Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London
Author: George Orwell 1933 213 pp
My rating: 4*
Started June 26 2008, Finished June 30 2008

“Poverty is what I am writing about …” (9)

Billed by the publisher and critics as a novel, referred to by its author as a “travel diary”, this work strikes the modern reader as a powerful example of participatory investigative journalism, delving into what life is like for some of those who have nothing.

In the Paris section, the narrator has consumed his small savings, lost his meagerly remunerative tutoring jobs, pawned everything he owns but the clothes he is wearing and is confronted with starvation. A long overdue paycheck is received, allowing him pay in advance a month’s rent on his filthy, bug invested, paperboard-walled closet of a room while he and a friend subsist, when they have food at all, on a daily shared loaf of bread and margarine while they look for hard to find restaurant work. A promise of employment in the near future from the owner of a soon to open establishment buoys their hopes until they have the good fortune to be offered positions with the restaurant of a top hotel, the narrator’s as a plongeur, a bottom-of-the-ladder dishwasher/general purpose menial. The work provides short term security, but nothing else as it consumes his life: “The hours were from seven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the evening till nine--eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-room. By the ordinary standards of a Paris PLONGEUR, these are exceptionally short hours.” (61) Its low wages and lowly status preclude any hope of getting married or self-improvement: “They have no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for anything else. The best they can hope for is to find a slightly softer job as night-watchman or lavatory attendant. (78) The only respite is weekly a savings-killing drinking spree on the one night off. Eventually the promised work at the new restaurant seems to materialize and the credulous narrator resigns his hotel position leading to a few weeks of essentially unpaid labor readying the restaurant for business before he is once again drawing a wage. The work at the new job makes the hotel work seem like a sinecure: aside from a few hours of sleep a night, he works virtually all the time for even lower wages. The behind the scenes views he provides to this day set the standard for what restaurant diners does not want to know about the anti-sanitary conditions their food is prepared under: absolute filth, dishes wiped clean instead of being washed, prevalent vermin, unrefrigerated perishables. To the narrator’s surprise, the restaurant appears to being prospering, a fact he attributes to his understood knowledge that “Sharp knives, of course, are THE secret of a successful restaurant.” (114)

In order to restore his sanity and health depleted from the battlefield conditions of his Parisian existence, the narrator arranges a promise of a job and a loan from a friend in England quits the restaurant and travels to London, only to find the job delayed for a month, causing him to once again pawn his clothes and while away the unemployed interval as a homeless person, getting to know various of his fellow “tramps” and the “spikes” (inhumane homeless shelters) they frequent. A person is only allowed to stay at a spike in any city one night in a row and twice in a month, causing the always malnourished, often infirm wretches to have to pointlessly walk many miles a day from one spike to the next. The narrator develops great compassion for his fellow disposed, concluding that the only thing keeping most of them down is lack of opportunity – there is virtually no work to be had. Any character failings he sees in these men are not innate but a result of their wasting circumstances: “It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood.” (153)

Down and Out provides insight into the development of Orwell's signature humanism and class consciousness, one of its primary motifs being the indifference and/or contempt in both societies for the less fortunate and the willingness of nearly everyone above the bottom to prey on those below them. If the book had been less reportorial and more novelistic, in particular revealed a little more of the narrator’s emotional state beyond famished apathy or slave-worked exhaustion, I would have found it more resonant and rated it even higher. As it stands, though, it comes across as a very effective piece of reporting, elevated by the occasional profound and unexpected observation or bon mot such as the following: “He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)” (168)

Buddenbrooks

• Buddenbrooks
  Author: Thomas Mann 1900 648 pp
  My rating: 4.5*
  Started June 6 2008, Finished June 12 2008
  
  “ … to use a situation without any sense of shame, he told himself, that is what it means to be fit for real life.” (p 543)
  
  Mann’s early masterpiece, published when he was in his mid 20’s and set in the mid-19th century, chronicles four generations of the titular merchant family as it devolves from prosperity to disintegration. It brought to my mind a variety of referents, from The Godfather, with which there is a strong “weak son” parallel between Christian and Fredo, to The Naked and the Dead, another precocious tour de force. Published in 1900, this is more of a descriptive “19th century” novel as compared with the introspective, idea-driven The Magic Mountain; it is fair to say that the plot driven Buddenbrooks is a much easier read and that most readers will find it more appealing than its counterpart in Mann’s oeuvre.
  A few themes particularly captured my attention:
  
  
• That the Buddenbrooks’ existence was driven entirely by appearances – aside from black sheep Christian, the family members are almost entirely motivated by how their actions will reflect on the reputation of the family. None of the characters is permitted an inner life beyond a commanding sense of duty, a notion explicitly expressed by Thomas in denouncing Christian’s tendency to introspection: “And for me the important thing is control and balance. There will always be people for whom this sort of interest in oneself, this probing observation of one’s own sensibilities, is appropriate … But we are just simple merchants, my dear; our self-observations are dreadfully petty.” (p 233)
  
• How constrained the lives of women of their class were – the end of all of a woman’s life was to make a “good marriage”, one that would somehow redound to the benefit of the family. A woman of this class from a family that had fallen on hard times and was incapable of funding a dowry had no chance of suitable marriage and thus was condemned to a life of spinsterhood.
  
