Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON” by George Orwell (first published 1933)

As I promised, after having considered on this blog all the works of fiction George Orwell wrote in the 1930s (Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up For Air) and making glancing comments on his two well-known later fictions (Animal Farm and 1984), I am now going to look carefully at Orwell’s three works of non-fiction, again all written in the 1930s.

Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first book to be published, in 1933, one year before his first novel Burmese Days, on which he had been working. Down and Out in Paris and London is Orwell’s account of the condition of poverty. A little more than half the book is taken up with Orwell’s experience in Paris, first living in a sort of penniless bohemianism, cadging food and cigarettes as best he could; then toiling as a plongeur [scullion] for very low wages in a couple of restaurants. He says: “Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this [Parisian] slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.” (Chapter 1) Then, slightly shorter, the second section of the book has him suddenly leaving Paris, going back to England and adopting the life of a tramp, seeing how impoverished and deracinated men existed there.

But, even for the reader who hasn’t done much background research, there are immediately some oddities about this non-fiction. Why are we never told how Orwell came to be in a situation of destitution? We can’t help wondering why an Eton-educated, former imperial police officer should have no resources or contacts to draw upon if he was hard up. And why does he suddenly skip back to England? The book gives a rather feeble explanation for this sudden move (he says that out of the blue he was offered a job looking after a mentally-challenged child). We also can’t help noticing that the two halves of the book don’t quite fit together.

            As it turns out, there are reasons for these anomalies [and in this I am drawing on two biographies, Bernard Crick’s George Orwell, A Life and D. J. Taylor’s Orwell, the Life]. Orwell in fact had examined and already written articles about the life of British tramps before he went to Paris. When he went to Paris, he stayed there for a year-and-a-half, spending his time writing, trying to kick off a literary career and earning some money from essays and commentaries that were published in magazines. He wrote two novels which were never published and which he destroyed, and he began writing Burmese Days. His whole examination and experience of Parisian poverty took up just ten weeks of his year-and-a-half time in Paris – and it has been noted that in those ten weeks, he did live in one of the poorer quarters of Paris, but it was relatively respectable and far from the most impoverished. Not completely penniless, he was sometimes sent money by his eccentric aunt Nellie Limouzin. [In her attempted take-down of Orwell, Wifedom, Anna Funder mentions this as a new discovery, but it was already widely known]. However, there were times when he genuinely was without money.

When Orwell first presented his non-fiction to publishers, they all said it was too short to be published. It dealt only with his experience of poverty in Paris. Orwell was going to call it A Scullion’s Diary. So he did some more weeks as a tramp in England (supported by his parents) and expanded his book to include the section on English vagrants. Again two publishers rejected it, and it was finally picked up by Victor Gollancz. It was named Down and Out in Paris and London by Gollancz as a compromise after Orwell had mooted a number of possible titles. Eric Blair wanted to write under a pseudonym, and he suggested four or five names to Gollancz. It was Gollancz who picked “George Orwell” as the appropriate pseudonym and George Orwell he remained. Down and Out in Paris and London reads as one sequential narrative, beginning in Paris and ending among down-and-outers in London. In fact that was not the order which Orwell experienced in reality.

And, in his “documentary” book, there a moments that could be possibly be fiction or close to fiction. In Chapter 3, for example, he tells us that he had his money stolen by a fiendish Italian who knew how to pick locks, and this is what left him in poverty. In fact, as he admitted later in private letters, he was really robbed by a prostitute whom he had bedded. What more often concerns me is that Orwell frequently inserts long tales purportedly told to him by people he met. Thus (Chapter 2) the long tale told to him by a young man called Charlie who boasts about his sexual conquests. Or (Chapter 4) the Russian called Boris, formerly a tsarist army officer who tells his whole life story. Or (Chapter 15) the kitchen-hand Valenti, who tells in detail a story about getting money when he was starving. My problem here is that these tales are presented as if they are verbatim, in the speakers’ very own words, when it’s highly unlikely that Orwell heard them or preserved them that way… even assuming the tales were told at all.

