In the Company of Men

In this paper, I examine the ambivalent romance of the tramp, or homeless man, in the tramp writings of Jack London and in those of the enormously popular tramp writer (and self-titled tramp authority) Josiah Flynt. I begin by examining Flynt’s works and the nature of Flynt’s representations of tramping, and then go on to argue that London’s far better known works on tramping suggest a quasi-political role to tramping absent in Flynt’s works.

By the end of the 19^th century, after successive economic depressions had dispossessed millions of men of their jobs, tramps had become an inescapable and unsettling sight on America’s roads and in her cities. The tramp, who was invariably a white man, captivated both the imagination and, simultaneously, scorn of middle-class writers who devoted a considerable amount of energy writing about the tramp. The volume of writing on tramps was such that it veritably constituted a genre.

Josiah Flynt has been almost entirely forgotten. London, it is worth mentioning, dedicated his tramp memoir, The Road, to Flynt, calling him "blowed in the glass," or a true tramp. Flynt’s claim to authenticity rested on his own experiences as a tramp, and he extensively marketed this claim. Indeed, Flynt was the most important writer of the turn of the century on the tramp, and his many accounts, which tend to the sociological and even ethnographic, were routinely referred to by scholars, writers, and the police as accurate representations of the tramp and his milieu. Not incidentally, Flynt was able to leverage his expertise on tramps and become a railroad policeman. In this capacity, he was able to do what he loved doing: write about tramps with a police eye, and travel with tramps. For Flynt was extremely ambivalent about tramps and tramping, and frequently expressed his desire to tramp, and the enjoyment he derived from tramping, as a kind of mania requiring harsh remedy and suppression.

This ambivalence colors Flynt’s writings. For Flynt, the tramp is hardly the dispossessed homeless laborer; he is, more bleakly, a parasite or predator. The tramp threatens not just the home and everything it implies, but more particularly, tramps threaten the sexual stability of the home itself.

In his 1897 Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis included as an appendix an essay by Flynt on "situational homosexuality" among tramps. In his "Homosexuality Among Tramps," however, Flynt goes beyond the simple description of "situational" homosexuality among adult tramps and describes the threat posed by tramps to boys at home:

Every hobo in the United States knows what "unnatural intercourse" means, talking about it freely, and according to my finding, every tenth man practises it, and defends his conduct. Boys are the victims of this passion. The tramps gain possession of these boys in various ways. They tell these children all sorts of stories about life "on the road", how they can ride on the railways for nothing, shoot Indians, and be "prefeshunnels" (professionals), and they choose some body who specially pleases them. By smiles and flattering caresses they let him know that the stories are meant for him alone, and before long, if the boy is a suitable subject, he smiles back just as slily. In time he learns to think that he is the favourite of the tramp, who will take him on his travels, and he begins to plan secret meetings with the man. The tramp, of course, continues to excite his imagination with stories and caresses, and some fine night there is one boy less in the town.

This, I should mention, is a more restrained passage; Flynt also in this essay he wrote for Ellis describes the brutal rape of a young boy by some tramps. In his popular books, the explicit becomes implicit. Thus, in Tramping with Tramps (1907), "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). Tramping is not freedom but slavery. Interestingly, tramping is not bad in Flynt’s homophobic accounts simply because the tramp is a lazy vagabond. It is bad because the tramp is a homosexual vector, who insinuates his subversion of the normal through the language of popular Westerns and frontier fiction.

I want to turn now to Jack London, whose account of tramping is more interestingly nuanced and whose exploration of the masculine communities constituting trampland focuses less on the rapacious and more on the comity and friendship tramping offered. I also want–I realize this is ambitious, given the time remaining, to suggest that if Flynt is more interested in containing the tramp even as he sensationally documents him, London is committed to presenting the tramping as a kind of subversion of the normal.

Halfway-through London’s Martin Eden, Martin says to Joe, his coworker at the Shelley Hot Springs laundry, "Better a hobo than a beast of toil." The two men, Martin has observed, are being transformed by the work they must do in the heavily mechanized laundry into "intelligent machine[s]," or "beast[s]"–the two are the same and equally lack subjectivity. Unable to take it any longer, and inspired by Martin’s insight, Joe ends up resolving to quit his job at the laundry and go hoboing, or tramping.

The decision is an extraordinary one, especially as Joe, who has been a laundryman all his life, is implicitly repudiating work itself for the seeming dangers and uncertainty of a life on the road. But in the discussion between the two men, those dangers don’t appear so terrible. Rather, tramping is represented as a space for living, beauty, and desire: a kind of romantic utopia where Joe will be able to recuperate both his body and his subjectivity.

