Alms for Oblivion

Houston is a city of appalling wealth and squalor. For these reasons and others, it is the ugliest city I know, embodying an ugliness both aesthetic and moral. Hovels adjoin skyscrapers and beggars stand beside 10-lane highways. Most of the latter beg with the aid of cardboard signs, like those used by hitchhikers. A sign I saw Friday morning, with correct spelling but no punctuation (like much advertising copy), is typical: “Homeless Hungry God Bless.” Appeals to the guilt-triggers of piety and patriotism are common. Many beggars assert their status as Vietnam vets. They advertise sick spouses (wives, that is – I seldom see female beggars in Houston), job loss or house fires.

Later on Friday, I stopped for a red light along a freeway access road. On the corner stood a tall, middle-aged, grim-faced man holding a rectangle of cardboard reading: “I NEED A BEER. WHY LIE?” His stone face and his pitch – a postmodern parody of begging signs? – made me laugh out loud. I wonder if the deadpan humor works. Is philanthropy stimulated by wit? Or does his honesty confirm, at least to the hard-hearted, that beggars can be juicers?

Henry Mayhew, author of the four-volume London Labour and the London Poor, based on stories he wrote for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, was an anatomist of Victorian beggary and other lowlife. More than 30 years after I first read it, I remember his description of the “scaldrum dodge,” in which beggars mutilated themselves to augment the pathos of their appeal. Mayhew’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, mined his work for stories and details of life and language. Here’s a beggar Mayhew calls “An Imposter”:

“This man, who has been seventeen times apprehended by the Society‘s constables, and as many more by the police, was taken into custody for begging. He is an old man, and his age usually excites the sympathy of the public; but he is a gross impostor, and for the last fifteen years has been about the streets, imposing upon the benevolent. He has been convicted of stealing books, newspapers, and on one occasion an inkstand from a coffee house. His appeals to the benevolent in the streets are very pertinacious, and persons frequently give him money for the purpose of getting rid of him. He had, when last taken into custody, 2l. 9s. 4d. secreted about his person, part in his stockings, which he stated had been given to him to enable him to leave the country, and a variety of what he represented to be original verses.”

Here’s Mayhew’s pithy, straight-faced description of a female beggar: “A woman with twins who never grew older sat for ten years at the corner of a street.”

And here’s the words of 22-year-old man who, when not begging, worked as a birds'-nest seller:
“Mother died five years ago in the Consumption Hospital at Chelsea, just after it was built. I was very young indeed when father died; I can hardly remember him. He died in Middlesex Hospital: he had abscesses all over him; there were six-and-thirty at the time of his death....I'm a very little eater, and perhaps that's the luckiest thing for such as me; half a pound of bread and a few potatoes will do me for the day. If I could afford it, I used to get a ha'porth of coffee and a ha'porth of sugar and make it do twice. Sometimes I used to have victuals given to me, sometimes I went without altogether; and sometimes I couldn't eat. I can't always.”

Wordsworth wrote poems about beggars and so did William Butler Yeats. Here, from the 1914 collection Responsibilities, is “Beggar to Beggar Cried”:

“`Time to put off the world and go somewhere
And find my health again in the sea air,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`And make my soul before my pate is bare.’

“`And get a comfortable wife and house
To rid me of the devil in my shoes.’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`And the worse devil that is between my thighs.’

“`And though I’d marry with a comely lass,
She need not be too comely – let it pass,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
But there’s a devil in a looking-glass.’

“Nor should she be too rich, because the rich
Are driven by wealth as beggars by the itch,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`And cannot have a humorous happy speech.’

“`And there I’ll grow respected at my ease,
And hear amid the garden’s nightly peace,’
Beggar to beggar cried, being frenzy-struck,
`The wind-blown clamour of the barnacle geese.’”

Often and rather surprisingly, Yeats recalls the loquacious, goatish wretches of his younger countryman, Samuel Beckett. Christopher Ricks, in a 2000 review of Beckett's theatrical notebooks later collected in Reviewery, writes of another scholar's lecture: "It brought together two great writers: Beckett and Wordsworth. A surprise, and one that was then made good. `Resolution and Independence'; `Old Man Travelling'; `Animal Tranquility and Decay'; `Argument for Suicide'; `Beggars'; `Incipient Madness'; `The Recluse'. . . : the Wordsworthian titles speak of, and to, the lasting apprehensions of solitude, ageing, exacerbation, induration, distance, and distaste. True, there are urgent differences: Beckett is inconceivable without a sense of humor, and Wordsworth inconceivable with one."