Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  A British reviewer of In Cold Blood described the sensation of watching ‘two strange, inhuman, sharklike monsters swim to the surface out of the lower depths of American life’ - actually, not out of the depths, merely across into the mainstream. He touched the nerve more precisely later when likening their wanderings, after the murder, to ‘some modern and corrupt version of Huckleberry Finn; the beautiful epic has turned sour, Huck and Tom Sawyer, though they still retain a pale shadow of their former charm, have acquired hearts that are cold, callous and depraved, boyish dreams of adventure have given way to futile hopes of living without work by impossible lagoons, and all human relationships have become those of homo homini lupus’

  As a temporary fellow traveller through that soured epic, the foreigner in the United States, and particularly the Englishman from his damp, meek climate, is constantly, edgily, aware of an electricity of violence; it is like the tremble of summer lightning on any skyline. It can explode in such casual slaughter as in that Kansas farmhouse or in the outburst of racial frustration or in the most routine little ugly city crimes and gratuitous gang carnage, but these are perverse distortions of its true nature which is that of energy, and the conflict between the imperative of fusion into one national, manageable entity and the resistance of American individuality against being so managed and fused. It is the persistence of that quest for ‘the boundless licence of a new region’ which Timothy Flint wrote of in 1826 and which, even then, he said with melancholy, was ‘something we crave and have not’.

  The neon of the American sign carnival, showering the night with cold, empty colour - the marsh gas of urbanism - signals sameness and safety to the traveller. Risk of the unfamiliar has been screened out: WMCA The Good Guy Service, trailers for sale or rent, Gulf Gas, Litebite Bakerette, Country Ham Steak, Ancient Age Bourbon, Optimo Cigars, Beltway Toll, Howard Johnson, Trailway Post House, Lazy Susan Ranch-Style Meals, See You In Church On Sunday, Budweiser, S Public Shelter, Chok Full o’ Nuts, Save Supermart, Flamingo Tourtel, Stoppe Shoppe, English Muffins, Leisure World Community for Senior Citizens, The Methodist Men Welcome You, Big Chief Motor Court, Snax, Eat, Kumrite Inn: Anywhere USA, go where you like, it won’t feel different. Yet over the dazzling promises of indistinguishability that earlier craving for ‘boundless licence’ still hangs like moonwrack. Which do people want ? The man who made his choice, the hobo, now does not have the strength of numbers, the variety of job, the private gazetteer of waystages, the ease of companionable stowaway rides, all of which gave him a conviction of free decision, of elbow room and of fraternity. His kind has now dwindled away into different strands the ageing blear-eyed fauns in any skid row; the man from a ‘poverty pocket’ striking out for any place offering hope of no longer being on the outside looking in; the fruit migrants scouting around on their own wheels with the family packed behind; the loner - hitch-hiker or rubber tyre tramp - who is often that deeply dislocated man with Perry Smith’s ‘aura of an exiled animal’; the boys finding their way on the old freight train routes which have become tribal lore; and the protean bindle stiff who still contrives to scrape a perilous living on the motorized wheat belt ranches and in the Pacific shore lumber ‘shows’.

  The longing for reprise, the need to will back into existence all that was marvellously inchoate in the American story, is everywhere. It remains as part of the credentials of most successful, settled, middle-aged men. On my excursion, meeting with an assortment of hospitable sober citizens, I never had to wait two shakes, when they discovered my reason for being in America, for each one’s personal Odyssey of his apprenticeship on the highway or railroad. ‘I was raised in a staid middle-class family in Philadelphia,’ said a New York magazine editor, ‘and when I was sixteen my idea of tasting life with a capital L was to get out on the highway, put up my thumb and see where I ended up.’ ‘I was on the bum for years,’ said a foreign editor, ‘and that’s the way I educated myself for journalism, by riding the rods and getting to know for myself how ordinary people felt and thought.’ ‘I went hoboing at eighteen,’ said an Illinois school teacher. ‘I’d been ading Jack London. It seemed to me that in this country everyone had to go somewhere else; there was a pioneering spirit still about. I was convinced that it was a good life and that every man should have that experience.’

