8
Si j’ai du gout, c’est n’est guère
Que pour la terre et les pierres.
Je déjeune toujours d’air,
De roc, de charbons, de fer.
(Rimbaud, Un Saison en Enfer)1
Increasingly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, writers describe and seek deprivation as a gateway to creative insight; among these are Pushkin (‘Egyptian Nights’, 1835?), Thoreau (Walden, 1854), Tolstoy ‘Lucerne’ (1857), Rimbaud (A Season in Hell [Un Saison en Enfer], 1873), Hamsun (Hunger, 1890), Kafka (‘A Hunger Artist’ [Ein Hungerkünstler], 1922), and Orwell (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933). Like medieval monks, these writers, or characters they describe, welcome poverty – not for religious purification but for self-improvement and art’s sake. As mystics seek the poverty of outward things to reach toward a new inner wealth of divine vision, some writers seek a famishing of the senses to nourish the soul. Balzac chose to dress as a monk and live half-starved in a garret; at times he was too preoccupied with his stories to eat.2 Some, including Rimbaud and Hamsun, dispossess themselves to enter the world of the poor, they famish and disorder their senses to sharpen their creativity. Hunger, even occasional famine, still scourged many countries; yet for the most part by the early 20th century, as machines improved production and preservation, and the railway improved distribution, unavoidable shortage of food was, in theory, a thing of the past in the West. The emerging modern state was increasingly aware of the nature of poverty, its causes and possible remedies, and the potential power of the poor, through the ballot box or revolution. In these circumstances the hunger-artist was not an obscene fool but an explorer of consciousness and truth.
The modern hunger-artist has forerunners in the Hebrew Bible: Moses fasts 40 days on Mount Sinai (Deuteronomy 9: 18); Elijah does the same in the wilderness (I Kings 19: 8). The prophet Amos (8: 11) envisages a time of ‘hunger not for bread, a thirst not for water, but to hear the words of God’. The prophet Ezekiel, an aristocratic priest, is practically the patron saint of hunger-artists: he publicly starves himself, to warn that the Judeans will be starved by the Babylonians in the siege of Jerusalem (early 6th century bce).3 In the Greek Bible, Jesus follows Moses and Elijah in fasting 40 days in the wilderness (Matthew 4: 2); the loss of possessions even through intemperance can lead to virtue;4 and self-denial brings ancient and medieval ascetics, too, closer to God, often through acts of charity.5 In the Talmud, those who devote their lives to the Torah should expect privation and suffering: a diet of bread and water, and sleeping on bare ground.6 In the Middle Ages, the friars preserved the tradition of self-denial; but as Europe became richer the Church did too and, as seen in Chaucer, their ascetic vows became a standing joke.7
Motives of the modern hunger-artist are, likewise, not new. Poverty could be an escape from the social artifice and corruption bred by wealth and social convention. The poor man, even if unwillingly poor, has the advantage in the afterlife. In the Bible, wealth is linked with vice and falsehood (Job is an exception): a rich man is no more likely to get to heaven than a camel through the eye of a needle.8 To the person of faith, self-denial is heaven’s gate.
In Shakespeare, a progression of well-born characters – Duke Senior in As You Like It, Lear and Gloucester in King Lear, Prospero in The Tempest, Bellarius in Cymbeline – find inner wealth in lives of deprivation, in a forest, on a stormy heath, a deserted island, a cave. The natural world, though wild, frightening, and dangerous, is a truthful teacher, unlike the court with its artifice and vanity. Even the ‘churlish chiding’ of the winter wind, a killer to the poor, is welcome to Duke Senior:
… when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
‘This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
(II i 8–11)
King Lear on one level explores avoidable hunger. The king is blinded to the needs of his people by his wealth and power. His foolish acts and wicked daughters drag him down until he is left exposed to the thundering rain at night on the heath, and he sees then how most of his subjects suffer in winter.9 To the real poor – those with no safety net of property, breeding, or education, their bodies weak with hunger, spirits broken by suffering, faces blank with despair – there is little sweetness in adversity. Lear, stripped of possessions, speaks for the poor as they cannot, of the truth of bare existence, the need to love and care for the ‘poor bare fork’d animal’ that all are at root – an idea, though expressed in a pagan setting, close to traditional Judaeo-Christianity. What Shakespeare’s first penny-paying audiences might have felt on seeing their lives articulated in this way, joined as perhaps only the Bible joined the poor to the human race, remembering the hunger in recent famines, fearful of the future – one can only imagine.
