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)