Forever Waiting

Isn't it Ironic: A 1930s soup line like the ones Kromer stood in.

We’ve been reading many essays and excerpts about bum life over the past weeks and examining the truth behind the text. How do the made-up captions of Caldwell and Bourke-White add or, in my opinion, detract from the images of Depression victims? What guidelines do the ethics of style have about writing a semi-fictional “autobiography,” like Reitman did with Sisters of the Road? How can a well-educated, well-off artist pen stories or shoot photographs of dirt-poor farmers and hoboes without exploiting them and insulting them? The answer, I think, is found in Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing.

This book was harder to read than anything we’ve examined so far, including the gut-wrenching Grapes of Wrath. It’s hard to say exactly how he does it, but Kromer manages to take every ounce of romanticism, elitism and voyeurism out of his text. His use of straightforward language makes the book read almost like a news article: factual and devoid of artistic liberties. The humble, subtly gritty prose he employs demands trust from the reader. Repeated use of words and phrases like “stiff,” “bastards” and “on the fritz” make the text low, in a sense, and attainable to the common man. It reads like a counter-style to Agee’s complicated, artistic text in We Shall Now Praise Famous Men. He is a man possessing nothing, devoid of Ivy League airs or intellectual lies. He is simply telling you about his life without flattering himself, flattering the system, or flattering America.

On a deeper level, the stories he recounts are similarly gritty and self-conscious as his prose. In Chapter Four, he describes an encounter with a homosexual man known as Mrs. Carter. The area of male sexual exploitation and gay culture has been explored by none of the texts we’ve read so far, and Kromer’s willingness to divulge everything, to describe the absolute vulnerability of his lifestyle, is disarming. He makes no claim of high morality, but uses the gay man—and later attempts to use his roommate—simply as a means to the vital end: food and a place to sleep. His prose becomes more and more shamefaced as the chapter goes on, as though he is cringing as he recounts this mutual exploitation between Mrs. Carter and himself. His need to survive surpasses everything, and he ends on the eternally humble note, his vulnerability epitomized by his actual nakedness: “You can always count on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed” (Kromer, 53).

The book is remarkably unvaried in its stream of anecdotes—as it progresses, the stories do not become more positive or more negative. They contain a constant level of horror and recount similarly terrible circumstances. There are occasional passages of relief—the image of Kromer, Werner and Karl eating cakes and pies, for instance—but these are kept in check by the reality of Kromer wearing a coat with a stain from a tuberculosis hemorrhage. Kromer cannot escape the reality of his life, and he does not allow the reader to either. But his amazing prose, factual, concise and clear, does not obviously invoke pity. He is merely stating the facts. The book ends with a terrifying account of a homeless man dying in the bunk next to Kromer’s. Mary Obropta notes that Kromer’s imagery helps reinforce the static nature of his text: “This layering, this repetition of stiff above stiff above stiff, is like the twelve chapters of waiting and waiting in Waiting for Nothing. There is no progression. There is no salvation. Again and again, there is only the dead body.”

The book has ended, and nothing has changed. There is no hopeful scene of humanity’s good will. There is no Rose of Sharon to save the dying man. There is no Boxcar Bertha epiphany and renunciation of wanderlust. There is nothing. The reader has waited for twelve chapters for Kromer to escape, to find relief, to get out--to have a happy ending. And they are left waiting.