George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

I am now a George Orwell fangirl, a surprising development considering I hated Animal Farm and quit 1984 after a few pages. Maybe I was too young back then and not, you know, woke enough. 

One day I might pick up 1984 again, but until then, let's talk about Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell's memoir of his Hard Times living as a gentleman pauper in 1920 and 1930s (i.e., in between the 2 World Wars). The full text is available here.

The first thing I like about this book is how attentive to and curious about the world Orwell was. Despite living in bug-infested squalor, eating only bread and margarine, working 18 hours a day washing dishes, and living a tramp's life, Orwell took a joyful interest in the people and conditions he encountered. Anyone else would have spent those years in swimming in self-pity. 

In the first part of the book, set in humble quarters in Paris, bad fortune befalls Orwell. He runs out of work, his money gets stolen, he pawns everything he owns for virtually nothing, he is down to a few francs a day:

You have thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

And he starves. Which, it turns out, is so much more than just hunger:

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. [...] A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. 

Finally, he finds work as a plongeur in a hotel, basically a dishwasher and peon employed to do grunt work. The pay is low, the work is hard, and the hours are long. It is, of course, preferable to the starvation and enforced idleness of poverty, but it is the kind of job that depletes you of the hopes of anything more in life.

For one thing, working in this sort of job sucks up practically every waking hour. You get to work before dawn, work in a frenzy all morning and through lunch, take a couple hours' break in the afternoon, then enter the fray once more until late at night. By the time you get home, you collapse for what seems like a few moments before doing it all over again. You get one free day a week.

What this sort of life does is confine your world to just your workplace, your home, and maybe the one bistro that's open late/early enough for you to eat/drink at (which is only ever patronised by others in the same class). Even though you're employed by a fancy hotel, you live in a completely different world from that of its richer patrons.

As a virtual slave, you live for the one free day which you can spend getting drunk using whatever money you have left over that week. There isn't anything else within reach: there are no prospects of meeting a woman, starting a family, starting a business, getting a better class of job, etc. 

In the second part of the book, Orwell gets a job in England, but it doesn't start for several weeks, so he has to temporarily live as a pauper in London. Falling in with a handful of tramps, he experiences their mind-numbing routine of browsing pavements for cigarette ends, the debasing ordeal of obtaining free tea and bread "for the needy", and moving endlessly from lodging-house to lodging-house.

If the plongeur's life is nasty and brutish, he can at least take comfort in that there are hundreds of out-of-work men who would die for their jobs. And not just for the money, but for work itself!

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain.

Paddy is Orwell's Irish tramp friend, who:

pined for work as an artist pines to be famous. If he saw an old man working he would say bitterly, 'Look at dat old—keepin' able-bodied men out o' work'; or if it was a boy, 'It's dem young devils what's takin' de bread out of our mouths.'

Orwell would probably say that the ceaseless hard labour of a plongeur is only desirable because it is marginally better than the ceaseless hard labour of being poor. 

Just because menial jobs are wanted by the poor doesn't make them valuable or meaningful.

In Chapter 22, Orwell reflects that the worst part of a plongeur's work is that all his suffering is completely pointless. His 18-hour days do not contribute tangible value. His labour does not make the hotel's food any better than that of a neighbourhood bistro's, for example. The work only exists because the rich are willing to pay excessive amounts for mediocre food served on bigger and better crockery, cloth napkins, white tablecloths, obsequious service (plongeurs attend to waiters), etc.

Yet, Orwell writes, most rich and middle-class people do not see anything wrong with low-level jobs that suck up all of a person's life and vitality and hopes. Instead, the rich believe it's a good thing that these "low men" are employed, fearing that low-class people, once idle, will turn into a lawless mob:

"The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose."

And then, my favourite line of the book:

"The mob is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of rich men—is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels."