Down and Out in Paris and London Paperback – March 15, 1972

Prior to serving in the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil war, George Orwell worked as a plongeur or dishwasher in Paris. He also wandered England as a homeless tramp staying in doss-houses. George Orwell transformed these experiences into the book Down and Out in Paris and London which was published during the great Depression in 1933. This was, to say the least, an unusual path for an "old Eton boy" to take.Nietzsche once wrote, "Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them." Orwell did not hesitate to exploit his experiences as a "plongeur" in Paris or a tramp in England.If Trip Advisor Had been around in 1933 Orwell might have posted a review something like this: "Avoid all restaurants and hotels in Paris and beyond! The sanitary conditions are appalling. There is filth on the kitchen floors. Rats infest every kitchen. The staff could care less about their customers. How many Stars? Zero!"Here is what Orwell actually wrote after working at the Hotel X in Paris, "The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeteria had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. Once I suggested killing these beasts to Mario (he was in charge of the cafeteria). 'Why kill the poor animals?' he said reproachfully. The others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter...In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not figure of speech, it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spit in the soup--that is, if he is not going got 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. 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 with his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb around the dish and licks to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the piece of meat 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. When he is satisfied, he takes a cloth and wipes his fingerprints form the dish, and hands it to the waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers into the gravy--his nasty, greasy fingers which he is forever running through his brilliantined hair."Orwell then moved on to work at a restaurant in Paris called the Auberge de Jehan Cottard as a plongeur or dishwasher. He wrote about his employer, "The Auberge was not the ordinary cheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen. We did not provide an adequate meal at less than twenty-five francs, and we were picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social standing. There were indecent pictures in the bar, and the Norman decorations--sham beams on the walls, electric lights done up as candlesticks, "peasant" pottery, even a mounting-block at the door--and the patron and the head Waiter were Russian officers, and many of the customers titled Russian refugees. In short, we were decidedly chic.Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door were suitable for a a pigsty. For this is what our service arrangements were like.The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and half this space was taken up by the stoves and tables. All the pots had to kept on shelves out of reach and there was only room for one dustbin. This dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and the floor normally an inch deep in compost of trampled food...There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roof shed in the yard, with a tree growing in the middle of it. The meat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare earth, raided by rats and cats."One of Orwell's colleague at the Auberge was a waiter named Jules. Orwell confides that 'Jules took a positive pleasure in seeing things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen doorway jeering at us for working too hard: 'Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the customers? They don't know what's going on. What is restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, and you go out; and in five minutes you come back by another door--with the same chicken. That is restaurant work."Has the restaurant world really changed much since 1933? One can certainly hope so, but there are many parts of the world where restaurant sanitation standards are little improved from the Paris of 1933.Orwell then moved on to England where he tramped about the country moving from flop house to flop house. He survives on a "cuppa" and two slices with a bit of margarine. He is nearly molested at night by "Nancy" boys. He and other tramps are preached to by religious do-gooders and Salvation Army warriors.He offers one piece of advice which is as sound for today's London as it was in 1933. Handbills were distributed on the streets of London by local merchants then as they are now. Orwell writes, "When you see a man distributing handbill you can do him a good turn by taking one, for he goes off duty when he has distributed all his bills."Orwell writes with genuine understanding, sympathy and, often, humor in his descriptions of the grinding poverty of the working classes and those unfortunates who are unemployed and homeless. His account helps us to appreciate how fascism was able to exploit the suffering of so many throughout Europe during the Great Depression.Check out George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. At minimum, you may never think of restaurants and hotels in the same way again. Has George Orwell's review been helpful to you?If you like Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London you may also enjoy America Invades: How We've Invaded or been Militarily Involved with almost Every Country on Earth by Kelly / Laycock and Italy Invades

The kind of Entitlement we feel as Americans is something made up mostly of the funk exuded from the idol we revere of ourselves as Middle Class people -- one myth created by decades of Madison Avenue advertising, and a lie like most of them -- which we don't recognize because TV and pulp infortainment have blinded us with the vulgar dazzle of celebrity-hood, until dopey, we have come to feel that we know them, the celebrated PEOPLE people; that we share their quirks and inhsecurities; that we have so much in common with them -- trouble with excess weight, with prescription drugs, papparazzi, out-of-control credit card debt -- that we are celebrities too. That we too are people who need people who need people like us. I mean, we're all American, aren't we? A rich, successful and powerful classless society? ...Of ordinary people, with excellent credit. No? But... Haven't you ever travelled to strange places and looked at your fellow-citizens and wondered sometimes, Who in the world do they think they are? So rude! So inane! So pretensious! And, of course, they're our Neighbors. Our selves.I've heard it said, "With foreign travel its either palaces or poverty." But you don't have to go to another country to come face-to-face with the big P; with the unspeakable danger, Poverty. And that's what everybody's afraid of. Looking at a recently released and much-praised movie recently, THE WRESTLER, one sensed that this evocation in contemporary style of a favorite genre from Depression days, one had the feeling that much of the attention to it and praise of it was generated by the fact that it looked as though it might have been filmed in Manesquan, NJ; that is, on location somewhere below the poverty line. And the public reaction was sincere embarassment on one hand, and on the other, gratitude for not being that poor oneself.DOWN AND OUT was published in 1933, that fateful year Roosevelt got his Congress and HItler got his Reischtag; the nadir of the Great Global Depression that began in '29, and the book was possibly written two or three years earlier. Considering the shape the world was in, with the financial systems of Europe and America and everywhere else in collapse, and including the inevitable unemployment and the resulting wide-spread poverty, it is astonishing to contemplate Orwell, young and only trying to make a career for himself, deciding to not run off to a foreign country, as he did later when he went to Spain, but deciding to leap head-first, as it were, into Poverty, POVERTY ITSELF, in the country just across the channel. Simply to have experiences? Simply to have something to write about? To have subjects for his fledgling journalism? Yes! Apparently so. On the final page of the book he writes that he believes he may have written a kind of Travel Book. He did! And the means are shocking; the effects quite free of tinted light. Except that the second, third and fourth letter of the commonest Anglo-Saxon epithet are deleted in print, there are no euphemisms. But oh! my foes and ah! my friends, the results are spectacular. What extraordinary courage! What powers of observation and description!Here is a tourist who does not intend to look at the world through the windows of the Hilton lobby. Imagine: Without even a credit card! You don't know what to say. You stand back, gasp in admiration and wonder if you would ever have the nerve to undertake anything like it; the discomfort, the embarassment. Work as a Dishwasher? Me? And you wonder if you would ever have the nerve to be as honest with yourself as you wrote it? Honest about your squeamishness? About your dirt hatred. About being seen among uneducated people. About the fear of looking dirty. Or going a week without changing clothes.The English have written some great travel books. I've always admired Cunningham-Grahame and Maugham, but this book is different. It doesn't cover much land or take a great deal of time, but it plummets to depths often ignored by other authors. Depths of the human soul and condition so terrifying to many -- which never terrified him -- I'm reminded of that french song..."Children with faithful hearts have no fear of wolves."Ritz Plongeur? Moi? Quelle cauchemar.

Most interesting is I didn't know Orwell was born in India. I will say not much has changed for people down on their luck. The church I went to when I first came here did a lot for the unfortunate but were also judgmental of their own flock. I think the only answer is the church but thrrein is the problem.