From The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2018 edition:
The Modern Beggar
In his unfinished work on nineteenth-century Paris seen through the smoke and mirrors of rising consumer culture, the critic Walter Benjamin noted Victor Hugo’s heroic portrayal of the beggar, most memorably in Les Misérables, a literary monument of popular commiseration.1 Its hero, Jean Valjean, is, after all, as Hugo characterizes him, “the beggar who gives alms,” whose rags-to-riches story is overwhelmingly rags, or what we now simply call “poverty porn.”
In 1868, Hugo received a letter of supplication from an unknown young writer freshly arrived in the City of Lights from Montevideo, Uruguay:
Yesterday at the post office I saw an errand boy holding in his hands l’Avenir National with your address and so I resolved to write to you. Three weeks ago I sent off the 2nd Canto to Mr. Lacroix so that he could print it with the 1st. I preferred him to the others, because I had seen your bust in his bookshop, and I knew that was your bookseller. But until now he has not had time to look at my manuscript, because he is very busy, he tells me; and if you would write me a letter, I am quite sure that through showing it to him he will be more prompt and read the two cantos as soon as possible to have them printed. For ten years I have cherished the desire to come and see you, but I did not have the money.
Incredibly, the aspiring author concluded his note with a self-assured reprise of his appeal:
You would not believe how happy you would make a human being, were you to write me a few words. Could you also promise me a copy of each of the works you are going to bring out in the month of January? And now, having come to the end of my letter, I look upon my audacity with more composure, and I tremble at having written you, I who am still nothing in this century, whereas you, you are Everything.
Isidore Ducasse2
For all we know, Hugo replied to this out-of-the-blue request: All six cantos of The Songs of Maldoror were published by Lacroix within a year, the author, Ducasse, having chosen to publish them under the pseudonym Comte de Lautréamont.
Around 1860, beggary became bohemian. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx counted beggars “alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie…vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jail-birds, escaped galley-slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni [idlers], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers,” as part of “the whole indeterminate, disintegrated, fluctuating mass which the French term the bohème.”3 For Marx, this comédie humaine represented a regressive social element, the lumpenproletariat. Easily manipulated, lacking everything down to “class consciousness,” it had nothing to contribute to the coming proletarian revolution.
But aspiring writers—Marx’s literati—soon found themselves honored under another name, in another social category. They were also flâneurs, poor and lazy strollers-about-town who did not hesitate to waste time as though in defiance of the fruits of capital all around them. It is thanks to another writer of the French Second Empire, Charles Baudelaire, who extolled the flâneur as the modern metropolitan artist-poet, that poverty was refashioned as creative, as bohemian in our post-Marxian sense. The greatest admirer of this facet of Baudelaire was again Benjamin. He saw the poet’s “modern heroism” as having been conjured out of misery like a “monstrous provocation.”4 The author of Les fleurs du mal, whom Arthur Rimbaud was among the first to recognize as the rightful “king of poets” (roi des poètes), had, “in the guise of a beggar,” Benjamin wrote, “continually put the model of bourgeois society to the test.”5
Yet even beggars have many guises. They have long been cast among human archetypes, a fixture of civilization whose existence is predicated on individual material want. Before anyone had heard of public welfare, their social function of blessing in exchange for assistance had already made an institution of alms giving. This fluid reciprocity held together by religious belief has not survived capitalist modernity. Mendicancy, meanwhile, has grown and assumed new forms.
Introducing the Modern Beggar
The begging I call “modern” is not uniquely so. It is not a byproduct of meritocratic society, of the respectability bestowed on Randian self-interest and self-seeking, or of the goad of upward mobility and its correlate, greenback-riding ambition. Predating the universalism of meritocracy with its unfixing of social hierarchies, it has fed on meritocracy’s inconsistencies. “Modern beggars” have enough sense to know that proof of real merit can be worth less than its promise, especially when buoyed by favoritism and luck. What they ask for goes beyond what (“on merit alone”) is theirs to claim, or what a milieu to which they seek admission is prepared just then to give them. To improve their chances, they oblige others by gentle importuning. They already possess (or believe themselves to possess) cultural and other contributions to match their ambitions. Unlike classic beggars, they spring not from the economic margins but from the fringes of good society and target the very center of modern social life, where cultural wealth or capital is concentrated. To this extent, “modern beggary,” not seeing itself for what it is, is beggary by any other name.And if we are about to stretch the meaning of mendicancy to its breaking point, there is nothing per se forbidding this in the word itself, which derives from mendum, the Latin for “deficiency” or “lack.” Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, who exhibited some of the same artistic-professional aspirations, the modern beggar lives modernity’s paradoxes, illusions, and dispersals of attention: the paradox of begging one’s way up, the illusion of fame right around the corner of the next appeal, the fleeting experience of fame, the fragility of recognition. Flânerie may be solitary, but it is animated by a passion for blending into crowds, “to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.”6 The modern beggar, meanwhile, is defined by a (real or perceived) lack of, and consequent need for, recognition as distinct and worthy. His kind seeks exposure rather than anonymity, and not in the street but in a profession or an art. The activity to which one abandons oneself is private—as private as a mendicant letter sent from an unknown writer to an established one.
From Mendicity to Mendacity
Ducasse’s letter to Hugo differs in one fundamental respect from the missives posted to Charles Dickens, another nineteenth-century pen-happy friend of the poor who, in 1850, consecrated an article to the topic: “The Begging-Letter Writer.” Even the great English miserabilist was not immune to bogus impotence, writing of his subject’s inventiveness:...
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