Orwell (10 page)

George Orwell, author of the satiric fable
Animal Farm
and the prophetic novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, created an image of himself as a quintessentially English writer in his choice of pseudonym, in the subject-matter of his novels
and essays, and in his political analysis of the English social scene. But his mother was wholly French in background, though from an expatriate family. His first published book,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), told the story of his extended stay in Paris in the late 1920s, his menial jobs and descent into poverty. One of his best essays, “How the Poor Die” (1946) is a vivid account of how he came close to death in a Paris hospital. “Marrakech” (1939) gives a piercing snapshot of life in Morocco, then a French colony. Though his education and upbringing made him English, at a critical juncture in his life he chose to live in Paris. Why did Orwell go to live in France, what did he expect to find there, and how did this experience change his life and influence his work?

A schoolboy during the Great War, Orwell was taught French at Eton by the highly eccentric and rather miserable Aldous Huxley, who later wrote the influential utopian novel
Brave New World.
Half-blind, inexperienced and insecure, Huxley was treated by the boys with appalling incivility. But Orwell, unlike his classmates, saw beyond Huxley's physical disability and pathetic attempts to keep order, and disliked their cruel jeers. He appreciated the quality of Huxley's mind, and admired his use of unusual words and phrases. Always defending the underdog, a school fellow recalled, “he rather stood up for Huxley because he found him interesting.” Huxley must have taught him well, for Orwell mastered spoken and written French, and later taught French and English at the coeducational Frays School, west of London. He later corresponded in French with the translator of
Homage to Catalonia
, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War.

On leaving Eton at eighteen Orwell had gone to Burma to serve in the British colonial police force, where he remained for five increasingly unhappy years. Both his parents had a colonial background, and the French side of his family had a long association with Burma. His maternal greatgrandfather, G. E. Limouzin, was born in France and became a prosperous shipbuilder and teak merchant in Moulmein. His grandfather, Frank Limouzin—spiky-haired and beetle-browed, with sharp nose, thin lips and severe expression—looked exactly like a rapacious miser in one of Honoré de Balzac's novels. Punning on the Limouzins' exotic name, as a boy Orwell called them “Lemonskins” or “Automobiles.”

In July 1927, sailing home after five years in Burma, Orwell disembarked in Marseilles, planning to travel across France by train. There he witnessed a massive political protest in what was for him a defining moment. A vast crowd had turned out to support Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a highly controversial case. “All these people,” Orwell wrote, “—tens of
thousands of them—were genuinely indignant over a piece of injustice, and thought it quite natural to lose a day's wages in order to say so.” He contrasted the passion of the French crowds to comments of the English bank clerks in Marseilles, who didn't care if the men were guilty or innocent, and crassly exclaimed: “Oh well, you've got to hang these blasted anarchists.” He admired the instinctive sense of justice in the French people.

After returning from Burma Orwell became estranged from his parents, who were furious when he gave up his secure government job. They felt they had done their best for him, and had no sympathy with his ambitions to be a writer or with his political views. In the spring of 1928 the twenty–fiveyear–old Orwell put some distance between himself and his disappointed family, went to Paris to test his resolve and his abilities, and lived there for nearly two years. In 1929 he saw Philippe Pétain, the defender of Verdun, at the state funeral of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme commander of the victorious French armies in World War I. He contrasted his own experiences in Paris with that of thousands of American expatriates who flocked there in the 1920s, when everything was cheap for those with dollars to spend. As he wrote in his essay on the controversial American novelist Henry Miller: “During the boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchés and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen.”

Orwell's Paris was altogether different from that of the expatriate authors Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, and he had no contact with French or English-speaking intellectuals. He lived in the squalid rue Pot de Fer (Iron Pot Street) in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway had lived in the district with his first wife in the early 1920s, but by the time Orwell arrived he'd moved on to a richer wife and a better address. Orwell did not frequent the fashionable restaurants and cafés, though he thought he once saw Joyce in one of his favorite hangouts, the café Deux Magots (Two Apes). Other expatriate writers wanted to enjoy the good life for very little money. Orwell wanted to endure a harsh life with no money at all.

Orwell's grim experiences in Paris gave him the right to condemn the English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton, who ignorantly idealized “Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not spent much time in France, and his picture of it—as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the
Marseillaise
over glasses of red wine—had about as much relation to reality as [the popular musical]
Chu Chin Chow
has to every-day life in Baghdad.” Reviewing Cyril Connolly's hedonistic novel
The Rock-Pool
, which takes place among expatriates in the south of France, Orwell—in a finely tuned
sentence—defined the moral chasm between himself and his comfortably decadent old school friend: “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.” Orwell was interested in French politics and literature but he did not go to France for pleasure. When contemporaries like Connolly were studying at Oxford and spending the long summers enjoying art, architecture and music in Paris, the food, the scenery and the shimmering beaches of Provence, Orwell was doing a tough and lonely job in Burma.

For most of his time in Paris Orwell survived on his savings, supplemented by teaching English. “When you are in a foreign country,” he observed, “unless you are there because you are obliged to work there, you do not live fully and you do not usually mix with ordinary people. You tend to spend your life in cafés or brothels or picture galleries rather than in ordinary homes, and if you're also short of money your experiences will be more sordid than they would be in your own country.” He lived a more or less solitary existence, finding his own kind of dissipation in low life. Instinctively masochistic, he sought out the most uncomfortable place he could find and reveled in his ability to live on only a few francs a day. We know almost nothing about the first twenty-two months of Orwell's life in Paris, nothing about the ordinary people he met and homes he visited while teaching English. He made no lasting friends and had no serious relationships with women. He wrote two novels, but threw them away. He didn't think his commonplace existence was worth mentioning in
Down and Out.
His money dwindled, he became ill and he was robbed. First he pawned most of his belongings, then he got work as a dishwasher. He couldn't admit failure and ask his parents for money.

