Detail
Title: Down and Out in Paris and London ISBN: 9780156262248Published March 15th 1972 by Mariner Books (first published 1933) · Paperback 213 pages
Genre: Nonfiction, Classics, Autobiography, Memoir, Biography, Travel, History, Literature, Cultural, France, Politics
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User Reviews
Kimley
Do not read this book if you are unemployed.
Do not read this book if you are homeless.
Do not read this book if you are worried about the tanking economy.
Do not read this book if you have no retirement savings.
Do not read this book if you don't like eating stale bread and margarine.
Do not read this book if you like eating in restaurants.
Do not read this book if you are sensitive to foul odors.
Do not read this book if you are one of those people who carries a hand-sanitizer at all times.
Do not read this book if you are an artist, writer, musician or other creative occupation which certainly guarantees brushes with poverty.
If you do read this book (which I highly recommend) make sure you have some bubble bath on hand as you will need a nice long well-perfumed soak afterwards.
Bill Kerwin
As anyone who has read 1984 can attest, Orwell is--among other things--a master of disgust, a writer who can describe a squalid apartment building, an aging painted whore or a drunken old man with just the right details to make the reader's nose twitch with displeasure, his stomach rise into the throat with revulsion. What makes this book so good is that--although he may continually evoke this reaction in his account of the working and the wandering poor--Orwell never demeans or dismisses the human beings who live in this repulsive environment. The people he describes may be disgusting, but they are often resourceful too, and Orwell makes it clear that it is the economic system itself--not the character flaws of particular individuals caught up in the system--which is to blame for so much squalor and suffering.
I would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to read a vivid description of the conditions of those who live beneath the underbelly of society and the stratagems they use to survive, whether they be recently impoverished men endeavoring to maintain respectability, Paris dishwashers sweating through their underground existence, or British tramps enduring the daily bone-wearying trek for a cheap place to lay their heads.
Jeffrey Keeten
“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.”
In 1927 Eric Arthur Blair A.K.A. George Orwell gives up his job as a policeman in Burma and moves back to his lodgings on Portobello Road in London with the intention of being a writer. Like with many artists, writers, and those that wished to be one or the other, the siren song of Paris beckoned Orwell. In 1928 he moves to The City of Light.
”It was lamplight--that strange purplish gleam of the Paris lamps--and beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from top to bottom with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of fire.”
His lodgings are robbed by
A gagger--beggar or street performer of any kind.
I do hope that everyone has had an opportunity to experience some poverty. When I was in college I had several moments where my gas tank was on E, that amber dot nearly burned a hole in my retina, and well food, skipping a few meals builds character. The one thing that I learned about my brief bouts of impecuniousness was that I didn’t like it. The anxiety of potentially revealing the precarious nature of my affairs was much more excruciating than the discomfort of hunger or even the tension inspired by the keenly tuned ear listening intently for the first cough of an engine starved for gas.
The mind does sharpen when deprived of nutrients.
A moocher--one who begs outright, without pretense of doing a trade.
A slice of Orwell’s Paris.
Orwell does become truly down and out barely scraping together enough money to maintain lodging. Everything pawnable or salable is already in the shops and now he must find a job. He tramps for miles all over the city following rumors of employment. He finally lands a position at a hotel restaurant washing dishes. It isn’t particularly difficult work, but the hours are unbelievably long. Since he is on the lowest rung of the very tall totem pole he is roundly cursed by everyone.
”Do you see that? That is the type of plongeur they send us nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot? From Charenton I suppose?” (There is a large lunatic asylum at Charenton.)
“From England,” I said.
“I might have known it. Well, mon cher monsieur, L’Anglais, may I inform you that you are the son of a whore?”
I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitchen, for I always made some mistake; I was expected to know the work, and was cursed accordingly. From curiosity I counted the number of times I was called maquereau during the day, and it was thirty-nine.
A glimmer--one who watches vacant motor-cars.
