Top 10 Literary Bums

That writing is almost exclusively by and for the middle-classes is evidenced by the glee with which journalists pore over JK Rowling’s early life. Here is this poor single mother saved from her dreadful life by that behemoth Potter. No comment that this life is actually real life for a large number of people where bills loom like ships coming out of the fog and who have little of no chance of ever owning that Woolfian dream of a room of their own.
(1) Jack Kerouac is perhaps the most famous writer who describes life on the other side of the breadline. ‘On The Road’, is a post-archetypal journey, west across fifties America. This frontier was a bum one, living by the seat of your pants. There is a certain freedom to it; no job, no money. The woman, and the men. Kerouac was, after all, the sometime lover of Neal Cassady, his travelling companion.

Kerouac, along with his fellow beats, Burroughs, Ginsberg, while may be the first to document this new America was only playing at being a bum. Safely middle-class he had his mother’s to return to where he could type out his experiments knowing that three square meals a day would be provided. Along with the alcohol that eventually killed him.

(2) Charles Bukowski was disdainful of the beats, with which he was clumped. Appearing at a reading with Burroughs, they resolutely ignored each other. The life of a bum was Bukowski’s life, the drink, the dead-end jobs. It was no pose, although he himself became something of a cause célèbre.

‘Post Office’, his first novel, an autobiographical account of his off and on life as a postal worker, was a document of this experience. Written in just a few weeks, it went on to sell millions.

Bolstered by this, Bukowski exerted his influence, or the moolah did, publishing never being one to miss a beat. His own hero at the time was out of print. Bukowski says he discovered John Fante in his local library and it was reading him that made him want to write, or made he realise what writing could be about.

(3) Fante’s three early novels ‘The Road to Los Angeles’, ‘Wait Until Spring, Bandini’ and ‘Ask the Dust’ tell the story of Arturo Bandini, living in depression era Los Angeles, trying to make it as a writer, living in flop-houses, hungry and aching for love. This is the American dream for what it is for many; just a dream.

(4) As dreams are passed from father to son, Fante’s son Dan also became a writer. He also inherited the love of alcohol, the dislocation. His first three novels ‘Mooch’, ‘Chump Change’ and ‘Spitting off Tall Buildings’, are thinly disguised autobiography. They tell the story of his own alcoholism, living on the fringes of American society, not working, or working as a cab driver, a window cleaner, telesales, one step from drink, drugs, madness.

But why read of such things? Is it as William Boyd says, reading as empathy? For me I read to find myself, and to escape myself. Find myself in people who have no hope, no future. Escape myself in history, adventure, drama.

(5) George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ I first read because at the time my dad was living the life of a bum. It was something to aspire to.

“Don’t ever get a mortgage,” he said, as if this was something I could ever aspire to. Instead I was cursed with his love of books.

For all these writers (6) Rimbaud was something of a template. He is the archetypal artist as outsider. As a teenager he wrote brilliant poetry and was transported by Verlaine to 19th century French society which he duly scandal by such antics as wiping his arse with another poet’s poems and becoming the lover of Verlaine. They moved to England where they lived in poverty, writing in the British Museum because heating and lighting were free.

Rimbaud eventually grew up and became something of a gun merchant in Ethiopia. Perhaps it should be time for me to get my application in to Haliburton. If only I didn’t have the pacifism of a Methodist.

Better be like (7) Genet; beautiful prose, sordid life. If you want sex, and prostitutes and prisons then Genet is your man. Start with ‘The Thief’s Journal’. He eschewed personal property and lived his life out of a suitcase. He was engagé at least – pro-Palestinian, supporter of the Black Panthers, and later of the gay rights movement. He was both a bum and believed in something.

(8) Raul Nunez’s Antonio (from ‘The Lonely Heart’s Club’) and (9) Willy Vlautin’s Frank Flannigan (‘The Motel Life’) are looking for love. The former lives in a sleazy Barcelona hotel dumped by his wife. He mixes with low-life, drug addicts in his search for someone special.

Flannigan inhabits motels, one after another, dreaming of his girlfriend, forced to turn tricks by her mother and his brother who killed a kid. Their existence moves ever downwards. No future.

If capitalism works it is because it is self-perpetuating, an endlessly recreating myth.

(10) William Boyd would have it that his life is out there for all of us, not wealth, but its obverse. Life, he posits, is precarious. Adam Kindred the hero of his latest novel, ‘Ordinary Thunderstorms’, loses everything, and descends into a London’s underworld of bums and drifters.
This is the riches to rags story of our recession age. A cautionary tale, perhaps, for the haves. They are, after all, the people who read.

Drew Gummerson’s first novel ‘The Lodger’ was published in 2002. It was a finalist in the Lambda Awards in the States. Drew’s latest book ‘Me and Mickie James’ was published by Jonathan Cape in July 2008. Drew is also an award winning short story writer, his short fiction being widely published and featured on Radio 4.

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