CHARLES ASHLEIGH -The Rambling Kid. Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1930. Charles H. Kerr, US, softcover, 2004.

   Semi-autobiographical hobo novel of a Wobbly about his experiences in America circa 1912-1919, coming to America, joining the IWW, riding the rails, and being imprisoned for opposing US involvement in ‘the war to end all wars’.

   Hardboiled writing: ‘Words that would be simple, so that all could understand, hot and clear from memory and feeling and hard thought’. About life on ‘the road — a rising coloured stream of incident, divine adventure filling his heart with action-satisfaction.’

   The road offers a reality you can’t see from the university’s ivory towers: ‘I left because it stank. Life in college became unendurably dull. It was stale — most of it—and false. I wanted reality….. There’s more genuine feeling, more straight acting and talking, more health and reality among the working class than in all the trim little intellectual circles or in all the colleges….It’s a tremendous relief to get away from the smart-alec cynicism [and] dreamy-dreamy aestheticism’.

   And there are some memorable incidents described, riding the rails. I’ll share one of them here where a young brake-man fresh off the farm accosts a car full of Wobblies:

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   Overall, sorry to say, it’s just not that good. The novel is divided into three parts, the first and last more fictionalized than the middle. And not the better for it. Ashleigh himself came to the US as an adult, proselytizing the IWW and hooking up with Claude McKay on the way. But gay miscegenation doesn’t make its way into the novel. Neither does his deportation back to England in lieu of imprisonment.

   Instead, Ashleigh concocts a story of an English family, sunken with poverty around the turn of the 20th century, with no hopes but those found in letters from family who’d made the trek to America, Land of Opportunity!

   The family makes its way to America only to find that their American brethren had been grossly exaggerating things in their letters. What did you expect? Them to tell you the truth in their letters? That after all that effort, pomp and circumstance of moving to America that things were just as bad? No. That would be humiliating. So family after family is lured to America by false hope, only to spread the horsefeathers themselves when writing their own letters back to the old country. They promised to write. Not to lie would be to admit defeat and embarrassment.

   The problem is that this ‘family moving to America’ business is made up. Not made up in the sense that it didn’t happen. Many times, of course, to other people. Just not to Ashleigh. Ashleigh is not a talented enough novelist to make up episodes of a life he had not lived and make it sing. Or singe.

   It’s for this reason that the middle section of life of a Wobbly on the rails is compelling. It has the verisimilitude that can usually only be earned by experience. Unless you’re a really talented writer. Which Ashleigh is not.

   The final section is also imagined. While Ashleigh and his protagonist doppelganger were both arrested for opposing the war, his doppelganger doesn’t take the boring option that Ashleigh took: accept deportation and go home. His character, rather, heads for the Russian revolution.

   Anyway, as I said, it’s just not that great. The middle section has some nice bits. But for a sustained novel of the hobo life by a hobo, head for the amazing Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer and You Can’t Win by Jack Black.