Down and Out in paris
There is a camaraderie that comes from working long hours, from getting up with aching muscles, and a wool stuffed head from too little sleep. While in college I worked for a used bookstore that was the size of a grocery store. We were always understaffed, sometimes ridiculously understaffed. We needed three cashiers and generally had two. We needed three book buyers and generally had one. It wasn’t infrequent for people to work double shifts, not for the money, but because we couldn’t stand to think of our comrades left facing impossible odds. What was crazy is after we closed the store we would sit out in the parking lot, or when we could afford it go get a drink, and talk about books or about the craziness that happened during our shift until the wee hours of the morning. We were as bonded as soldiers in the trench because we were survivors. We didn’t bother to learn much about newbies until they had been there a month because chances were they would last a week or less.
We were working for $4 an hour.
A drop--money given to a beggar.
The endless stream of dirty dishes is truly an Orwellian nightmare.
While working in this fine restaurant Orwell did reveal some things that made me queasy.
”When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb around the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, the steps back and contemplates the piece of meal like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning.”
But the place of course is kept spic and span, right?
”Everywhere in the service quarters dirt festered--a secret vein of dirt, running through the garish hotel like the intestines through a man’s body.”
You may reassure yourself that restaurants are much better regulated now than they were in Paris in the 1920s and they are, but chat with a few people who work in the industry and it may not be as easy to reassure yourself.
A flattie--a policeman.
I always marvel at people that make a complete ass out of themselves berating a waiter in a restaurant. The distance that food must be carried from the cook to the table there is so much time for a waiter to enact some form of petty, but very satisfying revenge on some disrespectful jerk.
To knock off--to steal.
”Waiters in good hotels do not wear moustaches, and to show their superiority they decree that plongeurs shall not wear them either; and the cooks wear the moustaches to show their contempt for the waiters”…. Thus Orwell had to shave his moustaches.
Henry Miller was in Paris about the same time as Orwell. Miller wrote his books without worrying about what mommy and daddy might think. Orwell certainly put his remembrances through a strainer and certainly this book does not have the gritty intensity of a Miller novel. The descriptions of his time in the Paris restaurants are superbly drawn. They were certainly my favorite parts of the book. When he gets back to London he spends time tramping through the various charity houses and reveals the absurdity of the way they are run. He also makes a compelling case for changing the public view of who a tramp really is. A quick, enjoyable read, that for me, brought back some surprisingly fond memories of when I REALLY worked for living; and yet, still walked the razor edge of weekly impoverishment.
***3.75 stars out of 5
Ahmad Sharabiani
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the British author George Orwell, published in 1933.
It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities.
The first part is an account of living in near-destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens.
The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «محرومان پاریس و لندن»؛ «آس و پاس ها»؛ «آس و پاس در پاریس و لندن»؛ «آس و پاس ها در لندن»؛ «بیخانمانهای پاریس و لندن»؛ «فقر و دربدری در پاریس و لندن»؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و یکم ماه جولای سال 2006میلادی
عنوان: محرومان پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول؛ مترجم: اسماعیل کیوانی؛ تهران، تیسفون، 1362؛ در 318ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، مصدق، سال1395؛ در 248ص؛ شابک 9786007436554؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان انگلیسی - سده 20م
عنوان: فقر و دربدری در پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: علی پیرنیا؛ تهران، ممتاز، 1362؛ در 318ص؛
عنوان: آس و پاس ها؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: اکبر تبریزی؛ تبریز، انتشارات بهجت؛ چاپ اول و دوم 1362؛ چاپ سوم 1385 در 269ص، شابک: ایکس - 964667190؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، بهجت، 1389؛ شابک 9789642763474؛ چاپ دیگر 1394؛
عنوان: آس و پاس ها؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: آوینا ترنم؛ تهران، ماهابه، هنر پارینه، 1394، در 286ص؛ شابک 9786005205558؛ چاپ سوم 1396؛
