Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell
120 pages
published in 1933
In the present day and age, it has almost become embarassing to profess a fondness for George Orwell's writing. He has been thoroughly co-opted by odious rightwingers and ex-leftists scared by 9-11 into supporting Bush's crusade against evildoers. By selective quotations and careful reading into his works what they want to read, they've tried to make him into an icon of the struggle against Islamofascism, a mostly imaginary spectre haunting the dinner parties and speaking tours of the ex-left. This reinvention of Orwell, from socialist and social critic into alleged supporter of exactly the sort of social order he would've opposed, has made him somewhat suspect. Guilt by association, so to speak.
But a Christopher Hitchens might fancy himself Orwell's reincarnation but he'll never measure up to the real Orwell. Orwell always went against the grain, a foe of both English captialism as Russian stalinism, a stance that did him no favours; Hitchens was a Trot when it was fashionable and became a toady to Bush when that was fashionable. Hitchens is a self promoter, getting his face on television or giving after dinner speeches for the Washington elite, while Orwell was the short of writer who not only wrote about the underclass, but lived as one of them to discover for himself what it was like.
Down and Out in Paris and London was the main result of this research, a slim book boiling down his experiences in the two cities over a period of two and a half or so years. When he first moved to Paris, he made a living as an English tutor and by writing for various periodicals; he did not earn much, but enough to be comfortable. It is when both these sources of income dry up, that he gets in trouble. For a while he has to survive purely on his savings, before he finds a job as a plongeur in a big Paris hotel, washing dishes and doing the kind of jobs the cooks or waiters find beneath them.
Later, via the same friend who got him this job, Orwell gets a similar job at a newly opened restaurant. However, when he and his friend quit their job at the hotel, the restaurant is nowhere near open; they end up working for free to help finish it. The job he has to do when the restaurant finally opens is even harder then his old job at the hotel.
The second part of the book deals with his return to London, after he has finally become sick of Paris. He should've a cozy job waiting for him there, but unfortunately that meets with delay and so he spents several months on the road as a tramp. I found this to be less interesting than his experiences in Paris, as it was more monotome.
Orwell draws the realities of his situation well, in a style of writing that works as a window pane, in that it doesn't obscure anything. It is a pared down, sparse style of writing in which Orwell's own personality almost, but not quite disappears, generalising his experiences. If I compare this with Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's similar look at the realities of minimum wage work in contemporary America, I see that Ehrenreich's work is much more about her experiences as she experiences them, while Orwell writes about his experiences in a voice almost entirely detached from them. The fascination with Down and Out in Paris and London lies in the experiences Orwell describes, not in his writing or in the fact that it is Orwell who experiences them.
And those experiences are horrendous, of a sort we'd like to believe we've left behind in Europe; for most of us this is indeed the case, but as Ehrenreich showed, for many people it is still a daily reality. The near starvation and endless days spent worrying about very small amunts of money, where mislaying one or two euros (or pounds, or dollars) means the difference between having something to eat every day of the week or not, is still a reality for those people who have to depend on the charity of the state. they may be "lucky" to live in a time when this assistance is available, but it is still a meager and luckless existence.
Orwell's descriptions of his work as a plongeur, with the hot, physical work and long hours, especially hit home to me. Not that our situations were at all simular, but I've worked summer jobs where I'd do 12-14 hours shifts for six-seven days a week. Your world contracts to working, eating and sleeping. all of which is doable if it's temporarily and you earn enough, but not so much when that is the only life you'll have until you're too old do continue and then you'll slowly starve...
Down and Out in Paris and London is not an analytical look at poverty, it is an explainatory book: this is what it feels like to be poor. Orwell does offer some solutions, but is aware that the roots of poverty lie in the capitalist system. In western Europe, large scale poverty of the kind Orwell describes has gone or is at least migitated by the social democratic measures put in place since then: unemployement benefits, state pensions, universal health care and such, yet even so it still exists. It is easy to read it as an exotism, something which no longer has any relevance to the society we live in, but that would be wrong.
