Copyright © 2004 Louis Suárez-Potts

If he [the worker] has fought the hard fight, he is not unacquainted with the lure of the "road."  When out of work and still undiscouraged, he lhas been forced to "hit the road" between large cities in his quest for a job. He has loafed, seen the country and green things, laughed in joy, laid on his back and listened to the birds singing overhead, unannoyed by factory whistles and bosses' harsh commands; and, most significant of all, he has lived . That is the point!  Not only has he been care-free and happy, but he has lived!  And from the knowledge that he has idled and is still alive, he achieves a new outlook on life; and the more he experiences the unenviable lot of the poor worker, the more the blandishments of the 'road' take hold of him. And finally he flings his challenge in the face of society, imposes a valorous boycott on all work, and joins the far-wanderers of Hobo-land, the gypsy-folk of this latter day.

Jack London "The Tramp"

"Better a hobo than a beast of toil," Martin in Jack London's Martin Eden (1909) says to Joe, his coworker, who, inspired by Martin's drunken observation that the work at the Shelley Hot Springs resort laundry is transforming them into "intelligent machine[s]," "beast[s]," has decided to quit his job at the laundry and go hoboing, or tramping. [1] [2]   Joe's decision to tramp is a repudiation of the sort of work that makes things of men, the only sort he knows. Unlike Martin, who can (and does) go back to being a sailor, Joe doesn't know how to do anything else but be a laundryman, and although as a tramp he will be radically outside the money economy and the home, the arrangement will still be better than working. Better, because as a tramp Joe will "live," a term that Martin in his exhortation to Joe uses to mean that he will be able to experience desire and beauty; he will, that is, be able to be himself (137)--an experience impossible in what London calls the "telic endeavor" of factory work." [3]

Tramp discourse intersects with several discourses, including labor, will psychology, and sexuality. [4]   Recent work done on defining the tramp as a transient, homeless worker, has neglected the way in which tramping functioned as a discourse enfolding questions of the will and sexuality. [5]    In the most influential study on the tramp, by Michael Denning, in Mechanic Accents, the disorienting sexual and psychological resonances of the figure of the tramp are invisible. [6]   The result of such readings is that the tramp becomes but a version of the (white) working-class man, [7] not unusual or different, just more oppressed, and his place as a rhetorical device is played down in exchange for his essential reification. Thus, in establishing the tramp as a real historical figure who existed independently of any literary claims by middle-class observers, social historians such as Erik H. Monkkonen, the editor of the most sophisticated collection of historical essays on tramping, Walking to Work, naively disconnect circulating representations of tramps from the facticity of tramps. [8]   Both Monkkonen and Denning are more interested in the quite serious problem of how the transients who tramped recorded their lives, not in how the middle classes saw tramp lives, nor in how the representation of tramping influenced the living of self-named tramps. [9]   That is, they seek to make history a simple thing of empirical research only. But the shortcomings of such an historical approach become apparent when we try to interpret the homosocial tramp romances of London, who was a tramp but not a working tramp (not a transient laborer) and who published in both labor and bourgeois journals; who never ceased to recall his working-class origins and titled himself a socialist but was a quasi-Nietzschean individualist, and who figured tramping both as the effects of a ruthless exploitation, and as providing a male homosociality that threatened the economic and normative underpinnings of the social. [10]  

           In his 1903 "How I Became a Socialist," London recounts how he came to recognize the mistake of thinking of tramping as purely an adventure for the individual "blond beast," and concluded if at first tramping appealed to him, that was because "his joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics." [11]   But instead of finding men as "blond-beastly" (London's term for the Nietzschean superman) as he imagined himself, he found that tramps had been "wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses" (364). The tramp, in this socialist account (London also presents contradictory accounts), tramps because he has been cast aside after he is no longer fit to work, not because he has rejected work itself as not fit for him.

           London's socialist essay is not exactly a denunciation of tramping; rather, it is a denunciation of the system of work that destroys the worker's body. In a move that would seem to cut short any possible redemption of tramping, it explicitly condemns the liberal logic that would support tramping as a gesture of the radical Nietzschean will. In fact, both here and elsewhere in London's works, the will to power expressed by the phrase the "blond-beastly," becomes aligned with the reifying will that destroys men. Romantic liberalism leads to reifying death. But, paradoxically if not unexpectedly, tramping, independent of that will to power, is nevertheless fondly embraced as providing what might be called a homotopia, or a community of men removed from the mechanical system of production that takes as its premise the reification of the person. [12]

