A tramp at home,
a plongeur abroad
Actually, Down
and Out in Paris and London, is both fact and fiction. Orwell claimed that
every event in the book actually happened to him at one time or another, though
not necessarily in the same order. The Paris sections generally took place
after the London ones.
The book recounts
Orwell's experiences of living on the poverty line in Paris and later as a
tramp on the streets of London. He'd come from a lower-upper-middle class
family, educated at Eton and recently returned from serving in the Burmese
police force. In Burma he'd witnessed and recorded the indignities suffered
under British rule (explored in depth in The Road to Wigan Pier). He
dressed as a tramp upon his return to England and went out to get amongst the
poorest and assess their situation. He slept in kips, he slept in missionary
huts, he even tried to get himself arrested one night. Orwell wrote and
published a plethora of articles on his experiences, as well as forming the
latter part of Down and Out in Paris and London.
It's a book of two
halves which could almost be called Down in Paris and Out in London. The first
half finds Orwell reduced in circumstances after being robbed and spending
every waking hour washing dishes at a high class Parsian hotel. When he can
take no more, he returns to England and his troubles really begin. It's a
fictional account of a number disjointed events in the writer's life, but Down
and Out in Paris and London has all
of Orwell's character traits, his curiosity and his humanity; his searching
mind and ability to frame the questions that society need address to itself. It
has its flaws, but an important work of anthropology and serves as a bridge to
the works that followed.
Mining the north
The Road to Wigan Pier, like Down and Out in Paris and London, is a book of two halves.
The first half depicts Orwell's experiences travelling around the industrial
towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the 1930s, investigating the conditions of
the poor. The second half is written in essay form. It examines class
consciousness and is Orwell's passionate defence of socialism. It contains the
famous words, 'The working classes smell'.
Which is what the
middle class were taught, we are told, and Orwell takes his own strata of
society to task for their snobbish attitudes to those lower down the food
chain. However, as with all his writings, it as much what The Road to Wigan
Pier tells us about an important epoch in history that matters.
Thirties politics was dynamic, unlike today, with widely divergent opinions
fighting for supremacy, occasionally even fighting side by side. The road to
Wigan Pier led George Orwell all the way to Catalonia to sign up against the
fascists. These days he'd be labelled an insurgent.
The Road to Wigan Pier isn't patronising or pompous, it merely sets out Orwell's observations
and his opinions and asks that they be added to the aggregate of intellectual
thought on the subject. That it is done with such forthrightness is all the
better. And yet like so many books written against the backdrop of the great
depression, The Road to Wigan Pier speaks to the modern world with new
relevance. It reminds us how far Britain has come.
POUM!
For me George
Orwell's most accomplished work is Homage to Catalonia. It was 1936.
Even then many in Europe saw war between Germany and Great Britain as
inevitable. Civil war erupted in Spain between the Nationalist fascists and the
Republican co-operative of anarchists, socialists and communists. Men scurried
from the continent to join the action, writers like Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee
and Hemingway arrived in Spain to lend their support. George Orwell headed for
Barcelona and joined the POUM militia.
Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's memoir of life on
the Aragon Front, the lice, the cold, the boredom. It also records the street
fighting that broke out in Barcelona in 1937. The Republican coalition was
tearing itself apart and as Orwell took leave in the city, fighting broke out
between the Communists and the other leftist factions that they were trying to
ban and repress. Orwell returned to the front but was shot in the throat. It
ended his war and with perfect timing. The POUM had been declared illegal and
its members were being rounded up under orders from Moscow. He left Spain the
day the warrant was issued for his arrest.
Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's most accomplished work because it shows political
disintegration in action. The egalitarian feel upon arrival in Barcelona, the
seeming parity between all trades and classes, all of that disperses in such a
short space of time. There is a marked changed in atmosphere in the city when
he returns and it all soon boils over. He concludes that Stalin would rather
lose to Spain to the fascists than have to share it with the anarchist
syndicates. Absolute rule or noting. It's a salutary lesson for our time. The
biggest enemy is often the one that supposed to have your back.
