Orwell in the Gutter

Silver spoons in the soup kitchen

I was in high school the first time I read Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell. A memoir about his time in the slums of France and England.¹ Orwell, while in Paris, worked as a plongeur—a person employed to wash dishes and carry out other menial tasks in a restaurant or hotel. Plongeur sounds much better than “bus boy.”

Because, at the time, I was also working as a busboy and dishwasher, I enjoyed Orwell’s description of employment in a busy restaurant. He wrote that the work itself was simple, like sorting a deck of cards, but when done against the clock it became exhausting. That captured exactly how I felt on my Friday and Saturday evening shifts.

Later I was disappointed to learn that Orwell had come from privilege. The guy went to Eton, a prestigious all-boys school. The book recounted his experiences with slum tourism. When he was penniless during the periods described in Down and Out, particularly during his return to London, his well-to-do family could and did take him back in for temporary periods so he could eat well and shower. At first this made the story feel less authentic.

Over time, though, I came to see it differently. It took someone like Orwell to write about life in the slums in a way that other educated people would pay attention to. I had to go through something similar. Only after spending time around the upper middle class did I understand how to describe my life in a way that would actually make them pay attention.

Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933, ninety-two years ago. It was the first book Eric Blair released under his pen name, George Orwell. He chose the name at random to spare his parents the embarrassment of having their only son associated with a book about life as a penniless drifter.

His family belonged to what he once called “the lower-upper-middle-class,” people who had social standing but little money, and who cared deeply about appearances. A book about scrubbing dishes in a hotel basement would have been a source of shame for them.

Characteristically for Orwell, the book rejects ornate literary style for direct, journalistic clarity. It shows the method Orwell would carry throughout his career: experience first, theory second. Unlike the ideological socialists of his day, he did not impose doctrine on his observations. Instead, he built his politics from what he saw and lived. That is one reason we like Orwell in the first place. He was genuinely interested in people and society, and uninterested in the abstract theories that claimed to describe them.

In one amusing passage, Orwell describes how a secret communist group in Paris approached him to write articles for their English-language newspaper. Orwell is offered 150 francs per piece, which he happily accepts. It turns out, though, that the group’s communism is merely a façade and that they are swindlers trying to scam people to extract membership dues. Orwell then goes back to the kitchen where he continues his work as a dishwasher.

Down and Out in Paris and London blends memoir, reportage, and social critique. It became the prototype for his later works and essays. The formula is simple but powerful. Live among ordinary people. Observe closely. Write plainly. Draw conclusions without sentimentality.

Orwell’s upper-middle-class background gave him access to educated readers who would not have listened seriously to any of the people he wrote about in Down and Out. His life allowed him to serve as a bridge. And that is what I eventually realized too. Sometimes you need to cross into another world to better explain your own.

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The writer Simon Leys² once observed that Orwell’s revulsion toward “the smelly little orthodoxies that compete for our souls” explained his contempt for intellectuals. Orwell himself admitted, “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.” That was the thread running through his work. He distrusted theories that ignored the concrete realities of ordinary people.

When Orwell left Paris in December 1929, he did not immediately live as a down-and-out in London. He spent Christmas with his family, who were surprised to see their penniless son—twenty-six years old and seemingly a failure—suddenly reappear. To deflect their concern, he insisted he was working on a book about his time in Paris. Meanwhile, he scraped together a living through tutoring and began establishing a reputation as an independent-minded reviewer. Here’s what Orwell had to say about the experience of reviewing books:

“The great majority of reviewers give an inadequate or misleading account of the book that is dealt with.

[...]

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are. In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be: ‘This book does not interest me in any way, and I would not write about it unless I were paid to.’ But the public will not pay to read that kind of thing. Why should they? They want some kind of guide to the books they are asked to read, and they want some kind of evaluation.

[...]

The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews—1,000 words is a bare minimum—to the few that seem to matter.”

George Orwell, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (1946)

In the second half of Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell describes living rough in London’s East End, staying in lodging houses and casual wards. He worked alongside the city's laborers to understand poverty from the inside.

Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first published book, written when he was in his mid-twenties. It is striking is how little he romanticized the idea of being an impoverished bohemian in world-class cities, the way so many others of his background might have done. Instead, he treated his immersion in the Parisian and London underworlds as an attempt to strip away the prejudices he had inherited as an upper-middle-class Etonian.