Although London traveled for a while with an Industrial Army associated with Coxey's ("General" Kelly's larger and better organized Industrial Army of homeless men and transient workers), he was never, he writes and describes in The Road, fully one of the army regulars; rather, with several others he preferred to continue his tramping despite the harm he and his friends did to Kelly's army as rogue tramps. [13]   His accounts of tramping in The Road and Martin Eden, are thus not, or not obviously, political. Rather, they tacitly counter the provisions and claims of the productive, heteronormative world. [14]   Most obviously, tramping implies a counter to "telic endeavor," the regime of industrial work and discipline that makes men instruments (machines, beasts), and which is neatly summarized by the convergence of the factory and the feminine in the mechanical laundry in which Joe and Martin work. For the tramp in London's works ensconced in trampland, the bourgeois home becomes a destination aligned with the money economy and the factory, and hostile to the fluid alliances of the tramp.

This is then to say that the tramp is hardly a simple figure; rather, he embodies a complex of desires and fears central to turn-of-the-century discourse on the person. Writers on the tramp at the turn of the century might have been mistaken as to the nature of the tramp, and read his poverty-induced transience as laziness or even mental illness, but their writings nevertheless produced the figure of the tramp that served as a device by which to relay anxieties over the will and sexuality. The tramp figure, that is, calls into question even as it serves indirectly to ratify those structures of discipline and authority by which Americans are made. But the tramp in London's works also exists within a homosocial domain, opposed to the economic and mechanical system of exchanges and reifications that characterize London's depiction of bourgeois culture. And London pictures his tramps as "living" only when removed from the harsh, productive world of mutilating machines and situated in the nomadic space amorphously defined by the community of male tramps that he and other tramp writers called "Trampland," or "Hoboland," [15] and which he further described as a "realm as unexplored as fairyland" and just as invisible to the uninitiated. [16]

Productive Work

Not all work is the same. London distinguishes in Martin Eden between different sorts of work, with the main distinction being between work that makes one a machine and work that doesn't. In the novel, sailor work aligns itself with intellectual work--writing--in allowing the individual to remain, in effect, more himself, an individual subject, and less an object, a cog in a machine. As London describes the difference between the subjective freedom of sailor work and the desubjectifying work of the laundry:

Always, at sea, except at rare intervals, the work he performed had given him ample opportunity to commune with himself. The master of the ship had been lord of Martin's time; but here, the manager of the hotel was lord of Martin's thoughts as well. He had no thoughts save for the nerve-racking, body-destroying toil. Outside of that it was impossible to think. He did not know that he loved Ruth. She did not exist, for his driven soul had no time to remember her.

(Martin Eden 130)

In the mechanized laundry, it's not just Martin's labor that is alienated from him; it is his thoughts, too. In the laundry, "All Martin's consciousness was concentrated in the work. Ceaselessly active, head and hand, an intelligent machine, and all that constituted him a man was devoted to furnishing that intelligence" (130). As a sailor he was a man who had the freedom of his thoughts, but as a laundry worker he is a man only insofar as he provides the intelligence that runs his body. Laundry work, metonym for industrial factory work, produces the worker comprised not of a body but of an assemblage of manipulable body parts willed into action by a remote consciousness:  "The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow room, a conning tower, whence was directed his arm and shoulder muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron" (130). [17]   Those hands, moved by his "conning tower" soul, work with "an automatic accuracy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and unerring" (129). They work, that is, as if without his supervision they might do things he would know nothing about. His body parts can be controlled not because they're his but because, as with Johnny of "The Apostate" (1906)--a story which provides the scenario for the laundry of Martin Eden--he is "in intimate relationship" not just "with machines," [18] but with his body; he is no longer quite the owner of his own body, merely the manager. And as Martin gazes wonderingly at the graceful efficiency of "his" automatic hand, he is removed to the point of experiencing a nearly aesthetic disinterestedness. [19]  

In the laundry, the boundaries between bodies and machines blur. Both the body and the machine become identical with regard to the will, i.e., they are equally prosthetic, [20] and this fact of dismembering interests London. Thus, London doesn't really focus on relieving the oppression of the workers by disposing of the laundry owner, the "Dutchman" who is "lord and master" of the men. Nor is he ultimately interested in tracing and saving the felt intangibilities of the workers' will. He focuses instead on the psycho-mechanics of making the body an efficient machine, which means focusing on the problematic of deploying the will to remotely move body and machine parts.

