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From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist’s joy in creation.

I wish I could remember where I heard of this book; it’s been some time, and I know I did some searching before finding my copy, from Budge Press. I’ve had it for years. I did find a hint, late in the book: a references to Richard Jefferies’s The Story of My Heart. Perhaps the recommendations for each were linked? At any rate, I finally decided it was time to read it during my own travels, though I am no tramp because I have a van and do not go on foot. (I suspect Graham would be disgusted.)

I opened this book quite blind, and not having heard of Graham Stephen Graham, although he turns out to be quite prolific (read here) with some 34 books to his name, whew! All that biographical data is not within these pages, though. All you learn from The Gentle Art of Tramping is that Graham is a passionate tramp, or walker-wanderer. (“One includes in the category ‘tramp’ all true Bohemians, pilgrims, explorers afoot, walking tourists, and the like.”) He loves sleeping outdoors, eating and living simply; he finds this lifestyle to be a high art form, and he is well-read and often eloquent, but would be unhappy within the walls of classroom or library.

This book offers an engaging mix of practical advice (how to choose a bed for the night) and poetic or passionate holding forth (the joy of, as Graham writes, sleeping à la belle étoile). There is no question how strongly this narrator believes what he writes; he positively exults in drying off by a fire after getting thoroughly soaked. (He is surprisingly exultant in the soaking, too.) He gives medical advice, though questionable: “a waterproof worn over wet clothes is a sure way to cultivate rheumatism. The damp cannot escape outwards – and so goes inward to your very bones.”

He waxes especially elegant about fire-building.

The fire in the rain is a triumph; the night fire in darkness under the stars is the happiest, but it disputes happiness with the dawn fire.

I love to see the blue smokes crawling upward in the dawn, while, with bare legs, one struts about doing the domestic work of morning out of doors. It is part of the very poetry of the tramping life. You give a proper affirmative then to Browning’s

Morning’s at seven
All’s right with the world.

Graham is much concerned with reading and writing while one tramps. He writes that “it is in description that the keeper of a diary becomes artist,” and he does some lovely describing, as in a chapter on what he calls the “zigzag walk,” where you take the first turn the the left and then the next first turn to the right, alternating, and exploring a city in this way. (Cities get their own special treatment, although Graham, of course, favors the countryside and the wilderness.) I love more his pith and cleverness, though. His explanations of how to make coffee and what to eat are interesting side notes, but it’s his life philosophy and turns of phrase that capture me best. Here, a series of quotations to illustrate.

The best companions are those who make you freest. They teach you the art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves. After freedom, I enjoy in a companion a well-stocked mind, or observant eyes, or wood-lore of any kind. It is nice sometimes to tramp with a living book.

All books are worthwhile; perhaps especially the living ones?

If manners could be improved we should more easily get into sympathy with ‘foreigners’; if they could be perfected there would not be any foreigners.

Lovely. Although Graham does indulge in stereotypes, none were especially negative; I found these easily forgiven (this book originally published in 1926), especially with this line to wrap them up. He is remarkably well traveled, and has thoughts to offer on many countries on several continents; sometimes (unavoidably) this information is overly simplistic, but it’s interesting to see his perspective. He is especially well-versed in Russia, where he claims to have tramped several thousand miles.

Atlases are not so good. You have to take them down from a shelf and consult them. Wall maps spare you the trouble; they consult you.

Who doesn’t love a map that is consulting you when you’re not looking?

And, in answer to that other book that I guess I’m still irritated about, Graham on class:

Class is the most disgusting institution of civilisation, because it puts barriers between man and man.

Leaving aside the ‘man’ usage (again, dated), another fine philosophy.

I found this book a slow read, but I’m not sure why; perhaps a low point in the cycles of my own attention span. Graham certainly rambles on the page as on the land. And some of his how-to advice is either obsolete, or personally irrelevant; and I am not at all convinced of the joys to be had in getting totally soaked in a deluge, while hiking or while sleeping, thank you very much. But clearly there is much to be loved, and consulted at length, in these pages. I do recommend.

I will end as Graham ends, with his final, ecstatic paragraph.

I am still on that zigzag way, pursuing the diagonal between the reason and the heart; the chart could be made by drawing lines from star to star in the night sky, not forgetting many dim, shy, fitfully glimmering out-of-the-way stars, which one would not purpose visiting. I said we would not enter a maze, but we have made one and and are in one, a maze of Andalusia and Dalmatia, of Anahuac and Anatolia, of Seven Rivers Land and Seven Kings. The first to the left, the next to the right! No blind alleys. A long way. Beaucoup zigzag, eh!

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