It might come as a shock to no one that Orwell is one of my go-to guys and I have frequented the phrase ‘Orwellian state’ far too many times in the last 18 months. But there has been far too little of Orwell in my life the last few years though! Perhaps as a result the morbid call to reread 1984 and Animal Farm are pulling quite strongly at me again (even if that is also to put myself in a position to write about them).
Down and Out in Paris and London is far from his other work, Orwell is penniless, living in lice ridden rooms, and destitute. His first hand account of living within Paris and London in the 1920s in less then ideal circumstance is probably one of the more interesting things you could have drop in your path. It is humbling. It is not a scream at a starving artist waiting for daddy to come rescue you while you endlessly tap out dreadful prose on a rusty typewriter. It is more of a book within the present moment, struggling through homelessness, near starvation with a good helping of the people. Street artists, drunks, tramps, and down-on-their-luck-con men, this book has it all. Orwell scrapes together survival on sugary tea, stale bread, cheap wine, and cigarette butts. But as he writes Orwell doesn’t condemn the people he rubs shoulders with, instead he condemns the people who fail in their desires to better life for their fellow man.
Down and out in Paris and London – George Orwell
“A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: ‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.'” – p.120
Any observation or comment Orwell makes about class politics or social situation is done with an air of good humour. He talks of the relief of finally realising you, yourself are at last down and out, as if it is inevitable to fall as low as you can and survive.
Orwell’s Paris is a difficult affair. Everything he owns has gone to pawn shops or has been sold to keep his lodgings, and he tramps around Paris chasing rumours of employment. The job he finds is at a restaurant washing dishes, where the hours are unbelievably long and he is at the very bottom of the hierarchal ladder and must endure being verbally abused. From this stand point Orwell also sees behind the scenes of the restaurant, he sees the waiters, how the kitchen is run and how the food is really treated away from the customer.
There is something queasy in these scenes, a nightmare of dirty dishes piling up, the over intimacy the head cook treats food destined for customers and “the secret vein of dirt, running through the garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.” It is difficult to not love the disgust Orwell brings to Down and Out. It is difficult to not be swept up in it.
There is potentially something romantic in the Paris half of Down and Out, working hard on 17 hour shifts, 7 days a week, for a couple of glasses of wine every night, accompanying the whimper of rubbing together francs for anything to fill the belly. But more importantly is how he demonstrates empathy with the poor and the lower classes that likely is the precursor for his later works. Orwell is shrewd in this book but he does not continually push his beliefs through the somber material but waits for natural pauses in the narrative.
The second half of the novel is based in London which is far less vivid and interesting to my mind. But Orwell there describes what it is to tramp around London, living from found cigarette butts, in long days walking from one place to another for a mouldy blanket and a mattress with 60 other people.
There seems to be more energy in the first half of the novel for me, more vitality but that may have more to do with the content. Tramping around London seems more to do with waiting, and pausing, and waiting whereas the Paris section is energetic in it’s search for work. It’s energetic in its packhorse mentality, the urgency of survival seems more keen in the first half of the book. Whereas London is a sort of apathy, a sort of, drifting no man’s land. To compare them, the two halves have a very different sort of feel. But they are demonstrating two very different things, one is utter unemployment and reliance on the good nature of others and hand outs, and the other is good-honest-work of the kind that leaves no room for self-pity.
I really loved this book. I’m not sure what to call it, a memoir, a thinly veiled perhaps true account somewhat stirred with artistic licence – there is real divided opinion. But wikipedia says it’s non-fiction so I guess that’s a start? Out of all of the books I have read this year this one really sticks out as one that shines, one that has a touch of rebellion about it. One that I’m sure to read again. There is something honest and ‘within the present’ at the time it was written, there is something intangible that I can’t quite put words to. But perhaps that is because I, myself, come from a privileged position and have never experienced what it is to be down and out.
The Shelf Wanderer 