The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson

Ho-hum escapades of a hobo hobbyist

The Friendly Road, a book by David Grayson, was published in 1912. David Grayson was a pseudonym used by Ray Stannard Baker, an American journalist and writer of nonfiction in the muckraking style of social justice exposé. Under the pen name of Grayson, he published several lighter and fluffier books. The first was Adventures in Contentment (1907), about life on a farm. The Friendly Road is the second Grayson book, hence its subtitle New Adventures in Contentment. The Friendly Road is written as if it were a first-person nonfiction memoir, but then again, David Grayson isn’t a real person, and many of the happenings in the book seem contrived and not very realistic. This is more of a work of semiautobiographical fiction, and it falls somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories.

Grayson owns a farm, whereabouts unknown. All the names of cities and towns in the book are fictional, so you never know where the story is taking place, just somewhere in America. (Baker lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.) Grayson decides he wants to take a break from his farm and strike out on the road to dabble in the life of a tramp. He carries very few possessions and soon spends all of the money in his pockets. Over the course of his journey, he lives off of the kindness of strangers. In a typical chapter, he encounters someone along the road. He sees them working and decides to pitch in and help, uninvited. He asks for no compensation, but there’s always hope that he’ll be offered a meal and a place to sleep for a night or two. There’s no real purpose to Grayson’s journey other than wanderlust and the possibility of making new friends. Grayson wants to make friends with everyone and thinks everyone wants to make friends with him.

I can sympathize with Grayson’s wanderlust, and I generally enjoy reading books about this unfettered, wandering lifestyle. What I don’t like about The Friendly Road, however, is how Grayson constantly reminds the reader that he’s bestowing sage wisdom upon you. He’s extremely satisfied with his own sense of humor and flaunts a know-it-all confidence in his discovery of the secret meaning of life. His revelations, however, are not particularly surprising. What is the key to a happy life? No responsibilities. Duh. Nice (non)work if you can get it, but Grayson’s rosy pictures of pointless wanderlust don’t really stand up to his own moral sermonizing. If everyone lived their life this way, would the world be a better place? Nope. It’s important to note that when Grayson leaves home and strikes out on the road, he leaves behind a woman whom you assume is his wife. She, or someone else, is left responsible for the farm from which he’s fled.

The Friendly Road improves a little in its second half when Grayson encounters a socialist and gets involved in a labor struggle. Baker slips into muckraking mode for a while, and you at least get some sense of historical events that were going on at the time. Still, his insight into the class struggle is a lot shallower and tamer than contemporaries like Jack London or Upton Sinclair. Grayson is neither for nor against socialism. He won’t commit to either side. He just wants everyone to get along.

There are many better books on hobos, tramps, and drifters. In fiction, there are classics like Knut Hamsun’s Wanderer trilogy (1906–1912), B. Traven’s The Cotton-Pickers (1926), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983), just for starters. In nonfiction, Jack London’s The Road (1907) and John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) are both excellent. With so many other superior choices, why bother with Grayson’s tepid chicken soup for the soul?