The Tale of the Tramp

‘What you fucking looking at cunt?’

‘What you fucking reading, cunt?’

Not that it was any of his business but I was flicking through the introduction to The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, sitting outside a Bloomsbury café in sunshine made more glorious by its rarity.*

I’d risen early, come into town on the train and done a little browsing about the bookshops and stalls around the Brunswick Centre and Lamb’s Conduit Street.  It had been a very trying week at work, in close succession to several other very trying weeks at work and now as I settled down with a coffee and a pastry to pore over my purchases this tramp had started, first of all in general upon the customers of the café and then, more specifically, and for no particular reason that I could see, upon me.

The first rule of starting upon people has to be to be harder than they are.  The tramp had made a serious miscalculation in this respect.  I don’t know how old he might have been – tramping almost certainly takes it out of you – perhaps about 50, not much above five feet tall, slightly built, distinctly grubby and limping along with a walking stick.  Hardly hard.

As I say, I had been having something of a time of it at work, suffering the slings and arrows of the edicts, whims and opinions of those far above my pay-grade and being obliged, in order not to further diminish my career-prospects, to restrict myself to silence or, at best, very guarded and diplomatic responses.  Such a state of affairs can lead to the build up of a deep dark reservoir of angst, which only needs a little provocation to bring about a breach in the dam allowing it all to come flooding out at once.

‘Don’t you fucking start on me!  D’you want me to come and kick your fucking stick away?’^#

I was half out of my seat before I realised it, ready to give this bastard the pasting that he was asking for. 

It was just as well that the tramp backed away snarling before shuffling off down the street.  He was a nasty man and thoroughly deserving of the tongue-lashing that I gave him but it could have been unfortunate had matters really descended to fisticuffs.  For one thing, no one else at the café had reacted to the insults thrown in their direction, although none but I had been on the receiving end of a personal attack.  Secondly, had things got out of hand and the police been summoned it wouldn’t have been at all clear where right lay and a spell in the cells would have rather spoilt my day.  Finally, in this age of smart phones and instantaneous social media it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility to imagine HOMELESS DISABLED MAN BEING BEATEN UP IN THE STREET BY FASCIST going viral on YouTube and that certainly isn’t the sort of notoriety that I would wish to attract.

The Tale of the Tramp was told and retold a number of times over the next few days, with the uncouth language either stated in full or merely alluded to, depending upon the audience.  There was no need for allusion that afternoon as I met up with William Gazy and several of his pals for a boozy progress about the West End, from the Coach and Horses to Bradley’s Spanish Bar, on into the evening via the Fitzroy Tavern and which, memorably, featured a rendition of Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the style of the Reverend Doctor Lord Paisley. 

I have, for sometime, held a mixed opinion of Wharton.  I adored The Age of Innocence, both upon the page and on the screen.  I do believe that it ranks as one of Scorsese’s best movies.  I was far less enamoured of The House of Mirth, warming to neither book nor film and I have never got around to either Ethan Frome or The Buccaneers.

It was a piece by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker (February 13-20 2012) that prompted me to keep an eye out for The Custom of the Country in my bookshop browsings and the search bore fruit on this brightest of Saturday mornings.  There seems to me to be strong odour of Balzac about this book, which isn’t altogether surprising given that Wharton made her home for so many years in France.  The heroine, of sorts, Undine Spragg could just as well have sprung from the Comedie Humaine.  She is, as Franzen says, ‘almost comically indestructible, like Wile E Coyote’, progressing from the city of Apex in the Mid-Western heartland, through brash and graceless anonymity, marooned in the splendidly named Hotel Stentorian, bludgeoning  her way into New York society and trampling a trail of debts and marriages and a Reno divorce, suicide and scandal and a cast-off child, plundering Paris and a Normandy chateau, on to the point of becoming the bride (for the second-time around, as it turns out) of one of the newly-richest men in America. 

She is spoiled and selfish and possessed of the skin of an avaricious rhino. 

She is magnificent.

*And when, by the way, did the phrase ‘European Monsoon’ enter the meteorological lexicon to describe rained-out springs and summers?  See also ‘White Cloud’.

^# This was a first: I have never, ever, before threatened to kick someone’s walking stick away, though perhaps it prefigures arguments over the best seat in the TV lounge 30 years hence.