Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  ‘We had a lot of briefings but we never really succeeded in defining why we were doing this except that we all wanted to get out on the road and this seemed a new way of doing it. We had a shakedown trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles and that went okay so then we pushed off on the real trip.

  ‘By then there were fourteen men and one girl and we all had our movie names: there was Intrepid Traveller, Swashbuckler, Highly Charged, and so on. One of the men was the original Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On The Road. It was really great - flying across the Nevada desert at sixty miles an hour, sunbathing on the roof, all the way with Ornette Coleman coming across the intercom. That’s the way to travel.’

  *

  Professor J. K. Galbraith has drawn attention to the similarity between the American system and the bumblebee, whose aerodynamics and wing-loading are such that in principle it cannot fly. The fact that it does fly in defiance of the authority of Isaac Newton and Orville Wright must, Professor Galbraith thinks, keep the bee in constant fear of crack-up. It is a successful but insecure insect and he believes that there is among Americans a corresponding ‘depression psychosis’, a deep undercurrent of insecurity about an economy which obviously flies high but flouts the rules with a dangerous combination of audacity and apprehension.

  As we have seen, however, there are in the Ameripan beehive many who never get airborne, who from the outset reside in the Other America, that half-life lapping at the buttresses of the Great Society. Here beyond the edge is the homeless and work-less man, the Odets eidolon of the Thirties still on the street corner: ‘… a beggar with the face of a dead man. Hungry, miserable, unkempt, an American spectre.’ The American spectre, thirty years later, is still not an anachronism, a wingless survival of an earlier evolutionary stage of the insect colony. He continues to be in a lively state of mass production.

  Until the draft call for Vietnam, the American economy maintained an unemployment pool among under twenties of sixteen per cent, and a million jobless young people between sixteen and twenty-five, a gristly lump of undigestible workless amid unprecedented boom conditions. This is mass despair and defeat, which in most magazine surveys of the state of the nation is parcelled briskly in such a phrase as ‘unemployment sank to an eight-year low of 4-5 per cent’. It fluctuates, but it has stuck around the five to six per cent mark for about eight years. That official estimate is based on statistics of insured wage-earners and those statistics omit multifold groups of workers, many of whom in despondency have lapsed from labour exchange registers and have gone into social limbo. Six million may be the more realistic level of fairly steady unemployment.

  Despite President Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, thirty-five million (or perhaps forty, or fifty, no one is sure) of the nation’s 198 million continue to live below the line of sufficiency and security, badly housed, badly fed, badly paid, in want: the central paradox in a nation whose destiny, a plausible pipedream, has been repeatedly celebrated as upward into ever more sumptuous plateaux of affluence.

  It is a lopsided ascendancy, with the prosperous escalating away and leaving the poor behind across a widening gap of disparity. When President Johnson appointed R. Sargent Shriver as generalissimo of the new Office of Economic Opportunity, charged with running such vital-sounding departments as Vista, Community Action Programmes, Neighbourhood Youth Corps and a Job Corps (conservation camps and urban training centres, strongly echoing the New Deal CCC) for 25,000 illiterate or impoverished adolescents the bugle call was ‘to weed out poverty at the grass roots’. At that time a cynical Republican remarked: ‘Lyndon Johnson is the only man who could run on a platform of poverty and plenty at the same time.’ The subsequent waning of enthusiasm to get at those grass roots of poverty may connect with the result of a Gallup poll, in which forty-six per cent of the electorate expressed the opinion that poverty is a result of lack of effort rather than force of circumstances.

  Old myths never die and don’t often fade away. Move. Go West, young man. Look slippy. Git up and go. Go places and do things, as they used to say in the Twenties. Faith is unshaken even when disproved, and that same discredited faith is preserved, in companionship with guilt, in the breasts of the illiterate, the impoverished, the unskilled, the untaught, the untrained, the displaced, the disrupted, the defeated. Many in modern America sit hopelessly in defunct areas, made superfluous by automation or vanished styles of manufacture; but most respond to the social praxis and move. They move along the interstices of the American Good Life and just keep rolling along, for perhaps the coal pits are closing in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, but there may be an opening in Colorado, and if Colorado is dying too, let’s try California where the sun shines on everyone, and if that’s crowded out then Chicago’s worth a throw. The journey continues along the freight tracks and in city-bound fruit trucks, in Greyhound buses and salesmen’s cars; stays in skid row cage-hotels or the Muni or a rundown tourist court; meals in beaneries and hash houses with the menu written in soap on the window; drinks on a panhandled quarter in sawdust saloons where the muscatel can be spiked with raw alcohol.

