
vitality in Masterman’sThe Condition of England.^35 A similar heroism
informs a magazine calledThe Tramp, which opens with Whitman:
Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road.
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.^36
ForThe Trampas for Kennedy, vagrancy is a way of self-remaking,
with something of Nietzsche’s love of inner strength and forgetfulness –
in one article Jack London describes the professional young vagrants of
America as ‘the primordial, noble men, the blond beasts so beloved of
Nietzsche’.^37 Its opening piece is rapturous:
The joys of tramping are to the true vagabond practically infinite. The snow of
January, the sun of August, and the damp breezes of April, all are equally
welcome. The moan of the wind at night, the noises of the wind over grass, the
whispering of trees at dawn... these are all the company the [amateur] tramp
needs... it is only the tramp who is able to realise the meaning of Maeterlinck’s
statement that we all live in the sublime.^38
Another writer tells us that ‘tramps are of a community as superior to as
they are distinct from the common tourist tribe’ and consequently they
138 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism