Down and Out in Paris and London

"I think that Orwell was one of the great travel adventurers of the 20th century. The reason I think that is because in Down and Out in Paris and London he showed that empathy could become an extreme sport and the guideline for the art of living. It’s the second half of the book that I particularly like, in which he describes how he went tramping in east London. He would dress up as a tramp and go into the streets of London, fraternising with beggars and people living on the streets. He was trying to empathise with people who lived on the social margins. One has to remember that Orwell had an incredibly privileged background. He went to Eton, he was an officer in the colonial police in Burma for five years. He realised that he didn’t know how everyday people lived, so his experiments in the late 1920s and 30s of tramping in London were a form of travel really, or experiential adventuring. He was trying to experience how other people lived, to get a taste of their lives. By doing so, he discovered that empathy isn’t something that makes you good but something that is good for you. So for me, Orwell is one of my great empathic heroes. I think we’ve been too obsessed with self-interest over the last century, and that’s limited the way that we pursue the good life. I think that empathy – the ability to try to imagine yourself into someone else’s life, to look through their eyes – can expand our lives enormously. Of course, if you see somebody begging under a bridge you might feel sorry for them or toss them a coin, but that’s not empathy, it’s sympathy or pity. Empathy is when you have a conversation with them, try to understand how they feel about life, what it’s like sleeping outside on a cold winter’s night – try to make a real human connection and see their individuality. The benefit of this is not only that it widens your own moral universe, but that it engages you with other people and other ways of living. It expands your curiosity to new ideas of how to live. That’s what happened to Orwell. He expanded his moral universe by talking to beggars and people sleeping on the streets, but also he met incredible characters. He was energised for his literary work by everything that he saw. It was the great travel adventure of his life, and that’s ultimately what I think empathy can do for us. I think it’s anything but mundane. The traditional way to think about social change is about changing political institutions – new laws, new policies, overthrowing governments and so on. I think social change is actually about creating a revolution of human relationships. About changing the way people treat each other on an everyday basis. That’s what Orwell was learning about. He was talking to individuals – understanding the minutiae of their lives – and after his time living in the streets of London he went on to do journalistic work which was really about trying to connect with human lives. For example, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier there’s a famous essay called “Down the Mine”, when he goes down a coal mine and tries to understand what it’s like to be a coal miner. These coal miners were powering British society at the time – coal created everything. Orwell said if you don’t understand their lives, you understand nothing."

"This is the one that first got me really excited about food: Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell . It’s meant to be the book that shows you everything that’s wrong in hotels and restaurants. A young Orwell goes to a hotel and then, I think, a Russian restaurant in Paris, and works like a slave. It’s the most chaotic, poorly paid job, with people living to drink their wages at the weekend, but it was the first thing that really excited me: the idea of the production of restaurants, the front and the back. Yes – you’re putting on a show every day. Every service is a show. And I like the idea of the back of house, the machinery, making this whole thing work for the front of house. My first job was as a chef in a hotel restaurant on London’s Park Lane, and it was incredibly grand. But you went back of house and between your shifts you’d go down to the staff room in the basement with no natural light, and everybody smoked down there. There were smashed-up hotel chairs and a TV that played news all the time, and snoring porters and chefs in their whites grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep, and I found that exciting: the upstairs/downstairs thing. That you go upstairs from there and put on a show. It’s a bit like one of those Heath Robinson drawings – it’s fun to see how each thing fits in with another. Having said that, I like to think that the working environment at Leon is slightly more fun for the people who work with us."

"It took Orwell quite a long time to become a writer. He came back from Burma at the end of 1927. Now, there are various myths behind this. It’s always thought that because of his later radicalism and his anti-imperialist stance as a writer that he came home from serving in the colonial police force in a furious rage, determined to throw over all the trappings of the British Raj and imperialism. But in fact, he came home from Burma on a medical certificate. He’d been ill with dengue fever. He hadn’t yet decided if he was going to give it up, so he had six months furlough in England at the end of 1927. In the end, he decided he didn’t want to go back to Burma—he wanted to become a writer. It’s a mark of the manner in which he was feeling his way that implementing this decision took more or less five years. He published his first few articles, and then embarked on what these days we would call the research journey that produced Down and Out in Paris and London . “It took Orwell quite a long time to become a writer” The fascination of Down and Out in Paris and London is that it’s his first book. In it, you can see Orwell stumbling, moving towards the kind of writer he wants to be, choosing the sort of subject matter he thinks will be appropriate. He spent time in Paris, working humbly in hotels and restaurants as what the French called a plongeur , someone who basically does the washing up. Then, he came back to England and went on what he called his ‘tramping adventures’, masquerading as a down and out. He went and stayed in what were known as ‘casual wards’ in the south of England, and sort of walked his way around Kent and Essex and the London home counties, storing up impressions for what became his first book. Again, it’s often thought that these are the first stirrings of Orwell’s pronounced social conscience; that already he was showing solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. Which of course he was, but we should also remember that on another level, he was a writer looking for copy. He was a journalist looking for experience that he could convert into books. It’s very interesting that one of the English passages of Down and Out in Paris and London is obviously based on a book called The Autobiography of a Supertramp by a writer called W H Davies, which had appeared about a quarter of a century before. He was obviously using literary models. Apart from the vividness of the reportage—he’s staying at these dreadful places and talking to tramps and down and outs and men and women of the road—what’s interesting about Down and Out in Paris and London is that it was the book of nonfiction in which he becomes George Orwell, having been born Eric Arthur Blair. He famously disliked being called ‘Eric’. One or two critics in the past have suggested that this was an almost mythological transformation, in which a certain kind of person becomes another kind of person by way of a change of name. But in fact, calling himself ‘George Orwell’ happened almost by accident. He decided he wanted Down and Out in Paris and London to be published under a pseudonym, because he thought that his very respectable parents might be slightly offended by some of the more colourful themes, especially in the Paris part. He wrote down a list of potential pseudonyms, one of which was ‘H Lewis Always’. Imagine if Nineteen Eighty-Four had been written by H Lewis Always! In the end, he was staying in Suffolk at his parent’s house. He went on a day-trip to Ipswich, the county town, and came back and said to his then-girlfriend, ‘I’m going to call myself George Orwell. It’s the king’s name, ‘George’—good, solid English name—and ‘Orwell’ is the name of the local river that flows through Suffolk.’ So, George Orwell. A very simple process, in the end. The question of how and when Orwell obtained his political consciousness is a fascinating one. I would argue that he doesn’t actually become fully politically aware until he goes to Spain in 1937, and lives for a time in Barcelona and sees what he regards as democratic socialism in action. Interestingly, I discovered a new, previously unpublished letter from around this time, written in the autumn of 1931, again to the then-girlfriend in Suffolk. This was a time when England was in political crisis: we’d gone off the gold standard and were about to elect a national government, and Orwell, who was actually living in London at the time, writes to his friend Eleanor and says words to the effect that “the situation is very disturbed … there’ll probably be rioting in the autumn, but I don’t know anything about this because I don’t take any interest in, nor do I have knowledge of, politics.” Which seems a very odd thing for George Orwell to write at the age of 28. A good comparison to make is with some of Orwell’s Burma reminiscences. There is the famous essay ‘A Hanging’ (1931), which is written from the point of view of somebody who sees a prisoner hanged. And then there is ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), which is always seen as this great symbolic attack on British imperialism. But it’s never been conclusively proved that Orwell saw a man hanged, and it’s never been conclusively proved that he shot an elephant. There is an account of a British colonial official shooting an elephant like that in the Rangoon Gazette , the Burmese paper of the time. But it’s not Orwell—it’s somebody else. I made the point earlier about Orwell being very conscious of using literary models when he began writing. A lot of his work is framed in procedures established by other writers. The essay about going to see the hanging in Burma, for example, in terms of its structure and some of the reflections on human rights sound rather like an essay that Thackeray wrote called ‘ Going to See a Man Hanged ‘ (1840). Although I’m sure much of the book is based on his personal experience, I think it’s woven together from various parts, and I suspect that one or two liberties are taken. There are some bits I don’t believe at all, like the conversation he has with his friend Charlie about the brothel, and so on—that I think that’s just invented. It’s the way that a lot of non-fiction writers work. You don’t have to swear blind that everything in it absolutely happened; it’s a question of the ultimate aesthetic effect that you’re trying to produce. But though I have my doubts about a certain amount of the constructions of Down and Out , they don’t in the least detract from its merits. You couldn’t say that it wasn’t a faithful, autobiographical description of his life."

"That is a book I read when I was young – in my teens – and it really marked me. I had been to Paris in the 1970s and I was fascinated by the city but slightly underwhelmed. I knew Rome very well and other European cities and when I spent time in Paris I thought it was an awful lot more modern and tame than I expected. Reading Orwell’s book suggested to me that there was a Paris underworld. I knew about an underworld in America, because I grew up in big cities like San Francisco, and lived in New York. I knew that America had a very tough side to it. I didn’t imagine before coming here that Paris had a very gritty real underside. Reading that book I discovered it. I also discovered that the Paris Orwell knew in the 1920s and early 1930s was very much still alive in the 1970s and in many ways is still alive today. Oh, absolutely very much so, especially Americans. There are also many British people over here and also South Americans, Africans and Italians. Paris for them is the same city that it was for Orwell and that it was for me. It is a place that you can come to and when here convince yourself that you too might be able to become the person you wanted to be, or you could at least try to. You can do things like paint or write. One of the great things about Paris, then as now, is that if you are a writer or an artist or indeed a creator of any kind you are respected. Your status is actually perfectly high in society and you are not necessarily measured on your material success, how many books you sell, how much your paintings sell for – that sort of thing. Whereas in the culture I come from in America you are largely measured on how much money you earn, the neighbourhood you live in and the kind of car you drive. It was refreshing to me and I think it still is. But Orwell’s book doesn’t just show the artistic side of Paris. There is a long section about working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and it really shows the grimness and filth of that life. He describes how people were basically wage slaves. They worked horrific hours – 16, 17, 18-hour days – and they had no energy to do anything but to work and sleep. My experience, as someone who has done a lot of reporting on food and restaurants, is that that scene has improved but it is still pretty gritty. People work very long, hard hours and are poorly paid and now they are almost entirely non-French. They are almost entirely North African or Tamil."