From the perspective of the workers that London represents, "will" is something that invisibly but no less powerfully compels behavior; and personal will is something that is dislocated in the labyrinth of mimesis. Thus, Joe, the more efficient, more experienced worker, is a template that Martin "patterns himself after," and Martin does so by willing his body to follow suit:  "He [Joe] concentrated himself upon his work and upon how to save time, pointing out to Martin where he did in five motions what could be done in three, or in three motions what could be done in two. 'Elimination of waste motion,' Martin phrased it, as he watched and patterned after" (126-127). It isn't even Joe that Martin ends up mimicking. Rather, he mimics specific motions, actions, and he does this not by suspending his will and rendering the body passive in its mimicry but, as we saw above, by consciously forcing his body to follow the patterns he sees. Once habituated to such movements, his body would fall into automatic states, which still require the supervision of the willing subject (as we saw, the "conning tower"). In this regard, then, will, as a defining term of nineteenth-century liberal identity, becomes something objectionable to the factory workers. Rather than allowing for independent, purposeful behavior and thought, it instead is dedicated to the utter disciplining of the body and implies a psychic dismemberment and internalization of an aesthetics of prosthesis. Employed thusly, in the working-class milieu, if not in the luxury of bourgeois ideology, will spells not the acquisition of autonomy, but its loss, and the transformation of the worker into the "intelligent machine."

            But automatic behavior was not universally condemned, quite the opposite, especially by the bourgeoisie. Thus, in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, William James could famously argue that automatic behavior is not only good for us but ultimately makes us more socially acceptable and desirable. Because the will is consumable, we must use it carefully, and "make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can" (emphasis his), for "the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." [21]   The advantage, then, of habit--or mechanical behavior--is that it frees us from, as James adds in the same chapter, the "miserable" condition in which everything, all quotidian acts of simple consumption and production are "subjects of express volitional deliberation" (I, 122). For James, that's a paralysis of "indecision"; the will in this view, needs care and coddling, lest it be exhausted with the mind-robbing minutiae of daily life left unprotected by the habitual. Thus, in his chapter on "Habit," James describes the more sensible man who, through the daily "gratuitous exercise" of his will, or ability to govern himself, is able to withstand otherwise crippling adversity: 

Asceticism of this sort ["gratuitous exercise"] is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

(I 126-127)

The man who husbands his will and does not waste it on doing those things that could be done automatically is able then to master an unanticipated situation and maintain his "Self [the "empirical me," which] is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account" (II 291). Without property, the empirical self is seen as verging into "nothingness"--a quality shared by the "tramps and poor devils whom we despise" (II 293). "Property" defines the "Self" and its public relations; it makes us creditable, not despicable, like the tramps. Of course, when James constructed this rather moralizing psychology of the social "me," tramps were a common sight. Yet instead of seeing the tramp as embodying economic effects, James sees in him moral causes. The tramp comes to lack property--of self, of things--because he lacks the right habits of mind and person, habits that would insure his continued identity, his propertied identity, in the world of things and people. Tramps are thus despicable not just because they don't own property, but because as tramps, they personify the inability to own property.

This view, I should emphasize is James's not London's. For London, tramping rejects the forms of the will and habit suggested by James's logic; for London, the dissolution of the mechanics of the will is a good thing, at least insofar as it allows the realization of beauty and desire for the worker (who would otherwise be mechanized in a factory). Trampland for London is characterized by its resistance to the mechanization of the subject, and by a redemption of the body dismembered by instrumental work, effected through the circulation of a hinted, implicit (and in the case of the tramp writer Josiah Flynt, explicit) homoerotic desire. [22]

In a powerful reading of the "cultural logistics" [23] of the "body machine complex" informing much of London's work, Mark Seltzer has argued that in regard to the exemplary short story "The Apostate," "London's case study in fatigue thus epitomizes the transposition of the character of the energy-converting machines and the character of the natural body:  not the demotion of the living body to the machine but their intimate correlation." [24]   Seltzer seems to mean by this transposition the convergence of the use-history of persons, workers, and machines, and their metallic elements. This convergence, Seltzer argues, reaches a prominence around the turn of the century, and it differs from the earlier and simpler notion that

machines replace bodies and persons (as in, for example, Melville's earlier account . . . .); nor is it accounted for primarily in the notion that persons are already machines . . . ; nor is it "covered" in the notion that technologies make bodies and persons (as in Frederick Winslow Taylor's or Baden-Powell's programs for the systematic making of men). . . . [Rather, there is] the radical and intimate coupling of bodies and machines.

