Review: Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
Like most readers, I know George Orwell for “1984.” Since Donald Trump’s election, the book has, once again a half century after its publication, become a bestseller. That bump in sales had mostly to do with Trump’s decomposing attic-gremlin, Kellyanne Conway’s assertion of “alternative facts.” It reminded many of Winston Smith’s line, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Winston Smith, is of course, named for Winston Churchill, a man Orwell admired. In a review of Churchill’s memoir, “Their Finest Hour” Orwell wrote highly of Churchill, that his musings were “more like those of a human being than of a public figure.” While reading a book about the two, “Churchill and Orwell — The Fight for Freedom” by Thomas E. Ricks, an extraordinarily incisive work, I came across a title of Orwell’s I had never heard of: “Down and Out in Paris and London.” In my reading, I have found that books I enjoy tend to draw on others books I enjoy, and this was no exception.
Whereas Orwell wrote “1984” as he succumbed to sickness — no doubt his nearness to that abyss aided in dramatizing for us what torturous isolation he saw when it stared back at him — “Down and Out” was his first major work, published in 1933 when Orwell was only 29. For an observer of the world with a consciousness so set on utopian, socialist ends, while unrelentingly cynical about their ever coming to fruition, that particular year provided much fodder for writing. Though the Great War had just concluded, the recoil reverberated still. The age of jazz in Europe and America, though in full swing just a few years before, ended with the spectacular ruination of the global economy 1929. And, of course, Europe was becoming moonstruck with Fascism, a perversion, oppressive and sublime, of the dream Orwell and others held dear of a socialist paradise.
“Down and Out” is comprised of two sections. First, Paris. Orwell’s is a different Paris than we think of. Or, rather, Orwell’s is the underbelly of the Paris we think of. A youthful Orwell narrates his travels through that underbelly, missing meals and drifting from one odd job the next eventually settling as a dishwasher first, in a fancy hotel, and then a lowlier establishment. There are a slew of entertaining, if not flat characters, namely his vivacious, wily Russian acquaintance, Boris. There are engaging moments both driven by plot — a failed attempt at making it big by smuggling cocaine that is actually talcum powder — and also by Orwell’s own analysis — of the political and social dynamic of the labor force behind the gilded city’s luxurious attractions.
As are his illustrations in “1984,” the details of the grunge are off-putting as they are exciting to behold, particularly his accounting of the stenches. More than an actual experience of misfortune, Orwell’s narration was an experiment to dip his face below what other writers described as the artificiality of imported, bourgeois culture — the “Crystal Palace” of Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” — to see what life was like, hi-jinx, dirt, illness and all. For Orwell, to understand it, he had to live it.
Whereas the overriding theme of his time in Paris was poverty, Orwell’s time in London focused on idleness. As the health of the global economy affected the Parisian portion, the high levels of unemployment in Britain following the war-effort make up the essence of the story’s second portion. Orwell continues his explorations of squalor in London’s underbelly. Instead of a convivial Russian Boris, he drifts about the city with a motely crew of tramps, that includes such marginal yet interesting character as a man called Bozo, who is an artist and astronomer — likely the inspiration for the “prole” characters in “1984.” There is a sense in the London portion of Orwell’s story, instead of the musk of Parisian streets, of stillness and senselessness. Like Walter Lippman’s notion of being adrift, Orwell intones it in his wanderings that the tramp’s struggle is uniquely tragic, for there is no reward for suffering, only punishment: “the tramp’s suffering is entirely useless.”
Compared to the first portion, the London narrative wanders excessively and fails to create an arc that leads any discernible direction. Much of that unconnectedness owes to Orwell’s hope that he could publish the work as a series of shorter articles — a hope dashed by publishing houses’ refusal to publish the work altogether for some time.
Orwell draws the work to a close with an oddly analytical set of observations and conclusions that he seems to have failed to work in. Orwell’s is a plea for empathy for the laborer, the tramp, and the impoverished. His essential thesis he makes explicit toward the end is that poverty deadens the spirit, and that a pauper can be lifted only when his struggle is given meaning, and she enjoys the fruits of her labor.
All in all, “Down and Out in Paris and London” is a fascinating anthropological study of poverty, its empirical value tarnished by its richly entertaining prose, and overt imposition of Orwell’s political dispositions upon his observations. During a time when the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board calls the crisis of homelessness in Los Angeles County a national disgrace, and though the problem of homelessness today is more complex than the voluntary squalor Orwell undertook to bath in, it is well worth the read.