عنوان: آس و پاس در پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: عاطفه میرزایی؛ تهران، نشر پر؛ 1397؛ در 272ص؛ شابک9786226041140؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، باران خرد؛ 1397؛ در 288ص؛ شابک 9786226199049؛
عنوان: آس و پاس در پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: بهمن دارالشفایی؛ تهران، نشر ماهی؛ 1393؛ در 237ص؛ چاپ دوم و سوم سال1395؛ چاپ چهارم1396؛ شابک 9789642091942؛ چاپ پنجم 1397؛
عنوان: آس و پاس در لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: فهيمه مهدوی؛ تهران: محراب دانش؛ 1398؛ شابک 9789642758531؛
عنوان: آس و پاس در پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: محبوبه ناصری؛ ساری آنوشا مهر؛ سال 1398؛ در 284ص؛ شابک9786227092158؛
عنوان: آسوپاسهای پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: زهره روشنفکر؛ تهران، مجید، 1388؛ در 240ص؛ شابک 9789644531118؛
عنوان: بیخانمانهای پاریس و لندن؛ نویسنده: جورج اورول، مترجم: علی منیری؛ تهران، ناژ، 1390؛ در 234ص؛ شابک 9789641740926؛
داستان «آس و پاسها در پاریس و لندن»، روایت نویسنده ی «بریتانیایی»، «جورج اورول»، از زندگی فقرا، و بیخانمانها در «پاریس»، و «لندن» است؛ این کتاب در ماه ژانویه سال 1933میلادی منتشر شد، و در انتشار آن برای نخستین بار، جناب «اریک آرتور بلر» نویسنده، از نام مستعار «جورج اورول»، سود بردند؛ «اورول» پس از خوانش «تهیدستان جک لندن»، به زندگی در میان طبقات محرومان، و مهاجران، در شهرهای «پاریس» و شهر «لندن» علاقمند شدند؛ رویدادهای زندگی آمیخته با فقر ایشان، در بهار 1928میلادی، در مسافرخانه های «پاریس»، و اشتغالش به ظرفشویی، در رستورانها و هتلهای «پاریس»، فصلهای نخست این روایت را، شکل میدهد؛ راوی در بخشهایی از زندگی خویش در «پاریس»، با یک افسر پیشین «روسیه»، به نام «بوریس»، همراه میشود، که به سختی زندگی خویش را میگذراند، و از صاحبخانه ی «یهودی» خویش ناراضی است؛ برخی به همین دلیل، این کتاب را «یهود ستیزانه» میدانند؛
گزارش ایشان از «لندن»، بیشتر شرح روزگار بیخانمانهای کشور «انگلیس» است، که در پی یافتن بستری برای خوابیدن، از نوانخانه ای، به نوانخانه ی دیگر، رانده میشوند، یا شبها را، در پیاده رو خیابانها، میگذرانند؛ «اورول» این نوع زندگی را، برای نگاشتن گزارشی، در روزهای پایانی سال1927میلادی، تجربه کرده بودند؛ نکته ی تاثیرگذار این روایت، بر خلاف نظر همگان، این است که همه ی بیخانمانها، اشخاص بیعار، یا پست فطرت نیستند، و در بین آنها هنرمند، و روشنفکر نیز، میتوان پیدا کرد؛ در پایان کتاب «اورول»، پیشنهادهایی برای بهبود زندگی تهیدستان، و بی خانمانها ارائه میکنند؛ ...؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 16/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 31/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
karen
this book isn't going to cause anyone to have the huge revelation that "poverty is hard!" or anything, because - duh - but it also doesn't piss me off the way morgan spurlock pisses me off, because orwell makes his story come alive and there is so much local color, so many individual life stories in here that this book, despite being horribly depressing, is also full of the resourcefulness of man and the resilience of people that have been left by the wayside. it is triumphant, not manipulative.
i liked the part when he was down and out in paris better than the part he was down and out in england. even though he had a handy exit strategy in england, in the form of someone who was willing to lend him money when he was truly and completely broke, and even though he only had to live the tramp's life for a month in england before his job started, the english parts were just so much more dismal, so horrifyingly bleak.
in paris, poverty is almost a lark. the accommodations are better, the homeless are allowed to congregate beneath bridges and these is almost a romantic tinge to being penniless.
england is just grim. flat-out grim.
big ups to orwell for his details - the smells and the disease and the horror of unwashed men being forced into cramped quarters are unfortunately very well-rendered and can be quite sickening at times. and the conditions of fine parisian restaurants at the time... shudder. don't read this while you are eating.
but this book will make you want to eat, truly. the days without food, the dizziness, the suffering. i ate like a hog on sunday, and felt very guilty for doing so while reading this, but it left such a hollow in me, i had to fill it somehow.
and - yes, this book was somewhat fabricated, and is like thoreau "in the wilderness," but that doesn't make orwell's observations any less legitimate or powerful.
thank you for writing such a fine book, george orwell...
come to my blog!Lyn
Orwell demonstrates his social conscience and empathy for the poor, which I think, makes his more famous attacks on totalitarianism more credible.
