ME: in Times Lit Supp
W. H. Davies
published March 6, 2020
Blood on the tracks
In his review of Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which is about illegal Mexican immigrants train-jumping to get to the United States, Jakob Hofmann (February 14) describes these trains as “Not the ‘hobomotives’ employed by W. H. Davies and his kind, but the limb-lopping freight trains that barrel their way through Mexico …”. There is a clear suggestion that the “hobomotives” (an apparent neologism of Hofmann’s, the meaning of which I had to guess at) were somehow more benign, less harmful machines, ignoring the fact that in Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp he describes how he had a leg lopped off after a failed attempt to jump a train, thus cutting short his “super-tramping” around North America. He returned to England and became the poet we know today.
F. W. Nunneley
Beckley, East Sussex
In his review of Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which is about illegal Mexican immigrants train-jumping to get to the United States, Jakob Hofmann (February 14) describes these trains as “Not the ‘hobomotives’ employed by W. H. Davies and his kind, but the limb-lopping freight trains that barrel their way through Mexico …”. There is a clear suggestion that the “hobomotives” (an apparent neologism of Hofmann’s, the meaning of which I had to guess at) were somehow more benign, less harmful machines, ignoring the fact that in Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp he describes how he had a leg lopped off after a failed attempt to jump a train, thus cutting short his “super-tramping” around North America. He returned to England and became the poet we know today.
F. W. Nunneley
Beckley, East Sussex