WILLIAM HENRY DAVIES
William Henry Davies
The lives of most modern poets would make rather tame writing, which is possibly why so much modern poetry makes rather tame reading. It is a pleasant enough thing to go from a Public School to a University, then come to London, unlock at once a few otherwise difficult doors with the open sesame of effective introductions, and settle down to a literary career; but it leaves one with a narrow outlook, a limited range of ideas, little of personal experience to write about. Fortunately W. H. Davies never enjoyed these comfortable disadvantages. He did not come into his kingdom by any nicely paved highroads, but over rough ground by thorny ways that, however romantic they may seem to look back upon, must have seemed hard and bitter and sufficiently hopeless at times while he was struggling through them.
There is nothing to say of his schooling, except that it amounted to little and was not good; but later he learned more by meeting the hard facts of life and by desultory reading than any master could have taught him. Born at Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1870, he was put to the picture-frame making trade, and went from that to miscellaneous farm work. But work, he once confessed to me, is among the things for which he has never had a passion, and a legacy from a grandfather gave him an interval of liberty. This grandfather, with a sensible foresight, left him only a small sum in ready cash, but, in addition, the interest on an investment that produced a steady eight shillings a week. With the cash Davies went to America, and saw as much of that country as he could as long as the money lasted. Then he subdued his dislike of manual labor and did odd jobs on fruit farms; wearied of this and went on tramp, and picked up much out-of-the-way knowledge of the world and of men from the tramps he fell in with during his roamings. Presently, he got engaged as a hand on a cattle-boat, and as such made several voyages to England and back.
At length, getting back to America just when the gold rush for Klondike was at its height, he was seized with a yearning to go North and try his luck as a digger. The price of that long journey being beyond his means, he followed a common example and tried to “jump” a train, fell under the wheels in the attempt and was so badly injured that he lost a foot in that enterprise and had to make a slow recovery in hospital. When he was well enough, his family sent out and carried him home into Wales.
But he could not be contented there. Although he says himself that he became a poet at thirty-four (when his first book was published), the fact is, of course, he has been a poet all his life and through all his wanderings was storing up memories and impressions of nature and human nature that live again now in vivid lines and phrases of his verse and prose. He had already written poems, and sent them to various periodicals in vain, and had a feeling that if he could be at the center of things, in London, fortune and fame as a poet might be within his reach.
So to London he came, early in the century, and took up residence in a common lodging-house at Southwark, his eight shillings a week sufficing to pay his rent and keep him in food. The magazines remaining obdurate, he collected his poems into a book, and started to look for a publisher. But the publishers were equally unencouraging, till he found one who was prepared to publish provided Davies contributed twenty pounds toward the cost of the adventure. Satisfied that, once out, the book would quickly yield him profits, he asked the trustees who paid him his small dividends to advance the amount and retain his income until they had recouped themselves. They, however, being worldly-wise, compromised by saying that if he would do without his dividends for some six months, when ten pounds would be due, they would pay him that sum and advance a further ten, paying him no more till the second ten was duly refunded.
This offer he accepted; and he tramped the country as a pedlar, selling laces, needles and pins, and occasionally singing in the streets for a temporary livelihood. When the six months were past he returned to London, took up his old quarters at the lodging-house, drew the twenty pounds, and before long “The Soul’s Destroyer and Other Poems” made its appearance. But so far from putting money in his purse, it was received with complete indifference. Fifty copies went out for review, but not a single review was given to it anywhere. No publisher’s name was on the title page, but an announcement that the book was to be had, for half-a-crown, “of the Author, Farmhouse, Marshalsea Road, S.E.,” and possibly this conveyed an impression of unimportance that resulted in its remaining unread. After a week or so, seeing himself with no money coming in for the next few months, the author became desperate. He compiled from “Who’s Who,” at a public library, a list of people who might be expected to take an interest in poetry, and posted a copy of his book to each with a request that, if it seemed worth the money, he would remit the half-crown.
One of the earliest went to a journalist who was, in those days, connected with the Daily Mail. He read it at once and recognized that though there were crudities and even doggerel in it, there was also in it some of the freshest and most magical poetry to be found in modern books. Mingled with grimly realistic pictures of life and character in the doss-house were songs of the field and the wayside written with all Clare’s minute knowledge of nature and with something of the imagination and music of Blake. Being a journalist, he did not miss the significance of this book issuing from a common lodging-house (and one, by the way, that is described in a sketch of Dickens’), could easily read a good deal of the poet’s story between the lines of his poems, promptly forwarded his remittance and asked Davies to meet him. Not sure that he would be welcome at the doss-house, he suggested a rendezvous on the north of London Bridge, and a few evenings later the meeting came about at Finch’s a tavern in Bishopsgate Street Within. “To help you to identify me,” Davies had written, “I will have a copy of my book sticking out of my pocket”; and there he was—a short, sturdy young man, uncommunicative at first, as shy as a squirrel, bright-eyed, soft of speech, and with a general air about him of some woodland creature lost and uneasy in a place of crowds. By degrees his shyness diminished, and in the course of a two hours’ session in that bar he unfolded the whole of his story without reserve. Then said the journalist, “If I merely review your book it will not sell a dozen copies, but if you will let me combine with a review an absolutely frank narrative of your career I have an idea we can rouse public interest to some purpose.”
This permission being given, such an article duly appeared in the news columns of the Daily Mail, and the results were more astonishing than any one could have foreseen. Not only did the gentle reader begin to send in money for copies, but ladies called at the doss-house and left At Home cards which their recipient was much too reticent to act upon. Editors who had ignored and probably lost their review copies sent postal orders for the book and lauded it in print; illustrated papers sent photographers and interviewers; a party of critics, having now bought and read the poems, made a pilgrimage to the Farmhouse, and departed to write of the man and his poetry. After a second article in the Mail had recounted these and other astonishing happenings, a literary agent wrote urging Davies to entrust him with all his remaining copies and he could sell them for him at half-a-guinea and a guinea apiece.
His advice was taken, and the last of the edition of five hundred copies went off quickly at these prices. So enriched, the poet quitted his lodging-house and went home into Wales for a holiday, and while there began the first of his prose books, “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp,” which was published in 1908 with an introduction by George Bernard Shaw. Meanwhile, Davies had written two other volumes of verse, and his recognition as one of the truest, most individual of living lyrists was no longer in doubt. Mr. Shaw notes of his prose that it has not the academic correctness dear to the Perfect Commercial Letter Writer, but is “worth reading by literary experts for its style alone”; and much the same may be said of his poetry. It is not flawless, but its faults are curiously in harmony with its unstudied simplicity and often strangely heighten the beauty of thought and language to which verses flower as carelessly as if he thought and said his finest things by accident. He has the countryman’s intimacy with Nature—not for nothing did he work on farms, tramp the open roads, sleep under the naked sky—knows all her varying moods, has observed trivial significances in her that the deliberate student overlooks; and he writes of her with an Elizabethan candor and fantasy and a natural, simple diction that is an art in Wordsworth. He has made a selection from his several volumes in a Collected Edition, but has published other verse since. For some years after his success he lived in London, but never seemed at home; he has no liking for streets and shrinks from crowds; and now has withdrawn again into the country, where our ultra modern Georgian poets who, despite the fact that he is in the tradition of the great lyrists of the past, were constrained to embrace him as one of themselves, are less likely to infect him with their artifices.