George Orwell is Down and Out in Paris (and London).
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933) is a semi-biographical account of a British author struggling to live and work in Paris and London in 1929.
The Parisian part is the more interesting for me. Here he criss-crosses the River Seine, from Left Bank to Right Bank, from restaurant to restaurant to look for work. He finds work but must juggle several part-time jobs to make ends almost meet. In a filthy restaurant kitchen, he works as a plongeur – a dishwasher – the lowest job in the establishment, but the plongeur is permitted two litres of wine a day, because if not, “he will steal three.”
In London, yet to find a job, he lives with tramps and street people, finding free accommodation in the lodging houses: “A word about the sleeping accommodation open to a homeless person in London. At present it is impossible to get a bed in any non-charitable institution in London for less than sevenpence a night … Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life – a squalid, eventless life of crushing boredom.” Life hasn’t changed much in more modern times.
George Orwell, real name: Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), is the British author of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Animal Farm (1945), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Down and Out in Paris and London was his first book. Told with an element of humour, it is nevertheless about dire poverty, poor working conditions with 17-hour shifts, begging, pawning goods, and fighting for survival. But is also about camaraderie within his band of others, giving a more genuine account of life’s ups and downs, downs and outs, and the glue and humour that holds people together.
Knowing that he survived the most difficult period in his life, he reflects on it: “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.”
