Here's some more social isolation reading for you. As you may know, I've spent a lot of my career working on housing and homelessness. I could write endlessly about policy and service responses (indeed, I have in other forums) but this is not the place for that. Instead, here are two books that tell great homelessness stories.
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A few years ago I read John Healy's The Grass Arena, his account of life as a homeless alcoholic in London.
This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers. It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read.
Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants. As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life. He was an angry man. As a teenager he took up boxing, feeling exhilaration when he managed to pummel and opponent and earning notice for his talent and aggression. After school he joined the army and became regimental boxing champion, but the army is not the place for a man who has issues with authority and he spent as much time in detention as boxing or doing his assigned duties. Before long he was given a dishonourable discharge and sent packing. He wound up homeless on the streets of London.
Through all this the one constant was alcohol. He began drinking at the age of 14. It relieved his pain, or so he said, but it also ruined his life. He was an angry drunk (or perhaps he was just angry no matter what) and impossible to live with, so he wound up living nowhere, or everywhere, one of the many homeless alcoholics who are a constant of the street life of London and any other city you care to name.
His description of this life forms the heart of the book, and a confronting description it is. What he describes is a series of incidents which centre around callous brutality. He and his companions would do whatever it took to get their hands on alcohol, and would get drunk. If necessary, they would steal it from one another - not by stealth, but by brute force. If there was enough to share they would drink it together, but as they got drunker all appearance of conviviality would disappear and eventually someone would be beaten up, even on occasion killed. He had companions on the street but no friends. Each of them had only one friend, alcohol, and none of them would not hesitate to knife anyone who got between them and their true love.
This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers. It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read.
Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants. As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life. He was an angry man. As a teenager he took up boxing, feeling exhilaration when he managed to pummel and opponent and earning notice for his talent and aggression. After school he joined the army and became regimental boxing champion, but the army is not the place for a man who has issues with authority and he spent as much time in detention as boxing or doing his assigned duties. Before long he was given a dishonourable discharge and sent packing. He wound up homeless on the streets of London.
Through all this the one constant was alcohol. He began drinking at the age of 14. It relieved his pain, or so he said, but it also ruined his life. He was an angry drunk (or perhaps he was just angry no matter what) and impossible to live with, so he wound up living nowhere, or everywhere, one of the many homeless alcoholics who are a constant of the street life of London and any other city you care to name.
His description of this life forms the heart of the book, and a confronting description it is. What he describes is a series of incidents which centre around callous brutality. He and his companions would do whatever it took to get their hands on alcohol, and would get drunk. If necessary, they would steal it from one another - not by stealth, but by brute force. If there was enough to share they would drink it together, but as they got drunker all appearance of conviviality would disappear and eventually someone would be beaten up, even on occasion killed. He had companions on the street but no friends. Each of them had only one friend, alcohol, and none of them would not hesitate to knife anyone who got between them and their true love.
Of course if you behave this way you are bound to end up in prison, and that is what happened to John Healy. While inside, he learned to play chess, and it changed his life. On his release, instead of returning to the streets he went to live with his mother and started practicing his new-found obsession. Although he never quite achieved his dream of becoming a Grand Master he did become one of England's leading chess players, travelling the country for tournaments and exhibitions and writing a book on chess strategies. I believe he is still alive, living sober and probably still grumpy and difficult but nonetheless alive in a Council flat somewhere in England.
This is a great book, graphically and brilliantly written, but something about it doesn't quite ring true. Not that I think Healy is a fraud, by any means. He is no Helen Demidenko, inventing a fake persona to give his fantasies an air of reality. All the indications are that he is just who he says he is, and that his life of homeless alcoholism is the real deal. Nor does his story of trauma ring false. Although he doesn't follow the classic recovery trajectory of someone like Eric Clapton, his life trajectory is highly believable for someone who suffered childhood abuse, and his story is all too familiar.
What strikes a false note here is the unremitting brutality of the account of his life on the streets, of the habitual violence, the absence of kindness and friendship, the total lack of scruple of both he and his companions. Not that there is no violence among rough-sleepers. It's all too frequent. But Healy's account is oddly one-dimensional. Anyone familiar with chronic homelessness will tell you that along with the violence is genuine friendship, loyalty and affection. One of the reasons that attempts to house people who have been sleeping on the streets for a long time are often unsuccessful is that they get lonely in their housing, and go back to where their friends are. Perhaps, in a moment of drunken rage, friends will fight fiercely and injure or even kill one another, but this is not the totality of their friendship.
