My aunt Joyce Barkhouse of Nova Scotia, who is now ninety-five, tells the
following story involving a pawnshop.
When my brother was born, in mid-February 1937 - in the depths of the Great
Depression - there was a special Valentine's Day excursion price on the
train from Nova Scotia to Montreal. It cost ten dollars. My aunt and a
girlfriend scraped together the ten dollars each and went to Montreal to
help out my mother with her newborn baby. When they got there, my mother was
still in the hospital, because my father hadn't received his monthly
paycheque and thus couldn't pay the bill and bail her out, hospitals at that
time having a lot in common with debtors' prisons. My father was finally
able to spring my mother, but paying the hospital bill - ninety-nine
dollars, as I found from looking in my mother's account book - used up all
of the paycheque.
My parents didn't have a bean at that time, so my father had no cash reserves,
and he pawned his fountain pen in order to take my aunt out for a thank-you
lunch. (The fact that he felt the need to do this shows that he understood
the need for a gift of gratitude in return for a gift of care and service,
which was what my aunt had bestowed.) When my aunt and her friend took the
train back to Nova Scotia, they were also given two valuable going-away
presents: a bunch of grapes and a small box of Laura Secord chocolates - and
this is all they had to eat during the train ride. They had no berths, so
they had to sit up the whole time, and this was uncomfortable; but a man was
renting pillows for twenty-five cents each. Alas, they had only forty-eight
cents between the two of them, but they offered the forty-eight cents and
two of the chocolates - fluttering their eyelashes, said my aunt - and their
offer was accepted. Thus they slept in comfort.
When I heard this story as a child, I rejoiced at the successful securing of
the pillows, and remembered the lesson of the haggling procedure: if you
don't offer a deal, you won't get one. Later, having become interested in
pens, I thought, What kind of fountain pen was it? And considering the fact
that my parents didn't have a bean, how could my father have had a fountain
pen that was expensive enough to pawn? Still later, I marvelled at the
cheapness of the train trip - ten dollars would hardly get you a bottle of
water and a few potato chips now - and the high value placed on the bunch of
grapes.
But now I think, My father! That man of rectitude! Going into a pawnshop! How
incongruous! Indeed, this part of the story was told in a hushed but
delighted tone, as if the pawnshop episode was disreputable - like sneaking
into a girly show - and transgressive - some line had been crossed - but
also courageous and self-sacrificing: look what my father was willing to put
himself through in order to do the right thing!
When I was very young, I used to think that pawnshops had something to do with
chess - you could buy extra pawns there to replace those that were always
vanishing down behind the sofa cushions. But this is not the case. The chess
kind of pawn comes from “peon,” or peasant - the pawns are the foot
soldiers, and you send them out first and make pawn sacrifices with them
because they're worth relatively little. The pawnshop kind of pawn comes
from a word meaning “pledge” - you leave something in the pawnshop and the
pawnshop owner gives you some money and a ticket with a number on it, and
you can come back later and “redeem”, or buy back, your item by presenting
the ticket and paying the original sum, plus extra for the use of the money
and the cost of the transaction. But if you don't come back with the cash
within a stated period, you lose your right to buy the thing back, and the
item belongs to the pawnbroker, who can sell it and keep the profit.
As for why pawnshops had a seedy reputation by the time my father went into
one with his fountain pen, opinions are mixed. As with anything that has two
sides and involves the balance between them, it's hard to get the two sides
exactly equal.
Pawnshops go back at least to classical Greece and Rome, and, in the East, to
1,000 BCE in China. The negative view of them comes from their reputation as
the last resort of down-and-outers and the suspicion that robbers used them
to dispose of stolen goods: pinch something, sell it to the pawnbroker, then
just never come back to collect it. There was another dodge too: a man
intending to go bankrupt or skip town could buy goods on credit, pawn them,
and then take off with the cash.
