Coming Up Tramps

by Theodore Dalrymple (March 2014)

There is no disguising the fact, however, that the method was somewhat at variance in spirit with the poem that we learnt:

Is W H Davies forgotten? I daresay that, such being the impermanence of literary celebrity, you could walk down a busy street in any English-speaking city without passing anyone who had ever heard of him. But Davies was once well-known enough, as much for his life story, a remarkable one, as for his work as a poet, which was nevertheless popular. D H Lawrence derided him as a poet, or at least damned him with faint praise, saying that he had but a single sweet tone: but perhaps because I am inclined to cynicism I am easily moved by emotion simply-expressed, that is to say the one note that Lawrence said that Davies sang. (Or is it the ease with which I am moved that inclines me to cynicism?) At any rate, lines such as the following move me:

Come, let us find a cottage, love,
To laugh at every grumbling bee,

Or again:

No doubt it is a selfish thing
No doubt he is a selfish man,
Who shuns poor creatures, sad and wan.

His Autobiography and his books of poems brought him renown if not fame and fortune, and he mixed for a time in high society. But he grew tired of that life, and retired to the countryside with a new-found wife.

Mrs Davies died in 1979, after 39 years of widowhood, and the book was published the following year. It is the story of how he came to marry Helen Payne.

When he was fifty, Davies decided that he did not want any more to live alone, so he set about finding a wife in what seems to modern sensibilities a cold-blooded and deliberate fashion:

There was an actress and a rich woman whom he could have married, but they would not suit him:

dependent in my own loving kindness.

If there is a lesson in the story of W H Davies and Young Emma it is the unpredictability of life, which is what makes life so difficult, so worth the living.

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