Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell (review)

Does George Orwell really need a review? Can’t I just say: Well, it’s George Orwell… and sigh with contentment, because you all know what it means? What it means is that George Orwell is one of my very favourite writers. What it means is that every single book of his I’ve read, from the novel Burmese Days to his account of the Spanish civil war in Homage to Catalonia, struck me as fascinating and great, and left me wanting to shout his praise from the rooftops. Down and Out in Paris and London is no exception.

In this memoir, the author recounts his hard times in the capital cities of Europe’s two great powers. While living in a cheap, bug-infected hotel in a popular area of Paris, he accidentally ends up with no money left at all. Pawning all his possession to be able to keep paying his rent, he must suffer days of unhealthy diet, malnourishment and starvation before at last, together with his Russian friend Boris, he can find employment. But employment in that day and age when you’re desperate for money means working from dawn till night in the stuffy, hot cafeteria of a smart hotel (the cafetiers being the lowest employees there, attending on higher-ranked employees like the waiters).

He was a comely youth, aged twenty-four but looking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself well and knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tailcoat and white tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just like an Eton boy; yet he had earned his living since he was twelve, and worked his way up literally from the gutter. Crossing the Italian frontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow on the northern boulevards, and being given fifty days’ imprisonment in London for working without a permit, and being made love to by a rich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond ring and afterwards accused him of stealing it, were among his experiences.

- Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (Penguin Books, 2003 [1933])

The depiction of his job and fellow workers at the restaurant is, in typical Orwell fashion, both very precise and incisive, occasionally hilarious. It is an adventure unto itself, if a mind-numbing, exhausting, horrid adventure. Those who have worked in restaurants will recognize his sharp analysis of what goes on in a kitchen, though I dare hope we don’t slave as much anymore, whether as plongeurs, cooks or waiters. Those who haven’t may never step into a restaurant with the same confidence as they used to… True to his interest in politics, the author also offers us a basic, yet still too true social commentary on what he’s seen of the French working class and division of labour.

For, after all, where is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. [...] Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. 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.

- Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (Penguin Books, 2003 [1933])

When Orwell finally leaves Paris for London, he is once again caught in dire straits as he learns that the promised job won’t start before a couple of weeks. Begins a new adventure of sleeping in dirty lodging houses or dreary spikes, of receiving charity and moving along with tramps. On his way he meets a laid-off Irishman names Paddy, a talented screever called Bozo, and a number of other half-colourful, half-pitiful wretches. The atmosphere is decidedly different from what he got used to in France (Orwell firmly believes in national temperaments and types), but not any less problematic. Why do the English laws, instead of making unemployed people useful and self-sufficient as possible, condemn them to a life of idleness, vagrancy, and disease?

Down and Out in Paris and London is a treat, a curiosity, sometimes a laugh, and a reflection on capitalist politics and societies. I know what it is to live on borrowed money, to be stranded in Paris at night without a roof to sleep under, to randomly hook up with strangers, to develop horrible eating habits for the sake of saving money… God preserve me from the extremes Orwell tells us of! But I can fully sympathize with his experience and feelings. One day I should write about how I lived in Paris at my friend’s one-room pigsty before another friend in Warsaw offered me a place in a shared apartment, about my life there, and the strange freedom of being rootless…

Have you read Orwell? What are your favourite books of his, and why? What’s your experience of poverty, and how has it influenced your take on global politics?

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