Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

I do not want anyone to be mistaken on the point: I did not learn to write as I wrote in Travels with Lizbeth by digging for scraps in skips. I was a writer, although not a successful one, before I became homeless. But I did not become homeless to have something to write about.

I became homeless from raising an issue of principle in the matter of the treatment of inmates at the state asylum where I was working. When confronted with the choice of resigning or being discharged I chose to resign, for from my insulated civil service position I had not realized that Texas was then in midst of its great banking bust of the mid-1980s and that I would not find another position. The rent soon exhausted my savings and the little money I could make from writing. I was put onto the street. I was unlucky and, no doubt, foolish, but my literary aspirations had nothing to do with it.

Now that Travels with Lizbeth has been reviewed by professors of comparative literature, who have a tendency to compare literature, I have learned that many previous authors of down-and-out literature were rather counterfeit hobos. I am not so dedicated to my craft as they. I cannot imagine deliberately exchanging a gentleman's attire for rags, sleeping on a bench when I had a good bed of my own, or doing any of the other things the other authors are said to have done merely to get a book. Whenever I had the opportunity of improving my situation, I took it, and if I had found the chance to get off the streets, my book would not now exist.

Every year many young people travel to Hollywood in hopes of furthering their careers in acting. Some of them become homeless. Then if they do get an acting job, no one asks them if they became homeless in order to have something to act about. But writers, I suppose, are always suspect. At least, I am asked about it a lot.

That I was a writer to begin with is, of course, the key to the whole thing. My maternal grandmother was a minor Texas poet, and from an early age I was constantly exposed to the tools of the trade. I could, and did, read dictionaries for amusement. My family did not pressure me to pursue a career in writing, yet it was our common tacit assumption that I would. As a very young child I often spent the whole of my allowance on little pads of colored paper which, before I could write, I would scribble across in lines. I think in English and often find myself revising my thoughts—not changing my opinions, but refining my mental expression of them. Although I was into my thirties before I began to submit work to paying publications, I always had some kind of little writing project going. I wrote for the underground papers, which of course did not pay. I wrote college papers for money and supported myself for several years in this way—I did not think of that as professional writing, but thought only that I was helping my friends avoid becoming cannon fodder.

To say I enjoyed writing would be an understatement. I could not imagine existence without writing. I studied writing, but I studied it for the love of writing, not to become a writer. This is a fine distinction, but one I think worth drawing clearly. Wanting to become a writer is not the same thing as wanting to write. Now I meet everywhere people who want to become writers, and I think this is a vain and hopeless aspiration. First, one must want to write. Since the stub of a pencil and a scrap of paper can be had nearly anywhere, anyone who really wants to write, will write. Wanting to become a writer is immaterial. One who writes is a writer and one who does not, is not.

Because I was a writer before I became homeless, I wrote the whole time I was homeless. I wrote very long letters, little essays, scraps of fiction—all with nothing more in mind than filling the many empty hours with an activity I enjoyed. Much of this material was lost to thieves and to the elements. But my friend Steven Saylor preserved the letters I wrote to him. When I was at last fairly settled in an vacant building, he suggested I try to write about my experiences. He assured me that people would be interested in events such as I had recounted in my letters.

I had my doubts, but as I had nothing better to do, I began to write my memoir by the light of three paraffin lamps using a manual typewriter I acquired for $10. My strategy was to write everything I could recall about my life since I had become homeless. I meant for this to be a draft, and I included little essays and Tristram-Shandy-like digressions. I thought it would be easier to cut material later than to be in the position of having too little.

Steven sent me photocopies of the letters I had written him. I had some scraps, including some fairly long ones, that I had written in longhand while I lived in a park. I had found a blank five-year diary and I made little notations in it—seldom more than a word or two—whenever I could associate an event with any particular date. I had less difficulty recalling the hitchhiking trips because these episodes had a geographical order as well as a chronological one. But things that happened when we were not traveling were difficult, and some parts—such as our encounter with the person with AIDS—I cannot date within a month.

To remain in the abandoned building I became a virtual serf of the owner of the property. My arrangement with the last tenant was that in exchange for keeping an eye on his valuable equipment I was allowed to camp under the eaves and eventually in the building itself. This served both sides well: I needed a roof, and the vandals and drunks of the area would have quickly reduced the building and everything in it to rubbish without my attention—and indeed they did so when I finally left the building some two years later.