Together with the emergence of literary hunger-artists in the 19th century, there were parliamentary investigators into industrial conditions, leading to the ‘Blue Books’ – reports which were used to decide on policy – as well as writers such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, whose observations of the poor entered their works. Hunger-artists go further: they do not just observe and record but enter the lives of the poor and try to live like them. Though they often rebel against the Judaeo-Christian world into which they were born, they conform to the reformist radicalism of their abandoned religious traditions. Writers such as Pushkin, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Flaubert follow the Bible when they write of the poor as more in touch with reality than the rich. Thoreau’s conclusion after living for two years in a hut he built in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s was that money was not needed to buy a single necessity of the soul.
To many Americans, with their frontier mentality, ruggedly individualistic, poverty was to some extent a matter of choice – the log-cabin, the simple life, the puritan outlook, expected trials of isolation, danger, and privation. To Lincoln in particular, the American president most deeply immersed in the Bible and its language, the log-cabin was a political destiny.
By the mid-19th century, as advanced industrialized states were increasingly able to conquer poverty, writers no longer saw chronic hunger exclusively as an involuntary symptom of poverty but as an increasingly complex symbol. In Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), the young aristocrat Marius Pontmercy chooses poverty. Marius, raised in Paris by his wealthy royalist grandfather, worships his father, a distinguished soldier who fought at Waterloo, whom he has never known. He abandons his life of comfort on principle: by rejecting his royalist grandfather and choosing a life of struggle he emulates his father, ‘by facing the trials of poverty as bravely as his father had faced the enemy’.10 Those born poor – Jean Valjean, Fantine, and Cossette, who most deserve the name les misérables – have no choice: poverty is a life-threatening trap to be escaped, if possible.
Among some 19th-century writers – Nerval and Rimbaud, for example – poverty is a lifestyle or drug consciously used to heighten insight by disordering the senses. The expansion of the press opened further possibilities of identification with the poor. From the 1860s, newspaper reporters dressed like tramps and lived among the poor, in search of sensational stories. Knut Hamsun’s Norwegian novel Hunger (1890), set in Christiana (Oslo) in the late 19th century, is a landmark in the depiction of voluntary hunger. Later writers, including Kafka and Hemingway, followed Hamsun in seeing hunger as a nourishment of art; and Orwell chose to live as hungry tramp in order to understand the life of the poor.11
Poverty and authenticity
The hunger-artist is distinguished from the genuinely poor artist in having a choice of lifestyle. John Clare and Taras Shevchenko, to take prominent examples of peasant-born poets, had no choice in their impoverished origins. They were rescued by admiring patrons, as George Crabbe was by Edmund Burke, or W.H. Davies (the ‘Super-Tramp’) by Bernard Shaw. In Russia, the social standing of writers, mostly well-born and aristocrats, contrasts with the poor who appear increasingly in their writings. Poverty as a stimulant or accompaniment of art, a mark of spiritual wealth, is a theme in Pushkin’s unfinished story, ‘Egyptian Nights’ (1835?), and in Tolstoy’s story, ‘Lucerne’ (1857). Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment (1865) and The Idiot (1868–9) and Flaubert in ‘The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator’ (1877) assert the traditional links between poverty and Christ-like goodness and self-sacrifice and the supreme value of individual acts of charity.
