homelessness: tragedy or just a breather?

I have, finally, finished Down to This. Let me start out by saying it is really a great read, well written given the circumstances and a look at the world that will change your outlook as you walk down the street. Really.

In Lindsay's post on the novel she said she had a lot of questions. So here we go: "Stall, being a well educated middle class person just accepts his life in Tent City and goes about his way." Discuss.

I have a deep distrust of autobiographies for just this reason. Very few people are entirely honest, everyone makes decisions about what is relevant, no-one wants to look as bad, addicted, hopeless or culpable as they actually are. There's probably some brilliant mathematician somewhere who could develop an algorithm to detect the percentage of truth in any given autobiography based on the author's background, predilictions and the book's subject matter. But all of that aside.

I got the impression from Stall's book that he was pretty much down and out when he made his date with Tent City. He was always a bit of a wanderer having travelled around Mexico, Italy and other places. Although he was a writer you don't get the impression that at 27 years old he'd ever held a steady job. In the course of the novel you learn that he rarely saw his parents. He was addicted to cocaine. He had just suffered a horrific break-up and been forced to move out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend.

Sure, he had a few hundred dollars lying around probably, sure, he could have called his parents or friends. He could have hibernated for a week or so and come out having faced his demons and ready to solve the problems of another day. But mentally he didn't have it in him. His life may still have had a full tank of petrol but mentally he'd cracked a cylinder and his gearbox was stuffed. Technically his life could still go, but it wasn't going far.

So he went to Tent City with it. He told a story about it that was selective. He acknowledges it. He says that he's not been totally honest, that he didn't want to write about people until they did something to direct the course of the plot. Sure, he got sick, drink addled, mentally damaged while he was there. However, halfway through his time in Tent City he was signed up with a publisher for the book. That isn't a man full of desperation, that isn't a man like the others in Tent City, abused, imprisoned, hopeless. That is an author. No matter where you are or what your circumstances if you know why you're doing this and you know when it will end it's going to be easier. Not to say that it was easy for Stall. But when Tent City folded he had a book deal, not a crack addiction.

The book is fascinating in that it tries to pinpoint why people end up that way. Was it the desperation that led to Tent City or was it Tent City that led to the desperation? Stall decides it was the latter - after it folded half the former residents were moving up in the world after six months. He ignores the irony that he himself is proof of the opposite - he wouldn't have ventured into Tent City if he hadn't had nothing to lose. Whether he'd admit it to us or not.

Brideshead Revisited (Kate's take)

"I'm not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me. If they once get hold of you with their charm they'd make you their friend, not mine and I won't let them."

So Sebastian Flyte tells the protagonist Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Of course it's Sebastian who's the charming one. Looking and sounding as though he's drifted in from an E.M Forster novel Sebastian is a bloody delight to read and he dominates the landscape of the book in its first half, seducing Charles (though probably not like that) and the reader with charm and booze and food and more booze.

In the preface for a reprinting of the novel Waugh said"

"It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the
period of soya beans and basic English - and in consequence the book
is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the
recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full
stomach, I find distasteful."

He has a point - it is a little bit like the literary equivalent of a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a lobster. In this I thought it was a big departure from the clipped efficiency of the wonderful A Handful of Dust or the comic stylings of Scoop but Waugh's style is so good and his ability to switch between spot-on humour and pathos that I found it completely charming and engaging.

And then we reach the second half.

Well. I don't want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it because, despite my mixed feelings, I think it is incredibly well written and very much worth reading, but the book does change - a lot - in its second half as Waugh slowly takes Sebastian apart and refocuses the novel on Charles and a new (female) love interest. I think perhaps it would have worked better if Waugh was as good at writing sympathetic women as he is men but I do not think he is. However good he is at writing bitches I've never warmed to a female character in a Waugh novel and Brideshead wasn't the one to make me start.

All that said the book is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, incredibly beautifully written and quite fascinating in its way.

Next on the list: Decline and Fall, which should round out my Waugh education fairly decently for now.

Brideshead once visited...

I once told someone I enjoyed the prose of Evelyn Waugh. He turned to me and said "Urgh, how can you? How can you like anyone who can do that to his characters?".
And the primary evidence in the trial of Evelyn Waugh was Sebastian Flyte: The brilliant teddy bear-carrying academe and bon vivant who is perhaps one of the greatest characterisations ever written.
A character Waugh slowly and maliciously turns into a sun-seeking invalid and booze-soaked lay-about.
The descent of the character is absolute. He is the creation that keeps you reading, initially, because he is so entertaining. Somehow, despite the entire tome descenting into a celebration of mediocre success, middle-aged vanity and upper-class immorality, it is still Sebastian who keeps us reading, despite the soul of his character being evicerated by his creator. Flyte becomes a shadow - both in character and in motif. Hope of his resurrection keeps you reading, long after all hope is lost.
Waugh gives all the sentimentality to setting and scene and saves none for his characters, prefering to torture them - and the reader - slowly.
This I could handle but the hero is DULL. Everyone is soooo dull. I recognise that Waugh was trying to show-up the flaws, hypocrisy, immorality and deficiencies of the upper classes but he could at least have given us SOMEONE to put our faith in.
So anyway... I read the book ages ago and seeing as Kate has just read it too, I wanted to put this out here in the hopes some of you other peeps might have something to say as well.