But the landlord, once he repossessed the property, was not satisfied to have merely my services as a watchman, but thought he should have my labor as well. Often he worked me from dawn until dark, and when I was not actually at work, he occupied my time with one kind of foolishness or another. He paid no wages and the building had no power or heat nor even running water. All of this was quite illegal, and I might have had a judgment against him from the labor board. But then I would have been on the street again.

I only had the darkness in which to write. Some of the worst times were when I ran out of paraffin. Then there would be nothing to do. I experimented with typing in the dark. This worked better than longhand to record a fleeting bit of inspiration, but was useless for advancing the narrative as a whole.

I worked on the 500-page draft for the almost two years I lived in the vacant building. That would put it at about a chapter a month. In the winter I had more darkness in which to work and the considerable heat of the paraffin lamps was less objectionable. Much of the time I did not believe there ever would be a book, but I thought it was important to have something to do.

Although I felt that I was creating a draft, I put most chapters through three or four rewrites before I would let them stand even as a draft. The average chapter was 20 or 30 pages of typescript, and so in drafting one chapter I might consume 150 pages of paper. I wrote on the backs of letterhead stationery I found in the trash. Long afterward I discovered that the letterhead bled through when photocopied and I was very embarrassed to think that Steven had circulated copies in this condition.

After I left the abandoned building I found a computer in the trash and with it I composed an additional 250 pages that existed only in electronic form. These 750 pages in all covered only about half of the time represented in the finished book.

I sent the chapters of the draft to Steven Saylor as I completed them since I might lose my place in the abandoned building at any time and was afraid of losing the work. I did not have the resources to make carbon copies. As I did not have the whole manuscript in my hands, I often lost my way in the narrative, and frequently duplicated material from chapter to chapter.

I deliberately chose to write the most elevated style of English that I thought modern readers would tolerate. My purpose was to draw an ironic contrast between the dignity of my language and the indignity of my circumstances. Some readers, however, think Travels with Lizbeth is written the only way I know how to write. I suppose I am confused with a common character: the street drunkard who expresses himself grandiloquently.

The sources of my elevated style were, I suppose, Churchill, Orwell, and Conan Doyle. I must have read much English literature at a young age without being aware that it was English, for I had great difficulty in school learning to spell colour and labour without u's and grey with an a—for some reason the English spellings kerb and gaol never tempted me, but I never was a good speller in either English or American. I had not really cared much for Orwell until his essays and letters were published—I still find his fiction unreadable. In the essays and letters, however, I felt I had discovered a kindred spirit, and except that he survived my birth by several months, I might flatter myself to think I was a reincarnation.

Curiously, I never read the London parts of Down and Out in Paris and London until after Travels with Lizbeth was at press. Excerpts of the Paris parts were included in many texts for American school children on the theory, I suppose, that scenes of squalor and poverty would not be so distressing where the people were speaking French.

Beyond matters of style, I aimed to be as objective as a memorialist can be. I knew it would be deadly if I gave myself over to self-pity. I tried to put the facts as plainly as I could and to distinguish them, when I could, from my own opinion. I tried not to dictate to the reader how to feel about the various events. I worried about some parts. I worried about the hospital chapter. It had a point, one that was really very important in understanding the situation of the homeless. But I worried that readers would mistake it for any of the countless, pointless stories of the surgeries of friends or relatives that are so boring to all but the teller. Some parts of the book were bound to affect sympathetic readers; I thought restraint was my best policy.

Matters of style and tone seemed paramount to me. I saw nothing inherently interesting in the events of my homelessness. I was sick of homelessness and everything about it seemed commonplace and mundane to me. However much Steven reassured me that my story was interesting enough, I continued to think, since I could not alter the facts of the story, all would depend upon the way I told it.

