(TXT) View source
# 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...
(DIR) Boy Travellers on to Congo by Henry Morton Stanley
(DIR) How I Found Livingstone (Adventures) by Henry Morton Stanley
(DIR) In Darkest Africa, Volume 1 by Henry Morton Stanley
(DIR) In Darkest Africa, Volume 2 by Henry Morton Stanley
(DIR) My Dark Companions And Their Strange Stories by Henry Morton Stanley
(DIR) Through South Africa by Henry Morton Stanley
(DIR) Adrift in the Arctic Ice by Elisha Kent Kane
(DIR) The Far North: Exploration in the Arctic Regions by Elisha Kent Kane
(DIR) Travels In The Interior of Africa, Volume 1 by Mungo Park
(DIR) Travels In The Interior of Africa, Volume 2 by Mungo Park
(DIR) 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.
(DIR) gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/search/%09creator:(MacFadden,%20Bernarr%20Aldolphus,%201858-)
... 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
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Harry_Kemp
LOC: PS3521.E45 Z5
(DIR) source: gopher://gopher.pglaf.org/1/1/5/4/1/15415/
tags: ebook,non-fiction,travel,vagabond
title: Tramping On Life
# Tags
(DIR) ebook
(DIR) non-fiction
(DIR) travel
(DIR) vagabond