Book Review: “Down and Out in Paris and London,” by George Orwell, 1933. Reprinted by Penguin Books, London & New York, 2013.
By Stephen Wilson, our reporter in Moscow
I proposed reviewing Orwell's “Down and Out in Paris and London” because it is about being homelessness in those cities and some issues have not changed in all these years.
“We again failed to find work the next day, and it was three weeks before the luck changed. My two hundred francs saved me from trouble about the rent, but everything else went badly as possible. Day after day, Boris and I went up and down Paris, drifting at two miles an hour through the crowds, bored and hungry and finding nothing. One day, I remember we crossed the Seine eleven times. We loitered for hours outside service doorways and when the manager came out we would go up to him in ingratiatingly cap in hand. We always got the same answer: they did not want a lame man, nor a man without experience” {page 30}.
English writer George Orwell penned this great work, Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell had experienced bouts of extreme poverty and homelessness. The above scenario where he and his friend are roaming around in Paris in a hopeless, humiliating and fruitless quest to find work in a big city will be familiar to many unemployed people.
Although his book was published in 1933, the social problems that he encountered still surface in 2021. For instance, in Moscow a person can be denied work because he or she is lame, old or lacks the right experience. And being forced to accept the worst low-paid jobs where they accept abysmal conditions of overwork, low pay and abuse to avoid ending up on the streets is sadly familiar. Just as there were negative stereotypes about the homeless in the 1930's, so they continue in 2021. Note that Orwell devotes a whole chapter to refuting the prevailing prejudice in England which portrayed tramps as 'dangerous monsters.’ He argues convincingly that most tramps are not dangerous, idle or openly embrace the wandering life but more often ended up on the streets via all kinds of misfortune and bad luck.
When most people think of George Orwell, his more popular novels “1984” and “Animal farm” come to mind. This is a pity. It fails to do justice to other wonderful works. For example, “Down and Out in Paris and London” remains a classic work which tells the untold stories of so many tramps, refugees and homeless people.
Orwell was a master storyteller who could tell a story in a very down to earth style which still directs your attention to the intricate details of a person's mannerisms, appearance and speech. He was able to describe a character in a very vivid, convincing, and plausible way that you feel you have already met him in the flesh rather than just read about him. The descriptions of the amiable and passionate Russian soldier and refugee Boris are just brilliant.
Orwell's book is not just a narration of his own experiences but is part polemic. He argues that a lot of the boring and dead end labor in hotels is needlessly futile. A lot of misery and suffering could be easily averted by prudent new laws and regulations.
The Paris which Orwell describes is a far cry from the city you will read about in Hemingway's “A Moveable Feast” or the Romantic image of the city presented in Woody Allen's films. Instead of being a place where people enjoy sitting around in cafes attending great parties, drinking wine, and meeting up with other writers and artists for pleasant conversation, most of the people in Orwell's work are doing long hours in boring dead end jobs as waiters or dishwashers in hotels. They don't have time or energy to admire the pleasant scenery in Paris. You'll quickly get the idea if you read about Orwell's back breaking toil as a dishwasher in “Hotel X.”
How Orwell reached rock bottom in Paris is very instructive. He was very unlucky. First, his French students of English stopped their lessons and then a thief robbed all the guests at his hotel. Orwell reminds me of so many situations where people were rendered homeless due to accidents, illness or because they were victims of crime. When I visited Guatemala in 1990, I came across a Dutch man who made a living as a travelling salesman. He told me how he had become homeless in America for two years after a horrific car accident had left him without a cent. He managed to get back on his feet again, but the lingering experience still haunted him.
Orwell writes about his odyssey and ordeal through the meanest streets and backdrops of both London and Paris where he struggles to avoid being thrown out on the streets again and again. It is his kind Russian friend Boris who rescues Orwell and allows him to share his abode as well as feed him. Boris is a Russian soldier who has lost everything due to the revolution but still remains an indefatigable optimist who keeps going despite the hurdles. Orwell obviously admires him. Unlike many of the local French and other writers, Orwell befriended and adored the Russian emigrants. He found that the Russian refugees were hardworking and coped better with misfortune than the English in Paris.
Perhaps Orwell best illustrates this in an amusing talk with Boris when Boris chides him, "How easy you despair, mon ami, where is the English obstinacy I have read of? Courage! We'll manage it." Orwell recalls, “It was a great relief to remember that I had after all one influential friend to fall back on” {page 23}.
Orwell's compassion and empathy for the suffering of the poor always comes through in this book. He writes, “When one is overworked, it is a good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and will go on doing it not for a few weeks, but for years. There was a girl in a bistro near my hotel who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that she had not been further than the street corner for several months. She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Paris” {page 113}.
Orwell expresses the view that most of the affluent hold mistaken views of the poor and they are rarely acquainted with or social with them. He writes, “Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor.....But in reality there is no such difference” {page 121}.
In England, Orwell offers portraits of beggars and pavement artists he meets and goes into detail about how they manage to obtain money. At the time Orwell wrote, the false stereotype of “the monster tramp” existed in England. However, this stereotype did not always prevail. In the late 19th century, tramps were often respected as “Gentlemen of the Road.” It would be interesting to explore why this great shift in opinion took place. Was it due to the rise in the media or the influence of extreme ideologies at the turn of the century?
Orwell modestly acknowledges he has not quite got to the bottom of the problems he has sought to investigate. In reference to the penniless he writes, “Someday I want to explore that world more thoroughly. I should like to know people like Mario and Paddy and Bill the Moocher, not from casual encounters, but intimately: I should like to understand what really goes on in the souls of *plongeurs and tramps and embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty” {page 215}.
You are forgiven for thinking Orwell's mode of research was a bit extreme. It can be termed “Participant Research.” There is a design at the core of this style of research. This is research in which a person takes part directly in the activities as a member of the scenario. For example, the person participates in the Spanish Civil war or becomes homeless in order to obtain authentic insights. In this style of research, direct raw experience seems more effective than distant experiments. Instead of taking a distant and detached view of experience, the person actually experience what the subjects are experiencing.
Whatever the merits of this way of investigation, Orwell left a gripping account of poverty and homelessness. The book represents a must for anyone actively concerned about poverty.
*dishwashers, busboys