The book is restrained in its politics. Orwell rarely pauses for commentary, preferring to tell the story as it happened and saving his more general conclusions for a couple of chapters at the end. This is more or less the same approach I took with Troubled; describe the world as it was, or at least as I remember it, and let the meaning emerge on its own.

One of the strongest features of Down and Out is its focus on the psychological effects of petty humiliations. Orwell describes kitchens where people from every corner of Europe are screaming at each other in different languages, frantically trying to keep pace with the chaos. If you have ever watched one of those Gordon Ramsay shows, you have some idea. He admired the strange order that somehow emerged from the chaos.

This voyeuristic quality is part of the book’s appeal. We all go to restaurants and see only the polished surface, knowing almost nothing about what happens behind the doors. Likewise, we all encounter homeless people in daily life and know little about how they live. Back in the 1930s, you didn’t have to make many mistakes to find yourself in a tough spot. My guess is that because society today is wealthier, there are more social services available, and powerful recreational drugs more accessible, the typical homeless person (he uses the word “tramp,” which was a prevailing term at the time) Orwell encountered nearly a century ago is very different from those we see today.

During his year and a half working menial jobs in Paris, Orwell wrote a few books, all rejected by publishers in London. None of this appears in Down and Out. He never dwells on his literary ambitions or his many failures. He does not even treat “writing” as a subject worth mentioning. For him, sleeping on a bench along the Embankment was a detail that mattered more than discussing proofs with an editor. Struggle is more interesting to read about than success. Sometimes people ask me if I’ll write a follow up to Troubled. No way. No one wants to read a whole book about a guy who went to elite universities and then blathers on about his subsequent prosperity. The thought of it induces a feeling in me of both amusement and nausea. Even if I focused on the unexpected struggles and costs of upward mobility, the stakes are so low that I can’t bring myself to take it seriously.

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Here are some choice excerpts from Down and Out in Paris and London, with some of my thoughts:

Pg. 125

“[T]he plongeur [dishwasher]…is a king compared with a rickshaw puller”

Today this is perhaps my favorite quote from the book.

One reason we shifted from speaking about “poverty” to “inequality” is because U.S. poverty looks nothing like poverty in much of the rest of the world.

Left: The dishwashing station from my first job making minimum wage, which at the time was $6.75/hr in California. Today that job would pay around $18/hr, which sounds unbelievable to me, but it’s true.

Right: Dishwashing job in Malaysia. Wage is equivalent to $1/hr. For what it’s worth, the spending power of $1 USD in Malaysia is roughly equivalent to $3.50 in the U.S.

Very few people in the U.S. would wash dishes for $3.50 an hour, even in the much better conditions of the left picture. A dishwasher in the U.S. is a king compared with a dishwasher anywhere in the developing world.

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Pg. 209:

In this passage, Orwell has arrived at a “spike” in London, a government-run shelter for the homeless. The person who oversees the shelter asks Orwell a question.

“'So you are a journalist?'

'Yes, sir,' I said, quaking. A few questions would betray the fact that I had been lying, which might mean prison. But the Tramp Major only looked me up and down and said:

'Then you are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so.'

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,' he said; 'bloody bad luck that is.' And thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a kind of deference. He did not search me, and in the bathroom he actually gave me a clean towel to myself—an unheard-of luxury.

An example of ingrained class prejudice. Even in a place of utter destitution, the perception of someone as a "gentleman" (implied by a middle-class profession like journalism) elicits sympathy and privileges from authority figures. They skip the usual invasive search and provide Orwell rare comforts.

Respectability (social status) is a resource as real as money. Even when you lose everything, you will be treated differently based on your class background. This was more true nearly a century ago when Orwell wrote this. But a version of it exists in the U.S. today.

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Pg. 18

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs — and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

The unexpected consolations that come with hitting rock bottom. It strips away pretensions and future-oriented anxieties. Allowing a kind of numb acceptance.

Related, on pg. 95

“I had no sensation of poverty, for even after paying my rent and setting aside enough for tobacco and journeys and my food on Sundays, I still had four francs a day for drinks, and four francs was wealth. There was—it is hard to express it—a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment a well-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple. For nothing could be simpler than the life of a plongeur. He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world”

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Pg. 135

“The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic.”

This is Orwell reflecting on his return from Paris back to London. For me, this line came to mind at age 17 when I first considered enlisting.