  Now there is atavism among the present generation, the old Drang nach Westen. In the Solidarity Bookshop, at 713 Armitage Road, Chicago, Bernard Marszalek, pinkly youthful behind his beard, was running off mimeographs of a declamatory pamphlet. ‘I’m going up to Washington in September to lend a helping hand organizing the apple pickers,’ he said. ‘I shall go largely for romantic reasons. My old man was up there, organizing in the Twenties. The people now taking this kind of action are the permanently unemployed, the completely dissatisfied people who used to be called beats. There’s a difference in them now. They’re developing an ideology. They’re urban kids trying to break out into new fields of activity. The freedom riders were beatniks. We’re trying to go even further out into this country, not just politically but individually.’ Pat Ellington, young wife of the administrator of the Oakland, California, Orchestra, said: ‘The IWW is more active than’s generally realized. A new generation has joined. When my husband took out his card in 1957 some of the older members didn’t like us “dirty, upstart anarchists”, as they called us, but then one day an old guy got up and said, “The kids may run this organization into the ground but they won’t let it die on the vine.” We’d much rather the IWW went out in a blaze of something, rather than sit around in a dusty hall playing pea-knuckle. A lot of us have this urge to move out, a sort of wanderlust, and organize. You can’t in this day and age walk up to a farmhouse back door and ask for a handout. You’re right away picked up for vagrancy. But that’s the longing we have, to get out into this country the way the old Wobs used to.’

  Aside from those with a political purpose there are the others who may be said to draw sustenance from post-war maladjustment, who believe that it is more neurotic to adjust to a society of the style which is offered as normal. The rebel who rejects life’s goals was first defined by John Clellon Holmes in 1952 in Go: ‘… all of them, like children of the night; everywhere wild, everywhere lost, everywhere loveless, faithless, homeless. All with some terrible flaw.’ Clellon Holmes’s world, there, is of ‘dingy backstairs “pads”, Times Square cafeterias, bebop joints, nightlong wanderings, meetings on street corners, hitchhiking, a myriad of “hip” bars all over the city, and the streets themselves … connected by the invisible threads of need, petty crimes of long ago, or a strange recognition of affinity. They kept going all the time, living by night, rushing around to “make contact”, suddenly disappearing into jail or on the road … They had a view of life that was underground, mysterious.’

  When Kerouac’s On The Road appeared in 1958, attracting the first wide acknowledgement of the beats and their mysterious, underground life, there was the accompanying reaction of outrage against such ingrates who rejected, so insolently, the fecundity of mid-century America. Since then beats have, of course, become an international phenomenon in societies and economies of all hue and stripe, but, it must be conceded, only where the living has some upholstery. As has been pointed out, if you tried to be a beat in India or Cairo you would die without being noticed. Nevertheless, there are beats in Israel and beats in Paris, beats in Western Germany and beats of a sort behind the Iron Curtain, beats in the Greek Islands and beats in Tangier, and there are beats in the English seaside towns and rundown London tideland areas, mostly teenage, mostly working class, not asking for much except the few shillings they can scrounge and a dossing space on the beach or in an abandoned house. They do not regard themselves as the surplus men of economists’ tables. They are on the lam from the factory daily grind; they have chosen not to enter the industrial system. They are incurious about each other’s identity and background, but generous with a cosmopolitan code of chipping in without question, generous with the offer o
f succour. They have an insect instinct for homing in on the beat hang-outs in whichever city or country they arrive in with their sleeping bag and toothbrush. If they have a political attitude it is vaguely pacifist and brotherly. They have elected their own representatives and minstrels, in such persons as Bob Dylan and Donovan, free-form poets in the old Woody Guthrie form, with neck-frame harmonica and guitar. They are self-elected outsiders with a mild, sardonic woodenness and dismissal of the clock-controlled world.

  One hostile American critic, Paul Goodman, discerned behind the hosannas of On The Road ‘the woeful emptiness of running away from even loneliness and vague discontent… The narrator finally finds himself betrayed, abandoned, penniless and hungry in a strange city. The theme of the rhapsody is metempsychosis’. Transmigration of souls is exactly what Kerouac was trying to convey in his frenzied but evocative writing, a return to ‘the beautiful epic’ of Huck Finn, but at the point of Huck’s valediction on his last page. ‘Aunt Polly she’s going to … civilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.’ And he decides to ‘light out for the territories’.

  Where are the territories now but in metempsychosis ? Where can the American wanderer go to compensate for the elegiac weight of forfeiture, to find the deja vu which haunts the more tormentingly because it is recognition of an idyll which may never really have existed ? The ‘emphasis on the will, on conquest, and on a kind of materialistic asceticism’ served its pioneer purpose and had to end, but the old hobo and the nomadic ranch hand and the recidivist beat are alike in finding it insupportable that America has shrivelled to a suburb and the independent man to a commuter.