Orwell used to visit his mother's bohemian sister, Nellie Limouzin, a militant Socialist and suffragette. Though he rarely sought her help, his aunt could always be counted on for a small handout. She'd acted in vaudeville and was married to a Frenchman, Eugène Adam, who'd been involved in the Russian revolution in Petrograd in October 1917. “The marriage was not happy,” according to one of their friends. “She had no character. She was soft, without backbone, without willpower.” Adam, a fanatic who refused to speak any language but Esperanto, later abandoned Nellie, wound up in Mexico and killed himself in 1947. If Orwell had gone to Paris with the idea of exploring the French half of his heritage, he must have been disappointed, for he had little contact with French people of his own social class. He inhabited the underworld of downtrodden foreign workers, and Paris reinforced his Englishness.

His memoir of those years,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(the metaphor in the title comes from being knocked unconscious in a boxing match), emphasized “the sour reek of the refuse-carts,” the extreme decay
of the place and the bizarre consolation of desperate poverty: “I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced 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.” Though his extreme poverty was the result of bad luck, it was inevitable. The miracle had not happened, the novels were no good, and Orwell still had no idea what he was going to do with his life. And yet, in a typical Orwellian paradox, the experience of being doubly an outsider, in nationality and in poverty, inspired the particular angle of vision, political and social, that set its stamp on his writing. There would be false starts, and he would have difficulty publishing
Down and Out
, but it was his first authentic prose.

Despite Orwell's “pre-tubercular condition,” a friend recalled, he exposed himself in cold weather “in totally inadequate clothing. It wasn't just poverty. It was suicidal perversity.” This stubborn self-testing endangered his always precarious health, and in Paris he suffered a serious bout of influenza. In March 1929 he spent two weeks in the public wards of the Hôpital Cochin, which he later described in his moving essay “How the Poor Die,” an experience which taught him what it was like to belong to the world's underclass.

After filling out a lot of forms in the hospital and learning he had a temperature of 103°, he was forced to take a cold bath and, wearing only a thin night-gown, had to walk two hundred yards across the open grounds to reach the charity ward. He then suffered agonies as the inhuman staff first cupped him with hot glasses and then applied an excruciating mustard poultice to his chest. While there he felt reduced to nothing more than a thing, a mute specimen for medical students who didn't seem to realize that he and the other patients were actually human beings. In his essay the hospital resembles “an old-fashioned, dungeon-like prison” in which the poor died slow, smelly and painful “natural” deaths.

After he left the hospital, his marginal existence suddenly became desperate when his room was robbed and his money stolen. In
Down and Out
the thief is an Italian compositor and fellow-lodger who duplicates the keys and robs a dozen rooms. But Orwell was actually deceived by a French girl whose short haircut and slim figure reminded him of the boys at Eton. He picked her up and brought her to his room, and she stole everything he possessed. Reduced to destitution, Orwell tried unsuccessfully to catch fish in the Seine (Hemingway claimed to have caught pigeons for dinner), and with no rent money was forced to sleep outdoors: “I passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into your back—and much colder than I had expected.”

Finally, through Boris—a Russian émigré and former soldier whom he'd met in the hospital—he worked thirteen hours a day for ten weeks, first as a
plongeur
, or dishwasher, in the luxurious Hotel Lotti, then in a Russian restaurant. According to the Duchess of Westminster, the Duke, then a guest at the Lotti, once craved a peach in the middle of the night. There was no peach in the hotel and the lowly Orwell was hastily sent out to find one. All the fruit shops were shut, and he desperately but vainly pounded on several doors. Finally, afraid to return empty handed, he smashed a shop window with a rock, grabbed a peach and dashed back to the hotel with the precious fruit.

These menial experiences occupy most of the Paris section of
Down and Out.
The lowest of the low in the hotel hierarchy, he was forced to shave off his cherished mustache, which was considered insubordinate by the management. Abused by the waiters, he had to use his fists to get common civility. Some of the more ambitious waiters took English classes in the afternoon, yet he never tried to escape dishwashing by teaching them. He had no presentable clothes and was too exhausted to try to earn more money.

Orwell stuck it out in Paris as long as he could, but returned to England toward the end of 1929 with the promise of a job. Once more fate seemed to propel him into a hand-to-mouth existence. The job did not materialize, and for the next two years he continued his masochistic, almost pathological commitment to exploring the life of the poor and dispossessed, and wandered around the country as a tramp. Now back home, he kept comparing the two countries and testing his own Englishness. In August 1931, while tramping in London's Trafalgar Square, he recorded the English workingclass notion (a strong contrast to Chesterton's idealized view) that the French were “dirty”: “I spent most of the day reading [Balzac's novel]
Eugènie Grandet
, which was the only book I had brought with me. The sight of a French book produced the usual remarks—'Ah, French? That'll be something pretty warm, eh?' Evidently most English people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic.” Censorship of theater, art and publications was strict in England, and in the popular mind France was synonymous with racy cabarets, sexy books, obscene postcards and permissive morality.

In January 1933—six long years after Orwell had left the Burmese Police and decided to become a writer—his first book,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, was finally published. Influenced by the stark realism and social protest in the novels of Balzac and Emile Zola, Orwell, both observer and participant, described his journey to the lower depths, heightening reality to achieve dramatic effects. The book's episodic structure and mixed genre
helps to explain why he had great difficulty placing it. Combining sociology, anthropology and politics, autobiography, reportage and travelogue, it vividly describes harsh poverty, degrading work and desperate unemployment, but also tells the story of Orwell's personal adventures. The first part covers the last few weeks of his two years in Paris, his search for work and his job as a dishwasher.