Who was Tom Kromer? On the author of Waiting for Nothing

A few days ago, the Glasgow-based independent publisher the Common Breath released their first reissue title, bringing the Great Depression classic of homelessness, Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing, back to print for the first time since 1986. Though it’s mostly been out of print since its first publication in 1935, Waiting for Nothing was been quietly influencing generations of writers from Hubert Selby to Breece D’J Pancake to James Kelman with its hard-nosed prose, impressionistic narrative, and grim, survivalist outlook.

But who was Tom Kromer? Facts about him are scarce to start with and he didn’t help much when he was asked to contribute an autobiographical note for the British edition of Waiting for Nothing:

I am twenty-eight years old, and was born and attended school in Huntington, W. Va. My people were working people. My father started to work in a coal-mine when he was eight years old. Later, he became a glass blower, and unable to afford medical treatment, died of cancer at the age of forty-four. There were five children and I was the oldest. My mother took my father’s place in the factory. My father’s father was crushed to death in a coal-mine. My father never hoped for anything better in this life than a job, and never worried about anything else but losing it. My mother never wanted anything else than that the kids get an education so that they wouldn’t have to worry about the factory closing down.

Kromer glosses over the specific. He was born in Huntington in October 1906, the son of Michael Albert Kromer, who’d emigrated from Russia in 1891 to join his father at a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and Grace Thornburg, a West Virginia native. Bert Kromer spent most of his working life in one of the big glass and bottle factories in northern West Virginia. The Kromers lived in several different towns while Tom was growing up, but settled in Huntington, where his father went to work at the Owens Glass Factory. In the 1920 census, Bert Kromer’s occupation was listed as glass-blower. Coming after years of working in coal mines as a boy, it was a job that likely contributed to his early death from lung cancer.

Kromer mentioned having three years of college but didn’t identify the school as Marshall University there in Huntington (later portrayed in the movie We Are Marshall). He wrote, “I taught for two years in mountain schools in West Virginia,” but didn’t say that he’d left when two of his favorite professors were fired after they protested the school’s banning of Mencken’s American Mercury magazine for its printing an article about a Missouri prostitute nicknamed “Hatrack.” Nor that he took the schoolteaching job to support his family after his father’s death in 1926.

Kromer returned to Marshall in the fall of 1928 and got his first taste of life “on the fritz,” as he put it, on an assignment for the Huntington Herald-Dispatch soon after. As an experiment, the paper sent him out, dressed in shabby clothes, onto the streets of Huntington to beg for change. “Pity the Poor Panhandler; $2 An Hour is All He Gets,” read the resulting article. It may have given Kromer a false sense of the ease with which one could live life on the bum: in hindsight, $2 an hour would seem a a fortune in the eyes of the narrator of Waiting for Nothing.

A month or so later, Kromer ran out of money to keep attending Marshall and decided to head to Kansas in search of farm work. He would spent most of the next five years on the road. As he wrote in his autobiographical note,

My intentions were to hitch-hike, and after hiking all day without a lift, a freight train pulled to a stop Beside the road. I crawled into a hox car. i never again voluntarily took up the responsibilities of hitch-hiking, but I always aligned my interests with the interests of the railroad companies. They generally got me where I wanted to go, which was never more definite than “east” or “west.”

The big Kansas farmers had already mechanized their operations, so there was no work to be had. “I got my first taste of men trying to buck a machine,” he later wrote. Kromer headed home after five months with little money and many hungry days. But things were just as bad in Huntington and he soon headed out again.

Waiting for Nothing is a lightly-fictionalized distillation of Kromer’s years as a hobo. He claimed that, “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.” In fact, most of it was probably written in a notebook in the relative comfort of Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in California between mid-1933 and mid-1934.

At one of these camps near Murphy’s Camp in the Sierra Nevadas, he met the painter Marcy Woods. Kromer complained to Woods that he’d sent his manuscript, then titled “Three Hots and a Flop”, to several publishers with no luck. Woods’ wife Hazel was acquainted with the muckracking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who’d retired near the Woods’ home in Carmel, California, and offered to send the book to Steffens. Steffens returned the book after a few days with an enthusiastic note: “This story, this portrait of a ‘stiff’ is important. I sat up late nights reading it and I knew I was getting something I had never ‘got’ before: realism to the nth degree.” Encouraged by this response, Kromer sent the book to John Steinbeck’s first publisher, Covici-Friede. They rejected it.

Kromer wrote to Steffens again, asking for advice on hiring a literary agent. Steffens recommended Maxim Lieber, then the champion of many of the most promising radical writers in America: Erskine Caldwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Albert Halper, James T. Farrell, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes. Lieber submitted the book to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d begun to publish such writers in the hard-boiled style as Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Knopf quickly bought the book and included it on their Spring 1935 list as “Title not announced.” Knopf did not care for “Three Hots and a Flop.”