This is also an interesting novel to read for a glimpse into Paris and London of that time, between 1900 and 1930. Orwell worked in some restaurants and his view from the kitchen is far less romantic than Hemingway’s perspective from the table.
Not really a classic or a masterpiece, but a book that should be read.
Steven
Orwell’s take on destitution was every bit as good as I expected it to be: beautifully phrased, meticulous, honest, funny, but also moving, and along with his own vivid experiences of living a hand to mouth existence he blends the testimonies of other refugees and homeless people in Paris and London. This book might not have even come about had it not been for a thief who pinched the last of an ailing Orwell’s savings from his Paris boarding room in 1929, thus leading him to search for dishwashing work in the kitchens of the French capital. Yes Paris was indeed a tough place to find shelter between the wars and even though Orwell eventually found a job at the anonymous Hotel X, a place where dirty roast chickens were served, and chefs spat in soup, he remained without pay for ten days and so was forced to sleep on a bench until he had enough to cover rent. Throughout the book, when he did manage to find somewhere to stay, some of the beds even had blocks of wood for pillows.
“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work,” he wrote then, although his sympathies were firmly with his fellow “beggars”.
The book both illuminates the huge change between 1933 and now and exposes horrifying similarities. As Orwell reveals the cruelty of a lack of workers’ rights, where livelihoods are lost overnight or jobs not secure from one day to the next day, a modern audience cannot help but hear the words ‘zero hours contracts’. Job insecurity is still a major driver of homelessness nearly 90 years later. When in London Orwell describes the police arresting rough sleepers or ‘moving them on’, he foreshadows recent events such as the cleansing of the streets of Windsor before the royal wedding, and fines presented to beggars in Coventry. As he describes “the stories in the Sunday papers about beggars…with two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers” we can hear the headlines from this very year in a national newspaper proclaiming “fake homeless are earning £150 a day”.
Orwell’s books, however, are more than just treatises aiming to right the political wrongs. Aside from his political intentions, much of Orwell’s appeal has always rested in his brilliance as a writer: his ability to distil vast ideas or injustices into the most perfect phrases, his descriptive passages artfully conjuring the slum backstreets of 1930s Paris, and his sense of the preciousness of humanity, bringing clarity and colour to people's lives. through all all the filth, dirt, and smelly bodies, Orwell writes here and there with small moments of beauty, that at first don't feel immediately apparent. And when he writes of the people he meets in Down and Out are “just ordinary human beings”, he is stating a simple and obvious fact – but one that, even today, is still too often forgotten.
Of the two cities, I found the London half of the book the more interesting as I know less about the English capital than I do Paris; through my own knowledge and that provided by countless other writers nothing surprised me. Although it had it's funny moments, the seriousness of poverty really makes you sit up and take notice. This is just of an important book now as it was back then. A must read.
İntellecta
İ´ve read the Essay “Paris Ve Londra'da Beş Parasız” written by George Orwell. It´s a biography of his own life and personal experiences. After George Orwell´s cancellation as officer of the British colonial power, he flew to Paris to work as an English teacher, because he aspired a job as a committed writer. Unfortunately his job as an English teacher and writer didn´t worked out and consequently he worked as a day labourer, harvester and dishwasher in a luxury restaurant. “Paris Ve Londra'da Beş Parasız” isn´t about political emphasises and has principally an anecdotic character. However this biography shows and emphasises clearly the former living environment of the entirely poverty stricken lower classes. It´s questionable if the business of those big hotels is still the same after 70 years, as Orwell describes. But yet this biography is very enriching and motivates the reader to think about this personal story.
Rowena
Do not read this book while eating! I've been told that this book is semi-autobiographical. If so, George Orwell had an even more interesting life than I'd imagined! This book was disturbing, insightful and also funny (great, great characters, some just plain weird!)
The first half of the book depicts the main character's experiences living in poverty in Paris.Some of the descriptions about the living and working conditions are quite gruesome. All those bugs! Orwell sheds more light on what it must feel like to be poor; the ennui etc.I don't think I'll be able to eat at a Parisian restaurant anytime soon because now I'm a little paranoid about the cooking conditions.