Pushkin, in ‘Egyptian Nights’, tells of an itinerant Italian artist in frayed cravat and worn frock coat who appears to the wealthy, arrogant Charskii, a poet and dilettante who, ashamed of his arrogance, arranges an evening recital in a palace to help him out. The Italian, inspired by the kindness, improvises a poem on the spot, astonishing and transporting Charskii who shares the belief that although the poet is practically a beggar, as an artist of genius he is an aristocrat. Another anonymous hunger-artist appears in Tolstoy’s ‘Lucerne’, a story of a poor, hungry, itinerant street singer. To the well-to-do narrator, the singer is an artistic double, more genuine and successful than himself. ‘Lucerne’ is set in a magnificent Swiss hotel, whose opulence, again, contrasts with the singer’s poverty. Even so, his singing fits the beauty of the moment, and his audience listens, mesmerized – but no one drops a coin into his hat. The narrator, insulted, invites the singer for champagne in the hotel restaurant, under the disapproving gaze of the waiters. The narrator is furious at the hotel, where no one values the hungry artist. Yet, in the end, hearing once more in the distance the man’s gay singing, he senses no reproach, no malice or regret in the song; rather, a part of the eternal infinite divine flow and harmony of life – the wisdom to which Tolstoy returned in War and Peace.
Poverty is elevated, too, in Flaubert’s ‘The Legend of St. Julian Hospitator’ (1878): a bloodthirsty prince, scourge of all living creatures, ends by unwittingly murdering his own parents. In horror at his crime, he abandons his life of comfort and violence for monk-like poverty, isolation, and good deeds, culminating in the act of warming a dying leper with his own body. His self-denial is a model for the self-discipline of the artist, who in perfecting his art must pare away all that is inessential.
The quest for hunger: from Rimbaud to Orwell
Some artists seek in a life of hunger and self-denial the path not to saintliness and redemption but to creative insight. In his ‘Lettre du Voyant’ of May 15, 1871 to Paul Demeney, the 18-year-old Rimbaud lays out the aesthetic underpinning of his later poetry, including A Season in Hell (1873). He welcomes psychological turmoil, derangement of the senses, and physical hardship, in order to reach a transcendent, visionary state, that of the voyant.
In A Season in Hell, Rimbaud compares this sensory disorder to hunger, the objects of the world being food of spiritual consumption. Rimbaud’s imagery of hunger occasionally recalls the Christian ascetic tradition and suggests on one level an identification with the poor, but with the implication of emotional rather than physical poverty.
My taste, if such, is for earth and stone –
not much more. I live on air,
on rock, on iron, on coal, alone.
Hunger turn, hunger graze in fields of sounds.
From cups of morning-glory
swallow poison down.
Crushed flintstones too, church stones old,
cobbles swept from ancient floods,
scattered in valleys gray and cold.
Hamsun, in Hunger, follows Rimbaud in elevating the derangement of the senses in a quest for illumination. Hunger came at the end of a decade of deprivation (c. 1880–90), when Hamsun worked at many odd jobs in Norway and the United States: on roads, in lumber camps, as a streetcar conductor, agricultural laborer, and auctioneer. This was also a time of hardship in Norway, when hundreds of thousands emigrated, mostly for North America. There were times when Hamsun literally starved, he recalled in 1888: ‘A few times I was completely finished. I had pawned everything I possessed, I didn’t eat for four days at a stretch and sat here chewing on spent matchsticks.’12 At 25, Hamsun was diagnosed with tuberculosis but recovered. Hamsun’s memory of hunger seems not to have left him with a desire to fight hunger, in Norway or elsewhere. Thirty years later, on being awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun remarked that he would use the money to improve his garden: at this time, tens of thousands were starving in postwar Europe. There is a willed element in the deprivation the anonymous narrator of Hunger seeks: ‘he knows he has the strength to withdraw from the game before it claims him’.13 He seems not so much unable as unwilling to act. He values the experience of his predicament, his hunger, cold, isolation, more than release from it. He is not so much interested in the poor as in himself.
