(I realized too late that the text of Davids Revelation about Tom Kromer did not get posted last time I shared the Revelator link. Here it is, complete) A Revelation from David A. Beronä: Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer. As far back as I can remember, I have enjoyed reading diaries, journals, and autobiographies and have sought distinct works that expose lifestyles that encourage me to discover a different way of viewing the world. Some early autobiographies that expanded my world were by Henry Miller, Ned Rorem, Vaslav Nijinsky, Charles Bukowski, Alexander Trocchi, David Wojnarowicz, and Tom Kromer It is Waiting for Nothing, the only book published by the American Tom Kromer (1906-1969), that I found especially disturbing when I discovered it in my mid-20s. It is a book that I have returned to every few years for its unapologetic honesty and truth. It was first published in 1935 by Alfred A. Knopf, reissued by Hill & Wang in 1968, and reprinted as Waiting for Nothing and Other Writings in 1986 by University of Georgia Press. Although much has been written about the American Depression, few books match the scathing depiction of squalor in the amazingly simple style presented by Kromer. Ironically, the book closest to the spirit of Kromer’s text is Lynd Ward’s monumental wordless graphic novel Vertigo, published in 1937. Both books singularly captured the desperation in the lives of men and women during this era. In the preface to the Hill & Wang edition, Kromer wrote: “Sometimes I would stay in a town for four or five months doing odd jobs for a room and something to eat. Most of the time I slept and ate in missions, dinged the streets and houses, and used every other racket known to stiffs to get by. I had no idea of getting Waiting for Nothing published, therefore, I wrote it just as I felt it, and used the language that stiffs use even when it wasn’t always the nicest language in the world. Parts of the book were scrawled on Bull Durham papers in box cars, margins of religious tracts in a hundred missions, jails, one prison, railroad sand-houses, flop-houses, and on a few memorable occasions actually pecked out with my two index fingers on an honest-to-God typewriter.” Kromer’s autobiography is an account of a homeless man moving from one place to another in the hope of finding work. It is told using vernacular of the streets from the 1930s in a striking realistic style of effective short sentences that jab us with disturbing truths. Kromer displays the hopelessness on the streets that changes the lives of men and women who no longer “know what is right or what is wrong.” In a series of short chapters, Kromer exposes disturbing evidence of our inhumanity with tender moments of redemption and was an important book in my life that revealed the need of compassion for others. (Read David A. Beronäs piece on the brilliant woodcut artist Frans Masereel in the latest issue of THE REVELATOR.)
Posted on: Sun, 11 May 2014 23:07:05 +0000
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