Saturday 25 February 2017

Annals of the Book-Club: Down and Out in Paris and London

Today the 'Book-Club at the Club' met again, to discuss George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London.  This time there were only four of us, but the meeting was nevertheless a lively one.

As before, I gained lots of new insights into a book I had read several times before, which just shows the benefits of having a Book-Club, especially one populated by contrary independently minded individuals who always disagree with me - the only way to learn something new, of course.

The book is divided into two parts, where the author is 'down and out' first in Paris and then in London.  The Paris experience is described quite differently; Orwell focuses on the characters he meets, whereas in London he focuses on the mechanics of the experience of the 'tramps' he encounters.  In Paris, his experience is that of a poor man who has a grueling job, and is too tired to worry about the future.  In London, he is unemployed and describes the experience of wandering from one charitable institution to another, always in search of free lodging and 'tea and two slices', and trying to avoid having to give too much in return by way of praying and humbling himself.

While in Paris the author is a member of a group of individuals who are in a similar situation, in London it is obvious that he is only doing this for a short time - for one month, to be exact, until a promised job materialises.  In London he is the observer, the journalist, and not really part of the tramps he claims to be one of.  Consequently the atmosphere in the two parts of the book is quite different.

We discussed for a while the reason for this difference; was it that his experience had simply been different in the two cities, or was it because the book was addressed to an English audience, who he wished to convince to treat the tramps they encountered in a more compassionate manner?

The book is one of the author's first, and we wondered to what extent the style and content were deliberate, or simply the result of inexperience.  Personally I found the book more convincing than some of Orwell's later ones, like 1984 or Animal Farm; it seemed less polished, less designed to elicit a particular reaction from the reader, and precisely for that reason did not encounter my usual instinctive opposition to it.

Another interesting discussion we had was about the author's antisemitism (or not).  Personally I did not notice it, perhaps because I interpreted the passages where a character behaved in an antisemitic way as expressing the views of that character, rather than the author's, and I took against the character who expressed it, not the author.  I thought that the Russians described in the book, like Boris, and the restaurateur who swindled the author, were characterised as being worse than the Jews.  My fellow book fanciers, on the other hand, thought that the Russians had been described with a sort of amused tolerance, as though the author, despite being the victim of their misdeeds, secretly admired and approved of them.  

So the difference between my fellow biblioholics and myself seemed to be, that I considered what the characters in the book did, and judged them accordingly, whereas the others focused on what they considered the author's judgement of the characters to be.  It may well be that I simply don't notice this sort of antisemitism any more, because most of the books I read are from the period between 1850 and 1950, and antisemitism is rife in many of those books, so perhaps I skip across such incidents without much notice.  

In Paris the author worked as a 'plongeur', a sort of dishwasher and general dogsbody, and the stories he relates about cooks licking the food before it is served, the filth and grime and bugs and rats, are enough to destroy anyone's appetite.  Orwell asserts, probably truthfully, that it is far easier to get a good meal in a private house, and cheaper, too, than in a restaurant.  I rather hope that nowadays restaurants are more hygienic, but I have read similar accounts about prevailing practices in certain fast food 'restaurants' of the current era, so am not entirely convinced!

While the work in Paris was hard and the poor worked incredibly long hours (17 hours a day on occasion) they are not described as completely downtrodden and dissatisfied with their lot; as Orwell points out, if you work as hard as they did, there is no mental energy left for worrying about the future, or indeed, any sort of rebellion.  I have read other books about this period in Paris and I think the author may have been a bit too soft on Paris, and definitely not as critical as he was about London.

The author makes the point that most of the low level work he encountered could have been done much more efficiently, but that the upper classes preferred to keep the long hours for the lower classes, to keep them out of mischief and prevent revolutions.  This is an interesting point; while I don't believe that as much of the work was superfluous as Orwell claims (plates need to be washed, after all, and food cooked), I do agree that keeping the people busy goes a long way towards preventing them from noticing their exploited state and doing something about it.  One could make a similar point about today's exploited masses, who are kept occupied not by 17 hour long working days, but by mass consumption designed to keep them in wage-slave servitude, and cheap entertainment which numbs the brain and tries to stamp out independent thinking.

Orwell's book is quite short, and purports to be simply a personal experience, rather than a sociological study.  This is not quite true, as Orwell's biographers readily document.  At the same time as Down and Out in Paris and London, I also read 'The Classic Slum' by Robert Roberts, which is a study of the slum in Salford at Edwardian times, and considerably longer and more in depth.  

Orwell's book was published in 1933, so relatively late - to put it into context, 1933 was the year Hitler came to power in Germany.  When I read the book for the first time, I somehow assumed it was from around 1900, and I was surprised when I noticed, at my current reading, that it was set between the two world wars.  That time is endlessly interesting to me, partly because of all the changes that happened then, partly because I know about it so some extent from my elders, who lived through it.

So many of the authors who wrote about this time are now all but forgotten by the general reading public, especially the German ones.  But I have a little collection of them, and they well repay the time spend on reading them.  Jakob Wassermann, Hans Fallada, Stefan Zweig, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich Kaestner, Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Schnitzler, and Erich Muehsam - I love them all.

