第二遍了，第一遍听完的，意犹未尽。
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselves in a queue in the order in which they had arrived. The clergyman was a nice, chubby, youngish man, and, curiously enough, very like Charlie, my friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and did not speak except for a brief good evening; he simply hurried down the line of men, thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting to be thanked. The consequence was that, for once, there was genuine gratitude, and everyone said that the clergyman was a—— good feller. Someone (in his hearing, I believe) called out: ‘Well, he’ll never be a f—— bishop!’– this, of course, intended as a warm compliment.
Introduction
But he could not accept that what he saw as Burmese racial weaknesses justified Burma’s relentless exploitation by Britain. In 1927 he resigned from the Indian Imperial Police, much to his family’s baffled exasperation.
As his biographer Bernard Crick has noted, ‘He genuinely valued art more than success.’ In consequence, he was his own harshest critic. Sending the manuscript of A Clergyman’s Daughter to his agent, he sadly remarked: ‘It was a good idea, but I am afraid I have made a muck of it.’ Another hallmark of the born writer was his conviction that those who habitually discuss their writing produce little of worth. And his early dedication to his craft never waned. Fame, when it belatedly came, did not tempt him to demand less of himself as a writer. In Orwell’s case the style was indeed the man, as T. S. Eliot recognised when he referred to his ‘good writing of fundamental integrity’.
Most writers who share for a time in the lives of the poor are not genuinely down and out, though they may choose to appear so to their new neighbours. What gives the Paris chapters of Down and Out such pungent immediacy is the fact that Orwell was not then ‘playing a game’. True, he could at once have retreated to his parents’ modestly comfortable home in Southwold and admitted defeat; but after so obstinately quitting a secure career in the Indian Imperial Police that was not an attractive escape route. Also, he could have appealed for help to his favourite (because only) bohemian relative, Aunt Nellie. She was then living in Paris with her mildly dotty lover, Eugène Adam– who had recently founded the Workers’ Esperanto Association of the World– though for obvious reasons her proximity does not emerge in Down and Out. However, Aunt Nellie’s own circumstances were then too straitened for a proud nephew to batten on her. So there really was no alternative to working in the foul kitchens of the fashionable Hôtel Lotti on the Rue de Rivoli.
When Jonathan Cape rejected it, as being too short and scrappy, he expanded it and tried Cape again– only to be rejected again. A year later he submitted a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added) to Faber and Faber, whose rejection letter came from T. S. Eliot: ‘We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture.’ At that stage Orwell lost heart, a reaction hardly justified by only two rejections– and those from London’s foremost literary publishing houses. But by 1932 he may have been feeling hostile to Down and Out, an emotion many writers experience when a book has been too long on their mental plate.
We owe the rescue and publication of Down and Out to Mabel Fierz, in whose home Orwell discarded the typescript, requesting his hostess to destroy it but save the paper- clips.
At once he recognised it as a ‘natural’ for the bold new house of Gollancz, and very soon it had been accepted– on condition that certain names were changed and all swearwords deleted. Having swiftly completed this last easy revision, Orwell wrote to Victor Gollancz: ‘I think if it is all the same to everybody I would prefer the book to be published pseudonymously. I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use the same pseudonym again.’ Gollancz agreed and so Eric Blair became George Orwell.
I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. And, chiefly because I had had to think everything out in solitude, I had carried my hatred of oppression to extraordinary lengths. At that time failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self- advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundred a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.
Mixing on equal terms with the poor was not easy for Orwell– an extremely fastidious man who, even when starving, felt constrained to throw away a saucepan of milk merely because a bed- bug had fallen into it. Moreover, no one of his generation could have outgrown their ‘lower- upper- middle- class’ conditioning, however sincere their longing ‘to get right down among the oppressed’, and Orwell was too honest to affect the sort of camaraderie with tramps that could never come naturally to him. The peculiar flavour of English class- consciousness– at once more ruthless and more muted than Continental variants– comes across most aromatically when he is down and out in London. Yet this handicap did not prevent him from brilliantly documenting an area of human experience that his readers could never have glimpsed, or even begun to imagine, without his guidance. It was an area in which most middle- class readers were then uninterested; and indeed we still have with us a threatening percentage of the well- heeled who prefer not to think about inner- city and kindred problems. What Orwell wrote in 1930 applies to too many nearly sixty years later: ‘Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.’ However, the uncaring percentage has been steadily dwindling since the 1930s and Orwell was in the vanguard of those who brought about this change. Although Down and Out had no great immediate effect on public opinion, it marked the beginning of his ‘water dripping on stone’ influence.
one never doubts that those men existed. However, the dilemma that prompted Orwell’s self- contradictions is familiar to every writer of documentaries; one feels in honour bound to protect those who served as raw material, while avoiding any distortion of facts.
