Orwell (11 page)

The epigraph from Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales
announces the dominant theme: “O scathful harm, condicion of poverte!” The narrative is often interrupted by digressions—anecdotes, stories-within-the-story, character studies and observations—and by the tales that Orwell heard in the local bistros that were based on the oral traditions of illiterate workers. Two of his most eccentric types are Communists: Furex, a hardworking stonemason who becomes a French patriot as soon as he's drunk; and Jules, a Hungarian waiter, whose politics demand he does as little work as possible. By contrast, the waiters in the grand hotel, snobs to a man, delight in servility. Orwell also uses French literary models. He quotes a François Villon poem on hunger and invokes the name of Zola when describing the hellish kitchen. He uses Charles Baudelaire to symbolize the Romantic idea of the damned poet and compares himself to Baudelaire's impoverished “skeleton labourer” as he lies starving in bed. A temporary dweller in poverty, he tells his middle-class readers about this unexplored country that lies in plain sight.

The book opens abruptly and dramatically on what he calls the rue Coq d'Or (Golden Cock Street), where the leprous houses, like old drunkards, lurch “towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse.” With sharp social analysis and in vigorous prose, Orwell gives an economic profile of the quarter, and shows how he fits into it. “All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians,” and as one of these poor foreigners he's at the bottom of the heap. Yet he also reveals the gradations of poverty and how each level feeds on the one below: “amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes.”

Orwell is fascinated with the particularities of poverty, the special smells and sounds in a room where the walls are as thin as matchwood and layers of wallpaper house innumerable bugs. He's equally obsessed with how to survive on a few francs a day. When he discovers that one of his coins is Belgian, he has to slink out of a shop without a purchase, and must conceal bread in his pockets as he slips past the
patron
of the hotel. Orwell, the upright ex-policeman—a rather naïve, trusting and inexpert comic character—needs
his mentor Boris, the Russian waiter, to guide him through this underworld. Boris inks the white skin that shows through the holes in his socks, and urges him to lie to the boss.

Some scenes have a Charlie Chaplin-like humor and slapstick quality. Boris contrives to keep the
patron
talking about sport while Orwell, shielded by Boris' wide shoulders, escapes to a pawnshop with a suitcase full of clothes. The cramped kitchen in the Russian restaurant has piles of greasy plates and slippery vegetable peelings underfoot, and the big-buttocked cook bursts into tears when the going gets rough. All this would be funny, except that Boris and Orwell are starving, and the cook works sixteen hours a day to support an invalid husband. Like Chaplin, Orwell pushes comedy to the edge of misery and suffering.

The chapter on the luxurious Hotel Lotti, the most effective in the book, combines analysis of the social hierarchy with Dickensian descriptions of the laborers. The hotel, like an ocean liner, has strict class distinctions. The guests live in splendor while the workers toil in the infernal regions: “there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the whir of engines.” The hellish heat is matched by the raging abuse that pours in torrents from the cooks and waiters, who have to serve hundreds of people simultaneously.

Though he suffered at the time, Orwell the writer retrospectively delights in pulling the curtain aside to contrast the elegant façade with the disgusting mess that lies behind the scenes: “It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the customers in all their splendour.” An Italian waiter hurled insults at an apprentice in the revolting kitchen before he entered the dining room and “sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer.” The rigid class system in society is replicated in the hierarchy of employees, which naturally inspires resentment and provokes revenge. The cook routinely spits in the soup, the waiters dip their greasy fingers in the gravy. “Roughly speaking,” Orwell writes in a characteristically shocking epigram, “the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.”

Though he works like a slave from seven in the morning until nine at night, he finds—strangely enough—that the job suits him. It needs no skill, is extremely exhausting, has no interest and no future, but it produces a heavy contentment. Having done the work himself, instead of simply observing it, Orwell gains deeper insight into the mentality of workers and the rhythm of their lives. He admires the spirit of the people who put up
with endless drudgery and take pride in their ability to deal with anything. “What keeps a hotel going,” he argues, “is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is.” At the end of the week, the intensity of their work makes the pleasures of the bistro all the sweeter.

Orwell makes the transition to the second part of the book, on tramping and begging in England, by contrasting his impressions of Paris and London: “[London] was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of the trams, and the noisy festering life of the back streets, and the armed men clattering through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces comelier and milder and more alike, without the fierce individuality and malice of the French…. It was the land of the tea urn and the Labour Exchange [government employment office], as Paris is the land of the
bistro
and the sweatshop.”

The tone of
Down and Out
suggests that Orwell was more content as a
plongeur
than as an English tramp. It was easier to be
déclassé
outside his own country, and in Paris he could enjoy the freedom to be eccentric and the stupefying animal contentment of work and sleep. In Paris he had a hotel room (squalid), a job (horrible), a circle of acquaintances (drunkards) and a close friend (who couldn't help him). In London, though he could always retreat if necessary to his bolt-hole with family or friends, he was forced by strict regulations to be constantly on the move: tramping, begging and stealing. In England he observed men degraded by unemployment and homelessness, reduced to a spineless condition by hunger and malnutrition. Tramps, condemned to move from one shelter to another and cut off from women by extreme poverty, live in “enforced idleness” that destroys their souls. Only while hop-picking in Kent can they earn some money and enjoy a freer life in the English countryside.

Down and Out
was well received. Though Orwell had started tramping in the late 1920s, his book gained significance during the Depression, when unemployment, poverty and the struggle to survive were crucial issues for millions of people. His contrast between the luxury of the grand hotel and the exploitation of the workers, his firsthand analysis of the psychology of poverty met the demand for social realism in the 1930s. Reviewers praised his honesty, his sensitive social conscience, his practical suggestions for the alleviation of poverty, and his portrayal of the differences in national temperament in the sections on Paris and London.