• Class-consciousness, as in the entire portion of Mann’s work that I have been exposed to, is pervasive. Even the servants are snobs: “And Ida Jungmann had her self-respect, too. She knew who she was, and if some ordinary servant girl sat down with her ward on the same bench … and started a conversation as if they were equals, Mamselle Jungmann would say ‘Erika dear, I feel a draft,’ and depart.” (p 215)
  
• Dentistry in the era before anesthetics was a truly grim affair. The reader feels deeply for little Hanno, the family’s final scion, whose poor teeth force him to undergo regular extractions, which as his father Thomas, preparing himself to have a single tooth removed, anticipates thusly: “This will get worse and worse and rage out of control until I can’t bear it anymore, and then comes the real catastrophe and an insane, screaming, inhuman pain will rip my entire brain to shreds.” (p 583)
  
  Finally there is the following nugget -- in prose that would feel entirely in place in the pages of a Tom Wolfe novel -- concluding a financial showdown that quite reminded me of the “workout” scene of A Man In Full with its defenseless debtors, remorseless creditors and a devastating litany of unpayable debt: “The consul stood at the door, pale as death, the knob in his hand. Shivers of horror ran down his back. Was he really trapped in this little dimly lit room with a swindler and a vicious ape gone mad?” (p 200)
  
  
  
  

The Boat

The Boat
Author: Nam Le 2008 272 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started May 2 2008, Finished June 4 2008

“You couldn’t turn back from something like this. You saw it through and it ruined you.” (pp 132-3)

This promising debut collection of short stories is characterized by its remarkably diverse settings and perspectives: the former include Iowa, Columbia, New York City, the Australian coast, Japan during WWII, modern day Tehran and the South China Sea in the mid 70s. The protagonists are a seemingly autobiographical aspiring writer of Vietnamese extraction, a teenage hit man, an aging, ailing painter, a teenage Australian jock, a war orphan, a thirty-something American woman lawyer, and a teenage Vietnamese boat person. After reading some reviews, it seems everyone has different favorites, but the two stories that worked best for me were “Meeting Elise”, a Rothian take on the elderly painters attempt to meet his daughter for the first time in her adult life while confronting the ghost of his deceased lover/muse and his own rapidly impending mortality and “Cartegena”, a riveting tale – attention Hollywood -- of the barely adolescent assassin trying to survive in amidst impossibly conflicting loyalties in a world of limitless, post-sensate violence which was bolstered by convincing detail – its child thugs navigate at night “by the blue light of their cell phones” and are delayed in a urgent mission when one detours to check his email. The stories in the voices of Asian children did not work as well for me. “Hiroshima”, with its childlike view of the world switching continuously and seamlessly between the past and present, reminded me in its need for close reading of The Sound and The Fury, but was too brief to fully engage and marred by some historical anachronisms and inaccuracies: it seems quite unlikely that a child of that period would have aware of the concept of the guided missile and worse, there was never an operational bomber designated the B27. The voice of “The Boat” was probably true to its young Vietnamese protagonist and the cadences of her native language, but struck me as somewhat nebulous and difficult to relate to.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
  Author: Daniel Walker Howe 2007 856pp
  My rating: 5*
  Started May 16 2008, Finished May 27 2008
  
  “This book tells a story, it does not argue a thesis.” (p 849)
  