The second half of the book finds the protagonist back in London and we learn more about what it means to be a "tramp." Equally as disgusting descriptions as those in the Paris section, especially the part where several tramps had to use the same bucket of dirty water for cleaning themselves up, yuck!
Orwell definitely puts a human face on the tramps. He explains how tramping is a huge social problem and then suggests how this problem can be remedied. As I live in Vancouver, the Canadian city with the highest number of homeless people, I agree with his explanations and thoughts.
My only gripe was with this particular edition of the book. Way too many typos, both in English and in French. Also, they censored out some of the swear words, bizarre.
Fantastic book! Orwell rarely disappoints me with his wit and insight.
B0nnie
The film Midnight in Paris begins with some beautiful scenes of Paris: the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Seine, the Sorbonne, the Eiffle Tower, the arc de triomphe. And before long, arrives a parade of artistes from the 1920s milieu - Hemmingway, Bunuel, Dali, etc, - all speaking *SparkNotes*. But in the distant background (very distant) I hear a faint sound of et in arcadia ego and Orwell protests “say, I was there in the 1920s too - I saw all that. And I wrote a damn fine book about it”.
That book is Down and Out in Paris and London, written later on in England (he wrote 2 books while in Paris but he destroyed them after one rejection. He regretted doing that).
If I were to take a stroll, à la “Midnight in Paris”, I might find myself on 6 rue du Pot de Fer, 1928:
‘Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you’ve bought the hotel, eh? Why can’t you throw them out of the window like everyone else? Putain! Salope!’ The woman on the third floor: ‘Vache!’
Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street.
It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians.
At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and the Arab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conduct mysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionally revolvers.
At night the policemen would only come through the street two together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet 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. It was quite a representative Paris slum.
No Peugeots here. Orwell was not living a glamourous life. He had recently thrown away a promising career in Burma, and was determined to make it as a writer or die trying.
He published a few articles, but soon runs out of money and must find work. He takes a job (as a foreigner, “not seriously illegal”) washing dishes at the luxury hotel Lotti in 1929. That experience is the ‘Paris’ segment of the book.
He returns to England at the end of the year and “tramps” around with the down and out for the ‘London’ part.
The lifestyle of a tramp was unhealthy and mean. One "ate cat's meat, and wore newspaper instead of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a pair of trousers out of a sack".
It is boring, "a tramp's sufferings are entirely useless. He lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatever."
It is exhausting, "he had not eaten since the morning, had walked several miles with a twisted leg, his clothes were drenched, and he had a halfpenny between himself and starvation."
And it is no fun, "tramps are cut off from women".
On the bright side, "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.”
The first version of Down and Out is completed by Oct 1930, under the name George Orwell (used for the first time, to protect his upper lower middle class parents). The French translation La Vache Enragée is published in 1935.
Orwell’s inspirations for this book, indeed this life:
The Lower Depths
Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Selected Stories
The People of the Abyss
The Road
The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers
Germinal
Themes:
impoverishment, failure, privation, penury, leftovers, overextended, pennilessness, beggary, pauperism, difficulties, reduced circumstances, hunger, lack, want, dearth, depletion, exhaustion, vacuity, meagerness, dogged, indigent, impecuniousness, need, hardship, suffering, misery, dirt, filth, grime, lowness, grunge, muck, dust, rats, bugs, vermin, trapped, penury, destitution, greasiness, smelly icky slums, vagrancy, exiguity, mendicancy, down, out, crust-wiping, and all things squalid
W
Quite a harrowing book,with its depiction of stark poverty,menial work and the constant struggle for the basic necessities of life .
I found it hard to read,but it was very moving as well. Orwell also did a similar job in another book,The Road to Wigan Pier. That too,was very bleak and compassionate.
Orwell knew about hardship.He had given up his job in the imperial police,and things were not too bright for him financially. He actually became a dishwasher for a while. He lived that life,he could talk about it with authenticity.
It's been some years since I read it,it stays in memory.But I'd find it difficult to read again,it's too raw and realistic.
Grace Tjan
What I learned from this book (in no particular order):
1. There is hardly such a thing as a French waiter in Paris: the waiters are all Italian and German. They just pretend to be French to be able to affect that certain hauteur and charge you exorbitant prices for that mediocre Boeuf Bourgignon.
