It is hard to think of a poet who, despite persistent interest in his work, has remained more deeply in the shade than John Davidson (1857–1909). Most probably, the poems by which he wanted to be remembered have discouraged would-be readers: long, blank-verse declamations meant to advance his militant materialist ideas. Wisely, John Sloan, in his selection from Davidson’s poetry, gives us no more than tolerably short extracts from them. Then, too, Davidson stifled his reputation by leaving a foolish will that in effect kept the bulk of his work from being reprinted for fifty years. As a result, he has posthumously suffered indifference and neglect, as he did in life.

At least, since his death in the first decade of this century, his poems have drawn high praise from notables. Virginia Woolf once expressed perplexity that a writer of such caliber could be “so little famous,” while both T. S. Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid acknowledged deep debts to him. Davidson, said MacDiarmid, was “the only Scottish poet to whom I owe anything at all.” Eliot testified that for him Davidson’s entire work merited homage, despite its “uncongenial” philosophy, and in particular the ballad “Thirty Bob a Week” stood out as “a great poem for ever.”

If ambition alone could make a poet major, then Davidson would loom beside Milton, Spencer, and the megalomaniac Pound. In his late “Testament” poems, he seeks to do nothing less than sweep aside the wreckage of Christianity and replace it with a strictly material universe, whose dead atoms evolved, by happy chance, into the conscious human race. A few people are more conscious and therefore more admirable than the rest. (A certain fondness for superheroes made people call Davidson a Nietzschean, a label he insistently denied.) Unfortunately, reading the “Testaments” is rather like gulping down a slowly unrolling ball of string, with knots in it. In the first, Testament of a Vivisector, a strong-willed narrator rides herd over the animal kingdom— “searching into the secrets of Nature,” explained Davidson, “in his own bloody way.” As the series unfolds, it would appear that the poet is going spectacularly mad. The Testament of John Davidson opens with a spirited pitch for suicide, then recounts an assault upon the goddess Diana by a heroic stud named John Davidson. Worse, the hero’s descent into Hell doesn’t end things. There, he suffers a magnificent crucifixion and returns to earth all the better for it. Readers fond of Davidson tend to prefer his musical, Tennysonian lyrics, his ballads in popular style, his sure and touching evocations of the lives of working people trapped in an industrial world.

As Sloan demonstrates in his biography, Davidson eludes categories. Was he a Scottish poet or an English one, a fin-de-siècle decadent or a twentieth-century modern? Davidson rejected the notion of writing in Scots dialect, quit his native Scotland, went to London and took up the cause of British imperialism. He joined the Rhymers’ Club but thought it lacked “blood and guts,” and he didn’t hit it off with Yeats. And although he contributed to The Yellow Book, made friends with Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde, and published a novel about flagellation (with graphic art by Aubrey Beardsley), his tastes weren’t consistently mauve. He liked manly robustness and music-hall balladry. Besides, it was hard to sip absinthe in cafés and remain a family man.

Although in his essay “The Art of Poetry” Davidson blasts rhyme as mere excresence “like a sixth finger,” the rhyming ballad “Thirty Bob a Week” is his masterpiece. An ill-paid clerk laments his life: riding the underground (“like a mole … in the dark”), trying to support a wife and children in “three rooms about the size of traveling trunks.” He voices the fury that wells inside him:  

I step into my heart and there I meet
A god-almighty devil singing small,
Who would like to shout and whistle in
the street,
And squelch the passers flat against the
wall …

Yet he feels himself divided between this angry demon and an other self who meekly submits. Davidson’s chief ideas are here: that matter is all there is (and perhaps “we are lost and damn’d and served up hot to God”); that the speaker has evolved out of mollusk and ape into consciousness. The poem takes authority from the experience of a poet who for much of his life earned that same miserable sum, more or less. Survival on thirty bob a week becomes an art of heroic jugglery:

It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your
neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many
a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the
deck.

In this ballad, Davidson fuses his mystic-materialist philosophy and his poetry seamlessly; and in fact, he scored more than a single triumph. If Randall Jarrell was right and all a poet need do to be declared “major” is to be struck by a dozen true lightning bolts, than surely Davidson garnered his dozen. Most are in Sloan’s selection. I miss “The Wastrel,” but to his credit Sloan includes “A Ballad of Hell” (a self-contained excerpt from “Christmas Eve”), about a woman who kills herself in order to join her lover in the fiery furnace. When she arrives, she finds herself jilted. God takes pity on her, she is ushered into Heaven, and the poem triumphantly ends with two superb lines: “Amazed to find it could rejoice,/ Hell raised a hoarse half-human cheer.” Others of Davidson’s successful poems include “A Northern Suburb,” “In Romney Marsh,” “The Outcast,” and “A Runnable Stag,” this last a dreamlike experiment in rhyme and rhythm, in which a noble stag, pursued by hunters, plunges into the sea and drowns— a beast with which the poet may well have felt empathy.

Back in 1973, Andrew Turnbull brought out a two-volume Poems of John Davidson, but his edition supplies more of Davidson’s blank verse than most readers will need. John Sloan’s new selection, at least as strong as Maurice Lindsay’s of 1961, may be more likely to appeal. The prose portion, though, seems a bit anemic. It gives us short extracts from Davidson’s writings about poetry and some twenty letters, or pieces of them; but Davidson’s fecundity was greater than that. For nearly twenty years he earned his bread in London’s Grub Street—writing plays and novels, adapting French plays, ghost-writing, reviewing, churning out newspaper articles. Not a scrap of his verse dramas, none of his fiction, no writing on subjects other than poetry are here, despite intriguing mentions of them in Sloan’s biography. Sloan may well know what he is doing, and is going easy on us; still, it would be satisfying to have more prose, and be able to judge for ourselves.

In any case, Sloan’s biography, only the second to be written and incorporating new-found material, tells the story of Davidson’s tormented life absorbingly, fully, yet economically. That life was a continual tussle with melancholy, rejections by publishers and stage managers, critical mis- understandings, insomnia, hypochondria, family demands, and a chronic shortage of cash. In the end, when Davidson finally received a pension from the Civil List, he was granted a mere hundred pounds a year —hardly enough to keep him in cigars. Even that modest sum drew protests from those who wondered what business the King, Defender of the Faith, had in subsidizing a militant atheist. At fifty-two, deeply depressed and hating Cornwall, where he had moved to obtain cheap rent, Davidson seems to have put a bullet through his head and let his body drop into the sea. Sloan carefully traces the origins of Davidson’s personal tragedy, and does a capital job of setting the poet in the context of literary London of his day. His discussions of the poems themselves are shrewd and pointed.

Indeed, the only aspect of Davidson’s life and thought that Sloan seems to neglect is the poet’s politics, or distrust of any: his favoring of aristocratic rule over representative government. I would have thought it at least worth mention that, while profoundly sympathetic to the working class, Davidson had an aversion to Socialism, which seemed to him to encourage a dull, gray society—it struck “debasing bargains with the mob” (“Epilogue” to God and Mammon: Mammon and His Message).

If Sloan is correct and there is a new flurry of curiosity about Davidson, we may wonder whether this off-putting, underestimated writer will yet take his place beside Hardy, Hopkins, and other distinguished early moderns. Davidson’s reputation deserves an upward hoist, I think, for his ballads and lyrics alone. After all, far more drastic revisions of our literary pantheon have occurred lately, on behalf of neglected women and native Americans. But who knows? As the Russians say—referring to the many Soviet and post-Soviet revisions of their history—our past is entirely unpredictable.

---

---