(12-13; emphasis in the original)

Whereas before people were reduced to being machines, or thought of as being made like machines (manufactured, in factories), now there is the more subtle "miscegenation of the natural and the cultural:  the erosion of the boundaries that divide persons and things, labor and nature, what counts as an agent and what doesn't" (21). By "coupling," Seltzer presumably means a joining that is at once mechanical (the coupling of adjacent boxcars), and sexual; the term is both an extension and an alternative to the phrase from "The Apostate":  "'There had never been a time when he had not been in intimate relationship with machines.'" [25]   And the sexual, in Seltzer's account of naturalist body/machines, is presumably like the "machinic" sexuality that informs La Bête humaine (a text which evidences the "violent erotics" of the machinic-sexual "crossings"), [26] and is concerned with the erotic destruction of the body, and its equally erotic replacement with the machinic prosthetic.

Seltzer doesn't decode the sexual tension informing "The Apostate," but rather details the structure of identity effected by the "miscegenation" of what could be called a body and what could be called a machine. Yet it is that tension, produced by the miscegenation of bodies and machines that compels Johnny in the story to become a tramp. Indeed, Johnny's machined lack of desire is the crucial element in the story, and its redemption (coincident with his apostasy) the climax of the story. [27]   Johnny's entry into trampland figures the repudiation of the home, presided over by his mother. It's an important repudiation, for it explicitly aligns the factory with the feminine domestic in its work of turning desiring men into desireless machines.

Johnny (the "perfect worker [who] had evolved into the perfect machine" [28] ), comes to lack any "illusion"; as he becomes more perfectly mechanical, he progressively eliminates desire from his life. The brief love for the "daughter of the superintendent" (127, 126) has disappeared, as has his desire for other bodily pleasures and appetites, the most telling of which is his desire for the dessert, Floating Island:  "[f]or years he had looked forward to the day when he would sit down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he had relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals" (128). As the perfect machine, he can bring home more and more money, so his mother, who not only works and keeps the home but is also his taskmaster, can actually make him the fabulous dessert. It doesn't matter; when he finally encounters the dish, it means nothing to him; he does not recognize the object of his mother's stories, and he goes "through the meal in moody silence, mechanically eating what was before him" (132). The event is a watershed; it simultaneously marks his utter mechanization and stages his decline into the illness that presages his tramping. In the week of relief his illness gives him, Johnny "figures" out what he's been doing and what he wants. "I'm going away," he tells his scandalized mother, the day he recovers enough to know better than to get out of bed for the factory work his mother wants him to do, and he doesn't care where (132). Tramping gives Johnny the respite from the "moves" that he's been making "since he was born" (133). As a hobo, his actions won't be counted, they will hardly be under his willed control, and he can extend the desirable immobility of his body, its resistance to work, indefinitely.

The point of being a tramp for Johnny is to abstract himself from the institutions that limit his desires--the feminine home, the factory. By tramping, Johnny situates himself in a nomadic space that is irreducible to the machinic, and, importantly, to the domestic. That is, in aiming the story against child labor, London ends up hitting not (or not merely) the depredatory mill that employs Johnny and his underage coworkers but, more importantly, Johnny's home. Less a refuge from the mechanizing mill, that domestic space is more a reminder of the compulsions to work; in fact, it's a continuation of the logic of the mill by other means. The story begins, for instance, with the mother waking the small boy for work; and, it's she who throughout the story provides the compulsion, the guilt, for Johnny to work. The emphasis is on the system of production and reproduction that miscegenates (to use Seltzer's term) factories and homes, and that blurs the distinctions between the mechanical factory and the domestic. And in this miscegenated space, the mother, who is presented not in an entirely unsympathetic light, puts in motion this scandal of production that, in London's prose, literally unmans Johnny and transforms him into a "piece of life" (134), evacuating, in the process, the home as any space of respite. It is only ill, when his body can't work, or as a tramp, when he won't, that he can exit the miscegenated industrial space of the home and factory and enter the boxcar to rest. The miscegenation of bodies and machines that Seltzer describes works here more accurately as the miscegenation of spaces (factory/home), and to the detriment of the worker. Both the home and factory produce the same result, that is, the perfect worker.

In Martin Eden, the connection between the domestic, the female, and the mechanical is also clearly drawn:  women represent a slavery of production and reproduction; the logic is even biological. Thus, London's description of how Ruth, his bourgeois girlfriend, succumbs to Martin's animal force: 

She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny. . . . She felt his shoulder press hers and a tremor run through him. Then was the time for her to draw back. But she had become an automaton. Her actions had passed beyond the control of her will--she never thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon her.

