Tom Kromer (1906–1969)

This is what it was like: out on the street begging for small change in the rain, then “flopping” (i.e. sleeping) in a louse-infested dormitory alongside bay-rum and “derail” drinkers. Or crammed into the local Mission-house with a couple of hundred other “stiffs”, enduring the sermon only because it’s warm inside and perishing cold outside. Or in a derelict building at two in the morning being woken by flashlights and the boots of cops who are, to be frank, just uniformed thugs. Finding imaginative ways of panhandling a few coins. Riding the rails, the boxcars of freight trains, from one bleak town to another.
   It’s the 1930s of course, there’s mass-unemployment all across Depression-era America, and no work of even the most basic, menial or temporary kind to be had anywhere. It’s also winter, freezing, and people are reduced to begging for pennies to scrape enough together for a hot meal. Alternatively there’s the silent humiliation of standing in a block-long soup-line for hours on end, to be given “a bucket of slop and a stale loaf” (even the soup is almost inedible: rancid carrot-soup made from rotting carrots). It’s not just single men either; there are women out here too, women with children, with babies even, babies starving for want of milk—whole families living this real-life Hell.
   Tom Kromer was born in 1906 in West Virginia. After a conventional-enough early life (college, then a spell teaching) in late 1928 he was commissioned by a newspaper (the Huntingdon Herald-Despatch) to give its readers a taste of the Great Depression, then in its early stages, by going out on to the streets begging. A few months after the article was printed, suddenly finding himself out of a job (and money), he jumped a freight-train and went back out there for real this time. Five years later Waiting for Nothing (published 1935) was an account of his experiences. It’s not a story, but a series of scenes—which he claimed to be mostly autobiographical—describing life at the bottom, life “on the fritz” (= on the road, broke and out of work). The style is as plain as it gets, absolutely no frills at all, and with much 1930s slang: “I have seen one bull kick a hundred stiffs off a drag” (= I have seen one bastard of a blackjack-wielding cop single-handedly kick a hundred cowed, hungry, unemployed men off a train). The result is stark, almost as if written in black-and-white. I think you could put it alongside Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and George Orwell’s Down and Out…, but this is more like the former than the latter—here people often go days at a time without food or shelter of any kind.
   Although the book itself was a success, Kromer never completed another and, in the end, gave up writing altogether—I think maybe he’d put all he had to give into this one. The impression I also get is that Waiting for Nothing has been neglected, overlooked in recent decades, which is a pity. Above all, it brought home to me that the overwhelming majority of the people on its pages weren’t feckless or lazy, stupid or useless; they were people like you and me: average, ordinary, but just unbelievably unlucky to be living in the wrong place at absolutely, catastrophically, the wrong time. It could have been any of us.… (més)

After reading Waiting for Nothing, I was interested in finding out more about its author, who apparently wrote nothing else. I came across a reasonably-priced copy of this collection, and I'm glad I did. The centerpiece, of course, is Waiting for Nothing, which is perhaps the most harrowing account of hobo life and eking out a day-to-day existence that I have ever read. I agree with the editors' contention that the book is best published with no extraneous material such as an introduction or author biography to detract from the straightforward narrative.

It turns out that Kromer, before becoming ill with tuberculosis and spending most of the rest of his life as an invalid, did write a little more. Most notable is his attempt at a novel, Michael Kohler, which, like Waiting for Nothing, turns out to be largely autobiographical, though it begins before the author's birth. The chapters that were completed, in fact, form a pretty complete story of a couple coming to America and seeing their dream turn into a nightmare of deadly work in a West Virginia coal mine and their son's witness to a series of tragic events. At the end of what was written, he has started a new life in at least a slightly better place, but as the synopsis Kromer provided in his failed attempt for a Guggenheim grant shows, more travails were to come. Michael Kohler succeeds in providing some intense images of horror, but the overall lack of characterization, if not addressed, would have doomed it as a great work of literature.

The other Kromer writings are a hodgepodge, but the short fiction pieces are impressive, showing an active militancy that is lacking in the first person narrative of Waiting for Nothing. There are also some book reviews, including a scathing review of Edward Anderson's Hungry Men (which I have reviewed favorably here on LibraryThing). This was Anderson's first novel, before the more famous Thieves Like Us, and from Kromer's viewpoint, the criticism is justified. It is not a novel intended to capture the real lives of "Hungry Men"--but it is a great story, nevertheless.

The editors' short biography of Kromer and his works is also helpful. There isn't a lot of information to dig up, and it is rather sad to think of Kromer, who seems to have stopped writing in 1936 or so, living out the more than thirty years remaining in his life as an invalid, apparently sitting in front of a TV set much of the time. This volume, however, is proof that as slim as his writings were, he was an important author and still well worth reading.

Highly recommended.… (més)