By then, Kromer had left the CCC and taken a job at the Harvard Book Store in Stockton. One of the biggest risks of life on the road — along with getting beaten up by railroad bulls and falling off a train — was tuberculosis, and Kromer’s health could no longer stand up to the physical demands of the CCC work. The book store hosted a signing for Kromer when Waiting for Nothing came out in early 1935.

Waiting for Nothing came out at a busy time for the book reviewing business. It was competing with the likes of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, Faulkner’s Pylon, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet. And it wasn’t the first novel about life “on the fritz.” Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here, which was based on Newhouse’s experience of unemployment and homelessness in New York City, came out the year before and a few months later, Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men was instantly compared with Waiting for Nothing.

Yet Waiting for Nothing still stood out from its competition. It’s easy to imagine Kromer’s fingers flying on a typewriter’s keys: his prose has the same striking staccato pace:

It is night. I am walking along this dark street, when my foot hits a stick. I reach down and pick it up. I finger it. It is a good stick, a heavy stick. One sock from it would lay a man out. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would lay him out. I plan. Hit him where the crease is in his hat, hard, I tell myself, but not too hard. I do not want his head to hit the concrete. It might kill him. I do not want to kill him. I will catch him as he falls. I can frisk him in a minute. I will pull him over in the shadows and walk off. I will not run. I will walk.

Many, including Kromer, spotted the influence of Hemingway, especially his first short story collection In Our Time. But it’s also very close to this sample from a young hobo’s diary, quoted in a 1934 book titled Boy and Girl Tramps of America, a factual account by Thomas Minehan published in 1934:

Sept. 11. Villa Grove. Rode with truck. Good town. Raining when I hit first house. Woman gave me three eggs, two big pieces of meat. Cream and corn flakes, cookies, jell and all the coffee I want. Ask lots of questions. Man in house, too. He gives me a dime when I go. Made thirty cents hitting stem. A junction. Took train. Friendly. Good for supper and that’s all.

Sept. 12. Shelbyville. Cop picked me up. Sent to jail, had to work two hours for dinner and supper. Stayed in jail all night. Six guys of us. N. G. Got out before breakfast. Walked with Shorty to Baxter. Small burg. N. G. Rode with farmer to Clarksburg. N. G. Got handout from farm girl, bacon and bread. Me and Shorty came back to ask for drink of water and she says, “Sic ’em,” to big gray dog. Dog jumped at Shorty, but Shorty socks it. I gets a club. Dog chases us a mile until we get to gravel and a lot of bricks. Boy did we give it to him then.

One critic later groused that “the ‘Tom Kromer’ of the book is a craftily simple version of the Tom Kromer who wrote it: the former doesn’t know where is next meal is coming from, but the latter knew to tell it like A Farewell to Arms.” And while it’s true that Kromer was better educated than the average hobo, his experience and hardened attitudes rang true to the life Minehan encountered when he accompanied one of his subjects through a week on the skids:

Large sewer rats scurry across the floor, rustling the newspapers, foraging in the filth. Drunks stagger in, miss the top step in the darkness, and stumble to the bottom. They call and curse at each other, fight, vomit, urinate in the darkness. Some groan. Many hiccup. One sings a ribald ballad, tuneless and wheezy. And by my side a sixteen-year-old boy coughs, continually, without waking. Deep and chesty is the cough. Between coughs, I can hear his labored breathing. A rattle comes from his throat. The rattle becomes deeper, more difficult. Breath wheezes, a pause. And cough, cough, cough, until the tubes are clear, and the boy can breathe again.

For Kromer, rats carried a special terror:

I listen to these rats that rustle across the floor. I pull this sack off my face and strain my eyes through the blackness. I am afraid of rats. Once in a jungle I awoke with two on my face. Since then I dream of rats that are as big as cats, who sit on my face and gnaw at my nose and eyes. I cannot see them. It is too dark. I cannot lie here and wait with my heart thumping against my ribs like this. I cannot lie here and listen to them patter across the floor, and me not able to see them.

It’s hard to believe that Orwell hadn’t taken some of his inspiration for Winston Smith’s fear of rats in 1984 from Waiting for Nothing.

A few months after the US publication, Constable published Waiting for Nothing in England. Theodore Dreiser was enlisted to write an introduction, which was enthusiastic, if in Dreiser’s uniquely ham-fisted and occasionally incoherent way. In the 1986 University of Georgia edition of Waiting for Nothing, which also includes most of Kromer’s other writings, Arthur D. Casciato wrote, “In the entire introduction, only Dreiser’s first two sentences really make sense: ‘This book needs no introduction or foreword,’ he writes. ‘It is its own introduction or foreword.’ Dreiser probably should have left it at that.”

