Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
Hobohemians
A Study of Luxurious Poverty
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English Edition · Branch 7 of 36
Opening Section · ¶¶ 49–55
Hobohemians
p. 13Willy: “No, mein lieber [my dear], Viktor hasn’t come. Nor has Ali.”
Heinke: “I think I can see Viktor in the doorway. He looks proud, so perhaps he has money. You be nice to him. He thinks a lot of you, because you are English. There he is.”
Willy saw Viktor pull off his glasses.
* * *
Viktor in the hot café pulled off his glasses.—I must lose thousands of marks a day through these confounded spectacles. Film themselves as soon as I enter a café. Condenses the hot air on the cold glass. Can’t see anyone then, however rich. Never have anything to clean them with. Can’t ask a perfect stranger, clean my glasses on your woman’s petticoat. Gives anyone with money time to get out before I see them, cunning pigs. Look so foolish, too, polishing in the doorway here. Viktor on the lookout for a victim. Wouldn’t need to do it in London. Come to you.
—I will go there with that young Englishman. Only he must leave his Lotte behind. Only too willing, probably. Some English countess girl he must marry when his family bring him back from the grand tour. Still, good experience for him, have his first love affairs with types like Lotte. Thinks I don’t know, I will have to pretend to be angry. You have betrayed your good German friend, the great world artist, Berlin, London, Paris, and stolen his only model, ekelhaftes Vieh [disgusting creature]. He will be disappointed if I am not desolated. I suppose he thinks he did it. Can’t stop her wanting young men, she’s got to live herself out, takes all manner of lads to quieten types like that into marrying. Must give up these pince-nez, see through them now perhaps.—
Settling his glasses Viktor saw Willy, Lotte, Heinke. Lotte was telling Heinke she had found a young publisher who was going to look after her now. She wasn’t going to be kicked out into the streets by madmen like Viktor, who was always over-eating himself and being sick over the chessboards of his friends.
“Enemies, too,” said Heinke.
Socrates
Reading Hobohemians · Opening Section · ¶¶ 49–55
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Philip Owens’s Hobohemians follows Willy Burton through the cafés, cheap rooms, sudden journeys, borrowed meals, and volatile friendships of interwar bohemia. Its fractured interior monologues and restless movement between Berlin, Switzerland, and Paris make luxurious poverty both a comic pose and a dangerous condition. This single-language Literary Fiction edition presents the complete supplied English text in a continuous reader.
Historical Text
Hobohemians: A Study of Luxurious Poverty was first published in London by the Mandrake Press in 1929. The reading text follows the supplied transcription of its continuous appearance in American Aphrodite, volume 5, number 19 (1955). Clear typographic and spelling errors have been corrected conservatively; historical British forms, experimental syntax, section divisions, and intentional non-native speech remain intact.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the novella’s 441 prose units across its unnumbered opening and Parts II–IV, arranged in thirty-six comfortable reader branches. Select German, French, and other foreign-language expressions receive concise bracketed translations at their first meaningful appearance. Reader page references approximate the serialization’s story pages 7–42 rather than claiming facsimile-exact alignment.
Rights
Hobohemians was first published in 1929. The underlying English-language text is in the public domain in the United States.