Hamsun, born on an isolated farm in the north of Norway, had little formal schooling. The character in Hunger is similarly alone, though surrounded by people, his isolation underlined by being unnamed; though once in jest he calls himself ‘Wedel-Jarlsberg’ – reportedly the only Norwegian nobleman who survived the Black Death – and perhaps he regards himself, despite his self-harm, as a survivor. Hunger in the novel has different meanings for different people, as people starve in different ways; but for the artist hunger can give creative insight. The narrator’s hunger is emotional as well as physical; he hungers for love, for recognition; and his hunger to create seems to feed on physical hunger: he chooses destitution for his art. His contact with people is full of lies and imaginative deceptions. Hunger becomes a metaphor for life’s cruelty. The narrator lives in one room, like a badly made coffin. His circumstances are a cluster of negatives: no family, no food, no work, no stove, no decent clothes, no money for rent, no comb, no books, and his sight is so poor that he is turned down for a job in the fire department. He lives mainly on bread and butter and is frequently driven by want to pawnshops. When he has food his suffering makes him forget to eat. In contrast with some of the impoverished characters in Dostoyevsky and Flaubert, he accuses God; he plans a one-act play, ‘The Sign of the Cross’, in which a prostitute sins in the Temple out of hatred for God. He feels his failure as a writer, aimlessly wandering the streets of Christiana, immersed in self-pity, feeling himself victim of a terrible injustice. He is painfully sensitive to slights: when a young woman takes him to her room, and they confess to one another how poor they are, he takes her hand, and his visible dejection when she withdraws it leads her to observe that ‘A person can bring you down with just a tiny wrinkle in the forehead, demolish you just by moving away a few inches’.14
The world of Hunger is not totally bleak. The artist experiences hunger almost as an hallucinogen, to sharpen, not deaden, pain and humiliation, which work on the imagination, heightening perception of detail and the determination to extract the most from experience: ‘His senses are sharp, he is a man of feeling, he has experienced painful things, his soul has been burned and scarred.’15
Hunger had much influence on later writers, including Kafka, Hemingway, Orwell, and Jack London. In 1902, London dressed as a tramp and went to live among the poor in the East End of London, to learn what it was like to be poor. The city then was the heart of the richest and most powerful empire the world had ever seen; yet in London an estimated one in four adults was destined to die on public charity, in the workhouse, the infirmary, or asylum. Rich and poor lived in close proximity and constantly passed one another in the streets. In The People of the Abyss (1903), London attacks the criminal mismanagement which led to large numbers of people starved and overcrowded, neglected and diseased, humiliated and degraded. Stone age conditions were better than those of the early 20th-century poor. Several years later, W.H. Davies published Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908) and poetry describing years of living as a tramp in America and England. In the poem, ‘The Sleepers’, dozens of homeless ragged men and women sleep next to Parliament beneath the arches at Westminster Bridge: ‘These people have no work, thought I,/ And long before their time they die.’ But it is no better for those who do find work: ‘These people work too hard, thought I/ And long before their time they die.’16 Davies, one of these sleepers, was fortunate: recognition of his work by leading writers such as George Bernard Shaw rescued him from the abyss.
On the Continent, writers were similarly aware of the narrow boundary between respectability and poverty – and of the artistic value of skirting the abyss. Kafka in The Trial, written mostly in 1914, gives a picture of inequality in the early 20th-century European city. Josef K. works as chief financial officer of a bank, with a large office overlooking the city square, in a world of relative comfort, privilege and luxury, of cars, telephones, cabarets, attractive women, and invitations to exclusive parties and yachts. After he is arrested, his efforts to discover the cause take him to the world of the poor, whose entire life is a trial: slums in narrow filthy streets, overcrowded, with water provided by pumps in courtyards, rats in the sewers, windows piled high with bedding, women doing housework with babies on one arm, children ‘with the pinched faces of grown tramps’.17