  Howe’s desire to tell the story straight, without trying to have events conform to some overarching theme results in a continuously engaging and informative volume that shines a clear light on a relatively obscure period of American history during whose three decades, a golden age of the white male land owner, the country almost doubled in size, the eastern Indians were almost entirely “expropriated” (driven off their lands whether they’d cooperated with the whites or not) and slavery became more entrenched, polarizing opinion between the north and south. The book’s readability is greatly enhanced by a reliance on a comprehensive survey of secondary sources (the book contains well over 1500 bibliographic footnotes) meaning that most period ideas and opinions are summarized in comfortable 21st century writing and that we are spared all but the most lucid and revealing examples of period prose. While Howe succeeds in his objective of letting the facts speak for themselves, certain heroes and villains emerge, often against preexisting impressions. The preeminent heroes are Winfield Scott, John Marshall and, quite surprisingly, towering above the rest, John Quincy Adams, who despite a disappointing presidency, comes across as a paragon of devotion to public service, among the best Secretary of States ever, a very forward looking policy maker and, a man of unshakeable and ecumenical ethical integrity who can fairly be described as the national voice of conscience for most of the period covered in the book. The villains include the weaselly “little magician”, Millard Fillmore, who brings to mind Karl Rove and the anti-democratic, hot-tempered, Indian hating, slavery-supporting demagogue, Andrew Jackson.
  While What Hath God Wrought is literally a heavy volume requiring two hands, it is easily justifies the time put into it and my five star rating. I received far more from it than any other book discussed so far in this blog; for example, it a few scattered pages, it covers all the important issues raised by Nation of Counterfeiters.
  
  Nuggets:
  
  
• In 1818 the entire western border, diagonaling from what is now western Florida all the way to the Oregon coast was disputed territory (p22)
• “Wooden plows differed little from those used at the time of the Norman Conquest” (p35)
  “The census listed the median age as sixteen, and only one person in eight as over forty-three years old…One-third of white children and over half of black children died before reaching adulthood” (p37)
• “..in 1992, more than two hundred years after its submission, Madison’s limitation on the right of Congress to vote itself a raise was finally ratified … What had been intended as the Second Amendment to the Constitution became the Twenty-Seventh” (p 87)
• “The Americans spent three years building a fort at the northern end of Lake Champlain only to discover in 1881 that it stood on the Canadian side of the boundary; it had to be evacuated.” (p96)
• “Workers typically took a midmorning break and a midafternoon beak, both accompanied by alcohol, as well as liquor with every meal.” (p167)
• “This (temperance) campaign to alter age-old habits and attitudes proved amazingly successful: consumption of alcohol, especially of hard liquor, declined steadily, and dramatically after 1830, falling to 1.8 gallons person over fifteen by the late 1840s.” (p168)
• “In 1817, a twenty-five day steamer trip up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Louisville set a record; by the 8126, the time had been cut to eight days. Pre-steamboat traffic on the Mississippi had been mostly one-way downstream; at new Orleans, boatmen broke up their barges to sell for lumber and Walked back home to Kentucky or Tennessee …” (p214)
• “Delivering the mail was by far the largest activity of the federal government. The postal service of the 1820s employed more people than the peacetime armed forces and more than all the rest of the civilian bureaucracy put together.” (p225)
• “The turnout of eligible voters increased markedly in the generation from 1820 to 1840 and foreign visitors marveled at the extent of public awareness even in remote and provincial areas of the country.” (p231)
• 1825, Adams proposed “a standard national bankruptcy law and the adoption of the metric system.” (p252)
• “The campaign for the presidential election of 1828 lasted the whole four years of John Quincy Adam’s administration.” (p275)
• “… the presidential campaign of 1828 was probably the dirtiest in American history.” (p278)
• “In Georgia, where Indian Removal was the big issue, Adams got no popular votes at all.” (p281)
• Adams “recommended US conversion to the metric system … on the ground that it implemented ‘the trembling hope for the Christian’ for the unity of humanity, the binding of Satan in chains, and the promised thousand years of peace.” (p 287)
• “Indian Removal held the place in Jackson’s vision that internal improvements occupied in that of John Quincy Adams: the key to national development.” (p347)
• “Jackson told the Native Americans ‘to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.’ Submission to the laws of Georgia for a Creek or Cherokee meant not being able to vote, sue, own property, testify against a white person, or obtain credit. For [Jackson] to pretend that such submission represented a viable option offering the Natives the chance to ‘become merged in the mass of our population,’ was disingenuous, to say the least. (‘I was satisfied that the Indians could not possibly live under the laws of the state,’ Jackson admitted privately.)” (p348)
• “Jeffersonian Democracy … in the first place, was about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent.” (356-7)
• “In their attack on the Bank of the United States, Jackson and his followers exploited hard-money sentiments. But in the event, Jackson’s victory over Biddle’s Bank did nothing to reform the abuses from which the average person suffered. The elimination of the national bank removed restraints from regional and local banks, enabling them to behave more irresponsibly than ever. Getting rid of the BUS, whose note had constituted the most reliable form of pap3er money, only exacerbated the difficulties that continued to plague the currency until the Civil War.” (p383)
• Jackson’ removal of US funds from the BUS lead the Senate to pass a “motion of censure on the president – the only one in American history.” (p. 389) In his lame duck period, Jackson persuaded the Senate to “expunge” the censure from its official Journal, literally rewriting history. (p498)
• “The southern practice of ignoring inconvenient federal laws in order to preserve white supremacy was established long before the Civil War. Jackson, who had stood up to South Carolina so firmly over the tariff, cooperated with the state’s defiance of federal law when the issue was race.” (p 430)
• “Rioting, rather than crime by individuals, primarily precipitated the creation of police forces as we know them. There were no professional city police forces before 1844 … “ (p432)
  