(Martin Eden 153)

The "delicious madness" is of course the subjective sense of being a female automaton with a desire to mate with someone as biologically adequate as Martin. In this representation, desire is hardly the issue, at least not the desire that compels Martin into becoming a writer and that is enabled and circulated by tramping. Ruth is acting under virtually mechanical compulsion:  She wants to reproduce, whereas the tramp desires a pleasure that is not so "telic."  In Martin Eden, then, the male subject is held between two strong attractors, the instrumental and governmental will on the one hand and the animalistic urge on the other; both produce automatic behavior, both alienate the subject from himself. In the case of the worker, he doesn't so much internalize the will as he is constituted by it; constituted by it, he wishes to exercise it, to show that he is in fact, possessed of a will. But exercising the will makes one even more like a machine. Joe the laundryman is proud that he built the laundry machinery that makes him work even harder, that turns him even more into a machine. And Martin, intent on proving that he is not a machine, that he is a "man" with interests, romances, outside the automatisms of the mechanical, only further (and splendidly) proves the opposite when he rides his bicycle to see Ruth. But his bicycle trips do not redeem his manhood; they do not strengthen the "spark of something more in him," the element that makes him something other than a machine (136). Rather, the "glimmering bit of soul" in him that compels "him each weekend, to scorch off the hundred and forty miles" are instead "super machine-like, and [help] to crush out the glimmering bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life" (136). [29]   Less the confirming gesture of  the "mad lover," who responds to love or beauty, the "super machine-like" act of riding the bicycle the seventy miles there and back continues the same effect of the will that renders the doings of the body in the laundry manageable. Hardly the quintessence of autonomy, Martin's insistence on a Nietzschean will, and his excessive exercise of that "will" is instead but an instrument of servitude.

But this is obviously not the case for the bourgeoisie who so impress Martin at the very beginning, before he knows better. As Ruth sententiously tells Martin, the success of the businessman Charles Butler, who started off in Ruth's father's office as an "office boy" (64, 65), "shows us [Ruth and her class] that a man with a will may rise superior to his environment" (66). But for Martin, Butler's ascendancy rather shows the persistence of the mechanical and the absence of the romantic; the object of Butler's will, that is, has been sedimented under the scrapings of his "pinching privation" and "paltry" ambition (67). Martin can't find "adequate motive in Mr. Butler's life. . . . Had he done it for love of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would have understood. God's own mad lover should do anything for a kiss, but not for thirty thousand dollars a year" (67). But Martin says this before he commits himself to living down his words at mechanical laundry and well before he comes to learn of what the perfect identity between doing something for money and doing something for the love of a woman.

The Romance of Sterility.

Tramps were routinely imprisoned for being vagabonds and used as cheap labor. [30]   London represents his own imprisonment several times in his autobiographical writings. In this early rendition of his imprisonment ("How I Became a Socialist," 1903), London focuses on his powerlessness:

      Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the United States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days' imprisonment for having no fixed abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch of men similarly circumstanced, carted down to Buffalo, registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my budding mustache shaved, was dressed in convict stripes, compulsorily vaccinated by a medical student who practiced on such as we, made to march the lock-step, and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with Winchester rifles--all for adventuring in blond-beastly fashion.

(Foner 100)

The loss of mastery over the self is marked most clearly by the ability of the state to alter London's body, to shave his hair, and--perhaps more tellingly of the nature of that powerlessness--vaccinate him, which is to say, penetrate him. Where the laundry or mechanical factory requires the worker to render his body prosthetic, to dislocate his body, and abstract himself from it, prison does the opposite, and, as a gesture of contemptuous power, forces the prisoner into his body. In the version he gives in The Road, the vaccination is more than the prick of a needle: 

A youth, a medical student who was getting in his practice on cattle such a we, came down the line. He vaccinated just about four times as rapidly as the barbers shaved. With a final caution to avoid rubbing our arms against anything, and to let the blood dry so as to form the scab, we were led away to our cells. Here my pal and I parted, but not before he had time to whisper to me, "Suck it out."

      As soon as I was locked in, I sucked my arm clean. And afterward I saw men who had not sucked and who had horrible holes in their arms into which I could have thrust my fist. It was their own fault. They could have sucked.

(The Road 239)

Unlike the others--who don't "suck"--London is able to resist the state's defiling penetration of his body by forming a connection with the "squat, heavily-built, powerfully-muscled man" possessed of all the "passion and turgid violence of the brute-beast" (235) who becomes his "pal," his "meat" (235).