In his introduction to the French edition,
La Vache enragée (manger la vache enragée
means “to have a rough time”), Orwell took pains to mollify his French audience and wrote: “Since all the personal scenes and
events have something repulsive about them, it is quite possible that I have unconsciously portrayed Paris and London as abominable cities.” But, he disingenuously added, he would be hurt if Parisian readers “believed I feel the least hostility toward a city that is very dear to me.” In an enthusiastic letter of August 1936, Henry Miller, another connoisseur of Parisian lowlife, told Orwell: “It's almost fantastic; it's so incredibly true! How you ever held out for so long is beyond me…. Did you get to China? It's a pity you couldn't have had another section [complete with opium dens] on down and out in Shanghai. That would be the coup de grace!” In 1962 Miller added: “I was crazy about his book
Down and Out in Paris and London;
I think it's a classic. For me it's still his best book.” Miller would have been pleased to know that for many years
Down and Out
was the most popular work in the library of Dartmoor prison.

In France Orwell formed some personal habits that lasted a lifetime. He adopted a proletarian appearance, wore a blue flannel workman's shirt and started to roll his own cigarettes from strong black tobacco. He also returned to London with a narrow, rectangular clipped mustache that left an odd bare strip under his nose. It must have taken some trouble to maintain, but distinguished him from the clean-shaven English and made him look more military and authoritative. The English novelist Anthony Powell was fascinated by this idiosyncratic mustache, which always remained “a bit of a mystery…. It was perhaps Orwell's only remaining concession to a dandyism that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface of his self-imposed austerity…. Perhaps it had something to do with the French blood inherited through his mother.”

In January 1937, on the way to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell stopped to see Henry Miller in Paris. Miller thought Orwell, willing to sacrifice his life in a foreign war, a foolish idealist. But he wished him well and gave him a leather jacket that was useful on the wintry Aragon front. Six months later, after barely escaping the Communist death squads in Barcelona, Orwell crossed the border into France and spent three restful days (on one of the two rare holidays in his adult life) on the Mediterranean coast at Banyuls.

In 1938, to avoid another flare-up of his chronic tuberculosis, Orwell and his wife Eileen spent the winter in the supposedly perfect climate of French Morocco. Unfortunately, the hot, dry desert blew a lot of sand and dust in the air and irritated his lungs. He was no stronger and in no better health when he returned to England the following spring. Marrakech, a crossroads for caravan routes across North Africa, was supposed to be the most attractive place in Morocco. The Koutoubia Mosque and its 200-foot-high
minaret dominated the town, the museums, the royal palaces, the gardens and the maze of
souks.
The towering Atlas Mountains, snowcapped in winter, provided a stunning background for the palm trees, pink buildings and high mud ramparts. The living center of town, the vast Djmaa el Fna square, was filled with food sellers, storytellers, letter writers, witch doctors, dentists, mystics, acrobats, drummers and dancers. Their rented villa, three miles north of town, was on the edge of a huge date-palm plantation. It was “entirely isolated except for a few Arabs who live in the outbuildings to tend the orange grove that surrounds it…. There is a large sitting room, two bedrooms, a bathroom & a kitchen.” There was no provision for cooking, but they had “some little pots with charcoal in them & a Primus stove.”

Orwell was not interested in the picturesque or touristic aspects of Morocco, but in the social and economic conditions, the agricultural methods and urban poverty. He was disgusted by the endemic blindness and beggars. He had never visited French Indo-China while working in Burma. But his months in Marrakech enabled him to evaluate British and French colonialism; and he felt that Burma, compared to Morocco, was like paradise. The Moroccan villagers lived in miserable little straw huts, surrounded by mud walls. The old Arab quarter of town had labyrinthine bazaars filled with camels and donkeys, very exotic, but degraded by dirt and squalor. The decadent colonial milieu and the threat of a major European war made him gloomier than ever. He got to know some Foreign Legionaires, stationed nearby, who surprised him by showing no interest in the impending European crisis. Yet he was surprised to find, in contrast to Burma, that there was “very little discontent and, at any rate on the surface, no organised movement against the French rule.”

In December 1938 Orwell told Cyril Connolly why he disliked Morocco: “[It] seems to me a beastly dull country, no forests and literally no wild animals, and the people anywhere near a big town utterly debauched by the tourist racket and their poverty combined, which turn them into a race of beggars and curio-sellers.” His essay “Marrakech” contains a series of vivid impressions: brutalized donkeys, fly-blown funerals, starving Arabs, squalid Jews, hopeless farmers, aged porters and wretched soldiers. These brief scenes illuminate the desperate economic conditions of the French colony and reinforce his attack on colonialism, which reduces its subjects to moral, social and political insignificance: “when you see how people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe you are walking among human beings…. People with brown skins are next door to invisible” to the European colonizers, who see them not as individuals but as part of the mass.

At the beginning of his career, Orwell tried unsuccessfully to get a commission to translate Zola's novels.
Burmese Days
and
Animal Farm
were translated into French in his lifetime, but (at least in the beginning) never sold well. The translation of
Homage to Catalonia
did not appear until after his death, in 1955. When
Animal Farm
, his first great success, was published in England, Orwell asked his editor to send copies to the leading French writers: André Gide (who'd criticized the Soviet Union in
Return from the USSR)
, François Mauriac (who'd made Orwell think about the limitations of Catholic novelists), Julien Green (an American-born, Parisian-raised novelist who wrote in French), André Malraux (a brilliant writer who'd fought for the loyalists in Spain), and the Existentialists—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus (the novelist and courageous editor of the wartime resistance newspaper
Combat).