Down and Out in Paris and London
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. 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.
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.
You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. 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. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, ‘I shall be starving in a day or two– shocking, isn’t it?’ And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
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.
‘Then, comrade, you will hear from us by the first post tomorrow. Or possibly the second post. Our rate of pay is a hundred and fifty francs an article. Remember to bring a parcel of washing next time you come. Au revoir, comrade.’
Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left, and we spent it on half a pound of bread, with a piece of garlic to rub it with. The point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the taste lingers and gives one the illusion of having fed recently.
Later on, when we were prosperous, I occasionally saw him eat meals almost as large without difficulty.
‘The head waiter says he would enjoy calling an Englishman names. Will you sign on for a month?’
Sometimes we met some of our cooks and waiters in the bistros, and they were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were their slaves, but it is an etiquette in hotel life that between hours everyone is equal, and the engueulades do not count.
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three. We had the heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we often drank too much– a good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially drunk.
This washing up was a thoroughly odious job– not hard, but boring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend whole decades at such occupations.
A system of service bells ran through the hotel, and the whole staff used these for signalling to one another. A long ring and a short ring, followed by two more long rings, meant that the manager was coming, and when we heard it we took care to look busy.
Different jobs were done by different races. The office employees and the cooks and sewing- women were French, the waiters Italians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris), the plongeurs of every race in Europe, besides Arabs and negroes. French was the lingua franca, even the Italians speaking it to one another.
Then, the moment it’s struck twelve, I start raising such hell that they’ve no choice but to sack me. Neat, eh? Most days I’m sacked by half- past twelve; today it was two o’clock; but I don’t care, I’ve saved four hours’ work. The only trouble is, one can’t do it at the same hotel twice.’
What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. If a man idles, the others soon find him out, and conspire against him to get him sacked. Cooks, waiters and plongeurs differ greatly in outlook, but they are all alike in being proud of their efficiency.
The cook does not look upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he is generally called ‘un ouvrier’, which a waiter never is. He knows his power– knows that he alone makes or mars a restaurant, and that if he is five minutes late everything is out of gear. He despises the whole non- cooking staff, and makes it a point of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And he takes a genuine artistic pride in his work, which demands very great skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but the doing everything to time.
he cooked few of them himself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspected them before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. The vouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook seldom looked at them; everything was stored in his mind, and exactly to the minute, as each dish fell due, he would call out, ‘Faites marcher une côtelette de veau’ (or whatever it was) unfailingly. He was an insufferable bully, but he was also an artist. It is for their punctuality, and not for any superiority in technique, that men cooks are preferred to women.
The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when you sit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour after closing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side must surely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as he looks at you, ‘What an overfed lout’; he is thinking, ‘One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man.’ He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelve hours a day– they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, in many cafés. They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.
The plongeurs, again, have a different outlook. Theirs is a job which offers no prospects, is intensely exhausting, and at the same time has not a trace of skill or interest; the sort of job that would always be done by women if women were strong enough. All that is required of them is to be constantly on the run, and to put up with long hours and a stuffy atmosphere. They have no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for anything else. The best they can hope is to find a slightly softer job as night- watchman or lavatory attendant.
And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge– the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the mere power to go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable. Débrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se débrouiller– get it done somehow.
Yet we were clean where we recognised cleanliness as part of the boulot. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; and as our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by being dirty.
Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employee is too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to be eaten. A meal is simply ‘une commande’ to him, just as a man dying of cancer is simply ‘a case’ to the doctor.
Except for a few ambitious waiters who went to English classes, the whole staff wasted their leisure in this way; one seemed too lazy after the morning’s work to do anything better.
It was the typical life of a plongeur, and it did not seem a bad life at the time. 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; his Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few bistros and his bed. If he goes afield, it is only a few streets away, on a trip with some servant- girl who sits on his knee swallowing oysters and beer. On his free day he lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt, throws dice for drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again. Nothing is quite real to him but the boulot, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most important.
Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just as being hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, a debauch more than a relief. I had no more trouble with the bugs.
Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking- bout was the one thing that made life worth living.
In this way our incompetence piled one job on another throughout the day, everything in arrears.
Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that the engueulades of working hours did not count between times; but we had called each other things too bad to be forgotten– and besides, there were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly– from a sense of duty, he said.
I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they had been in dirtier places.
What is restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologise, you bow, you go out; and in five minutes you come back by another door– with the same chicken. That is restaurant work,’
I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps we were a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be past imagining.
The question I am raising is why this life goes on– what purpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why. I am not taking the merely rebellious, fainéant attitude. I am trying to consider the social significance of a plongeur’s life.
I think one should start by saying that a plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison.
But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.’