In Kafka’s ‘A Hunger Artist’ (1922), the abyss becomes art. A hunger-artist, unnamed as in Hamsun’s Hunger, chooses hunger as a profession and a way of life.18 He fasts in a cage with only a clock as furniture. People buy season tickets to watch him. He provides them with pocket torches to watch him by night and a hearty breakfast in the morning. He is offended at the continual suspicion of his rigor and continuity. He resents being allowed by his manager to fast only 40 days – is this a mocking allusion to Moses and Jesus? – as interest naturally slackens after the fasting period ends. As a true artist, he wants to go further, and is infuriated at having to stop: ‘His public pretended to admire him so much, why should it have so little patience with him; if he could endure fasting longer, why shouldn’t the public endure it?’19 He insists that his exhaustion at the end of a fast is caused not by hunger but by the premature end of the fast. As times change, fasting ceases to be an attraction. The artist joins a circus, and fasts in a cage by the animal cages. People throng past his cage to see the animals. In the end, sunken in straw, he is forgotten. One day his cage is cleaned out and the overseer finds him. Dying, he confesses his profession of artistic volition as a psychological need. ‘Forgive me’, the hunger-artist whispers, ‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting … But you shouldn’t admire it … Because I have to fast, I can’t do anything else … because I couldn’t find any food I liked [weil ich nicht die Speise finden konnte, die mir schmeckt]’.20
Poverty is a condiment to creativity in Hemingway’s autobiographical A Movable Feast (1964), set in Paris in the early 1920s. Hemingway tells how he gave up journalism in Canada to come with wife and child to Paris to be a writer. Though inflation favored the American dollar, he was at first ‘truly poor’, even hungry at times. Paintings in the museums seemed more beautiful when viewed on an empty stomach. Yet, Hemingway was middle class (his father was a doctor), and his letters from the early 1920s do not corroborate the picture of the starving artist; also, even A Moveable Feast makes clear, his vocation as a struggling writer did not exclude good food and wine, gambling, and holidays in Spain, Italy and the Swiss Alps, and Schruns in the Voralberg in Austria.21 Hemingway is remembered less as a liberator of the poor than as ‘liberator’ of the Ritz bar in Paris, in 1944.
Orwell: the disgrace of poverty in Paris and London, 1929
Like other middle-class artists, George Orwell (1903–50) sought poverty to experience what it is like to be poor, to speak with greater insight, authority, and outrage of the need for change: ‘Poverty is what I am writing about’, he states baldly in the opening of Down and Out in Paris and London (completed by the end of 1930, but not published until 1933), and that meant immersing himself in the filth, the hunger, and humiliation of the poorest in society. Born in India to a middle-class family, Orwell was sent to Eton, after which he was a policeman in Burma for five years. Burma roused his sympathy for the working classes, for whom in England he had felt snobbery and contempt. He set out to be a writer by sinking himself in the life of the English poor and destitute, which he describes in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937: ch. 10) as ‘a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy - perhaps the nearest thing to a democracy that exists in England’. Orwell the old Etonian was aware, and somewhat ashamed, that despite improvements in the life of the English working classes, he and his class were privileged. His height alone – Orwell was over six feet tall – was a reminder of his advantages: boys of 11 and 12 in industrial schools were on average five inches shorter than their public-school counterparts.22
For several months in 1929 – the year in which the New Poor Law of 1834 ended, and responsibility for the poor was transferred from parishes to county and county borough councils – Orwell lived as a tramp in Paris and London, gathering material for Down and Out in Paris and London.23 As a plongeur in a Paris hotel or a London tramp, Orwell lived his role to the full, eating, sleeping, working, and tramping with the very poor, who seem, in his account, to have largely accepted him as a posh Englishman down on his luck. His fanatical craving to live his part as a down-and-out ruined his health and contributed in bringing on the tuberculosis which eventually killed him. In Paris, Orwell experienced the weakness and mindless inertia of hunger after he was robbed of his savings. A friend helped him to find work in a hotel, poorly paid and exhausting, but enough to survive from day to day. Slaving in a filthy, crowded kitchen from dawn to late at night, he would collapse in his bug-infested bed, waking to drag himself back to work again. His respite came on Saturday night when, like everyone else, he got drunk.
