Down and Out

... in Paris and London. Very appropriately, I bought a second-hand copy of this book from a bouquinist plying his trade around the Millennium Bridge at weekends. It's a nice-looking 1969 pocket book edition (reprinted in 1984), the kind Penguin was famous for. The text is also available free on the internet.

First published in 1933, Down and Out in Paris and London recounts Orwell's life amid the poorest of the urban poor as a fully pledged member. An Old Etonian who chose a bohemian life in Paris, Orwell describes the squalid living conditions of the poor Parisian "quartiers" with both splendid detachment and the black humour that will become a hallmark of his style. 

Knowing the public's appetite for "continental scenes", Orwell opens the book with a colourful description of the inhabitants of Rue Coq d'Or (identified variously as Rue du Pot de Fer or Rue Mouffetard, they are adjoining), including the nosy and mouthy concierge, the old couple making money by selling regular poscards as if they were smut, or the young dissolute who tells to anyone listening about what love and passion mean (paying 1,000 francs for a night of unbridled pleasure under the streets of Paris). But, the author offsets the colour adding that he was "trying to describe the people in our quarter not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all  part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum."

Through a series of mishaps, the young aspiring writer's meager source of money dried up, and Orwell became pennyless. He notes, matter-of-factly, that penury brings with it a rather peculiar type of philosophy, "the great redeeming power of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. [...] And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. [...] 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."

Orwell returned to London after one year and a half spent more or less in Parisian slums. Once there, he turned his attention to the London poor, investigating the life of the tramps - while living as a tramp. He might not have set up to do investigative journalism, but this is what Down and Out in Paris and London turned out to be. 

Although it talks about events and conditions of more than eighty years ago, I found the book still relevant today, at a time of economic crisis, at a time when the disparity between rich and poor is so steep. We might be living better times than the 1920s and 30s, but the human drama coming from penury is the same. 

For admirers of the man, the Orwell Prizes publishes his diaries from 1938 to 1942, in real time - but after 70 years. There is a little bit of everything in there, from his gardening to political and literary themes. It is well worth a look.

When Utopias Go Bad

Utopias are, as literature teaches us, those stories in which the world lives in better, more just conditions than we are on a regular basis, and many a writer from Plato to St Augustine of Hyppo to Thomas More regaled the reading public with such texts. 

On the other hand, utopias gone bad are called dystopias, and there are such texts that have achieved far more fame and following than their counterparts - to mention only George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I am sure there must have been dystopias written before the 20th century, but the last hundred years have proved to be the most fertile ground for them. 

A book which I enjoyed greatly and which is said to have been an inspiration for Orwell is Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a book which was promptly banned by the nascent Bolshevik state almost as soon as it appeared in 1921. Orwell's 1984 is darker, tougher than We, but at least he allowed his characters to have names. Zamyatin's are not even people, according to the rules of the One State in which they live, they are ciphers called D-503, O-90 or R-13. In the One State life proceeds in mathematical progression, and imagination is one of the most-feared and despised things that can happen to anyone.

"[...] Mechanisms don't have imaginations.

 Have you ever seen an inanely dreaming and distant smile break across the physiognomy of a pump cylinder while it was at work? Have you ever heard of a crane, in the night-time, in the hours allocated for repose, turning over in anguish and sighing?

NO!

[...] But it is not your fault: you are sick. the name of this sickness: Imagination.

This is the worm that gnaws black wrinkles onto your forehead. [...] it is the last barricade on the path to happiness. But be glad: it has been detonated already. The path is clear. The most recent discovery of State Science is the location of the Imagination: the pathetic cerebral nodule in the region of the Pons Varolii. Cauterise this nodule with X-rays three times and you are healed of your imagination.

FOREVER."

I don't want to sound like a trite advert, but I have to say it. If you enjoyed 1984, you will enjoy We.

And while I am on this subject, I have to mention another dystopia, but one of a very different facture: Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole. In this book, a linguist misses a connection on a flight to Helsinki and ends up in a place where everybody speaks, reads and writes in  languages he cannot understand and cannot make sense of, in a perpetual state of motion through what must be the busiest metropolis in the world.

They are different books, but it is interesting they have something in common (besides being dystopian): an undercurrent of black humour, of darkest irony and of satire of the most mordant kind.