Lady and the Tramps
By Job Conger
In her eminently readable Springfield Stories column in the
September 10, 2004 State Journal-Register, Tara McClellan McAndrew explains to
readers the four tramps that Vachel Lindsay took in his life. It's a well written column,
reflecting comments from Vachel Lindsay Association past president William Furry and
current president Roland Cross and her own fine research. But it introduces a
fallacy which, in the interest of historical fact, I hope will be perpetuated no further
than her column. That fallacy is the result of McAndrew's understanding of the word
"tramp." It is aa flawed understanding, and the proof is evident to
readers who can count to five.
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition
defines the verb tramp as "to travel about on foot," and as a noun, "a
begging or thieving vagrant" and "a walking trip, a hike." In the context
of Vachel's time, the word meant the same. We know this from Stephen Graham's book Tramping
With A Poet in the Rockies. "Tramp" was a more engaging synonym for
"walk." It's hard to imagine a book entitled "Walking With a Poet in the
Rockies" having the same panache as "Tramping..."
Essayist McClellan attributes four "tramps" to the
poet, although, based on her understanding of the word, there were at least five and
probably more.
It's important for the serious Lindsay enthusiast to view
the word "tramp" not in the walking sense of the term, but in the "begging
vagrant" sense. Vachel repeatedly referred to his tramps in which he traded rhymes
for bread. He wrote two books about what should rightly be remembered as his
"tramps." Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, published
in 1914, describes his recent third, final tramp, and A Handy Guide For
Beggars describes his first two tramps.
They're easy to remember because there are only three.
On March 3, 1906, he left New York City on a steam boat with his friend Edward
Broderick, riding down the coast, visiting the former slave marketplace in Charleston and
other places along the way before reaching their destination in Florida. The plan was to
walk back to NYC, earning food and lodging by reciting and trading poems printed before
the trip commenced. This plan lasted about two days before Broderick took a train back to
the big fprbidden fruit and Vachel changed directions. He tramped to his Aunt Eudora's
house in Kentucky, read a poem for his neice's graduation day and took a train back to
Springfield. This was not a walking tour, appearing as the vagrant on the road, trading
his poetry and recitations for sustenance was the modus operandi of a tramp with something
to offer in return for solicited kindness of strangers.
Vachel's second tramp began from New York City, tramping east to
Springfield, on April 28, 1908. Again, he traded poems and entertainment for bread. In the
sense he was not appearing on doorsteps with a tin cup in his hand, that he was offering a
quid for a quo, a tit for a tat, so to speak he was not the tramp in the sense of
the traditional hobo, living in unsolicited abject poverty with no capacity to overcome
it. He was always "the doctor's kid," with a parachute, a guarantee of a safe
landing if things became intolerable on the road. He used his "parachute" on
every one of the three tramps he took. On his second tramp, he stopped at Hiram College in
Ohio where he visited his sister Joy, and completed this tramp, with his sister, by riding
a train back to mom and dad's house.
Tramp three came at the end of a period of intense focus on writing and
outreach in Springfield in which Vachel sent poems to everyone everywhere. In a way,
his four years homebound were his "wilderness experience" (Springfield has been
called worse) which was the crucible of intense humility from which the poet popped out
the way a kernel of Orville Redenbacher exits an uncapped popper when the time is exactly
right. When he departed Springfield on May 29, 1912, there was no sense of culmination of
anything. He couldn't see the future. There was no sense of reward waiting at his Uncle
Johnson Lindsay's house; this was just a needed amble toward an uncertain destiny. It was
a star-blessed tramp. It ended in New Mexico. Vachel had no zeal for walking across the
waiting withering desert wastes on foot, and he wired home forf train fare to complete the
journey to Los Angeles. Soon after arriving at his uncle's and spending many hours with
neices and nephews about his own age whom he had known when Uncle Johnson had practiced
medicine in Springfield along with Vachel's dad, he wrote General William Booth Enters
into Heaven and returned by train to homeville. The California interlude was shorter than
most folks imagine, about a month. He was back in Springfield by mid-October. It was there
on October 28, that he sent this poem to Harriet Monroe . . . and the rest is
history.
These three journeys share common aspects: Vachel prepared for
each by printing poems he intended to exchange for lodging and sustenance; he also planned
to entertain those who sustained him by reciting his poems, drawing informal pictures, and
lecturing about poetry and beauty to anyone who would listen. Every tramp was to a
targeted destination; no mindless bobbing around in the hinterland sans sail and rudder.
During each tramp he wrote poetry and kept notebooks describing his journey for future
reference. And with the exception of two days on the road with Edward Broderick in
Florida, each was a solo adventure.
Vachel was the tramp in the sense that "Tramp" was
in Disney's wonderful animated story Lady and the Tramp and he was much more than
that. As Graham would have sold fewer books titled "Walking With a Poet....,"
Disney would have sold fewer movie tickets with "Lady and the Beggar." By
referring to his journeys as tramps, Vachel imparted a dynamic, romantic ring to the
concept, the same way he often referred to his own reciting of his poems as
"singing." The poet reveals in his own verse that he was no singer in the
traditional sense of the term -- "And so I saw what music was/Though still
accursed with ears of lead." (How a Little Girl Sang, 1897) and Graham noted Lindsay
had no talent for song.
Tara McClellan McAndrew's good SJ-R story equates the
three afore-mentioned tramps with a hike Vachel took with Stephen Graham. This is an
error. When I emailed her, suggesting this, she replied . . .
"Thank you for your nice comments about my Lindsay clun
and your toughts on the trek versus tramp issue. I tend to agree with you; however, since
Graham called it a 'tramp' in his book, it was called a tramp in the papers,
and since neither of my two interviewees (Bill Burry and Rob Cross) challenged that
wording, I stuck with it. . ."
Though neither of the respected Lindsay enthusiasts McAndrew
talked to made the distinction between Lindsaytramp and Grahamtramp, the distinction
is important.
When Stephen Graham came to Springfield in 1921 and
the two trained to Glacier National Park, Vachel was established, and self supporting. The
sustained trek, riding shoe leather through that area and into Canada and back is
exquisitely chronicled in his book. In 1923, Vachel's "reply" to Graham's
book was published. Going to the Sun is the title of Lindsay's book, the
name of a mountain in Glacier ' Park. Vachel called it "our American Fujiyama,"
a reference to a prominent mountain in Japan. But if we consider the excursion a
"tramp" in the sense originally connected to the journeys which put Vachel on
the map of the American and world consciousness, a mutation of the meaning so well
entrenched in the journeys of '06, '08 and '12, we must add another.
I refer, of course, to the "tramp" Vachel and his bride
Elizabeth Conner Lindsay took in Glacier National Park from August 8 to September 15,
1925. His books The Candle in the Cabin (D. Appleton and Company, 1926) and
Going to the Stars (D. Appleton and Company, 1926) are based on their
honeymoon and travels via legpower through the magnificent vistas watching over that part
of the country. In the introduction to the latter, Vachel writes of their
"hikes," not tramps. Also in the latter, Vachel writes, " Many of the poems
in this book were written concerning three previous walks in the same reason. One of the
walks Vachel Lindsay took with Stephen Graham; the two others he took alone."
While in Springfield, Vachel also walked extensively, alone
and sometimes with John P. Snigg who published a pamphlet entitled I Walked With a
Poet years after Vachel's death. Snigg was one of six pall bearers at Vachel's
funeral. In "I Walked" Snigg describes walks west to "Old Berlin,"
Illinois and to Cornland. He refers to these treks as "walks" and also
refers to his "tramp" to New Mexico (Vachel's third).
Because Vachel didn't consider his time with Graham a
"tramp," and because of other considerations dilineated in this essay, I offer a
"motion" (propose) for the Record that History and His Story celebrate the
three tramps Vachel took; not four and not five. That is my motion to the arbiters
of time's tales. Only Time will tell if there is a "second" to this motion. It
probably won't come from Tara, or Roland Cross or William Furry, and that's okay. I
believe it will come anyway.
Thank you for reading my essay.
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