Viewed in a broad historical perspective, Orwell’s exposé of interwar poverty and the poor can mislead. From the mid-Victorian era the most extreme forms of poverty, hunger above all, could be eradicated; the standard of living was significantly higher, and there was a much better social safety net than in the past; the 1914–18 war had stimulated a huge increase in trade union membership, which in England reached eight million by 1919.24 Orwell alludes to these improvements in The Road to Wigan Pier but is outraged by the injustices that remained, the privation and misery that still defined the lives of many poor people, even and especially in the wealthiest countries. For many, the hope aroused by the benefits of industry and capitalism was largely unrealized by Orwell’s time. Orwell wrote that in post-World War I conditions, only socialists and idealists envisaged a world without poverty.25 In the world of Down and Out in Paris and London, hunger is general, the chief diet being bread and margarine: ‘nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition’. In one workhouse, the tramps strip naked for a medical inspection for smallpox, and Orwell sees that ‘nearly everyone was undernourished’.26 They are demoralized and emotionally starved. Dressed as a tramp, Orwell sees that women are as repulsed by him as by a dead cat. The poverty of the down-and-out is often regarded as their own fault.27 Orwell immerses himself in a world of squalor and boredom, hardly better than in Crabbe’s time:28 with filthy, bug-infested, putrid sheets, grimy basins, constant noise; separation of families; bullying officials, the invariable presence of the disease-ridden and the deformed; enforced idleness, particularly the confinement of tramps indoors on Sundays; the policy of forcing tramps to be constantly on the move, for it is prohibited to enter a lodging-house more than once a month; confiscation of money and tobacco, and the vulnerability to theft and to being cheated: pawnbrokers rarely give tramps a proper price for their belongings; shopkeepers cheat them of the full value of their meal tickets; and they are constantly humiliated, especially by missionary charities such as the Salvation Army with its military discipline, its shelters with signs, ‘The Lord will provide’, and the sense of entitlement to preach to people if they have no money.29
* * * *
It may be that hunger-artists such as Hamsun and Orwell became possible only after the West learned to conquer extreme poverty: ‘Before we can feel much for others’, writes Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (V ii 9), ‘we must in some measure be at ease ourselves’. Orwell stands out among such writers in that his social concerns are stronger than artistic ambition. He set out to live as the poor lived and describe their world truthfully with the aim of changing their lives for the better. Hamsun, in contrast, does not seek to improve the lives of the poor, but it is not clear either if the artistic ambitions of his narrator predominate: at times, his critical faculties and ability to write are damaged by hunger and deprivation. Orwell’s writing on poverty is driven by his socialist beliefs and the sense of responsibility the better-off should have toward the poor. Yet, even the more aesthetic hunger-artist of Hamsun or Kafka forces the viewer to consider social inequity and how to alleviate hunger. Hunger on a stage, based as it is on real hunger in places such as Oslo, Prague, or London, is not necessarily diminished, but as performance – at times, not unlike the biblical prophets and later religious visionaries and leaders who dramatize their messsage – can express great moral force, leading to action and social change.
Notes
1 For a translation, see p. 177.
2 Robb (1994: 71).
3 On the modern use of starvation for political purposes, see Ellmann (1993). It is not by bread alone that humans live but by the gaze of others (ibid., 17), a view of existence with greater credence in prosperity than in dire need. The ‘art’ of public fasting became a popular attraction in the late 19th century but fell out of fashion by World War I (Mitchell 1987).
4 In Luke (ch. 15) the prodigal son who returns to his father after losing everything on whoring and gambling is beloved. His deprivation, self-inflicted and avoidable though it is, nevertheless brings him home.
5 In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton cites the examples of the Athenian nobleman, Crates Thebanus, who throws his possessions into the sea and renounces his estate.
6 Avot (6: 4). On the monastic view of Torah study in the context of talmudic views of poverty and wealth, see Aberbach (2018: 78).
7 On the increase in European wealth in the Middle Ages, see p. 45f. On Chaucer’s friar, see p. 44.
8 See Matthew (19: 24). On the biblical attitude to poverty and wealth, see p. 29ff.
9 On King Lear, see pp. 69–70.
10 Hugo (1983: 590).
11 On Kafka, Hemingway, and Orwell, see later in this chapter. There is a touch of the ‘hunger-artist’ in the young Karl Marx, who hoped first to be a poet. Marx’s years of poverty after arriving in London in 1849 were largely self-inflicted: both he and his wife came from wealthy families. Marx for many years chose a life of poverty partly out of principle. Wealth would have lessened his authority as a socialist. Poverty was a means of gaining insight into the lives of the poor. Even in direst poverty, though, Marx was true to his bourgeois roots: he never sought a job, and his wealthy factory-owning friend, Engels, provided timely handouts.
