dissolute remnant’.^49 Thomas Holmes thought the tramp was harking
back to ‘the life of the idle savage’.^50 The effect of these negative defin-
itions is to invest tramps with a lack of interiority, the savage or child that
acts without thought. This view is also implicit in the labour-camp
remedy sought by successive Edwardian Poor Law Conferences, one of
which remarked: ‘The vagrant’s laziness is very much a matter of habit,
and industry must be made habitual instead.’^51 In other words, the
morality of working (which would imply interior conscience) is incul-
cated as habit, a purely mechanical response because that is what the
tramp is.
But by appealing to these ideas, Davies’s simplicity showed itself
resourceful, both in the manner and variety of his begging techniques
and the ability he had to find markets for his work. Ezra Pound described
him as having a ‘peasant’s shrewdness’ and Davies’s biographer agrees,
showing how Davies carefully made maximum publicity from being a
society pet.^52 Such canniness might seem to belie notions of simplicity at
all, but on the other hand, the testimony we have from his letters and the
many stories about his unworldliness is consistent. Although she also
noted his shrewdness, Helen Thomas remembered that Davies bought a
velvet jacket when he became a published poet because that was what
poets wore, and that he would carry his groceries home inside his coat
lining because he did not want anyone to know he had to do his own
shopping.^53 In keeping with Thomas’s assessment of him as having no
idea of proportion, Davies counselled Thomas not to worry about public
or critical indifference, because the manager of Davies’s doss-house in
Southwark had read some of Thomas’s work and declared that ‘that man
deserves a civil list pension’. In case this was not impressive enough,
Davies added, ‘he is getting a great admirer of your work, and his opinion
is worth having, for he is well known in South London as a speaker of
good verse’.^54 Here, Davies seems quite oblivious of the importance of the
right audience.
This difficulty the reader has identifying a single ‘real’ Davies, a figure
who would unite the contrary evidences of simple innocent and skilful
artist, has been every reviewer’s difficulty with his poetry as well. Which is
the real Davies in the ending of ‘The Sleepers’, say? The poem describes
the homeless asleep on a dockside at night:
That moment, on the waterside
A lighted car came at a bound;
I looked inside, and saw a score
Of pale and weary men that frowned;The simplicity of W. H. Davies 141