The Ironic Twist of Fate for Tom Kromer

Tom Kromer’s novel immediately struck me as much unlike any other of the travel stories we’ve read thus far. Told from a first person point of view, Kromer puts himself in the story that doesn’t hold back at all. He is brutally honest about what he has to experience, no matter how gritty it might be, and what he must do to make it from day to day.

Most striking for me was Kromer’s complete lack of hope. Conveyed through the title, Kromer basically has nothing to live for. Being on the bum is completely about survival, not at all about quality of life. The Grapes of Wrath might have been fiction, but the people in it never actually gave up hope. The Joads were indeed waiting for something even if time and time again they were denied. Kromer basically resigned himself to living life on the fritz without the potential for anything better.

Kromer had an interesting attitude within the whole thing. After doing some brief research, I found an earlier article of his “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 an Hour Is All He Gets” that was published in 1929. For the article, he goes undercover as a bum, to write about their lives. A year later Kromer was actually a bum. He had no choice but to beg. Perhaps that is why his attitude is that of someone who is waiting for nothing. He suffered the ironic twist of fate that put him in the very position that he referred to as “deplorable begging conditions.” Another bit of irony based on his earlier work is that Kromer wrote “A man dressed in the seedy garb of a “down and outer,” possessing a sallow, hungry look, a glib tongue and a limp, needs to have no fear of the wolf howling at the door as long as he stays in Huntington.” Clearly from the accounts that he provides in Waiting for Nothing, life as a bum is not actually that simple. He cannot even manage in his hometown and consequently takes to the road.

It’s hard to imagine criticizing the life of the bum, even making light of it, and then a year later living that life for real. Such was the case of Tom Kromer though. Perhaps it was his attitude toward these people before he was one of them that forced him to have the painstakingly cynical view that he was waiting for nothing.