iarlamac's Full Review: George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London
Those who like to travel and stay in first-class hotels might not want to read this book, even though it was published over seventy years ago.
Eric Blair, or George Orwell, as he is known from his nom-de-plume, spent a few hungry years in Paris and London as a young man, sometimes starving when he could find no work. Perhaps because he had a fairly privileged background as a boy, being the son of an Imperial civil servant who sent him to the famous public (i.e. private) school for the upper classes, Eton, he gives a very vivid description of the poverty he had to endure in a time of mass unemployment all over the western world. Unable to make a living as an English tutor and being paid a pittance for his newspaper articles, and having pawned all he possessed, Orwell had to look for unskilled work in Paris hotels. He records the complex caste system in operation, the waiters who behaved with absolute snobbery among their fellow workers but who displayed the utmost servility with the customers, the cooks who were men apart, ruling their kitchens with curses and endless abuse but full of pride in their work. Their skill was to turn ingredients of the worst quality into satisfying meals for the customers and hygiene was unheard of in their workplace. They prodded the meat with their fingers, spat into the soup, picked food from the floor and sent it back to the dining room after a casual wipe with a dirty cloth.
The parts of the hotel that the guests saw were cleaned and polished without cease, while in the background the badly-paid dishwashers and potscrubbers had no place to wash their hands. Employers and employees cheated each other constantly. The hotels of Paris had a motley crew of workers, Russian refugees from the revolution, illegal Italian immigrants who got the best waiting jobs, and many others of indeterminate nationality mixing together in the great city, sharing their poverty and their life stories, and competing for the menial positions available to those without qualifications.
One of Orwell's greatest qualities as a writer is his direct critical language:
'Dirtiness in inherent in smart hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten.'(79). "'The only food at the Hotel X, which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's and the patron's. The maxim repeated by everyone was ' Look out for the patron, and as for the clients, s'en fout pas mal!'"(80). Orwell says that the Americans and the English were especially easy to swindle as 'they seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. Perhaps, he says, it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not.
Life became a routine of work, food and sleep, the work so tiring that even when woken up one night as a man was being murdered on the street outside, he merely went out to have a look at the corpse and went back to sleep again within three minutes. Everyone tried to steal a little food, while the hotel managers did their best to cheat the workers of some of their pay.
Saturday night was for drinking, the few hours of happiness worth the painful hangover, the weekly drinking-bout the only thing that made life worth living for these single men without a future.
From the Hotel Orwell went to work in a bistro with a few Russians, and conditions there were even worse, working sixteen hours a day washing dishes and pans without hot water, with the food stored outside among cats and rats, and a proprietor who had no capital for his enterprise. Despite the incredible filth in the kitchen, the bistro was a success, and even the French came to dine there. Orwell had enough of the life of a plongeur by then, however, and headed home to England with the promise of a job as an attentant to a 'congenital imbecile'. This job did not materialise so he hit the streets as a beggar, living in squalid shelters, enduring prayer meetings for a cup of tea and a bun, meeting street artists, tramps, men who had lost their jobs and did not have the education or the resources to improve their lot in any way, when forty men would compete for a job handing out leaflets for eighty hours a week. The lodging house life was "a squalid eventless life of crushing boredom". He learned not to pity those who had come down in life from better positions: "The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind (182)".
Orwell is a hero to many people nowadays because of his writing. Both his journalism and his creative work are an open attack on the political and economic systems which exploited the poor and deprived them of their liberty. It is a bit of a shock therefore to see that he was not free from the anti-Semitism so common in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The Jews are the villains of many of the anectodes from Paris and when describing a coffee-shop in Tower Hill, London he says: "In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon (133)". No other group is written about in this fashion.
As in Paris, everyone was cheating the system, the tramps hiding what little money or tobacco they had to get a bed for the night, and the so-called charities profiting from the misery by skimping on bedclothes and soap, doling out barely edible 'food', making the tramps sleep forty to a room and share filthy toilets and showers. One gets the impression that life was slightly better in Paris, as people were allowed to sleep in the Metro or under bridges, as men and women were allowed to mix together, and even when slaving in the cellars and kitchens they were allowed a couple of litres of wine every day and tobacco was cheap, while in England the destitute were moved on by the police if they tried to rest, men and women were locked up at night in separate shelters, and a cigarette or a glass of watery beer was a rare luxury. Orwell blames a system which degrades people by making them do useless work for a pittance, or forces them to tramp the streets and blames them for their poverty.
He learned a lot:
"I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be suroprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscrfibe to the Salvation Army, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal in a smart restaurant."
It is shocking to consider that Orwell is describing life in two of the greatest cities on Earth, the capitals of vast empires in all the continents, and proud centers of some of the world's greatest architecture. One believes that the standards of hygiene in restaurants and homeless shelters has improved in the intervening years, and that workers have more rights and dignity now, but the anectodal evidence would suggest that kitchen workers will still spit in the soup, and neglect to wash their hands after using the toilet, and eveywhere there are those who fall through the safety social nets, even in the most caring societies.
While 'Down and Out' cannot be considered to be Orwell's greatest work, it has clear sharp prose style, the close observation of life at its most dreary, the empathy with the exploited and the sceptical view of organised religion and communism, and the bleak view of humanity's future that he later showed in his great novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Literary Fiction - George Orwell,Paperback, English-language edition,Pages:228,Pub by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - Down and out in Paris and LondonMore at Barnes and Noble
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