            Are we then to see Down and Out in Paris and London as fiction or fraud? Oddly enough, the answer is an emphatic “No!” There is in this book much acute observation of reality in the best journalistic tradition. Let it be made clear that nearly every writer of travel books, reportage or expose, no matter how truthful, will rearrange the order of events to make a clearer narrative and will embroider or rewrite conversations and speeches heard but not preserved word for word. Orwell is simply following the same tradition. As for the title Down and Out in Paris and London, we can charitably suggest that it does not mean that Orwell himself was “down and out”, but that he was reporting on social classes who were “down and out”. Orwell was influenced by writers like Jack London with his The People of the Abyss [reviewed on this blog], published exactly 30 years before Down and Out in Paris and London and reporting on the slums of London. And in his passages about English tramps, he was fully aware of W. H. Davies’ TheAutobiography of a Super Tramp [reviewed on this blog]. In effect, Orwell  - except for a few weeks – was an observer and examiner of poverty, but really part of poverty for only a limited time.

            The first nine chapters are largely about a workless and therefore poor existence in an unsanitary, dirty room in a cheap, bug-infested hotel. Orwell shares with the Russian Boris various desperate means to raise a tiny amount of money, such as selling or pawning clothes. Boris is typical of the many Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution who crowded into Paris in the 1920s. Orwell occasionally finds coins on the pavements, but they’re always just a few centimes. At one point he thinks he has secured a job writing for a Communist newspaper, but it turns out to be a fraud. Orwell, perhaps for the first time in his life,  experiences the pain of hunger: “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one has been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one’s blood has been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and being obliged to spit very frequently… I do not know the reason for this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has notice it.” (Chapter 7)

            So far, so relatively inconsequential. But the interest of Down and Out in Paris and London steps up from Chapter 10 to Chapter 23. Orwell gets a position as a plongeur in a large and fashionable hotel which is designated as Hotel X [the real name of the hotel was suppressed by Orwell and Gollancz for fear of facing a libel case]. Later he shifts to a smaller restaurant called the Auberge de Jahan Cottard. A plongeur can legitimately be called a scullion, but it means much more than one who does the dishes and scours the pots. Orwell counts most of the things he and his fellow plongeurs had to do: “ I don’t remember all our duties, but they included making tea, coffee and chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from the cellar, and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread, making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam, opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs, cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee – all this from a hundred to two hundred customers.”  (Chapter 11) Plongeurs are the lowest class in the hierarchy of the hotel. The cooks and the waiters are the most highly paid and the most prestigious people. Regarded by the community at large, “a plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world… His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive… [yet]. . . He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.” (Chapter 22)

            Shifts run from early morning to late at night, plongeurs have to work in poorly ventilated kitchens where food is cooked either in or over fires. The heat is overwhelming, everybody sweats profusely and sweat falls into meals about to be served. If food is dropped on the floor it is simply picked up and shoved on a plate to be served. The kitchens are filthy with dirt and grime… yet the customers believe they are getting clean and carefully prepared food, thanks to the smooth way the well-dressed waiters present the food .The work is exhausting. “It was amusing to look around the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door stood between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour – spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce leaves, torn papers and trampled food.”   (Chapter 12)

            The plongeurs are not only underpaid but have very little time off… yet curiously, there is a sort of camaraderie among the plongeurs, and on Saturday they can always drink [too much] and sing in a shabby bistro. What Orwell sees is exploitation and wages barely enough to sustain a decent life. In spite of which some plongeurs are proud of their work.

            When it comes to the English section of the book, Orwell is not so concerned with lowly-paid toil as with outright vagrancy. He suggests that in England there must be approximately ten-thousand tramps. He presents himself as a tramp in London, selling his clothes for cheaper ones so that he can fit in more easily with other tramps. On the whole he finds London streets cleaner and better policed than in Paris. But there are strict laws that forbid vagrants to sleep in the open at night [this is mentioned in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss too]. So in London destitute men have to sleep in “spikes”, doss-houses, lodging-houses and other rather primitive forms of shelter. The worse shelters – meaning most of them – are small, cramped and unsanitary, with tramps virtually sleeping on each other in a miasma of disgusting smells made by the unwashed or never-washed.

