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muggsyspaniel's review against another edition
4.0
For most of my life in my idle moments (usually when I'm at work) I have dreamed of one of two alternative lives I might possibly have lived.
Life number one is me in ragged white trousers, a torn white shirt and a battered straw hat beachcombing on some Pacific Island, drinking straight from the bottle and causing no end of gentle trouble for the local governor.
Life number two is me in a ragged suit of clothes, a slightly squashed top hat riding the rails in a depression era America.
I blame both these dreams on films making actually squalid lives look so romantic but anyway.
Beggars of Life is the memoir of Jim Tully who spent some of his early years as a hobo hopping freight trains and begging for food at back doors in small town America.
It's an episodic book, characters come and go and minor adventures succeed each other with little reference to each other.
The tone is matter of fact throughout, Tully never apologises or excuses stealing, never attempts to justify apparent bad behaviour other than by saying life as a hobo is tough.
There is a gruesome and unheralded lynching at the end of one chapter that genuinely horrifies but that too is treated in a matter of fact way. This unsentimental treatment of some pretty unpleasant happenings and hardships actually works although you have to put it in context of its age otherwise you might find some of the language used too much.
On the whole it hasn't quite ruined my dreams of life as a hobo but, they were only ever dreams to begin with.
It was adapted into a stage play which in turn appeared as a silent film starring Wallace Beery and Louise Brooks but the incidents in the book are mixed up and rearranged for the film.
Life number one is me in ragged white trousers, a torn white shirt and a battered straw hat beachcombing on some Pacific Island, drinking straight from the bottle and causing no end of gentle trouble for the local governor.
Life number two is me in a ragged suit of clothes, a slightly squashed top hat riding the rails in a depression era America.
I blame both these dreams on films making actually squalid lives look so romantic but anyway.
Beggars of Life is the memoir of Jim Tully who spent some of his early years as a hobo hopping freight trains and begging for food at back doors in small town America.
It's an episodic book, characters come and go and minor adventures succeed each other with little reference to each other.
The tone is matter of fact throughout, Tully never apologises or excuses stealing, never attempts to justify apparent bad behaviour other than by saying life as a hobo is tough.
There is a gruesome and unheralded lynching at the end of one chapter that genuinely horrifies but that too is treated in a matter of fact way. This unsentimental treatment of some pretty unpleasant happenings and hardships actually works although you have to put it in context of its age otherwise you might find some of the language used too much.
On the whole it hasn't quite ruined my dreams of life as a hobo but, they were only ever dreams to begin with.
It was adapted into a stage play which in turn appeared as a silent film starring Wallace Beery and Louise Brooks but the incidents in the book are mixed up and rearranged for the film.
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