12 Hamsun (1990: 76).
13 Ferguson (1987: 111). A precursor of Hamsun is Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment (1865), in which the degree of poverty to which the student Raskolnikov has fallen appears to be partly a matter of choice. Nastasya, the maid of Raskolnikov’s landlady, asks him, ‘Why does a clever man like you lie about like a sack of coals, of no use to himself or anybody else?’ (Dostoyevsky 1966: 46). From a practical point of view, he could get work as a tutor or translator, but his distressed emotional state keeps him in rags, indebted and hungry.
14 Hamsun (1990: 175).
15 Ibid., 181.
16 Davies (1911: 84, 85).
17 Kafka (1998: 40). The opening chapter of Kafka’s The Castle, similarly, has a sympathetic portrait of an overcrowded peasant family encountered by Joseph K., the mother, evidently worn out and sick, suckling a baby and surrounded by children and washing.
18 False beggars, too, can sometimes be described, or style themselves, as ‘performers’ or ‘artists’, using costumes, make-up and props, as in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891) and Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), based on John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Peachum, ‘The Beggar’s Friend’ in The Threepenny Opera, began his business as manager of counterfeit beggars with the realization that beggars who are truly blind or crippled do not elicit as much money as a good act. On false beggars, see Index, ‘the poor: fakes’.
19 Kafka (1978: 168).
20 Ibid., 173–4. Post-1945 fiction on poverty in the Third World, including Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. (1974) and Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions (1988), also occasionally depicts hunger as a symbol of protest. See Appendix, pp. 221–4. Coetzee’s novel was inspired partly by Kafka (Ellmann 1993: 108–10). Michael K., like Kafka’s fasting showman, claims to fast as he has not found food he liked.
21 The Russian writer, Sergei Dovlatov, in his satiric stories on life in Soviet Russia, The Suitcase, suggests wryly and wrongly that Hemingway discovered only after he became rich the value of poverty to him as a writer. More genuinely dedicated to self-denial than Hemingway was his older contemporary and fellow World War I veteran (on different fronts), T.E. Lawrence. In writing his account of the Arab Revolt during World War I, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), Lawrence sought creativity through self-mortification: he ‘believed that his creative power was intensified by hunger and lack of sleep’ (Wilson 1989: 628).
22 On comparative heights of the classes, see Hobsbawm (1969: 164). John Clare, the peasant poet, was five foot tall, over a foot shorter than Orwell.
23 On legislation pertaining to the poor in Orwell’s time, see Lees (1998: 330ff.).
24 See Boyer (2004: 312, 313) and Eichengreen (2004: 321).
25 See Orwell (1970: i 36–43). The socialist historian, R.H. Tawney, in a study of equality dating from the time Orwell wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), observes that in England 1% of the population owned two-thirds of the country’s wealth; and that three-quarters of the population had less than 100 pounds at death (Tawney 1994: 13). English society was a pyramid whose hierarchical tiers were formed by class, not ability (ibid., 67).
26 In Down and Out in Paris and London, chs. 27 and 36. In ‘How the Poor Die’ (1946), Orwell recalls being treated in a hospital for the poor in Paris in the late 1920s, hardly better than a pre-1800 hospital, a place of filth, torture, and death.
27 Though Orwell accepts that most of the tramps he encountered were genuinely in need, he adds in ch. 31 a contribution to a long-standing tradition in English literature of describing fraudulence among the poor (see Hitchcock 2004).
28 On Crabbe’s portrayal of the workhouse in the late 18th century, see pp. 84–5. Despite improvements in conditions, diet, and health care, the early 20th-century workhouse remained a place of hardship and misery.
29 Orwell’s objections to the humiliation of Salvation Army charity recall similar criticisms by W.H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908: ch. 21), Jack London in The People of the Abyss (1903), Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906: ch. 23), Bernard Shaw in Major Barbara (1907), and Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939: ch. 22).