Not that this should be an excuse to say, 'oh, that's alright then'. Just because it's not quite a bleak as John Healy paints it doesn't make it good. Homelessness is a blight on society, ultimately deadly to those who experience it, and totally unnecessary. COVID-19 has shown us just how easy it is to give shelter to homeless people, and with a little more persistence and a fraction of the resources governments have poured into assistance for wealthy companies and the recently unemployed, none of them would need to return to rough sleeping. My friends at Everybody's Home have a plan to end all homelessness, not just street homelessness, by 2030, all eminently doable.
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When I read The Grass Arena for the first time a couple of years ago, I immediately thought of WH Davies' The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, a copy of which I bought many years ago at some book sale or other because of the link between its title and the band Supertramp which I listened to in the 1970s. Supertramp even named a 'greatest hits' album 'Autobiography of Supertramp' as if to underline the connection for anyone who cared to dig.
Despite this later celebrity, like Healy Davies was the real deal. After growing up with his grandparents in a Welsh pub (where he learned to drink among other things) he left school under a cloud at 14 after being part of a gang of teenage thieves, and served an apprenticeship as a picture-framer which he completed but didn't enjoy. Feeling restless, he travelled to Liverpool and there took ship for the USA.
The heart of the book is his description of his five years in North America, travelling from place to place, riding the rails, begging for his living, occasionally working or living off charity. Where for Healy the homeless life was one of unremitting violence, in Davies' telling it is a long and exciting, although often hazardous, adventure. Many of the stories are genuinely funny and a lot of them may be apocryphal or at least exaggerated. For instance, one of the japes used by some beggars was to sing for their supper - they would arrive in the early evening in a reasonably well off street, stand in the middle of the road and begin to sing, in the hopes that the residents would reward them with money or food. You might think that this venture required some singing ability, but in Davies' description the opposite applies. The trick is to sing as mournfully and tunelessly as possible. If you sing well, the residents will want you to continue. If you sing awfully they will do whatever it takes to make you stop. It doesn't matter a great deal if you are pelted with foodstuffs rather than handed them, as long as they are edible.
Even Davies' exposure to prison was chalk and cheese to Healy's dreary inevitability. He explains how he and his companions would take advantage of a lurk in the penal systems of various US states under which the local sheriff would be paid an allowance for each prisoner he held in custody. On those cold winter nights prison seemed an attractive option - a warm bed, good meals, not particularly onerous incarceration, even a fair degree of freedom considering the sheriffs didn't want to scare off paying customers by making the incarceration too strict. Much of winter was spent travelling from place to place getting free accommodation in this way, until the spring made sleeping out of doors OK again.
As you can imagine, it was not a realisation that he needed to get his life in order that put an end to this merry jape. Rather, on a stint back in England, just as he and a companion were about to embark again to try their luck on the Canadian goldfields, he had a terrible accident. His foot was trapped and mangled under the wheels of a train, and as a result he had a brush with death, a long stint in hospital and his foot was amputated. This put an end to his wandering life and the book winds down with him writing poetry in front of the fire in a seedy London boarding house.
Looked at this way, homelessness is almost something you should try for yourself. Of course it makes for a merry story, and it certainly made Davies' standing as a writer and got him out of that seedy boarding house. Perhaps, indeed, it was a little easier in the 1890s US than in late 20th century London, or present day Australia, but somehow I doubt it. Going hungry, sleeping out in the cold and rain, being at risk of robbery and assault - you could survive it all as a young man, but you would be unlikely to come out unscathed - and in fact Davies did not, he ended up with a wooden prosthesis instead of a foot.
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No, dear readers, homelessness is not a jolly romp. It is hard, whether you are sleeping on the streets, couch surfing, moving from place to place or sleeping in a homeless shelter. Your physical and mental health are put under stress, you are at risk of exploitation and violence, your relationships break down and you are trapped in a cycle of poverty. Homelessness is something that should be avoided at all costs. A society that is blase about the existence of homeless people still has a way to travel down the path of humanitarianism.
Then again, neither is it as bleak as Healy would have you believe - at least, that is not the usual experience of people living through it. Homeless people, at least most of them, are not the psychopathic monsters Healy portrays. Certainly, many of them have mental illnesses which may be poorly treated, but more often than not these make them a danger to themselves. Homeless people are as complete as the rest of us - they experience and express love and care for one another as much as they fight one another, they laugh as much as they cry or shout, they are as likely to share as they are to steal. This is how people survive on the streets - that, and the hard work of various charities and many skilled professionals.
There is no reason for people to be homeless in a wealthy society. We have plenty of resources to go around. There is a vast amount of research about what works in helping people move from homelessness to a more stable, healthier life. The problem is not that we can't do it, it is that our governments and our community as a whole just doesn't see it as a priority. Why not? Search me, after 35 years in that industry I'm none the wiser.
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