  As the social pyramid towers higher, the rubble of poor at its foundations thickens. Yet the man without job or home rarely impinges, even as a shadow, upon the citizen with fresh laundry each morning, however concerned he may be about the default from the grammar of sound economy when he reads the figures in his newspaper. Inevitably, the fact that millions of his countrymen are in permanent destitution is an abstraction most of the time, an academic debate of conscience. For the commuter trains arrow from country club land to the city’s business heart; the expressways girdle towns without touching them; the cars glide between the billboard screens along the cement crosshatchings. Beyond those traffic conduits, the rejected man is geographically ever more distant, either a small bent-over figure in the sun of a factory farm or a face, glimpsed at night, etiolated by the sodium lamps of the city. And in his traditional hobo version he remains secure in the curio corner of stock American folk fiction. There is a break in circuit between the caricature and its physical truth. To the prosperous citizen the hobo of his fancy has about the same relation to the man turned away from the employment office grille, or to the derelict sleeping off dope or bay-rum on a park bench, as has Li’l Abner to the redundant Appalachian miner in a ghost shack town of the East Kentucky field, or as Baby Doll has to a sharecropper’s child of the hookworm belt.

  The fiction continues to be perpetuated in terms of whimsy derision. There are always the useful light relief newspaper filler paragraphs to be got out of hobolore. It is reported from Santa Barbara that ‘county supervisors ordered the District Attorney to look into complaints that hoboes have been using up electricity by plugging in their electric blankets at deserted homes’. From Buffalo comes the despatch that a hobo in from Chicago by de luxe coach complains: ‘It was terrible. The coach was either too hot or too cold. You couldn’t get a seat and when you weren’t standing you were sitting or lying down in the aisle. Give me the good old days when a ‘bo could ride the rods in comfort.’ When Harry Baronian, editor of The Bowery News and late of The Hobo News, died in 1965 the New York Times reported a friend as saying: ‘Harry was planning to bat the hell out of the war on poverty. He said there were hardly any old time bums left, anyhow, and President Johnson looked like he was trying to wipe them out altogether.’

  So can be provided not only a wry grin, but comfort for the conscience.

  Down in the boondocks, across the tracks, out in the jungles, in niggertown and Mextown, over the hill, on skid row - however it is labelled, this is the ghetto of ‘internal aliens’, those immersed in a depth of failure which they can move through horizontally but not vertically. They are all the easier to overlook because their ghetto’s boundaries are the borders of the United States and individually they are hard to focus upon. Their very mobility is no identity marker, for also mobile are the technicians and managers and high-grade artisans and specialists, and through the unpopulated mechan
ized tracts which were the countryside, along the inter-town highways, proceed the giant shuntings of a restless population. Why, among this ebullition, should the hobo be noticed? Yet he does enter into the anxieties and preoccupations of the others. Machine culture brought unparalleled ease of convenience and efficiency to the better-off American. Deliverance from frontier drudgery came, nature was whipped and overcome, but to be replaced by another wilderness, that of the apparatus of mass production, mass living, mass organization, at the heart of which lingers the fear that something irreplaceable and unique has been extinguished, and something less tangible than that ‘depression psychosis’, Gal-braith’s worm in the apple of abundance.

  It would seem ingenuous to accept in toto Metzler’s conversational statement that the migrant worker, the drifter, the landless stranger on his home soil, is ‘the last free American’. It can on the contrary be argued that the hobo has, since he was created in the kinetic American pattern, been a prisoner in a chain-gang of limited possibilities, oppressed and harassed, with access neither to his own hearth and family nor to sustaining relationships in which other men find a truer freedom of security and love. Therefore, the hobo had to invent his consolations. He had to wring a little poetry and pride out of his rag of a life, to make a simulacrum of himself.