• Garbage removal: “… city authorities loosed hogs and geese into alleys where dogs, rats, and vultures joined them in scavenging. Warnings appeared that unattended infants were in danger of being eaten.” (p 530)
  
• “American Industrialization took place in an environment of generally inexpensive material resources and high costs for skilled labor.” (p 536)
  
• “So desperate was the eagerness for currency that counterfeit circulated widely with very little attempt to suppress it, alongside the notes of distant and insolvent banks.” (p 561)
  
• “When Henry Clay first went to Washington from Lexington, Kentucky, in 1806, his trip took three weeks; by 1846, he could do it on a train in four days.” (p 564)
  
• “…the Whigs’ choice of Tyler turned out to be one of the worst mistakes ever made by any political party.” (p 572)
  
• “It would be easy to demonize Tyler as a sinister frustrater of the popular will, wrecker of the Whig Party’s only clear mandate, and the president who prostituted the Constitution to evade the requirement that the Senate ratify treaties.” (p590)
  
• “a caucus of Whig members of Congress took an extraordinary action unparalleled in American history: The expelled a sitting president from his political party.” (p 594)
  
• “…the principal and uniquely profound contribution of the Transcendentalists lay in their serious exploration of the … [issue:] What should Americans do with their freedom?” (p625)
  
• During the 1820s US publishers released 109 books of fiction, in the next decade, nearly 1000. (p628)
  
• “Surprisingly for us, one of the most horrific incidents of class conflict in antebellum American involved culture rather than material interest – specifically, rival visions of how to present Shakespeare.” (638)
  
• “Even in the North, the laws of several states restricted the opportunities for free Negroes to get an education, for literacy was associated with citizenship, a status that few states accorded their black residents.” (p 644)
  
• “… some historians have carefully examined the likely consequences of a Clay victory in 1844 and concluded that it would probably have avoided the Civil War … We too readily assume the inevitability of everything that has happened. The decisions that electorates and politicians make have real consequences.” (p 690) [Polk barely defeated Clay, victory turning on New York state where a spoiler third party (Anti-Slavery) candidate drew enough votes away from Clay to give the state to Polk.]
  
• “By the 1840s, the Mexican government became the prisoner of foreign and domestic creditors: By 1845, 87 percent of its revenues went for debt service.” (p 746)
  
• “Most of the Whig members of Congress continued to vote supplies to the armed forces while denouncing the administration for sending them into battle.” (p 763)
  
• “Winfield Scott, one of the greatest soldiers the United States Army has ever produced, wore the stars of a general for more than fifty years, in three major wars (1812, Mexico and the Civil War) … (p 778)
  
• Of the costly attack on a flour mill called Molino del Rey where the US lost a quarter of its troops: “ … the intelligence on which the attack was based turned out to be faulty: The Molino contained no weapons of mass destruction.” (p 787)
  “
• The military history John Eisenhower, after reviewing Scott’s who career in three major wars, has concluded that Scott ‘may well have been the most capable soldier this country has ever produced’ – high praise coming from the son of Dwight Eisenhower.” (p 791)
  
• “Polk has successfully discovered the latent constitutional powers of the command in chief to provoke a war, secure congressional support for it, shape the strategy for fighting it, appoint generals, and define the terms of peaces. He probably did as much as anyone to expand the powers of the presidency … Wartime presidents since Polk, including Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, have followed in Polk’s footsteps.” (p 808)
  
• “Adams’ vision was predominantly positive … He had stood in favor of public education, freedom of expression, government support for science, industry and transportation, nonpartisanship in federal employment, justice to the Native Americans, legal rights for women and blacks, cordial relations with the Latin American Republics, and undoubtedly, a firm foreign policy that protected the national interest.” (p812)
  
• “Historians have shaken their heads over a party running a military hero of a war they had opposed. Whigs at the time felt desperate to win, believing that Polk had betrayed his trust [and] that constitutional government itself was at stake.” (p 829)
  
• “A uniform single day had been mandated by act of Congress following the notorious 1844 frauds organized on Polk’s behalf by John Slidell in Louisiana, where five thousand men had cast their votes in one parish on one day and then traveled to another to vote again a day later.” (p 833)