WICKES
02-13-2013, 01:32 PM
This is a non-fiction work, detailing Orwell's life among the very poor of Paris and London in the 1930s. For a year or so he lived in the worst areas of Paris, sleeping in bug-infested lodging houses and working as a dishwasher in Parisian hotels. In London he sank lower still, living as a tramp and staying in 'spikes' or 'kips' with the other tramps and beggars. Of course, anyone who knows a little about Orwell's life may find it hard to take him seriously when he complains of going hungry for days on end or of having to serve the bloated and wealthy. This was not a man born into poverty. He had attended the UK's greatest private school, Eton (perhaps the most famous private school in the world, and the one that produced, among others, Percy Shelley and Aldous Huxley), and came from a family who, though not rich, were solidly middle class and able to rescue him from such a life. Still, it would be unfair to dismiss him as a guilt-ridden rich boy playing at being poor. He did genuinely live this life, suffering all the indignities and humiliations, and he writes with real sympathy and intelligence about the underclass of these two famous cities.
We begin in Paris, with Orwell befriending a Russian emigre, working as a dishwasher, pawning his clothes and sneaking out of lodging houses without paying his rent. He describes the various characters he meets, like the angelic-looking rapist Charlie and the ex-soldier Boris, how the poor lived for their drunken blowouts in the cafes and bars on a saturday night, the various stories he hears and so on. Then we move to London. Here he pawns his clothes for a tramps' outfit and is cheated when the pawnbroker suspects he is desperate. He befriends an Irish tramp and together they wander about, sleeping in filthy 'spikes' (homes where tramps can spend the night) and mixing with beggars, street performers and pavement artists. The section on Paris is the best and the book falls a little flat when he returns to London, perhaps because he really sank to the depths back in Britain wheras in Paris he'd just been 'respectably poor'.
There is a strangely masochistic strain in Orwell. He seemed to want to suffer, describing in detail the pain of being shot in Spain or the horror of witnessing an execution in Burma, and he lingers on the miseries he suffered when nearly starving to death in France or being subjected to homosexual assault in London. He was not a braggart and macho poseur like Hemingway, but he seemed to have a need to test himself, to learn to withstand and endure, to expose himself to suffering. I know he was a socialist and did so in part to reveal the life of the marginalized and oppressed, and he probably wished to atone in some way for his privileged background. But I think there was more to it than that. He clearly prized toughness and saw life as an endurance test- as something harsh to be faced and withstood. For example, for a man who loved literature and was widely read to describe poets as 'pansy-poets', which he does in both Keep the Aspidistra Flying and in this work, is a little odd. I suspect he was slightly homophobic (Christopher Hitchens once said his biographers suspect he might have been the victim of a sexual assault at school) and even a little misogynistic; he certainly admired the physical strength of the working man and in Down and Out he almost boasts of 'using his fists' to obtain respect from the waiters. But like most socialists he focusses a bit too much on man the animal, as if all our woes could be cured by more food and better drains, so I was pleased to find in this work the following passage (my favourite in all Orwell's work) about a crippled down and out he met in London:
"As we were crossing the bridge he stopped in one of the alcoves to rest. He fell silent for a minute or two, and to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the stars.
He touched my arm and pointed to the sky with his stick. 'Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like a ****ing great blood orange!'...From the way he
spoke he might have been an art critic in a picture gallery. I was astonished. I confessed that I did not know which Aldebaran was...he began to give me some
elementary hints on astronomy, pointing out the chief constellations. He seemed concerned at my ignorance...
'But isn't it very hard to take an interest in things-things like stars- living this life?'
'...Not necessarily. . It don't need to turn you into a bloody rabbit'
'It seems to have that effect on most people'
'Of course. Look at Paddy- a tea-swilling old moocher...That's the way most of them go. I despise them. But you don't need to get like that'.
'Well, I've found just the contrary', I said. 'It seems to me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing from that moment'
'No...If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, 'I'm
free in here'- he tapped his forehead- 'and you're alright'.
The description of this man covers several pages and is wonderful. Orwell describes his refusal of self-pity, even though his leg is so badly crippled it will eventually have to be amputated and he owns nothing but the clothes he stands up in. His future is beggary and death in the workhouse. Yet, writes Orwell, "He had faced his position and made a philosophy for himself". He'd studied the stars and read books on astronomy, even having articles he'd written on meteors published. He'd worked his way through all Shakespeare's plays, had read Zola and Gulliver's Travels and even spoke French. And this is a man who spent his nights sleeping on a bench in central London.