The positive version is that pawnshops are happy-to-help do-gooders for the
unwealthy, a sort of poor man's banker: both the Franciscans of the Middle
Ages and the Buddhist monks of Ancient China ran pawning operations for the
benefit of the poor. Such pawnbrokers would provide tiny sums that those
without a lot of collateral couldn't borrow from the more pompous lending
bodies: in effect, they were microfinancers. Saint Nicholas is the patron
saint of pawnbrokers - there's a touching legend whereby he provides dowries
for three poor girls who can't get married without them, and the dowries
were three bags of gold - hence the three gold balls you see hanging outside
every Western pawnshop.
There's nothing whatsoever to the other legend about Saint Nicholas - that he
comes down the chimney every December 25 with a sackful of stuff he's nicked
from the pawnshop. It is however true that the nineteenth-century colloquial
expression “Old Nick” - meaning the Devil - is directly connected with Saint
Nicholas. There are other clues. Note the red suit in the case of each; note
the hairiness, and the association with burning and soot. We get the slang
term “to nick,” meaning “to steal,” from ... But I digress, pausing simply
to add that Saint Nicholas, as well as being the patron saint of young
children, those sticky-fingered elfin creatures with scant sense of other
people's property rights, is also the patron saint of thieves. Saint
Nicholas is always found in the vicinity of a big heap of loot, and when
asked where he got it he'll tell an implausible yarn involving some
non-human labourers hammering away in a place he euphemistically calls his
“workshop”. A likely story, say I.
As for those three gold-coloured balls, the dowry story is lovely, but a more
substantial account is that the balls were part of the armor-ial bearings of
the Medicis, who were very rich; and that they were then adopted by the
House of Lombard, early bankers and lenders who wanted people to think they
were very rich; and quite soon - because this early form of suggestive
advertising and sympathetic magic worked - they were very rich.
***
Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: Without story, there is no
debt.
A story is a string of actions occurring over time - one damn thing after
another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes - and debt happens as
a result of actions occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot
line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were
in there, and then - depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad -
how you got out of debt, or else how you got further and further into it
until you became overwhelmed by it, and sank from view.
The hidden metaphors are revealing: we get “into” debt, as if into a prison,
swamp, or well, or possibly a bed; we get “out” of it, as if coming into the
open air or climbing out of a hole. If we are “overwhelmed” by debt, the
image is possibly that of a foundering ship, with the sea and the waves
pouring inexorably in on top of us as we flail and choke. All of this sounds
dramatic, with much physical activity: jumping in, leaping or clambering
out, thrashing around, drowning. Metaphorically, the debt plot line is a far
cry from the glum actuality, in which the debtor sits at a desk fiddling
around with numbers on a screen, or shuffles past-due bills in the hope that
they will go away, or paces the room wondering how he can possibly extricate
himself from the fiscal molasses.
In our minds - as reflected in our language - debt is a mental or spiritual
non-place, like the Hell described by Christopher Marlowe's Mephistopheles
when Faust asks him why he's not in Hell but right there in the same room as
Faust. “Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it,” says Mephistopheles. He
carries Hell around with him like a private climate: he's in it and it's in
him. Substitute “debt” and you can see that in the way we talk about it,
it's the same kind of placeless place. “Why, this is Debt, nor am I out
of it,” the beleaguered debtor might similarly declaim.
Which makes the whole idea of debt - especially massive and hopeless debt -
sound brave and noble and interesting rather than merely squalid, and gives
it a larger-than-life tragic air. Could it be that some people get into debt
because, like speeding on a motorbike, it adds an adrenalin hit to their
otherwise humdrum lives?
Scientists tell us that rats, if deprived of toys and fellow rats, will give
themselves painful electric shocks rather than endure prolonged boredom.
Even this electric shock self-torture can provide some pleasure, it seems:
the anticipation of torment is exciting in itself, and then there's the
thrill that accompanies risky behaviour. But more importantly, rats will do
almost anything to create events for themselves in an otherwise eventless
time-space. So will people: we not only like our plots, we need our plots,
and to some extent we are our plots. A story-of-my-life without a story is
not a life.
Debt can constitute one such story-of-my-life. Eric Berne's 1964 bestselling
book on transactional analysis, Games People Play, lists five “life games”-
patterns of behaviour that can occupy an individual's entire life span,
often destructively, but with hidden psychological benefits or payoffs that
keep the games going. Needless to say, each game requires more than one
player - some players being consciously complicit, others being unwitting
dupes. “Alcoholic,” “Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch,” “Kick me,” and
“See What You Made Me Do” are Berne's titles for four of these life games.
The fifth one is called “Debtor”.
Berne says “‘Debtor' is more than a game. In America it tends to become a
script, a plan for a whole lifetime, just as it does in some of the jungles
of Africa and New Guinea. There the relatives of a young man buy him a bride
at an enormous price, putting him in their debt for years to come.” In North
America, says Berne, “the big expense is not a bride but a house, and the
enormous debt is a mortgage; the role of the relatives is taken by the bank.
Paying off the mortgage gives the individual a purpose in life.”
Indeed, I can remember a time from my own childhood - was it the 1940s? - when
it was considered cute to have a framed petit-point embroidered motto
hanging in the bathroom that said “God Bless Our Mortgaged Home”. During
this period, people would have mortgage-burning parties at which they would,
in fact, burn the mortgage papers in the barbecue or fireplace once they'd
paid the mortgage off.
I pause here to add that “mortgage” means “dead pledge” - “mort” from the
French for “dead”, “gage” for pledge, like the part in medieval romances
where the knight throws down his glove, thus challenging another knight to a
duel - the glove or gage being the pledge that the guy will actually show up
on time to get his head bashed in, and the accepting of the gage being a
reciprocal pledge. With a mortgage, the house is the thing being pawned -
it's put up as the gage - but the pledge becomes “dead” once the mortgage
has been discharged. I like the word “discharge” here too - it's what is
said of an arrested person when he or she is let out of jail.
So “paying off the mortgage” is what happens when people play the life game of
“Debtor” nicely. But what if they don't play nicely? Not-nice
play involves cheating, as every child knows. But it's not always true that
cheaters never prosper, and every child knows that too: sometimes they do
prosper, in the playground and elsewhere.
Thus there is a not-nice cheating form of “Debtor.” “Try and Collect” is what
Berne calls it, and the name says it all. Like the other cheating games in
his book, the not-nice player wins something no matter what happens.
Basically, the debtor obtains a lot of things on credit and then avoids
paying. As with Berne's other disingenuous games, “Try and Collect” needs at
least two players, and the person playing opposite the debtor is of course
the creditor. If the creditor becomes too frustrated and gives up, thus
failing to collect what is owed, the debtor gets something for nothing. If
the creditor persists in his efforts to collect, the game becomes an
exciting chase. If the creditor becomes really serious and resorts to
extreme measures - court cases and the like - the debtor feels justified
anger, because the creditor is being so mean and grasping. The debtor can
then position himself as a put-upon victim and paint the creditor as a truly
bad person, who, because of his badness, does not deserve to be paid.
The obtaining of goods on credit, the avoidance of payment, the thrill of the
chase, the anger at the creditor, and the acting-out of victimhood all come
with their own jolt-of-brain-chemical rewards, and each also performs the
function of providing a key element in a story-of-my-life “Game of Debtor”
plot line. As the dilapidated tramp Vladimir in Beckett's play Waiting for
Godot says of an unpleasant scene he's just witnessed, it passes the time.
His pal Estragon replies that the time would have passed anyway. Yes, says
Vladimir, but it would not have passed so rapidly. Whatever else debt may
be, it can also - it seems - have entertainment value, even for the debtor
himself. Like the rats and their self-induced electric shocks, we'd rather
have something painful happening to us than nothing happening to us at all.
©Margaret Atwood 2008
Edited extracts from Payback
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, £9.99 Buy
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