The Welsh poet and author WH Davies spent much of his life on the road. There’s a moment in A Poet’s Pilgrimage, first published in 1918 and extracted here, in which the writer stops an old man who is travelling between Carmarthen and Kidwelly, some 10 miles distant, to ask if there are any inns along the way. Yes, he is told, “but if you will take my advice you will keep out of places of that kind. I have not been inside one for 13 years. If I had, I would not be the owner of this.” And he points to a rusty old bicycle, the pitiful product of 13 years’ abstinence, and rides off.
This is one of the more benign moments in Davies’ perambulations. He had by this time achieved success with his first books, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, Beggars and The True Traveller; he was back in his native country after years of train-hopping in America and Canada, and, as he puts it, “full of joy at the thought of going on and on”. He also had, by this stage, the esteem of George Bernard Shaw, and the friendship of Edward Thomas (yet to be killed in the trenches).
But before that, Davies had had a pretty rough time of it. Most of it was, to put it harshly, his own fault. He didn’t like staying in one place for long, and work, for him, was something he did to patch up his shoes before moving on. This is almost all I knew about him before picking up this book, along with the facts that he had lost a foot when a train ran over it, and had written a charming poem about his garden (“Where bumble-bees, for hours and hours,/ Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums,/ To wriggle out of hollow flowers”) as well as the more famous couplet, “What is this life if, full of care,/ We have no time to stand and stare.”
Those latter lines, familiar to the point of invisibility, or at least drained of the mild power they once had, are perhaps one of the reasons no one bothers to read Davies any more – why he is condescendingly filed under “Curiosities”. But that would be to miss the point: Davies may have been restless, but he also knew how to stand still. It’s a good combination for a writer.
So I’m very glad this selection has come out. On the whole I am not fond of books called “Readers” (as Julie Burchill once pointed out, you could fall in love with a brooding youth opposite you on the train reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, but not the same youth reading A Nietzsche Reader), but in this case we have to pragmatically acknowledge that we are not going to plough through Davies’ nine volumes of prose and all his collected poems.
And you quickly realise that Rory Waterman is a good editor. Consider the way he deals with one of the darker episodes that occurred during Davies’s American travels. It’s important to mention this, as a trigger warning so to speak, and to remind ourselves that a simple, Arcadian love of the countryside doesn’t necessarily mean an unblemished soul. Davies, in Tennessee, describes a lynching: and records it with a kind of grim approval, disgusted by the accused “negro’s” cowardice, which he sees as hypocritical, in the face of the lynch mob. “The reader hardly needs informing that these may have been trumped-up charges,” adds Waterman, expressing surprise at Davies’s uncharacteristic siding with the mob. But it was honest of him to include it; and there is enough of Davies’s wide-eyed innocence (a word that often attaches itself to him) to make us trust him as an observer of the road, and a chronicler of people and places that other writers ignored.
As for the poetry, generously enough represented here, it’s not quite to my taste – except when he’s writing about bees’ bums. But that is my problem, and even I can see why Shaw said that it showed “a freedom from literary vulgarity which was like a draught of clear water in a desert”.
• To order The True Traveller: A Reader for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