Steven Saylor began to circulate my chapters. Wendy Lesser at The Threepenny Review, a very influential literary magazine published in Berkeley, California, took an immediate interested and printed my first three chapters virtually intact. I would have wished for a chance to make a revision, but the check was very welcome. My tenth chapter was a self-contained essay about surviving on garbage. On Dumpster Diving more than any other part of the book, came to me more or less whole. I had in mind Dean Swift's Modest Proposal as a model. Of course modern readers cannot be relied upon to detect irony unless it is the most caustic sarcasm, but I had in mind something more subtle. I thought it was very unjust that I was reduced to eating garbage and to feeding it to my companion and my dog. But I did not suppose my complaint would receive much attention if it were put in a straightforward manner. Instead, I would compose a manual on how to eat garbage, how to select it, where to find it, what was good, and so forth, and I would put it in a strictly matter-of-fact tone, in the most gentlemanly language I could muster. For the piece to work, I thought, it would have to be perfectly authentic—that is, it would have to be really useable as a field guide to edible garbage. Since we did live on garbage, I had little difficulty composing the piece once I had conceived of it.

When Wendy Lesser published On Dumpster Diving, it became an instant chestnut. Harper's ran an excerpt of the essay and we were swamped with requests for permissions from anthologists. My companion had by then obtained a very small flat for us, and the permissions fees paid the rent for nearly a year. This was the first time I ever thought I might have written something that had a chance to outlive me. But we were still living on garbage. It was more than a year more before we sold the book.

Once the Dumpster piece appeared we had no problem finding editors willing to look at my work. We had inquiries from book publishers, and eventually a waiting list for the single circulating copy of the manuscript. Unfortunately when Steven sent the 500-page draft, interest would evaporate. The last thing an editor wants to do, you know, is to edit.

Not many modern editors are Ford Madox Ford looking for a manuscript from Joseph Conrad. What the modern editor most wants to find on his or her desk is Stephen King's latest, ready to send to the printer. Anything that really requires some editing is, and often for good reason, suspect.

I was eager, by this time, to revise the manuscript. The problem was to convince an editor that I could do the revision. No one wanted to be involved with the project if I were a prima donna who would fight tooth and claw over every comma. With no idea whether I could do the revision, an editor would find it safer to return the manuscript. This was the disadvantage of being an unknown writer: that no one could be sure whether I might hinder or help the editorial process. It was not that I lacked a famous name; for obvious reasons, my book could not have been written by Stephen King.

If an editor asked me for a revision, if my hopes were raised and I put another year's work into the book, what would the editor say if the revision proved unpublishable at last? If the editor undertook to revise the manuscript him- or herself, I might be difficult, I might be impossible, I might withdraw the manuscript at the last minute, and in any event it would be a lot of work for which the editor would be paid no more than his or her salary. Possibly some editors wondered whether the manuscript was really what it purported to be—after she accepted the first chapters for The Threepenny Review,Wendy Lesser had asked Steven Saylor if he were not really the author of the piece—or so he says. Indeed, for looking like a homeless man's manuscript, perhaps the draft did look too convincing: backside of letterhead, obviously layered in correction fluid, inconsistent margins from chapter to chapter, lines and lines of penned insertions, people called by differing aliases from page to page. (I had thought Steven was putting the text through his word processor before he circulated the parts. I never dreamt any editor would see the manuscript as it was when I mailed it to Steven.)

I became convinced I ought to insist that Steven send me a copy of the manuscript for revision. Unfortunately I thought there would be no point to this until I completed the first draft. I want to suggest to other writers that no law requires one to finish the first draft before undertaking a revision. I wasted a great deal of time on the first draft, which was never completed, after the outline of the revision was clear to me.

At last Steven Saylor, who had a successful series of mysteries set in ancient Rome (Roman Blood, Arms of Nemesis, Catalina's Riddle), convinced his editor Michael Denneny at St. Martin's that I really could revise the material into a publishable book. When Michael finally returned the manuscript to me—and it must be admitted that Michael is a very slow reader—with two pages of suggestions, it was the first time I had the whole manuscript all together. In the meantime I had developed from my memory of the manuscript, a very clear idea of how I wanted the revision to go.

The draft, being about everything, ended in being about nothing. It seemed to me there were two or three books in the manuscript. There was a book on homelessness, a book of essays on various topics, and sort of survey of gay communities like Edmund White's States of Desire, but from the underclass perspective. I perceived the homeless book had the best chance of attracting a large audience, and being very poor and not so very stupid, I wanted to extract that book first.

Michael wanted the homeless book and his suggestions were in good agreement with my own intentions for that revision. Using the computer I had rescued from the trash, I completed Travels with Lizbeth in a very few weeks.

