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.