Defining himself as a "fluid sort of an organism," London "laid [himself] out to fit in with that man . . . . We became pretty chummy, and my heart bounded when he cautioned me to follow his lead. He called me 'Jack," and I called him 'Jack'" (235). The terms, the tone, resemble those appropriate to a burgeoning romance between equals; but the nature of the romance in this case is purely economical and tactical, and by no means a relation of equals. In order to survive the Pen with his body and mind intact, London makes clear that he has to learn, so to speak, when to suck. Of course there are sexual overtones; and they are clear. The state rapes the men through the vaccination that craters their arms; London sucks the poison out of his body, saving his body.   His body is not left a cratered vessel (raped), and his friend, who told him to suck, helps to preserve London's manhood and body from the state.

Jonathan Auerbach describes this scene in which London "finds his manhood" as "homoerotically charged," [31] and goes on to suggest that London discovers in this relationship the negotiations of "power and prestige" that establish male identity in the "company of men" (180). But Auerbach doesn't touch on the configuring opposition between the state and the inmates that makes this particular relationship London has with this "brute-beast" of a man desirable, nor does he discuss London's oblique descriptions of homosexuality among tramps. [32]   Later in London's narrative, after a chapter on the romance of "Hoboes that Pass in the Night"--a cherchez l'homme episode describing, among other things, his partly accidental pursuit of a fellow skilled profesh, and describing, too, the romance of lost friends--London writes that he "was never a 'prushun'" [or "preshun"]--a boy who "travels with the 'profesh'" who possesses him, because he "did not take kindly to possession" (285). That is, he was never the kept sexual object of an older tramp.

In his 1931 hobo study, the hobo sociologist Nels Anderson describes the relationship the older man has with his preshun as pederastic. As George Chauncey quotes him, "The prevalence of homosexual relations was so 'generally assumed to be true among hoboes,' 'that whenever a man travels around with a lad he is apt to be labeled a 'jocker' or a 'wolf' and the road kid is called his 'punk,' 'preshun,' or lamb'." [33]   Anderson's account is relatively benign; in Josiah Flynt's influential (for London, especially) and popular Tramping with Tramps (1907), that benignity is absent, and a harsh, intensely homophobic description takes its place:  "In Hoboland the boy's life may be likened to that of a voluntary slave. He is forced to do exactly what his 'jocker' commands, and disobedience, willful or innocent, brings down upon him a most cruel wrath. Besides being kicked, slapped, and generally maltreated, he is also loaned, traded, and even sold, if his master sees money in the bargain" (57). [34]   "Possession" is equivalent to the masochism of "voluntary slavery" and as much a sexual as nonsexual oppression. Although London could scarcely have mentioned homosexuality in any but harsh terms, if at all, when he serialized The Road (in Cosmopolitan), he tacitly and implicitly condones the sexual element of the relationship. He objects to being a preshun on the grounds that he "did not take kindly to possession," but this is the harshest criticism he levels against the institution. The homoeroticism that works through the text and that configures tramp relationship is, in short, nothing scandalous. Rather, what scandalizes London is possession, either by another man, or by the state. Tramping, at least for the elite profesh, who lives better and more easily than the average workman" (71), preserves what comes down to London's "manhood" from the conditions of effectual slavery figured by state or preshun.

But if London can find his manhood in being a profesh, critics of tramps, Progressives and conservatives alike, found the exact opposite. In claiming to be a profesh, London implicitly claimed to be a tramp who does not look like a tramp. It was precisely his lack of obvious poverty that made the profesh such a "menace" to social critics. The profesh who may actually look reputable and who can therefore pass through cities and sometimes the smaller towns without drawing police attention "is the class to be most feared"; not only have "many of them 'done time'" but they are "capable and worthy of doing more." [35]   A species of confidence man, the profesh doesn't want anything more than to be idle, which is to say, not to work. He is, as Robert Hunter in his influential 1904 Poverty called the "professional" or "habitual vagrant," a "parasite," for whom "there are few apologists" (127). One can apologize and be sympathetic for the working man, but the Progressive Hunter can't tolerate the man who is not willing to work. Yet Hunter can't quite dismiss the profesh out of hand; rather, he must implicitly invoke the accusation that the main evil of the profesh is his effete idleness:  "He is the most interesting of his kind, valiant and sturdy as he is; but we have no respect for him, and look upon him as we look upon the idle rich. He takes to himself always; he gives nothing. To have a good stomach is not sufficient equipment for manhood" (127).