2. Some of them are spies. Waitering is a common profession for a spy to adopt. It is also a popular profession among AWOL ex-soldiers and wannabe snobs.
3. Real scullery maids do “curse like a scullion” (hey, that’s a Hamlet quotation!). No doubt Shakespeare had watched a real-life Elizabethan scullion at work.
4. Men cooks are preferred to women, not because of any superiority in technique, but for their punctuality in delivering orders. The only woman cook featured in the book has nervous breakdowns at exactly 12 pm, 6 pm and 9 pm every day, although it must be noted that they are caused by circumstances that are beyond her control.
5. A French cook will spit in the soup --- that is, if he is not going to drink it himself. He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certain extent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to look smart, needs dirty treatment.
6. A steak will not be handled with a fork: the cook will just pick it up in his fingers and slap it down, run his thumb round the dish and lick it to taste the gravy. He will further press it lovingly with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it to the waiter.
7. And the waiter, of course, will dip HIS fingers into the gravy --- his nasty, greasy fingers which he is forever running through his briliantined hair.
8. The scullery is the filthiest part of all: it is nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery is rinsing.
9. The Plongeur is the lowest kitchen worker in a French restaurant who deals with the dirtiest, sweatiest work available. However, he is allowed two liters of wine a day, because otherwise, he will steal three. Everyone seems to work faster when partially drunk anyway.
10. A bum’s life, whether in Paris or London, is a real BUMMER.
BUT SERIOUSLY,
George Orwell went slumming in Paris and London, and the result is probably one of the best-written accounts of the bumming life ever penned. However, don’t read it if you are sensitive to pungent, unsparing descriptions of filthy kitchens, foul body odors, bug-infested beds and other unsavory aspects of a life gone to the dogs.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨ Campbell
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I was inspired to read this book after picking up and enjoying A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway, which was a beautifully written memoir of living in Paris as a broke writer in the 1920s. I didn't even think I liked Hemingway as an author until I read that book and was totally blown away by the vivid descriptions of the "lost generation" working on many of their magna opera that would make them famous-- in the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, posthumously so. DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON is Orwell's memoir of being a broke writer in the 1930s and it is... well, vivid, yes, but not in the fun way. More like in the visceral doom-scrolling way that so many of us are accustomed to in Our Year 2021.
There are two parts to this book. It opens with Paris, which in some ways does glamorize poverty, I feel. Or maybe that's just because Paris is more livable to those in dire straits. He paints comical portraits of his landlords and fellow tenants, and of his co-workers at the hotel at which he worked as a dishwasher. This was my favorite portion of the book because it feels the most light-hearted-- he has some cunning observations on the poor versus the rich, on the hypocrisies of society, and a few cunning tips on how to even the odds as someone who has the odds stacked against them. Unfortunately, this is also the part of the book that is rife with antisemitism. Given the time at which this was published, it was not shocking to excuse it, but the zeitgeist does not excuse the fact that many of his comments would be wholly inappropriate today, even if it makes it easier to understand why he says and thinks the things he does. Apparently, Orwell came to question many of his harmful beliefs later in life in his journals (he was an ardent diarist) and if that is the case, it is glad news, because history is filled with creators who have messed up some way ethically and rather than introspect and seek to be better people, they have simply doubled-down and closed their ears.
The London portion, as others have pointed out, is much starker and far more grim. There is a description of a lodging house that is truly horrifying. The characters he meets in this portion are also interesting but I feel like they didn't have the verve of the people he met in the Paris portion, and Orwell himself seems so much more exhausted here. The work is harsher and less forgiving, people seem so much more jaded, the conditions are draconian, etc. I also found it to be more repetitive and skimmed some portions, although I did like his chapter where he lists out some of the "cant" he observed among people working the streets, and meditates on slang, appropriated words, and Cockney dialect.
Whether you like or hate Orwell (and there are reasons to feel either way), I think this is a fascinating insight into his life, and there were several events that seemed to inspire his two major works, 1984 and Animal Farm (particularly his observations on how the working class is exploited and basically worked to the bone while the rich pretend to care but don't). The first portion of the book is like hearing about that one "bro" friend of yours recount travel to a questionable location while staying in a dangerous hostel. The second portion of the book is like hearing about that same "bro" friend recounting a terrible ordeal. The tonal shift between the two portions is noticeable and even though it affected my reading, it really made the book feel raw and real in a way that some of these literary figures sometimes don't because so much time has passed that their personalities feel removed from their work.