            In his travels with the tramps, Orwell finds that most of them are wary of both charity and religion. In one shelter (Chapter 26), tramps are offered a free bun and a very good cup of tea, but it is run by evangelicals so the tramps have to listen to hymns and a sermon. The tramps – including Orwell – mock this. He is sure that the charity “was given in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we ought to have been grateful – still, we weren’t.” Later (Chapter 29) Orwell has complained about how dirty so many shelters are, so he has to admit that Salvation Army shelters are scrupulously clean. But he writes: “To my eye these Salvation Army shelters, though clean, are far drearier that the worst of the common lodging-houses. There is such a hopelessness about some of the people there – decent, broken-down types who have pawned their collars but are still trying for office jobs. Coming to a Salvation Army shelter, where it is at least clean, is their last clutch at respectability….”(Chapter 29). Later (Chapter 33) tramps react to a religious ceremony which they watch from a balcony as their price for getting fed. Says Orwell: “It was a queer, rather disgusting scene. Below were the handful of simple, well-meaning people, trying hard to worship; and above were the hundred men who they had fed, deliberately making worship impossible… A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor – it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.” (Chapter 33 )

            Orwell stoutly refutes the idea that all tramps are thieves or layabouts, insisting that they have been pushed into poverty by lack of work. He defends the beggary many of them have to practice. He says: “if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar’s livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said but then what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A Beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course – but then many respirable trades are quite useless.”  (Chapter 31) [Come to think of it, it’s not much of a defence.]

            One important “character” in this book is an old Irish tramp called (inevitably) Paddy whom Orwell befriends. He walks the roads with Orwell and is always filled with optimistic chatter, though Orwell is amazed that Paddy (who is probably illiterate) knows so little about the state of the world. Even more interesting is Paddy’s friend Bozo, a “screever” (pavement artist) who draws his chalk images on the Embankment and other parts of London, except when the rain is falling. He is clearly not an idle man, but a professional, even if his work is a sort of begging. Bozo turns out to have his own philosophy, and surprises Orwell by having a great knowledge of astronomy.

            There are some chapters that appear gratuitous or “filler”, such as Chapter 32, where Orwell proceeds to tell us the meanings of words used by tramps and cockneys. He is also wary of talking about the homosocial (or homosexual) culture of tramps. He refers in passing to  “nancy boys” and suggests older pederasts prey on them. (Chapter 29) But of course it would be hard to elaborate about this in a book published in 1933.

Apart from its disjointedness, Down and Out in Paris and London has some moments which would now offend many readers. There are some places where antisemitism is suggested. In Chapter 3, after an altercation with a Jewish buyer of second-hand clothes, Orwell says “It would have been a pleasure to flatten the Jew’s nose…” . Boris the Russian gives a full-blast anti-Jewish rant in Chapter 6. How antisemitic was Orwell?   D. J. Taylor devotes a chapter to this in his biography of Orwell and comes to the conclusion that Orwell was not antisemitic but sometimes spoke crudely as other Englishmen did when they were looking to insult people… and after the Second World War broke out, Orwell never said anything even mildly negative about Jews. Orwell did, however, have prejudices, and was often ready to belittle American tourists. Speaking of American tourists’ behaviour in French restaurants, he wrote: “They would stuff themselves with disgusting American ‘cereals’, and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet a la reine at a hundred francs, and then souse it in Worcester sauce.” (Chapter 14) “Disgusting American ‘cereals’” ??? Presumably Orwell assumed that English porridge was the only decent breakfast there was. Little did the poor chap know that just a few decades after he was writing, cornflakes and other “disgusting” cereals would become the mainstay of British breakfasts. As for the misuse of marmalade, vermouth and poulet a la reine … Oh my! Bring me my smelling salts!

In spite of all this, Down and Out in Paris and London remains an interesting survey of some levels of poverty over 90 years ago. It is still very readable and much of it is still relevant to social conditions.