  Yet it is a curiously insidious and seductive myth and, as has been shown on these pages, for nearly a hundred years it has been a tantalizing melody in the air, a wild, wood-wind note heard by most Americans. However imaginary that freedom of the man on the road, it makes no less real the repining, in the middle of mass plenty, that something of value has drained away. Ironically it is the dispossessed - the joke hobo figure - who is believed to have retained that possession still coveted by the others. He is the infidel excommunicated from the consumer theology, yet he seems to have in his moneyless state an American prize not to be got by planned payments or credit card. That he does have the prize is doubtful, but the salaried suburban American endlessly strives to reach through his suffusion of goods to grope for it.

  ‘As pants the hart for cooling streams, so does his spirit pant for money, the only wealth,’ wrote Karl Marx: but the conflict in the American has always been to want both money, meaning machine civilization and culture, and the cooling streams, meaning the repose of nymphs in the Garden of the World. The bucolic balm - or at least its synthetics - can be seen in America in a thousand forms and fantasies. The roadscape is pustuled with services for a population of rubber-tyre romantics, so the tubufar alloy cabins which have obliterated the countryside are tacked over with crusty clapboard and called Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Cottage. White picket fences cosily surround the drive-in banks. Motels and weekend fun compounds are disguised with lacy white Colonial wrought iron or knotty timber. Everywhere is ‘the piety towards the out-of-doors’. The flight from the ticky-tacky boxes on hunting and camping trips is a vacation ceremonial, and the wilderness cult is an advertising mode for anything from a sedan to a cigarette: wool shirts and whipcord for the models, mountains and elk trails for the setting. Kits for frying hamburgers by starlight, so recreating a whiff of the over-lander heritage, are a ten million dollar chain store sales item, maintained by the American who seeks his historical roots by chewing a charred Frankfurter with his Martini. The small town, its sleepy, warm, hi-neighbour serenity of life around the court house and the catfish ponds is obsolescent, and perhaps just about obsolete, by-passed by the highways, pruned off by rationalized railroads, strangled by absentee agriculture, and its hitching posts and spinning wheels and general stores are embalmed in Disneyland. So, quite recently, twelve writers collaborated to produce A Vanishing America, a faded, sepia daguerreotype proffered as ‘a hymn to lost simplicity’ - a simplicity which has drowned in the cream-whip of the 400 billion dollar consumer economy. Its epitaph is the words of Jack Isidor Strauss of Macy’s: ‘Our economy keeps growing because our ability to consume is endless … The luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow.’ And the necessities of yesterday - options, resource, independence - now seem to be the luxuries of today, priceless, unobtainable, not to be bought.

  It would be misleading to draw too much inference from that half-hearted rebellion against mass organization, the beatnik movement, yet it was in fact traditional in its impulse to dodge beyond the lasso of regimentation, and Jack Kerouac had some statements to make which are worth recalling. Kerouac (‘Joys of the open road’, one journal summed him up, ‘myth of the glamourous wastrel’) in On The Road attempted for his generation a twentieth-century restatement of The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was an incoherent shout of disaffiliation, a cry to be free: ‘I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way … I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further … I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.’

  The pearl appears not to be there, but who can scoff at the search for it ? Much of Kerouac - and the tense, obsessional crosscountry lunges in stolen cars - seems to be a frenetic extension of Huxley’s furor Americanus, the American cult of action. Perhaps more exactly it can be seen as the last spurt of the ‘democracy of haste’, not now the expansionist stampede of whole townships and populations and industy, but here the agonized rush back into an idea of sapling energy and liberty. This wrenching free from hindrance and habit was, in the Kerouac idiom, mindless and immaturely excitable, yet poignantly right at heart and oddly heroic. It was a try at hacking a path back across an American range of life which has been built over, expunged. The spaces have shrunk, the wheat prairies are mechanized, the the timber stands clear-felled, the trains are too fast for a man of an ambling disposition, the highways swoop from coast to coast, and the Wobbly union battles are won or forever lost. What is there left to travel for once you have reached the end of the Kerouac trail ? To be sure America is still the same prodigious and awesome bulk, but somehow Utah where Joe Hill went before the firing squad, the miners’ union halls in Butte, Montana, the apple orchards of Washington, the water tank towers of remote Western freight yards, the North Dakota steppes of corn - none has the same blood-singing stature of distance and adventure. The archetypal hobos who still stubbornly push around the circuit are ghosts on a path whose St Elmo’s fire fades. The very group to which the hobo belonged in a class or toil sense - that of the industrial machine operator - has performed its Marxian trajectory, and, after growing for seventy-five years to be the biggest single group, has now attenuated and been replaced by a new majority, the managerial technocrat.