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line ‘Ne pain ne voyent qu’aux fenestres’ by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. 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.’
Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.
Sometimes late at night men would come in with a pail of winkles they had bought cheap, and share them out. There was a general sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who were out of work.
Two or three of the lodgers were old- age pensioners. Till meeting them I had never realised that there are people in England who live on nothing but the old- age pension of ten shillings a week.
But, with an income of ten shillings a week, to spend money on a shave– it is awe- inspiring.
‘A——, that’s what you are, a————! Take that in your dirty gob and suck it, you——! By——, I’ll smash you afore I’ve done with you. A c——, that’s what you are, a son of a—— whore. Lick that, you——! That’s what I think of you, you——, you——, you——, you BLACK BASTARD!’
He could pronounce the words ‘the dear Lord Jesus’ with less shame than anyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned the knack in prison.
Evidently the tramps were not grateful for their free tea. And yet it was excellent tea, as different from coffee- shop tea as good Bordeaux is from the muck called colonial claret, and we were all glad of it. I am sure too that it was given in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliating us; so in fairness we ought to have been grateful– still, we were not.
We leaned against the wall, smoking, and the tramps began to talk about the spikes they had been in recently. It appeared from what they said that all spikes are different, each with its peculiar merits and demerits, and it is important to know these when you are on the road. An old hand will tell you the peculiarities of every spike in England, as: at A you are allowed to smoke but there are bugs in the cells; at B the beds are comfortable but the porter is a bully; at C they let you out early in the morning but the tea is undrinkable; at D the officials steal your money if you have any– and so on interminably. There are regular beaten tracks where the spikes are within a day’s march of one another.
Nevertheless, one would have known him for a tramp a hundred yards away. There was something in his drifting style of walk, and the way he had of hunching his shoulders forward, essentially abject. Seeing him walk, you felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one.
His ignorance was limitless and appalling. He once asked me, for instance, whether Napoleon lived before Jesus Christ or after.
I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London– the fact that it costs money even to sit down. In Paris, if you had no money and could not find a public bench, you would sit on the pavement. Heaven knows what sitting on the pavement would lead to in London– prison, probably.
‘Well, you got to take an interest in something. It don’t follow that because a man’s on the road he can’t think of anything but tea- and- two- slices.’
‘Of course. Look at Paddy– a tea- swilling old moocher, only fit to scrounge for fag- ends. That’s the way most of them go. I despise them. But you don’t need get like that. If you’ve got any education, it don’t matter to you if you’re on the road for the rest of your life.’
‘No, not necessarily. 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 a free man in here”’– he tapped his forehead–‘ and you’re all right.’
He spoke French passably, and had read some of Zola’s novels, all Shakespeare’s plays, Gulliver’s Travels, and a number of essays. He could describe his adventures in words that one remembered. For instance, speaking of funerals, he said to me:
‘Have you ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India. They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment I almost jumped out of my skin, because he’d started kicking. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat– still, it give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with a bang you could have heard fifty yards away. It fair put me against cremation.’
I talked to him and found that, like most swindlers, he believed a great part of his own lies.
Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course– but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high- minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire- purchase tout– in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.
Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately.
The swear words also change– or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked onto every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing- room and be replaced by some other word.
When you see a man distributing handbills you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills.
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.
Bozo said that these people came to the lodging- house several times a month. They had influence with the police, and the ‘deputy’ could not exclude them. It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor– it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.
Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselves in a queue in the order in which they had arrived. The clergyman was a nice, chubby, youngish man, and, curiously enough, very like Charlie, my friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and did not speak except for a brief good evening; he simply hurried down the line of men, thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting to be thanked. The consequence was that, for once, there was genuine gratitude, and everyone said that the clergyman was a—— good feller. Someone (in his hearing, I believe) called out: ‘Well, he’ll never be a f—— bishop!’– this, of course, intended as a warm compliment.
They had quarrelled overnight (there was some silly casus belli about one saying to the other, ‘Bullshit’, which was taken for Bolshevik– a deadly insult), and they fought it out in a field.
It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from ‘these here tramps’. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers.
The sexual impulse, not to put it any higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can be almost as demoralising as physical hunger. The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexual starvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from the whole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank of a cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to a man’s self- respect.
But the important point is that a tramp’s sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever. One could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine than walking from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours a day in the cell and on the road.
This law is evidently a piece of wilful offensiveness. Its object, so it is said, is to prevent people from dying of exposure; but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die of exposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris there is no such law. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine bridges, and in doorways, and on benches in the squares, and round the ventilating shafts of the Metro, and even inside the Metro stations. It does no apparent harm. No one will spend a night in the street if he can possibly help it, and if he is going to stay out of doors he might as well be allowed to sleep, if he can.
At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.