  I return to Kerouac because, although his importance as a writer is not large, he did express the yearning anew and because he is a praiser of life, and it is that which makes all the keener the heart-screness with which he invokes in his Lonesome Traveller what may be the last, doomed ‘vision of America that had no end’. In Brueghel’s time, he says, children danced around the hobo. Today ‘mothers hold tight their children when the hobo passes through town because of what newspapers made the hobo to be - the rapist, the strangler, child-eater. Stay away from strangers, they’ll give you poison candy. The Brueghel hobo and the hobo today are the same, the children are different … What about Shirley Temple, to whom the hobo gave the Bluebird? Are the young Temples bluebirdless?’

  And Kerouac describes how he concludes his own rather dilettante sallies by freight and thumbed lift after being surrounded by three of those ‘5,000-dollar police cars with the two-way Dick Tracy radios’ while on his way, haversack on back, at two a.m. ‘for a night’s sweet sleep in the red moon desert’. He relates the dialogue:

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Sleep.’

  ‘Sleep where?’

  ‘On the sand.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Got my sleeping bag’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Studyin’ the great outdoors.’

  ‘Who are you ? Let’s see your identification.’

  (I just spent the summer with the Forest Service.)

  ‘Did you get paid?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then why don’t you go to a hotel’

  ‘I like it better outdoors and it’s free.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m studying hobo.’

  ‘What’s so good about that ?’

  He ends: ‘There’s something strange going on … There ain’t a sheriff or fire warden in any of the new fifty states who will let you cook a little meal over some burning sticks in the tule brake or the hidden valley or anyplace any more because he has nothing to do but pick on what he sees out there on the landscape moving independently of the gasoline power army police station. I have no axe to grind: I’m simply going to another world… The woods are full of wardens.’

  The warden’s attitude to the mobile man is, today as ever, governed by the manner of that mobility. Mobility is unarguably an indispensable component in an economy of the American character and in a nation of America’s size, and so is justifiably prized and commended. But the idea itself has come to be qualified by a cluster of subordinate clauses. Mobility with money is, of course, laudable and desirable - you are then a tourist or an envoy of business. Mobility between firms and cities is proof of a professional man’s initiative and ambition. Mobility is also proof of a workless working man’s grit, of his determination to hunt down the breach in the wall and find readmission to the commonweal. Finally, mobility without those objectives or rationalizations - therefore mobility for its own feckless sake - must be held to be bad, for it is the act of a renegade and puts in jeopardy the American declaration of intent.

  So the wardens patrol the woods to keep the runaways on the move or in custody, and the vagabond misfits and the inept, hopelessly poor - those who by their existence are an offence against the immutable ideals of success - are punished for their failure by being ignored or counted out. Yet although there is officially now no room any more in America for the wayward man, there are those who do manage still to steer their own wilful course through the closing barriers, and from afar the hobo, the travelling man, is eyed with disquiet, with a mixture of envy and nostalgia, by the majority who must, to uphold their own choice of life, condemn his. The ‘American spectre’ seems, unwarrantably, to have a charisma not vouchsafed them: all the gains which have made America so dazzling and so powerful cannot wholly fill the sense of loss which, of all people, the hobo seems not to have suffered.

  1 See pp. 376-7 for modern equivalent.

  1Now the aeroplane is beginning to be enfolded by this old poignancy. Gordon Lightfoot’s 1964 composition Early Mornin’ Rain is the lament of a rover far from home, sitting ‘cold and drunk’ on the grass perimeter of Runway Number 9. He is watching a silver-shining 707 taking off, mournfully conscious that in three hours’ time it will be flying over his home. As he shuffles off through the falling rain, he reflects that ‘You can’t jump a jet plane/Like you can a freight train.’

  1 J. H. Walsh, a national organizer of the IWW who rounded up the biggest delegation in Portland and Spokane.

  1 This may have become part of a hobo’s supporting fantasy. On the other hand it may have happened oftener than might seem probable. W. H. Davies, in The Autobiography of a Super Tramp, describes how in the summer of 1894, after fruit-picking on a farm at St Joseph, Michigan, the old German couple with no son of their own offer to adopt him and bequeath him the farm upon their death. He turns the offer down.

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