  Both the trade and the dream have, functionally, gone. It is therefore extraordinary that the spell stays. It is entered by every new generation. In a smallish book, I See By My Outfit, published in 1965 by a young New Yorker named Peter S. Beagle, there was renewed the same glow of an enchanted journey - the two Bronx beatniks, motor-scooting across to San Francisco, ‘slide in and out among the cars like moonlight on railroad tracks’, into ‘the kind of country you dream of running away to when you are very young and innocently hungry, before you learn that all the land is owned by somebody’.

  It is an ache which is constantly there. It was present in the strange, scaley quality of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: the nihilism and random violence of the two killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who come out of space into the windy breadth of Kansas, that ‘gospel-haunted strip of United States territory’, and destroy the Clutter family. Capote said to me after the book was published: ‘There is in America a whole sub-culture, a uni verse, of wandering, desperate, rootless people, who move always in an aimless, drifting, dangerous way, and there was the collision between these peculiar wanderers and a race of pious, quiet, rooted people: the two great extremities, the greatest polarities.’

  There seems to me to be nothing astonishing about this collision of opposites. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock belonged in that terrain just as much as did the Clutters - part of the fauna. The previous summer w
hen I was about to leave New York on a 9,000 mile round-trip, I had been repeatedly advised - warned - not to take chances, not to pick up hitch-hikers, not to sleep at the roadside, not to lodge in dubious motels. The whole goddam United States is full of screwballs roaming around,’ a friend told me, very seriously. ‘Don’t come back dead.’ I had no wish to but I was, after all, looking for Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, not necessarily psychopathic murderers but men following their noses to nowhere in particular around the continental mass. I wanted to intercept some wild goose chases. I was driving out into a Kerouac landscape: ‘… we came to sundry sullen towns where we stopped for gas and nothing but bluejeaned Elvis Presleys in the road, waiting to beat somebody up.’ And I remembered Humbert Humbert’s sharpening eye, during his dark, doting year of motel-hopping with his nymphet, for ‘the curious roadside species Hitchhiking Man, Homo pollex, of science, with all its many sub-species and forms: the modest soldier, spic and span …; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go 2,000 miles’. I tried to cultivate a similar ornithological eye, especially for the killers, and obviously succeeded; yet I did meet those in whom one recognized the genetic embodiment of that phrase of D. H. Lawrence: ‘The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.’ Elsewhere Lawrence wrote of the black side of the pioneer experience: ‘… the grimness of it, the savage fight and the savage failure which broke the back of the country but also broke something in the human soul. The spirit and the will survived: but something in the soul perished: the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness.’

  Lawrence stopped short of the complete explanation, which is that the essential American soul hardened itself to stoicism and violence not only to endure isolation but to keep the dream alive. It had to have a carapace, the yolk of that egg. But in modern America the yolk has addled in the shell. The confident, solitary man who once could find exactly the sort of impersonal eclat his temperament needed among the awkward squad on the outgoing rail tracks and in the wild country of the North-West, has now been shouldered off into a different role: he is the baffled, alienated Camus stranger, without obligations or moral restrictions, and in a changed context. He is a disrupted personality, still performing an American drama which has been completed, the Pyrrhic contest between man and his environment. The collision between the Clutters and their two killers was of especial terror and ‘motivelessness’, yet it was the logical extension of the commoner conflict between ‘the world of safety’ and ‘the world of non-safety’ - the first increasingly encroaching upon the other, squeezing it into more concentrated and desperate paths of action, until it seems that such rolling stones as Smith and Hickock are hemmed inevitably into their role (‘fate burns gasoline along the endless highways’) for this is the only alley of free movement left to them.