Poverty without sentimentality
George Orwell’s first book Down and Out in Paris and London is supposed to be a novel but it feels like an autobiography (bildungsroman, as first novels usually are). Orwell had moved to Paris to become a writer, but he managed to sell only a few articles and his short stories and novels were all rejected (he threw them away). Then he was robbed of his savings and he descended deeper and deeper into poverty. Down and Out is a fictionalized account of that period.
George Orwell
We’ve read a few warnings on the net—Do not read this book if you are unemployed, etc—but we take the opposite view. Read this book if you are unemployed, it might make you feel better. (Granted, if you are unemployed in the Philippines and you would think to read Orwell then you are not that down and out.) We found it oddly cheerful, harrowing but often funny, and always honest. Consolata and I agree that from Orwell’s description it was more fun to be destitute in Paris than in London.
Henry Miller has written several books (Tropic of Cancer, which Orwell praised, Black Spring, Quiet Days in Clichy) about being down and out in Paris. Tropic of Cancer has style while Down and Out is so matter of fact as to be anti-style, and plenty of sex where Orwell maintains primness and propriety. But Down and Out is still worth reading for Orwell’s clear, unsentimental, no bullshit writing. You can tell from this book that George Orwell—Eric Blair was an outstanding human being.
In the Philippines where the majority of the population is poor it is almost impossible to discuss poverty without sentimentality. Is it guilt you think? Trying too hard to show that you care? Looking forward to the next election (the poor by their numbers decide the vote)? Catholic notions about suffering and the promise of eternal reward? We have turned poverty into the stuff of telenovelas, as if to say “Yes you have nothing, but glamorous actresses will play you on TV and movies about you will screen at Cannes etc”.
Orwell provides an antidote to all that. Yes, you are poor. Poverty is horrible. It has no redeeming quality. Once you slip into it you just keep sliding down. You think you’ve hit rock bottom but you still have a long way to go. It’s amazing what humans can endure. Why is there poverty? Why is there drudgery? And yet you are stronger than you think.
An excerpt from Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
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.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it–you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive.
And then there are your meals–meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalent of a day’s food. All day you are telling lies, and expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
You go to the baker’s to buy a pound of bread, and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy, and cuts more than a pound. ‘PARDON, MONSIEUR,’ she says, ‘I suppose you don’t mind paying two sous extra?’ Bread is a franc a pound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confess that you could not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you dare venture into a baker’s shop again.
You go to the greengrocer’s to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes. But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgian piece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, and can never go there again.
You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see a prosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe. Once in the cafe you must buy something, so you spend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it. Once could multiply these disasters by the hundred. They are part of the process of being hard up.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the JEUNE SQUELETTE in Baudelaire’s poem. 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 can read Down and Out in Paris and London as well as the complete works of George Orwell at www.george-orwell.org. Or you can buy the book, available in many editions.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 28th, 2011 at 13:01
There’s a BBC radio play too, starring Samuel Barnett (Posner in The History Boys) as George Orwell.
July 28th, 2011 at 13:02
His account reminded me of my three months of temporary poverty. The things he said about the vulgarity of food is true. I can also relate on the lies one tells oneself and one’s acquaintances to conceal the fact that one has slid into poverty. I vowed never to be poor again. That’s why I turned into a money-grubbing bastard. Bwahahahaha!
July 28th, 2011 at 13:06
I mean Eric Blair, sorry. This link might work: http://kbpyyb.tumblr.com/post/6135062306
July 28th, 2011 at 15:12
“You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing.” >> Love this line! Will read the rest of story.
I like what you said about being stronger than you think. I find that quitting my job a few months back and having difficulty in finding a new one has shown that fragile me can actually be strong. Sorry for the sentimentality. I’m celebrating by birthday in two days.
July 28th, 2011 at 17:17
I bought my copy of Tropic of Cancer in a nice bookstore beside a sex toy shop in Sydney. I was hungry and sleepy at the same time. While I was looking for a pub to grab a ginormous English breakfast, I started scanning the book and I was hooked; these lines got stuck in my head for such a loooong time…”There is a bone in my dick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.” Jessica, you did write about The Virgin Suicides being “incandescent” but Incandescent Ovaries is just absolutely hilarious. Baked beans were coming out of my nostrils!!!!
July 28th, 2011 at 17:23
My favorite working class novel is Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. I like woe is me tales about the middle class. It’s so gratifying to read somebody else’s bad luck and bad working conditions so I don’t have to feel so bad about my own.
Maybe it’s that our country’s so poor that we turn our poor culture into storylines for telenovelas which turn into money, and we make it interesting by exaggerating the poverty angles of these entertainments. We’re resourceful that way.
July 29th, 2011 at 08:43
This is totally unrelated to the post.
Just wanted to share this link with you and with the other cat lovers who visit your page:
http://www.dr-dan.com/earmites.htm
On the bottom part of the page, there is a supposed excerpt from “A CAT’S GUIDE TO HUMAN BEINGS”. It’s hilarious.
July 31st, 2011 at 05:17
I am curious-does “self-employed” count as “unemployed”? It oddly feels that way to me. I manage several apartment units and the income is enough to cover my needs,but somehow I feel that I am unemployed,i.e, I know I am not connected with any company. Odd,huh.