Not only do "we" have no respect for the "habitual tramp" but it turns out that his manhood is lacking, too. But why should "manhood" be at issue here at all?  In a sense, it's the final insult. Unable to find enough words to condemn the profesh's professed lack of interest in working (and making a good life of it, too), Hunter ends up attacking his manhood and saying, in effect, that one shouldn't want to be like a tramp, because a tramp is not even a man, and is, in fact, an effete--read homosexual--man. But if the worker (like Joe) has decided to tramp because, in Eugene V. Debs's words of 1908, his work in the factory jeopardized his "manhood," [36] then, in Hunter's judgment, he has only exchanged one form of lost manhood for another. Hunter, however, is not urging wage slavery; rather, in his rhetoric, manhood seems to mean having the will to be self-sufficient. Hunter sees the tramp as lacking such will (which is what makes him "habitual") and in lacking it, becoming at best charming, but in reality a beggar homosexual ("effete").

Although London would oppose Hunter's efforts to belittle the manhood of the profesh, in a remarkable, profoundly ambivalent essay "The Tramp" (1901), a section of which I've used as my epigraph to this essay, London comes around to making a similar point about the tramp, viz., that he is sterile:

And so the tramp becomes self-eliminating. And not only self!  Since he is manifestly unfit for things as they are, and since kind is prone to beget kind, it is necessary that his kind cease with him, that his progeny shall not be, and that he play the eunuch's part in this twentieth century after Christ. And he plays it. He does not breed. Sterility is his portion, as it is the portion of the woman on the street. They might have been mates, but society has decreed otherwise.

(Foner 487)

London is being ironic; in the essay he is, after all, defending the tramp and his plight against liberal critics, and his point is to attack the system of labor and economics that produces the "surplus labor army" that is "an economic necessity" but which does not include the tramp (486). "The Tramp is not an economic necessity such as the surplus labor army, but he is a by-product of an economic necessity" (486). He is out of the market of labor; a "confessed failure," he "does not usually come from the slums. His place of birth is ordinarily a bit above, and sometimes a very great bit above" (486). But he is "waste," "given-off" like sewage into the "road," thus allowing "society" to function smoothly (486). "Chloroform or electrocution would be a simple, merciful solution of this problem of elimination; but the ruling ethics, while permitting human waste, will not permit a humane elimination of the waste" (486), a term that anticipates the "elimination of waste motion" we saw in the Shelley Springs laundry. Clearly, a truly human solution would be to reorganize society so as to eliminate the system that produces tramps and armies of surplus labor; but London's criticism also points to the ambiguous desire present in the sterility of trampland.

Being a "eunuch," doesn't mean here that the tramp lacks desire, nor does it mean that there are not more tramps constantly being produced, either as "by-products," or through what Hunter saw as a dangerous sort of social contagion (wanting to be like a tramp). It means he lacks the financial ability to effectuate his desire within the heterosexist economy. Thus, as a tramp, the man can't afford the prostitutes he sees on the streets (heterosexual relations are commercial, here), and what's more, she's scarcely interested in reproducing with anyone, especially him. In this ironic view of the tramp, the tramp begins to resemble the undesirable social dereliction that we saw with James's account which imagines tramp desires only within the framework of the heteronormative.

Tramp Desires.

At the end of Martin Eden, after Martin has become an immensely successful and influential writer in the society he disdains, he encounters his former coworker Joe one night. Joe has been tramping, and therefore, we recall, living:  "I never knew what it was to live till I hit hoboin'. I'm thirty pounds heavier, an' feel tiptop all the time. Why I was worked to skin an' bone in them old days!  Hoboin' sure agrees with me" (Martin Eden 337). Hoboing--tramping--for Joe frustrates a heterosexual desire that we saw is identical to the desire to enter into propertied relations (something the tramp, of course, can't do). Thus, after Martin elevates Joe (by buying the incredulous Joe a laundry of all things), Joe changes his mind about the pleasures of tramping:

      "No more road in mine, thank you kindly. Hoboin's all right, exceptin' for one thing--the girls. I can't help it, but I'm a ladies' man. I can't get along without 'em, and you've got to get along without 'em when you're hoboin'. The times I've passed by houses where dances an' parties was goin' on, an' heard the women laugh, an' saw their white dresses and smiling faces through the windows--gee!  I tell you, them moments was plain hell!  I like dancin', an' picnics, an' walking in the moonlight, an' all the rest, too well. Me for the laundry [Martin gives him] and good front, with big iron dollars clinkin' in my jeans. I seen a girl already, just yesterday, an', d'ye know, I'm feelin' already I'd just as soon marry her as not. I've been whistlin' all day at the thought of it. She's a beaut, with the kindest eyes and softest voice you ever heard. Me for her, you can stack on that. Say, why don't you get married, with all this money to burn?  You could get the finest girl in the land."