Tuesday 14 February 2017

Musings on St Valentine's Day - Different Kinds of Love

The essence of cool sophistication - Book Club at the Club


Vol Amoureux des Azures by Toutsy

La Femme de Gilles versus Vol Amoureux des Azures


In a desperate attempt to catch up on my blog-posts, I have decided to shoehorn two subjects into one:  My annual St Valentine's Day scarf & musings, and my reflections on a book we read during a session of the recently established Book-club I happen to have co-founded.

The Scarf-of-the-day is Vol amoureux des azures, one of the most delightfully romantic scarves ever composed by Toutsy aka Laurence Bourthoumieux for Hermes.  It is possibly my most femininely romantic scarf, and I rarely wear it, being by nature more practical than conventionally feminine (a 'Virago', as defined by Florence King).  Nevertheless I treasure it, and have had my moments in it ....

The scarf to me is about love of the sort that Hollywood glamourises, and that ends at the altar, with a bit of luck.  It is about love that is like a butterfly, that flirts and flightily dances from flower to flower, taking a sip of nectar here and leaving a light dusting of pollen there, the love of which Germans have said, Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu Tode betruebt, gluecklich allein ist die Seele die liebt (roughly, Joyously happy, grieved on to death, happy alone is the soul that's in love).  The French refer to the same as 'Etoiles dans les yeux' (having stars in one's eyes, ie being blind with love).

St Valentine's Day is of course all about this sort of love, and I have discussed it on previous occasions.

But today I shall cover another sort of love, the sort that starts - hopefully! - when the wedding is over and the guests have gone home, and the newly minted couple look at each other a little forlornly, wondering where to take things from here.

La Femme de Gilles by Madeleine Bourdouxhe is the first book we chose for our book club, and although it is barely 150 pages long, we managed to talk about it for almost three hours.  I first read this book in the 1990s, and have re-read it on numerous occasions, but still I learned new and interesting things about it from my fellow book clubbers, which surely shows how very unusual and thought provoking it is.

The story is set amongst the working classes in Belgium, and was first published in 1937.  It was then forgotten, and re-published in the 1990s, when it fell into my hands and got stuck there ever since.

The book tells the story of a worker's wife who is deeply in love with her husband, and they are very happy together, until her younger sister, a flighty thoughtless creature, decides it would be good fun to start a dalliance with her brother-in-law.

So far so humdrum.  What makes the story different is the reaction of the wife, Elise.  She is, in my opinion, a true heroine, and it grieves me, to this day, that her efforts were not rewarded as they should have been.  She does not fight, argue, throw temper tantrums, or cheat on her husband in return - she continues to be kind and friendly and helpful to her husband and even her sister.  In the end, when everyone turns against her, she still quietly, determinedly, follows the path she had adopted.

I have re-written the end of this book a dozen times in my mind.  It upsets and angers me, that this woman who behaves in such a decent, adult way gets treated so badly by everyone, and in the end, when she has almost won, realises that she has given all she had, and has spent all her strength.  Haven given all she had, she had none left for herself, and she died.

Elise has a strength of character that is rare, and mainly found in fairy-tales and heroic sagas.  Most of us give our love judiciously, in bite-sized little pieces, carefully safeguarding our hearts, making sure that we cannot be destroyed when the subject of our love turns on us.  But Elise gave with both hands, and held nothing back, until she had spent herself, and was no more what she had always been, and always wanted to be - the Wife of Gilles.

OK, so maybe I have been brainwashed by American Hollywood tear-jerking movies, but I demand a happy ending for this woman!  She clearly deserved better, and although her hapless husband was scarcely worthy of her devotion, she loved and wanted the guy, and if I had written the book that's what she would have had, and they would have lived happily ever after.

'Till the start of WWII, I guess.  Happy ending are so hard to come by ...

This reminds me of a sentiment once expressed by Karl May, when he was criticized for his happy, unrealistic stories.  He said that life was bad enough, and in his stories at least he wasn't going to let the bad guy win.

Hear Hear, I say, and a Happy St Valentine's Day!













Sunday 12 February 2017

Catching up - coin count for 2016



I know I am way behind .....

Today I finally completed my coin count for 2016.  This is what I found laying in the streets last year (figures in brackets are for 2015):


Currency

Face value
Number found
Total value, coins
£ Sterling
£10
£5 (note)
2 (1)
0 (1)
£20.00
£0.00

£1
6 (9)
£6.00

£0.50
1 (1)
£0.50

£0.20
8 (15)
£1.60

£0.10
2 (11)
£0.20

£0.05
31 (60)
£1.55

£0.02
18 (24)
£0.36

£0.01
67  (105)
£0.67
Total £s


£30.88 (33.13) 








Euro
E1.00
E0.20
0 (1)
1 (0)
E0.00
E 0.20

E0.10
1 (3)
E 0.10

E0.05
3 (2)
E 0.15

E0.02
3 (3)
E 0.06

E0.01
6 (10)
E 0.06
Total E


E 0.57 (1.57)




Other currencies


1 US nickel
5 Swiss cents





While my coin count is way down - forth year in a row! - value is holding steady, mainly because of those two £10.  Not bad really, considering how fewer hours I now spend walking the streets.  And very few Euro coins - I tend to have company now when I visit Paris, and my last vsit to la Bourboule I was more sick than usual, so spent little time collecting.

Oh well, better luck in 2017!