2 - In Search of Experience: Vagabond Travel Narratives

Summary

Focussing on writing by Ralph Keeler, Lee Meriweather, Harry Franck, Stephen Graham and Vachel Lindsay, Chapter Two charts the development of a subgenre of writing that combines the slumming narrative with the travelogue, which I call the ‘vagabond travel narrative’. In this subset of travel literature, a narrator attempts to sightsee without money. These narratives make a spectacle of the supposed ingenuity of the narrator in acquiring, in the absence of financial capital, what I call ‘experiential capital’. Yet these texts also reveal, against the intentions of their authors, that it is their privilege as white men that enables these journeys and experiences. Vagabond writers set themselves apart from hobos and tourists, seeing both groups as too closely associated with modernity. Unlike the hobo, the vagabond travels to escape modernity – to go ‘off road’, rather than ‘on the road’, we might say. Yet Vachel Lindsay in particular shows an uneasy solidarity with the transient workers whom he inevitably encounters.