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Everyone knows about 1984 and Animal Farm. But his memoirs and essays deserve to be more widely read. Here are a few notable quotes from his other work.

"As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents. The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form, is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from. the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England...To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige."

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

**

"Within the intelligentsia, a mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory...intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many could not help getting a kick out of seeing their country humiliated"

“Notes on Nationalism” (1945)

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“The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred—against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs. Sometimes the hatred of bourgeois habits and ‘ideology’ is so far-reaching that it extends even to bourgeois characters in books.”

The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

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"This illustrates well the totalitarian tendency which is implicit in the Anarchist or pacifist vision of society. In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else."

“Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” (1946)

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“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial...when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society...can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable...Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy—or even two orthodoxies, as often happens—good writing stops."

“The Prevention of Literature” (1946)

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“[W]e have the disadvantage of living among clear-cut political ideologies and of usually knowing at a glance what thoughts are heretical. A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread—not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group. As a rule, luckily, there is more than one group, but also at any given moment there is a dominant orthodoxy, to offend against which needs a thick skin and sometimes means cutting one’s income in half for years on end. Obviously, for about fifteen years past, the dominant orthodoxy, especially among the young, has been ‘left’. The key words are ‘progressive’, ‘democratic’ and ‘revolutionary’, while the labels which you must at all costs avoid having gummed upon you are ‘bourgeois’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘Fascist’. Almost everyone nowadays, even the majority of Catholics and Conservatives, is ‘progressive’, or at least wishes to be thought so. No one, so far as I know, ever describes himself as a ‘bourgeois’, just as no one literate enough to have heard the word ever admits to being guilty of anti-Semitism. We are all of us good democrats, anti-Fascist, anti-imperialist, contemptuous of class distinctions, impervious to colour prejudice, and so on and so forth.”

“Writers and Leviathan” (1948)

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“In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean world where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”

“In Front of Your Nose” (1946)

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In his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell offers an intriguing possibility as to why literature in the years after WW1 was so much better than the literature after WW2. After the second world war, the literary world got captured by ideology (communism) and as a result their writing suffered.

“In western Europe and America large sections of the literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has produced extraordinarily few books worth reading.”

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I've long said the educated public gets a weirdly distorted view of the working class from pop culture; it's more exciting to watch or read about criminals breaking the law than ordinary working class people clocking in to their 9-to-5 jobs.

In his 1940 essay “Charles Dickens,” Orwell observed a similar pattern:

“If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole [...] the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists. When they do find their way between the corners of a book, it is nearly always as objects of pity or as comic relief.”

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Orwell wrote about the growing difficulty of identifying social class through mere observation:

“The interior of a working-class house resembles that of a middle-class house very much more than it did a generation ago. Fourthly, and perhaps most important of all, the mass production of cheap clothes. Thirty years ago the social status of nearly everyone in England could be determined from his appearance, even at two hundred yards' distance. The working classes all wore ready-made clothes, and the ready-made clothes were not only ill-fitting but usually followed the upper-class fashions of ten or fifteen years earlier. The cloth cap was practically a badge of status. It was universal among the working class, while the upper classes only wore it for golf and shooting. This state of affairs is rapidly changing. Ready-made clothes now follow the fashions closely, they are made in many different fittings to suit every kind of figure, and even when they are of very cheap cloth they are superficially not very different from expensive clothes. The result is that it grows harder every year, especially in the case of women, to determine social status at a glance.”

This is one reason among others why I argue that luxury beliefs have increasingly come to replace luxury goods as status symbols for the upper and upper middle class.

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“Within the middle class there is a sharp division, cultural and not financial, between those who aim at gentility and those who do not...Middle-class people are really graded according to their degree of resemblance to the aristocracy: professional men, senior officials, officers in the fighting services, university lecturers, clergymen, even the literary and scientific intelligentsia, rank higher than business men, though on the whole they earn less.”

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“I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in ­– at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.”

“Why I Write” (1946)

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“An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

A quote I connected with for obvious reasons.

1. It just occurred to me that this was in 2005. Around once a week I’d stop by my high school library after class and browse the shelves. By 2006 and 2007, I noticed fewer and fewer students actually reading in the library and more and more of them on the desktop computers, watching videos on a new website called “YouTube.” Can’t help but wonder how much streaming videos have reduced interest in reading among young people.

2. Simon Leys, like Orwell himself, was also a brilliant writer and left-wing critic of socialist doctrine.