Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  His memoir of those years, Down and Out in Paris and London (the metaphor in the title comes from being knocked unconscious in a boxing match), emphasized “the sour reek of the refuse-carts,” the extreme decay of the place and the bizarre consolation of desperate poverty: “I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” Though his extreme poverty was the result of bad luck, it was inevitable. The miracle had not happened, the novels were no good, and Orwell still had no idea what he was going to do with his life. And yet, in a typical Orwellian paradox, the experience of being doubly an outsider, in nationality and in poverty, inspired the particular angle of vision, political and social, that set its stamp on his writing. There would be false starts, and he would have difficulty publishing Down and Out, but it was his first authentic prose.

  Despite Orwell's “pre-tubercular condition,” a friend recalled, he exposed himself in cold weather “in totally inadequate clothing. It wasn't just poverty. It was suicidal perversity.” This stubborn self-testing endangered his always precarious health, and in Paris he suffered a serious bout of influenza. In March 1929 he spent two weeks in the public wards of the Hôpital Cochin, which he later described in his moving essay “How the Poor Die,” an experience which taught him what it was like to belong to the world's underclass.

  After filling out a lot of forms in the hospital and learning he had a temperature of 103°, he was forced to take a cold bath and, wearing only a thin night-gown, had to walk two hundred yards across the open grounds to reach the charity ward. He then suffered agonies as the inhuman staff first cupped him with hot glasses and then applied an excruciating mustard poultice to his chest. While there he felt reduced to nothing more than a thing, a mute specimen for medical students who didn't seem to realize that he and the other patients were actually human beings. In his essay the hospital resembles “an old-fashioned, dungeon-like prison” in which the poor died slow, smelly and painful “natural” deaths.

  After he left the hospital, his marginal existence suddenly became desperate when his room was robbed and his money stolen. In Down and Out the thief is an Italian compositor and fellow-lodger who duplicates the keys and robs a dozen rooms. But Orwell was actually deceived by a French girl whose short haircut and slim figure reminded him of the boys at Eton. He picked her up and brought her to his room, and she stole everything he possessed. Reduced to destitution, Orwell tried unsuccessfully to catch fish in the Seine (Hemingway claimed to have caught pigeons for dinner), and with no rent money was forced to sleep outdoors: “I passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had expected.”

  Finally, through Boris—a Russian émigré and former soldier whom he'd met in the hospital—he worked thirteen hours a day for ten weeks, first as a plongeur, or dishwasher, in the luxurious Hotel Lotti, then in a Russian restaurant. According to the Duchess of Westminster, the Duke, then a guest at the Lotti, once craved a peach in the middle of the night. There was no peach in the hotel and the lowly Orwell was hastily sent out to find one. All the fruit shops were shut, and he desperately but vainly pounded on several doors. Finally, afraid to return empty handed, he smashed a shop window with a rock, grabbed a peach and dashed back to the hotel with the precious fruit.

  These menial experiences occupy most of the Paris section of Down and Out. The lowest of the low in the hotel hierarchy, he was forced to shave off his cherished mustache, which was considered insubordinate by the management. Abused by the waiters, he had to use his fists to get common civility. Some of the more ambitious waiters took English classes in the afternoon, yet he never tried to escape dishwashing by teaching them. He had no presentable clothes and was too exhausted to try to earn more money.

  Orwell stuck it out in Paris as long as he could, but returned to England toward the end of 1929 with the promise of a job. Once more fate seemed to propel him into a hand-to-mouth existence. The job did not materialize, and for the next two years he continued his masochistic, almost pathological commitment to exploring the life of the poor and dispossessed, and wandered around the country as a tramp. Now back home, he kept comparing the two countries and testing his own Englishness. In August 1931, while tramping in London's Trafalgar Square, he recorded the English workingclass notion (a strong contrast to Chesterton's idealized view) that the French were “dirty”: “I spent most of the day reading [Balzac's novel] Eugènie Grandet, which was the only book I had brought with me. The sight of a French book produced the usual remarks—’Ah, French? That'll be something pretty warm, eh?’ Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic.” Censorship of theater, art and publications was strict in England, and in the popular mind France was synonymous with racy cabarets, sexy books, obscene postcards and permissive morality.

  In January 1933—six long years after Orwell had left the Burmese Police and decided to become a writer—his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was finally published. Influenced by the stark realism and social protest in the novels of Balzac and Emile Zola, Orwell, both observer and participant, described his journey to the lower depths, heightening reality to achieve dramatic effects. The book's episodic structure and mixed genre helps to explain why he had great difficulty placing it. Combining sociology, anthropology and politics, autobiography, reportage and travelogue, it vividly describes harsh poverty, degrading work and desperate unemployment, but also tells the story of Orwell's personal adventures. The first part covers the last few weeks of his two years in Paris, his search for work and his job as a dishwasher.

