2024-07-25 - Tramping On Life by Harry Kemp =========================================== I discovered this title in a reading list at a nudist resort, and later learned that it is a public domain autobiography of a vagabond poet. Sign me up! Now that i have finally read the book i have no regrets. The author loved nothing better than to read books and to study, and later to write. I had fun tracking down some of the titles he mentioned. I would have enjoyed meeting such a free and lively person. Some of his stories sound like tall tales. Either he used poetic license to embellish the stories, or he lived larger than life. Below are a few quotes from the book. My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were Stanley's Adventures in Africa, Dr. Kane's Book of Polar Explorations, Mungo Park, and most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called Savage Races of the World... Boy Travellers on to Congo by Henry Morton Stanley How I Found Livingstone (Adventures) by Henry Morton Stanley In Darkest Africa, Volume 1 by Henry Morton Stanley In Darkest Africa, Volume 2 by Henry Morton Stanley My Dark Companions And Their Strange Stories by Henry Morton Stanley Through South Africa by Henry Morton Stanley Adrift in the Arctic Ice by Elisha Kent Kane The Far North: Exploration in the Arctic Regions by Elisha Kent Kane Travels In The Interior of Africa, Volume 1 by Mungo Park Travels In The Interior of Africa, Volume 2 by Mungo Park Life And Travels of Mungo Park But a grey chaos was settling over me. I trembled often like a person under a strange seizure. My mind did not readily respond to questions. It went here and there in a welter. Day dreams chased through my mind one after another in hurried heaps o confusion. I was lost... groping... in a curious new world of growing emotions leavened with grievous, shapeless thoughts. I hated school so that I ran away. For the first time in my life, but by no means my last, I hopped a freight. I now informed my father that I wanted to go to work. Which I didn't so very much. But anything, if only it was not going to school. He was not adverse to my getting a job. The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness, dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked, jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the eye-pits of a skull. Every decisive influence in life has been a book, every vital change in my life, I might say, has been brought about by a book. How wonderful it would be to become a hermit on some far mountain side, wearing a grey robe, clear-browed and calmly speculative under the stars... During my subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them biting at all ... but most tramps "boil up"--that is, take off their clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them--whenever they find opportunity. Softly my buddy and I drew off our shoes, putting them under our heads to serve as pillows, and also to keep them from being stolen. (Often a tramp comes along with a deft enough touch to untie a man's shoes from his feet without waking him. I've heard of its being done.) We wrapped our feet in newspapers, then. Our coats we removed, to wrap them about us ... one keeps warmer that way than by just wearing the coat... I always had a book in my pocket. I read even at meals, despite my father's protests that it was bad-mannered. At that time McFadden's Physical Culture Magazine was becoming widely read. I came across a copy of it. I found in it a guide to what I was in search for. Faithfully I took up physical culture. ... and there were, as associates and companions, many people, who, if extremely eccentric, were, nevertheless, alive and alert and interested in all the beautiful things Genius has created in Art and Song... Derelicts, freaks, "nuts" ... with poses that outnumbered the silver eyes in the peacock's tail in multitude ... and yet there was to be found in them a sincerity, a fineness, and a genuine feeling for humanity that "regular" folks never achieve--perhaps because of their very "regularness." Here, at last, I had found another environment where I could "let loose" to the limit ... * * * My books were my parents, my relatives. I had been born of them, not of my own father and mother. My being born in the flesh was a mere accident of nature. My father and mother happened to be the vehicle. * * * Always, always I wrote my poetry and kept studying in my own fashion ... marks of proficiency, attendance at class went by the board. My studying was rather browsing among the multitudes of books in the college library. I passed hours, back in the stacks, forgetting day and night ... recitations ... meals... I was soon in trouble with my professors ... I was always up, and even ahead, with my studies, but I was a disrupting influence for the other students, because of my irregularity. * * * The Annual, a book published by the seniors each spring, now advertised a prize for the best poem submitted by any student ... a prize of twenty-five dollars. I had no doubt but that the prize was mine already. The prize was declared off. After an evening's serious discussion the committee decided that, though my effort was far and away the best, it would not do to let me have the prize, because I was so wild-appearing ... because I was known as having been a tramp. And because seniors and students of correct standing at the university had tried. And it would not be good for the school morale to let me have what I had won. They compromised by declaring the prize off. A year after, Professor Black, assistant professor in English literature, who served on the judging board, told me confidentially of this ... though he declared that he had fought for me, alleging how I needed the money, and how I had honestly won the award. I thought of the couplet of Gay: "He who would without malice pass his days Must live obscure and never merit praise." Outwardly I maintained a bold and courageous rudeness. Inwardly a panic had swept over me ... not the panic of deep solitude when a man is alone at night in a boundless forest ... I have known that, too, but it is nothing to that which comes to a man who knows all society, by its very structure, arrayed against him and his dreams. I saw that it was the object of education, not to liberate the soul and mind and heart, but to reduce everything to dead and commonplace formulae. On all sides, so to speak, I saw Christ and Socrates and Shelley valeted by society ... dress suits laid out for them ... carefully pressed and creased ... which,--now dead,--it was pretended their spirits took up and wore ... had, in fact, always worn... * * * My first night's shelter was in a leaky outhouse. The farmstead to which it belonged had burned down. I had brought a box of small candles for just such an emergency. I lit one after the other, sat on the seat, and read Keats all night ... in an ecstasy, forgetting my surroundings... * * * Quite often, in the afternoons, toward dusk, around a dying fire, the whole community had "sings" out in the woods, near the one large stream that abutted the colony, and gathered into itself, all the little brooks... The old songs were sung; rich, beautiful, old Scotch and English and Irish ballads--which were learnt, by all who wanted to know them, at the singing school ... and the old-fashioned American songs, too. And the music softened our hearts and fused us into one harmony of feeling. And all the bickerings of the community's various "isms" melted away ... after all, there was not so very much disharmony among us. * * * Free Love, Marriage, Polygamy, Polyandry, Varietism, Promiscuity--these were but tossing chips of nomenclature, bits of verbal welter, upborne by deep terrible human currents that appalled the imagination! The man who prated glibly of any ready solution, orthodox or heterodox, radical or conventional, of the problem of the relationships between men and women was worse than a fool, he was a dangerous madman! author: Kemp, Harry, 1883-1960 detail: LOC: PS3521.E45 Z5 source: tags: ebook,non-fiction,travel,vagabond title: Tramping On Life Tags ==== ebook non-fiction travel vagabond