Anyone who enjoys edgy memoirs or learning more about literary figures will enjoy this.
3 to 3.5 stars
Susan
First published in 1933, this was George Orwell’s first full length book which made it into print. Although it reads as though the events within it were concurrent, in fact much of the latter part of the book was published as an essay, titled, “The Spike,” while the author was in Paris. However, the fact that events do not necessarily follow the narrative, certainly does not invalidate the book, or the points that Orwell makes – sadly still very valid today.
The first half of the book sees Orwell in Paris. Although certainly not flush, he does not experience poverty until his meagre savings are stolen. Orwell’s aunt was, as we now know, in Paris at the time – although we do not know whether she helped him financially. Whether she did or not, it is certainly that he did experience financial hardship and that this led him to taking up work as a lowly dishwasher in hotels and restaurants. The scenes of hotel life are so vividly written that you have no problem imagining the organised chaos, sheer filth and wonderfully exotic characters that exist within the pages. Paris, at that time, had a huge Russian émigré population and Orwell is befriended by Boris, a Russian refugee and waiter. Through him, Orwell embarks on arduous attempts to find work. When work is finally obtained, the seventeen hour days, exhaustion and grinding work is offset by the possibility of eating regularly. Some of the characters in the Paris section of the book work so long that they seem trapped in kitchens and hotels around the city. If you go out for a meal after reading this book I will be very surprised!
In the book, Orwell returns to England after finally being driven to write to a friend to help him find work. When he arrives in London, he is lightly told that his employers had gone abroad for a month, but “I suppose you can hang on till then?” Of course, things did not happen quite this way – as we know, the London part of the book was written before the Paris section. Orwell was later to insist that the events within the book had taken place, albeit not in the order they are written here and it is not necessarily important that a little artistic tension is used to give the storyline a little tension.
The London section of the book sees Orwell living as a tramp in London. A real down and out, tramping from one hostel, or ‘spike’ to another. He shows the reality of that life – of being forced to move on constantly, because of rules which refused a man a bed two nights running, the way the tramps were forced into prayer meetings for a cup of tea and a bun, of their resentment and discomfort, of laws which meant the police could move tramps on if they were asleep and the general discomfort and filth they lived with.
This is moving journalism, which really presents a vivid portrait of a life on the edge. As Orwell points out, when funds are low panic sets in. When there is nothing, there is just existence from one meal to the next. He makes many valid points about how the poor are treated and how their life could be improved. Having just read a news report which suggested that so many people in Britain are reduced to using food banks due to problems with their benefit payments and punitive punishments, you have to sadly conclude that his conclusions about the treatments of people living in poverty are still more than valid.
Jason Koivu
This reminded me a bit of Thoreau's Walden in that you don't feel like Orwell had to go through with this. It's self-imposed deprivation. However, while Thoreau went on a camping trip to prove he was a hardy outdoorsman and that anybody could and should do it, Orwell put himself through his ordeal in order to investigate a situation. The same problem exists in both circumstances though. Both men could extract themselves at any time if they wished. In Orwell's situation, that means he was only experiencing the details of being poor, not fully feeling the all-but inescapable confinement of being destitute. Knowing you can't get out of a situation has a deleterious affect on one's outlook and actions.
Having said that, Orwell gets as close to the real thing as probably possible in Down and Out in Paris and London. Throughout much of the narrative, he's living hand to mouth with only the clothes on his back for possessions. The going is tough and made tougher by the prejudice people show towards a tramp.
But Orwell's a good storyteller with plenty of tales to tell. His characterizations of some quite colorful characters are a joy. So, while this topic can get heavy at times, there's enough lighthearted fun within these pages to make the reading fairly even.
Because parts of this book were admittedly embellished and other parts are clearly a factual account, it's hard to know how to shelve this and it's not always easy to trust what you're reading. I want to say that it's obvious what's real and what isn't, but seeing how some people fall hard for fake news these days, I'm hesitant to label anything "obvious".