A few critics who had read the raw chapters in The Threepenny Review seemed to prefer the rather aimless literary rambling of the first draft and in particular suspected that I had been made to censor most of the sex. This last was untrue. Once it was determined the subject of the book was homelessness—and this had not been certain in my mind until near the last—I had plenty of good material on that subject. It was my idea to cut the sex because to include it I would have to cut good material on homelessness.

That and, I suppose I should admit it, I was hoping to get another book out of the material. Since I write my erotica under my own name, this was not a matter of hoping to remain in the closet. I did think that people most likely to be sympathetic with the homeless book would be unlikely to care to think that the homeless have sex, hetero or homo. People with otherwise very liberal attitudes about sex, when it has to do with young, athletic people with trendy clothes and nice flats, do not like to think of old, ugly, fat, or poor people having sex. I was afraid we might end up with a book that was neither fish nor fowl: too much sex for the socially concerned and too much poverty for the sexually liberated.

Far from censoring the book, Michael Denneny encouraged me to put some of the sex back in where it seemed essential to an understanding of the personalities and events of the story. However we came to it, I think we ended up with an appropriately balanced book.

In compressing so large a draft into a publishable book I was everywhere confronted with an embarrassment of riches. The preface, for example, is a fine piece of writing. But it is drawn from a draft ten times its length. The best ten percent of anyone's writing is likely to be pretty good. I could not make a live performance of writing of that quality if my life depended on it.

I am a little concerned as to what I will do next. A work of nonfiction does not lend itself to an unlimited number of sequels. While I can imagine writing a better book than Travels with Lizbeth, I cannot think I will write one that would be so well received. I could see, in a few years, writing a book that is to Travels with Lizbeth what You Can't Go Home Again is to Look Homeward Angel—in other words, a look at the other side of society and the changes in my life, assuming of course that Travels with Lizbeth succeeds in delivering me to the other side of society, a matter still in some doubt. But there cannot be a Travels with Lizbeth II and a Travels with Lizbeth Revisited.

I am often asked what it is like to experience all the publicity, fame, admiration, and so forth that I have received after having had the experience of being an outcast. Well, first of all, the publicity is a part of the writing business and I suppose I contracted for it when I first undertook to make my writing show a profit. But it is not my favorite aspect of the business. I would rather be writing than sitting for a photograph or talking to even the most erudite interviewer—meaning one who had actually read my book before the interview. I found it profoundly disturbing when I first realized I was doing an interview that I would never be willing to watch if I could reach the channel selector of the TV.

Then too, fame and fortune come in different waves. I am on my fourth advance for the book and do not expect to get my hands on anything like a capital sum until August at the earliest—if even then. I shall be lucky to have a penny in my pocket when I land in London. Most of the time that I have traveled since the book came out I have had generous expense accounts, but that is not quite the same thing as having cash of one's own. I sometimes feel as if I were a bankrupt monarch going through the motions of state in threadbare raiment with dented trophies. I have not yet gone through the cushions of a limo looking for bus fare to my next appointment, but it is very nearly that.

As for fame itself: I never aspired to be recognized by fans when I went to the store for a package of cigarettes or a loaf of bread. If I could sell as many books and remain perfectly anonymous I would be just as happy. But hardly anyone has a job that is completely agreeable in every aspect, and I would be very vain indeed to think I could just sit on a pile of books and wait for the whole world to come to me for them.

What it is, I think, is there is something that insulates me from the opinions of the world to some degree. When I was homeless and despised I somehow avoided internalizing the negative attitudes that were directed towards me. But by that same mechanism, whatever it is, I do not now take the praise and acclaim that comes my way without a grain of salt. I was never so worthless as some said I was, and I am not now so great as some say I am.

Yet, having been to the bottom, the absolute bottom, I do not think I will ever really escape it. Now however high I rise, it is as if I stand on a glass staircase. I can feel the support under my feet, I may be sure enough of it to move about. But I can never look down without a little gasp, because it is a glass staircase, and I always see right to the bottom, right to the very bottom.

Oh yes. Lizbeth is nine now. She has a fenced yard, but in the summer she is more likely to be found on the sofa in front of the fan. We both nap more now. She does not like it when I travel and begins to follow me about as soon as I bring out my luggage to pack. After I am gone for three or four days she seems to give me up as lost and adopts Clint, of whom she is very fond anyway, as her new master. In all, however, it does not seem much more traumatic to her than a bath.