(342-343)

Tramping may be good for the body, but it isn't good for gaining the company of women. As we saw earlier, tramping leads to what London described as being a eunuch. Joe's body is nourished, but his greater substance doesn't translate him into the economy of the market that would allow him to exercise his desire for women. In giving Joe the laundry (a process incomplete until they wrestle), Martin thus moves Joe from an exclusively male homosocial world to one that defined by its visually alluring women who share odd identity with the "big iron dollars clinkin'" in his jeans. But women are not the only ones exchanged here:  Joe's desires for the propertied world of women and things, is phrased in terms that imply that Joe will simply exchange himself for the laundry ("me for the laundry"), for her ("me for her"); desire for property, for women, and the means to realize it, gestures toward a disappearing act of the male subject, and a continuation of the instrumentalism that we saw in the laundry.

This is the fear that besets Martin:  that he will disappear the more his image becomes visible in the sheltered world of women and things. Not only can Martin, with his newly got wealth, buy women, and get the "finest girl in the land," but his magnificent body (as London never tires in telling us) is itself a sign of biological money. But in the end, Martin rejects all the women who throw themselves at him. As Martin tells Lizzie Connolly ("A beauty, a perfect beauty" [303]) whom he knows to be "his," "I am not a marrying man, Lizzie" (305). Martin isn't telling Lizzie that he is not interested in her because he's not interested in women; he is not "lightly" confessing that he's one of those "sissy-boys" for whom it's "all right" not to "care when women look at you, a man like you" (328). Indeed, to assuage our probable anxiety, London has Lizzie assure Martin--and us--that he's not that way. But to readers in 1909, Martin clearly evidences the impotent lassitude of neurasthenia, a condition that would bring him close to the category of "sissy boy," by virtue of being outside the economy of desire. [37]

The result of such an assurance, however, is only to make Lizzie think that his problem lies with her, and that the right woman might cure Martin of his lack of desire (327). As if the embodiment of that belief, Ruth, in the very next scene, enters Martin's hotel room (where he sits in a stupor of melancholia) and stands, repentant of being bourgeois, before him, "waiting for him to accept" her (335). Of course, it's a little strange that Ruth should so humiliate herself in such a fashion, more, that she should claim to have come to him incognita. In fact, Martin learns, her brother Norman, in a gesture that confirms Martin's suspicions of the whorishness of the bourgeoisie, has walked Ruth to his hotel room. But Ruth, from Martin's perspective can't help but prostitute herself. Ruth may have loved Martin (as she claims) but she didn't love him enough for himself; now that he is famous, and admired by all, and rich, she loves him precisely for his exchange value, not, as he complains, for "himself." 

And that's the problem that plagues Martin at the end of the book:  in moving from a veritable tramp poverty and despised anonymity to respectable bourgeoisity he comes to realize that "His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books" (317). Instead of liking him for his "intrinsic" qualities, people like him because, in the terms of a recent film, he's "money"; that is, he embodies the market itself, and he would rather embody something that could not be exchanged for its own representation (as Martin can:  me for my books).

In the novel, in an image that is repeated throughout the work, the literary market is figured as a machine: 

The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. He folded the stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letterbox, and from three weeks to a month afterwards the postman came up the steps and handed him the manuscript. Surely there were no live, warm editors at the other end. It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups--a clever mechanism operated by automatons. He reached stages of despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all. He had never received a sign of the existence of one, and, from the absence of judgement in rejecting all he wrote, it seemed plausible that editors were myths, manufactured and maintained by office-boys, type-setters, and pressmen.

(172)

The literary market is as much a machine as the washing machines at Shelley Springs; and if the washing machines at Shelley Springs force Martin to prosthetize himself, so too the literary market compels him to mechanize his productions, in order to sell his short, mechanically plotted stories. [38]   Both reduce Martin's vaunted individuality to something mechanically instrumental and serial; in both cases, that is, he's reified, and becomes object not subject.

To sum up, if we can align on one side tramping, materiality and a homosocial desire, on the other we can place the market, the mechanical and heterosocial desire. The former produces and consumes little; the latter produces and consumes, and in the logic of the novel, the things it produces and consumes are the images abstracted from the material "real."  Thus, in replacing the "real" Martin with his commodified market image, the market parallels the logic of the instrumental we saw earlier that replaces persons with prosthetics.

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