The above might seem odd to any London scholar who is familiar with London’s tramp writings. Not only is Martin Eden not usually considered one of London’s many tramp works, but it also casts the tramp in a decidedly romantic light. Of course, London’s is well known for being ambivalent about tramping. His often rhapsodic account of his time tramping, The Road, for instance, imagines the tramp as a figure of romance and adventure and male camaraderie; but other essays take pains to clarify that the tramp is a victim of industrializing forces.

Thus, 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". But instead of finding men as "blond-beastly" (London’s term for the Nietzschean superman) as he imagined himself, he found that the tramp 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". The tramp, in other words, 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.

But 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 the essay, the tramp lacks the predatory sexuality of Flynt’s pederastic "professional" tramp, not surprising, given the focus of the essay. Yet as readers of London’s 1907 The Road can attest, the tramps London consorted with (all of whom were professional tramps) hardly lacked for pleasure. Indeed, in "hobo land," a "realm as unexplored as fairyland," the tramp "has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance."

More to the point, although London could scarcely have mentioned homosexuality in any but harsh terms, if at all, when he wrote The Road, he tacitly and implicitly condones the sexual element of the sort of relationship Flynt so objects to, that of the young boy and experienced tramp. But London objects to being a prushun (the possessed young boy) on the grounds that he "did not take kindly to possession." This objection to possession is the harshest criticism he levels against the institution; he might have, as did Flynt, transform that possession into savage slavery. The homoeroticism that works through The Road and that configures tramp relationships, 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 notoriously (and somewhat mythically) lives better and more easily than the average workman", preserves what comes down to London’s "manhood" from the castrating brutalization effected by state.

In London’s essay "The Tramp" of 1901, wherein London extols the tramp for being able "to live," London asserts that the tramp is sterile, and worse: self eliminating. And, because he is unfit for anything, the tramp is destined to

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.

London is being ironic; in the essay he is, after all, defending the tramp and his plight against liberal critics and attacking the system that produces tramps in the first place.

Being a "eunuch" and sterile, however, 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 Flynt imagined as a sort of tramp contagion working on the innocent desires of children. It means the tramp lacks the financial ability to effectuate his desire, and more generally, that he is removed from the market altogether. Thus, as a tramp, the man can’t afford the woman he wants, and what’s more, she’s scarcely interested in reproducing with anyone, especially him.

At the end of Martin Eden, after Martin has become an immensely successful 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’," he tells Martin. "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". Tramping, however, has its drawbacks for Joe. It precisely frustrates Joe’s desire to enter the market of women and things. 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 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."

Tramping may be good for the body, but having a good body is not enough–at least in Joe’s case–for gaining the company of women. He is, after all, a eunuch and sterile. In giving Joe the laundry (a process incomplete until they wrestle), Martin thus moves Joe from an exclusively male homosocial world to one whose landscape is revealed to be marked by alluring women who exchange that look of Joe’s on account of the "big iron dollars clinkin’" in his jeans. "Exchange" is the key term. It characterizes the market of heterosexual production and consumption that sweepingly enfolds not just sexual reproduction but also the production of the laundry, among others. In a series of bizarre phrases that encapsulate a wild, Circean logic in which men are transformed by women into productive beasts, Joe implies that because of his desire, he will exchange himself for the laundry ("me for the laundry"), and for the woman he likes ("me for her"). Propertied desire is catastrophically figured as an exchange of the subject for things, and it gestures towards the disappearance of that subject and a continuation of the instrumentalism that we saw figured in the laundry.

And that problem of exchange plagues Martin at the end of the book and motivates his neurasthenic isolation from desire itself: in moving from a veritable tramp poverty and despised anonymity to the respectability of owning a great deal of property, 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". In the desire manifest for his books and for his celebrity, Martin, as "himself" has disappeared, replaced by the figured desire of the people for something like Martin that is firmly located within the machinery of the publishing and within the infinite exchange logic of the marketplace.

Put another way, tramping in Martin Eden seems to articulate the blond-beastly logic of tramping and to read the tramp as possessed of a Nietzschean individualism opposed to the castrating social. But London’s account goes beyond this. Rather, tramping is vectored as a repudiation of the reifying logic of production and consumption that turns men into machines and women into prostitutes and that reads heterosexual desire as but another symptom of the mechanical system of production and consumption.

In effect, London reverses the moral valences Flynt presents. Tramping is not bad; it is just not quite good enough. But, in its nostalgia for a masculine and homosocial heterotopia, London’s description of tramping presents a subversion of the normal that has been little examined and even less understood.