How to be poor

pink tickets
ostentatiously in your breast-pocket! What a poor fool a man must be if he
needs that sort of boost. On trains, too, I prefer travelling second class.
    One often hears the phrase: “Only the
best is good enough for me!” It has always astonished me. What does the speaker
mean? Is he implying that he is one of the best people alive? If things were
really allocated on the basis of merit, many of the people who use this phrase
would be horrified to get the rubbish they deserve.
    People who have gold taps fitted in
their bathrooms positively nauseate me. They belong to a different species, or
at least I should like to think so. But what species? Most of the animals I
know have more sense than that: animals do not venerate gold.
    This anti-rich attitude used to be an
eccentricity (except among Marxists), but I am pleased to observe that most of Western Europe is being slowly converted to it. Britain has become poor, so it is chic to
be poor. Money — just sheer, accumulated wealth — is losing its appeal and is
starting to be despised. The rich man is no longer revered; the successful
executive, the powerful manipulator takes his place. I am not sure whether this
is a change for the better, but it is a change. Showing off will not die away
before humanity dies away, but it is taking new forms. Machismo is taking the
place of the pride of the new rich. Indeed, some people have begun to show off
their poverty (like myself). This snobbery of the poor is a small step in the
right direction, because — and this is my main argument — you should not just
accept poverty with a sigh of resignation, or even with a defiant shrug. You
should be proud of it. You should positively strive for it. You should
sincerely want to be poor.
    One word of caveat should be
uttered here. I am not speaking of the starving beggars of India or the emaciated children of the Third World. Not even of the pitiable rejects of our own
society. They should be the subjects of other studies. I am speaking only of
respectable — indeed, desirable — middle-class poverty, the poverty of a
significant silent, and distinguished, majority.
    Elsa Maxwell, the celebrated New York hostess of a former era made the remark: “Been poor: been rich. Rich better.”
    She was wrong.
    Poor better.

Part One: Private
Poverty

The Misery
of the
Monomaniac

     
    As I grew older and wiser, my anger against the rich turned into
pity for them. I should like to list my main reasons for this pity under a few
headings.
    Nearly all rich people are
monomaniacs. It is hard to decide what came first, the egg or the chicken. Did
their single-mindedness about money — their monomania — make them rich or did
their wealth turn them into monomaniacs?
    An interesting question but also a
moot point. I can imagine no drearier, lower, more destructive preoccupations
than worrying about money. You (and that means all of us) get into tight
corners from time to time, and naturally you spend time fretting about how to
get out of them. But, for most of us, these are passing worries, like an aching
toe or a slight dent on the wing of your car. They are not the dominant feature
of your whole life. And if you are poor your financial worries are justified:
it is much more decent to worry about money you do not have than about money
you do have.
    The rich may object that there is a
constant danger of their losing their riches. So what? There is a constant
danger of my losing my poverty. Any book of mine may become a runaway
bestseller, bringing in untold fortunes. I am sticking my neck out even
further: I have just written a play, to be performed in six months
time from the day of writing this. Plays are even more dangerous than books.
For all I know, money may soon start pouring in from five Continents in an
uncontrollable flood.

    Indeed, dangers lurk everywhere. For
a long time I lived in St John’s Wood and in my immediate neighbourhood, in
Hamilton Terrace, there was a house for sale. It was a huge building and they
asked £800 for it—not a huge fortune even in those distant days just after the Second World War. The reason for this low price was that one of the tenants was a tax
office, and how could you get a tax office out? My wife suggested that we
should buy the house. I would not hear of it. I did not want to become a
landlord (although the idea of becoming the landlord of H.M. Inspector of Taxes
and getting a bit of revenge for his bullying did rather appeal to me).