This is a great book. I would agree that 1984 and Homage to Catalonia are most likely to stand the test of time, but for me Down and Out is Orwell's most entertaining. It is packed with interesting characters and anecdotes, all described in Orwell's hard and plain, yet precise and lucid style. A must-read (9/10)
We begin in Paris, with Orwell befriending a Russian emigre, working as a dishwasher, pawning his clothes and sneaking out of lodging houses without paying his rent. He describes the various characters he meets, like the angelic-looking rapist Charlie and the ex-soldier Boris, how the poor lived for their drunken blowouts in the cafes and bars on a saturday night, the various stories he hears and so on. Then we move to London. Here he pawns his clothes for a tramps' outfit and is cheated when the pawnbroker suspects he is desperate. He befriends an Irish tramp and together they wander about, sleeping in filthy 'spikes' (homes where tramps can spend the night) and mixing with beggars, street performers and pavement artists. The section on Paris is the best and the book falls a little flat when he returns to London, perhaps because he really sank to the depths back in Britain wheras in Paris he'd just been 'respectably poor'.
There is a strangely masochistic strain in Orwell. He seemed to want to suffer, describing in detail the pain of being shot in Spain or the horror of witnessing an execution in Burma, and he lingers on the miseries he suffered when nearly starving to death in France or being subjected to homosexual assault in London. He was not a braggart and macho poseur like Hemingway, but he seemed to have a need to test himself, to learn to withstand and endure, to expose himself to suffering. I know he was a socialist and did so in part to reveal the life of the marginalized and oppressed, and he probably wished to atone in some way for his privileged background. But I think there was more to it than that. He clearly prized toughness and saw life as an endurance test- as something harsh to be faced and withstood. For example, for a man who loved literature and was widely read to describe poets as 'pansy-poets', which he does in both Keep the Aspidistra Flying and in this work, is a little odd. I suspect he was slightly homophobic (Christopher Hitchens once said his biographers suspect he might have been the victim of a sexual assault at school) and even a little misogynistic; he certainly admired the physical strength of the working man and in Down and Out he almost boasts of 'using his fists' to obtain respect from the waiters. But like most socialists he focusses a bit too much on man the animal, as if all our woes could be cured by more food and better drains, so I was pleased to find in this work the following passage (my favourite in all Orwell's work) about a crippled down and out he met in London:
"As we were crossing the bridge he stopped in one of the alcoves to rest. He fell silent for a minute or two, and to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the stars.
He touched my arm and pointed to the sky with his stick. 'Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like a ****ing great blood orange!'...From the way he
spoke he might have been an art critic in a picture gallery. I was astonished. I confessed that I did not know which Aldebaran was...he began to give me some
elementary hints on astronomy, pointing out the chief constellations. He seemed concerned at my ignorance...
'But isn't it very hard to take an interest in things-things like stars- living this life?'
'...Not necessarily. . It don't need to turn you into a bloody rabbit'
'It seems to have that effect on most people'
'Of course. Look at Paddy- a tea-swilling old moocher...That's the way most of them go. I despise them. But you don't need to get like that'.
'Well, I've found just the contrary', I said. 'It seems to me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing from that moment'
'No...If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, 'I'm
free in here'- he tapped his forehead- 'and you're alright'.
The description of this man covers several pages and is wonderful. Orwell describes his refusal of self-pity, even though his leg is so badly crippled it will eventually have to be amputated and he owns nothing but the clothes he stands up in. His future is beggary and death in the workhouse. Yet, writes Orwell, "He had faced his position and made a philosophy for himself". He'd studied the stars and read books on astronomy, even having articles he'd written on meteors published. He'd worked his way through all Shakespeare's plays, had read Zola and Gulliver's Travels and even spoke French. And this is a man who spent his nights sleeping on a bench in central London.
This is a great book. I would agree that 1984 and Homage to Catalonia are most likely to stand the test of time, but for me Down and Out is Orwell's most entertaining. It is packed with interesting characters and anecdotes, all described in Orwell's hard and plain, yet precise and lucid style. A must-read (9/10)