  The epigraph from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales announces the dominant theme: “O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!” The narrative is often interrupted by digressions—anecdotes, stories-within-the-story, character studies and observations—and by the tales that Orwell heard in the local bistros that were based on the oral traditions of illiterate workers. Two of his most eccentric types are Communists: Furex, a hardworking stonemason who becomes a French patriot as soon as he's drunk; and Jules, a Hungarian waiter, whose politics demand he does as little work as possible. By contrast, the waiters in the grand hotel, snobs to a man, delight in servility. Orwell also uses French literary models. He quotes a François Villon poem on hunger and invokes the name of Zola when describing the hellish kitchen. He uses Charles Baudelaire to symbolize the Romantic idea of the damned poet and compares himself to Baudelaire's impoverished “skeleton labourer” as he lies starving in bed. A temporary dweller in poverty, he tells his middle-class readers about this unexplored country that lies in plain sight.

  The book opens abruptly and dramatically on what he calls the rue Coq d’Or (Golden Cock Street), where the leprous houses, like old drunkards, lurch “towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.” With sharp social analysis and in vigorous prose, Orwell gives an economic profile of the quarter, and shows how he fits into it. “All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians,” and as one of these poor foreigners he's at the bottom of the heap. Yet he also reveals the gradations of poverty and how each level feeds on the one below: “amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes.”

  Orwell is fascinated with the particularities of poverty, the special smells and sounds in a room where the walls are as thin as matchwood and layers of wallpaper house innumerable bugs. He's equally obsessed with how to survive on a few francs a day. When he discovers that one of his coins is Belgian, he has to slink out of a shop without a purchase, and must conceal bread in his pockets
as he slips past the patron of the hotel. Orwell, the upright ex-policeman—a rather naïve, trusting and inexpert comic character—needs his mentor Boris, the Russian waiter, to guide him through this underworld. Boris inks the white skin that shows through the holes in his socks, and urges him to lie to the boss.

  Some scenes have a Charlie Chaplin-like humor and slapstick quality. Boris contrives to keep the patron talking about sport while Orwell, shielded by Boris’ wide shoulders, escapes to a pawnshop with a suitcase full of clothes. The cramped kitchen in the Russian restaurant has piles of greasy plates and slippery vegetable peelings underfoot, and the big-buttocked cook bursts into tears when the going gets rough. All this would be funny, except that Boris and Orwell are starving, and the cook works sixteen hours a day to support an invalid husband. Like Chaplin, Orwell pushes comedy to the edge of misery and suffering.

  The chapter on the luxurious Hotel Lotti, the most effective in the book, combines analysis of the social hierarchy with Dickensian descriptions of the laborers. The hotel, like an ocean liner, has strict class distinctions. The guests live in splendor while the workers toil in the infernal regions: “there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the whir of engines.” The hellish heat is matched by the raging abuse that pours in torrents from the cooks and waiters, who have to serve hundreds of people simultaneously.

  Though he suffered at the time, Orwell the writer retrospectively delights in pulling the curtain aside to contrast the elegant façade with the disgusting mess that lies behind the scenes: “It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour.” An Italian waiter hurled insults at an apprentice in the revolting kitchen before he entered the dining room and “sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer.” The rigid class system in society is replicated in the hierarchy of employees, which naturally inspires resentment and provokes revenge. The cook routinely spits in the soup, the waiters dip their greasy fingers in the gravy. “Roughly speaking,” Orwell writes in a characteristically shocking epigram, “the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.”

  Though he works like a slave from seven in the morning until nine at night, he finds—strangely enough—that the job suits him. It needs no skill, is extremely exhausting, has no interest and no future, but it produces a heavy contentment. Having done the work himself, instead of simply observing it, Orwell gains deeper insight into the mentality of workers and the rhythm of their lives. He admires the spirit of the people who put up with endless drudgery and take pride in their ability to deal with anything. “What keeps a hotel going,” he argues, “is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is.” At the end of the week, the intensity of their work makes the pleasures of the bistro all the sweeter.

  Orwell makes the transition to the second part of the book, on tramping and begging in England, by contrasting his impressions of Paris and London: “[London] was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of the trams, and the noisy festering life of the back streets, and the armed men clattering through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces comelier and milder and more alike, without the fierce individuality and malice of the French…. It was the land of the tea urn and the Labour Exchange [government employment office], as Paris is the land of the bistro and the sweatshop.”

  The tone of Down and Out suggests that Orwell was more content as a plongeur than as an English tramp. It was easier to be déclassé outside his own country, and in Paris he could enjoy the freedom to be eccentric and the stupefying animal contentment of work and sleep. In Paris he had a hotel room (squalid), a job (horrible), a circle of acquaintances (drunkards) and a close friend (who couldn't help him). In London, though he could always retreat if necessary to his bolt-hole with family or friends, he was forced by strict regulations to be constantly on the move: tramping, begging and stealing. In England he observed men degraded by unemployment and homelessness, reduced to a spineless condition by hunger and malnutrition. Tramps, condemned to move from one shelter to another and cut off from women by extreme poverty, live in “enforced idleness” that destroys their souls. Only while hop-picking in Kent can they earn some money and enjoy a freer life in the English countryside.

  Down and Out was well received. Though Orwell had started tramping in the late 1920s, his book gained significance during the Depression, when unemployment, poverty and the struggle to survive were crucial issues for millions of people. His contrast between the luxury of the grand hotel and the exploitation of the workers, his firsthand analysis of the psychology of poverty met the demand for social realism in the 1930s. Reviewers praised his honesty, his sensitive social conscience, his practical suggestions for the alleviation of poverty, and his portrayal of the differences in national temperament in the sections on Paris and London.

  In his introduction to the French edition, La Vache enragée (manger la vache enragée means “to have a rough time”), Orwell took pains to mollify his French audience and wrote: “Since all the personal scenes and events have something repulsive about them, it is quite possible that I have unconsciously portrayed Paris and London as abominable cities.” But, he disingenuously added, he would be hurt if Parisian readers “believed I feel the least hostility toward a city that is very dear to me.” In an enthusiastic letter of August 1936, Henry Miller, another connoisseur of Parisian lowlife, told Orwell: “It's almost fantastic; it's so incredibly true! How you ever held out for so long is beyond me…. Did you get to China? It's a pity you couldn't have had another section [complete with opium dens] on down and out in Shanghai. That would be the coup de grace!” In 1962 Miller added: “I was crazy about his book Down and Out in Paris and London; I think it's a classic. For me it's still his best book.” Miller would have been pleased to know that for many years Down and Out was the most popular work in the library of Dartmoor prison.

  In France Orwell formed some personal habits that lasted a lifetime. He adopted a proletarian appearance, wore a blue flannel workman's shirt and started to roll his own cigarettes from strong black tobacco. He also returned to London with a narrow, rectangular clipped mustache that left an odd bare strip under his nose. It must have taken some trouble to maintain, but distinguished him from the clean-shaven English and made him look more military and authoritative. The English novelist Anthony Powell was fascinated by this idiosyncratic mustache, which always remained “a bit of a mystery…. It was perhaps Orwell's only remaining concession to a dandyism that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface of his self-imposed austerity…. Perhaps it had something to do with the French blood inherited through his mother.”

  In January 1937, on the way to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell stopped to see Henry Miller in Paris. Miller thought Orwell, willing to sacrifice his life in a foreign war, a foolish idealist. But he wished him well and gave him a leather jacket that was useful on the wintry Aragon front. Six months later, after barely escaping the Communist death squads in Barcelona, Orwell crossed the border into France and spent three restful days (on one of the two rare holidays in his adult life) on the Mediterranean coast at Banyuls.

  In 1938, to avoid another flare-up of his chronic tuberculosis, Orwell and his wife Eileen spent the winter in the supposedly perfect climate of French Morocco. Unfortunately, the hot, dry desert blew a lot of sand and dust in the air and irritated his lungs. He was no stronger and in no better health when he returned to England the following spring. Marrakech, a crossroads for caravan routes across North Africa, was supposed to be the most attractive place in Morocco. The Koutoubia Mosque and its 200-foot-high minaret dominated the town, the museums, the royal palaces, the gardens and the maze of souks. The towering Atlas Mount
ains, snowcapped in winter, provided a stunning background for the palm trees, pink buildings and high mud ramparts. The living center of town, the vast Djmaa el Fna square, was filled with food sellers, storytellers, letter writers, witch doctors, dentists, mystics, acrobats, drummers and dancers. Their rented villa, three miles north of town, was on the edge of a huge date-palm plantation. It was “entirely isolated except for a few Arabs who live in the outbuildings to tend the orange grove that surrounds it…. There is a large sitting room, two bedrooms, a bathroom & a kitchen.” There was no provision for cooking, but they had “some little pots with charcoal in them & a Primus stove.”

  Orwell was not interested in the picturesque or touristic aspects of Morocco, but in the social and economic conditions, the agricultural methods and urban poverty. He was disgusted by the endemic blindness and beggars. He had never visited French Indo-China while working in Burma. But his months in Marrakech enabled him to evaluate British and French colonialism; and he felt that Burma, compared to Morocco, was like paradise. The Moroccan villagers lived in miserable little straw huts, surrounded by mud walls. The old Arab quarter of town had labyrinthine bazaars filled with camels and donkeys, very exotic, but degraded by dirt and squalor. The decadent colonial milieu and the threat of a major European war made him gloomier than ever. He got to know some Foreign Legionaires, stationed nearby, who surprised him by showing no interest in the impending European crisis. Yet he was surprised to find, in contrast to Burma, that there was “very little discontent and, at any rate on the surface, no organised movement against the French rule.”