Down And Out In Paris And London – George Orwell, 1933 ★★★

Before Becoming an Adjective

When your last name becomes an adjective, it means you left a mark. George Orwell has rare company that way, but when looking at his first book, the term Orwellian feels off.

Paranoia and a brooding kind of prescience are my standard Orwellian associations. They go out the window reading Down And Out In Paris And London, Orwell’s memoir of a destitute life in France and England. Big Brother is no longer watching; nobody even cares. Yet there are compensations. Given how dry and gloomy 1984 and Animal Farm are, I wasn’t expecting the humor or characterizations I got here.

At times, Orwell suggests a British Mark Twain, describing the gritty life of hotel work:

Essentially, a “smart” hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.

Later, Orwell notes the hypocrisy of regulations for begging:

As the law now stands, if you approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you seven days for begging. But if you make the air hideous by droning “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches – in short, if you make a nuisance of yourself – you are held to be following a legitimate trade and not begging.

More recognizable perhaps is this latter Orwell having at society. This is especially true in the second half of Down And Out In Paris And London, a full-throated attack on how capitalism works in the United Kingdom. A society that treats people like animals, he notes, degrades them unrecognizably. “You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs,” he writes.

But most of this comes later. The first half of Down And Out In Paris And London is quite a different book. Being a visitor to another country, Orwell’s focus is less on social ills than the colorful behavior of people on the margins, “people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent.” It is here that Orwell’s distinctive writer’s voice – mordant, precise, ever-observant – comes into play and makes its strongest impressions.

George Orwell a few years after the events of Down And Out. One sacrifice he had to make in order to find work was to shave his mustache. Image from https://nationalvanguard.org/2016/01/historical-revisionism-and-the-legacy-of-george-orwell/

First up: Is this a novel, or a memoir? The answer depends on your point of view. Orwell did spend time working as a dishwasher, or plongeur, while in Paris, after his money was stolen. In Down And Out In Paris And London, Orwell blames a young Italian with side whiskers; a Wikipedia entry notes instead the culprit was likely a woman with whom Orwell had been intimate. Orwell skipped over this to spare his parents’ sensibilities. Also made up for the same reason: the name “Orwell” itself. [His real name was Eric Blair.]

Other facts were reworked or reordered to give his book readability. In Down And Out, our author is very much hand-to-mouth, living by his wits. Much of the tension chapter-to-chapter rests in whether and how he will survive. In reality, Eric Blair had an aunt in Paris to help out. When he did go back to England, it was not to public lodgings, or “spikes,” but home to his parents. In real life, Blair’s time with the destitute was spent out of vocation, not desperation.

So a kind of caveat exists when reading the opening chapters of Down And Out. Orwell presents himself as an authority when explaining how hitting rock-bottom was almost refreshing, in a what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger way. He writes: “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.” So too did generous relatives.

What does command respect, regardless of the facts, is Orwell’s lively prose and flair for description. He gets to it right away, in an opening chapter where we hear a hotel patronne standing on a sidewalk yelling up at a lodger not to squash bugs on her wallpaper: “Why can’t you throw them out the window like everyone else?”

The argument goes on awhile, never resolved, while Orwell moves on to introduce the many strange habits and eccentric residents in his neighborhood. A recent arrival to the City of Light, he dispels any illusions we might have about Continentals living high and fancy.

For a while, Orwell explains his sustenance lifestyle giving English lessons and selling the odd magazine article. But then he loses everything when that Italian shows up. After, he finds himself watched carefully by the patronne, well aware of the temptation her tenants have to “shoot the moon,” a. k. a. run out on their bill by sneaking off with what they can carry. Instead of running, Orwell pawns near all he owns for a few francs, which he relates in excruciating detail.

“Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how,” he writes. “But it is a complicated business.”

Mostly he keeps introducing new characters. Old Charlie fondly recalls the night he raped a helpless girl. R., an Englishman, drinks four liters of wine a night and six on Saturdays. A group of Russians offer Orwell work as a writer for their communist paper, even having him carry parcels of laundry to their address so the police wouldn’t suss out their radical activity. It turns out they were fake Reds who scammed Orwell out of a few precious francs. As throughout his Paris sojourn, Orwell’s attitude toward them is non-judgmental:

They were clever fellows, and played their part admirably…as for that touch about bringing a parcel of washing, it was genius.

The book really takes off when Orwell introduces us to Boris, a Russian émigré who dreams of working as a maître-d’ at a hotel. Boris is the book’s voice of ridiculous optimism, dreaming of big tips and a mistress even as he enlists Orwell’s help shooting the moon.

“It is fatal to look hungry,” Boris warns the narrator. “It makes people want to kick you.”

For a time, Boris seems a weight to Orwell, however amusing. But then Boris finds jobs for both of them at a fancy hotel-restaurant where cleanliness ends where the kitchen door begins.

Constructed in 1758, and first operated as a hotel in 1909, Paris's Hôtel de Crillon is one of two suspects for "Hotel X," the workplace of Orwell as described in Down And Out. It remains a chic place for vacationing celebs like Taylor Swift and Madonna. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org.

The actual identity of this Paris establishment is much debated to the present day. It is understandable why Orwell fudged its identity. No one who read the book would ever eat there again.

 

Waiters lick steaks before bringing them to diners. They stick oily fingers in the gravy. One, a lazy radical, takes pride in wringing out his washcloth in the soup.

This waiter, Jules, goes on to explain his mindset:

“Who cares about the customers? They don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologise, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you come back by another door – with the same chicken.”

Actually, I am conflating stories of two restaurants told in the book, the second being a place run by Russian émigrés where Boris has an in. The stories do run together after a while, enjoyable as long as you don’t eat while reading them.

The second half of Down And Out, the London part, is where the book sags for me. It has colorful bits to it, but Boris is sorely missed. So is a story arc. Instead of witnessing the author’s struggle to keep his sanity in increasingly desperate circumstances, sucking back heeltaps of bad wine and sweating off the effects of intoxication, bickering with crazy colleagues, and so on – the London section offers a rinse-repeat cycle of visits to various tramp hostels in and around the city as Orwell’s authorial voice flits between observer and pontificator.

Pennyfields, a working-class London neighborhood as it appeared at the time of Down And Out. Orwell's experiences finding lodgings here and at other areas in and around the city make up the book's second half. Image from https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/plate-16.

A “screever” named Bozo, whose occupation is drawing on sidewalks for spare coins, explains the economics of his work:

“…You’ll never get a drop off real toffs. It’s shabby sort of blokes you get most off, and foreigners. I’ve had even sixpences off Japs, and blackies, and that. They’re not so bloody mean as what an Englishman is.”

Bozo stands in for Boris for the second half, being the most regular of the narrator’s English companions. He smacks more of an idealized tramp with his stargazing ruminations than the more likeably off-center Boris, a true original. The characters here are better behaved than the French crowd; more boring, too.

Orwell questions the rule of sending tramps out from a hostel after a brief period, rather than letting them work for their sustenance and perhaps helping them get a leg up. It seems pragmatic enough, conservative even by today’s standards, but perhaps too radical for its time as Orwell makes clear over and over.

Other suggestions are easier to follow: “When you see a man distributing handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.”

All in all, Down And Out serves notice of the arrival of a new voice in English literature, skeptical yet imaginative and ready to voice uncomfortable truths. If it isn’t Orwell in his more recognizable form, Down And Out In Paris And London is still a worthy read as a time capsule, most especially in the first half. Just don’t expect Big Brother.