The English edition was, however, missing an entire chapter. In Chapter 4 in the original, the narrator meets and goes home with a homosexual known as “Mrs. Carter” simply to get a warm meal. Once at Mrs. Carter’s, he faces the facts of his situation:

I will have to go to bed some time. This queer will stay awake until I do go to bed. What the hell? A guy has got to eat, and what is more, he has got to flop.

“Sure,” I say, “I am ready for the hay.”

You can always depend on a stiff having to pay for what he gets. I pull off my clothes and crawl into bed.

Given the laws in England at the time, however, Constable was in a quandary. “An experienced member of the book trade had sent us a warning,” they wrote in an insert that took the place of Chapter 4, “and we must decide whether, under existing conditions in this country, a true incident which could be publicly described in America was one which might not be publicly described in England.” It might not, Constable decided.

We have cut out Chapter IV entirely — cut it out with reluctance and with shame, merely consoling ourselves with the thought that fortunately the continuity of the book is in no way affected. Were we wrong to cut it out? No one can possibly say. Would we have been guilty of corrupting youth had we left it in? Once again, no one — in advance — has the smallest idea. That is how things are in England these days; and that is why Waiting for Nothing appears in England in an emasculated form.

On the strength of his five years on the road and the reviews of Waiting for Nothing, Kromer felt he’d earned the right to sit in judgment of those who would write about the hobo life. His contempt for Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men when he reviewed the book for The New Masses is unmuted:

You will see no Jesus Christ looks in the eyes of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men, no soup-lines that stretch for a block and never start moving, no derelicts dying of malnutrition on top of lice-filled three-decker bunks while the mission sign outside flashes “Jesus Saves” on and of? in the dark. In a word, you find no Hungry Men. When one of Mr. Anderson’s puppets gets a gnawing in the pit of his guts, he takes him up to a back door or a restaurant and feeds him. When his hero is mooning on the waterfront over a respectable two-bit whore that he is in love with, you will never guess what happens — the Communist in the book hands him fifty bucks and says here take this dough, I’ll not be needing it and make a home for the gal.

“Perhaps Mr. Anderson has never seen a bunch of desperately hungry men,” Kromer speculated.

Soon after Waiting for Nothing, however, Kromer found that even the book store work was too much for him. He headed again back to West Virginia, where one of his classmates from Marshall, Thomas Donnelly, convinced him to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Donnelly was taking a teaching post at the University of New Mexico starting that fall, working for their former Marshall professor Arthur S. White. His two Marshall acquaintances arranged a scholarship for Kromer to study journalism. In the report of literary conference in July 1936, Kromer was identified as “a health seeker and student living in Albuquerque.” Not long after he started classes, he began coughing up blood and was admitted to St. Joseph’s Hospital for treatment.

At St. Joseph’s Hospital, Kromer met Jeannette (Janet) Smith, a Vassar graduate who was being treated for rheumatic heart disease. Janet had been working in New Mexico for the Federal Writers Project and teaching at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school near Santa Fe. The two decided to get married, but postponed the wedding until Kromer was discharged from the Sunnyside Sanitorium where he’d been transferred. Janet got a job writing for the Albuquerque Tribune and Kromer sent off reviews for The New Masses and articles for The Pacific Weekly, a liberal magazine recently started by Steffens and his wife, Ella Winters. He applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship but was turned down. He also began work on a new novel titled Michael Kohler based on his grandfather’s life as a coal miner.

And that was essentially the end of Tom Kromer’s career as a writer. Janet and Tom Kromer married in December 1936. His last article, “A Glass Worker Dies,” based on his father’s death, appeared in The Pacific Weekly the same month. Tom never finished Michael Kohler.

In 1937, the Kromers bought a lot in Alameda, on the north side of Albuquerque, where they constructed an adobe house still known as “the Kromer House.” Janet became the editor of the Tribune’s Women’s Page and supported the couple until her death from lung cancer in 1960. According to at least one account, by the late 1940s, tuberculosis and alcohol abuse had turned Tom into a recluse. After the war, Janet established a chatty weekly advertising paper known as Janet Kromer’s Shopping Notes and there is a chance that Tom contributed some of its material. He was, in any case, the named party when an upset local Albuquerque TV personality sued Janet’s Shopping Notes for libel over a suggestion that she was pregnant and taking a beauty course when she was neither.

By the time the suit was dismissed by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 1964, Tom Kromer had left the state. He sold the Kromer House to Harvey Hoshour, an architect, who later reported that the place had fallen into serious disrepair. Hoshour and his wife restored the house and it’s now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Kromer moved back to Huntington and took a room in the same house on 4th Street he’d left in 1929. He lived there, cared for by his sisters Emogene and Katherine, until he died in 1969. He was buried in a family plot alongside his parents.