Down and Out with George Orwell

As I have continued my reading of early 20th century British authors, I've moved on from Evelyn Waugh to George Orwell, and from satirical fictions to very down to earth memoirs and essays. One thing Waugh and Orwell have in common is mastery of English. Orwell's style, however, is much crisper and more modern. There are no frills or self-conscious embellishments. It is immediately apparent why he became the model for so many English essayists who followed him.

Down and Out in Paris and London, like so much of Orwell's non-fiction, reads like a report from another country. This is true even of the second half of the book, which records his experiences tramping around London and its suburbs. From Orwell's perspective, the truly poor do inhabit another country, although there are distinct differences between his experiences in Paris and his time spent in London. In Paris he was forced to pawn his possessions or find some kind of employment, however poor the wages, to survive. In London he found it was possible to live as a tramp, although with considerable discomfort, subsisting on bread and tea, moving from one state-sponsored shelter to the next, or begging in some creative fashion on the London streets. The comparison suggests that while life in either place can be harsh and demoralizing, there is something rather more sinister about the British solution of institutionalized poverty.

Orwell finds himself in these constrained circumstances, living without means or small means, through various choices and turns of events, but manages to take advantage of his own misfortune by examining his experiences and the lives of his acquaintances and reporting on what he has learned as part of a program of personal education in subjects seldom broached in schools or even polite conversation. After his adventures in Paris and London, and his time as a policeman in Burma, in The Road to Wigan Pier he takes off to study life among the coal miners of northern England, and the devastations wrought by unemployment in that region of Britain. Reading Orwell's reports gives one an insight into the life of the poor, but also that of those employed in some of the more necessary but disagreeable jobs that support the infrastructure of civilized society.

Orwell observes that it's no good trying to put the harsh realities of such lives out of our minds:

For they exist in tens and hundreds of thousands; they are one of the characteristic by-products of the modern world. You cannot disregard them if you accept the civilization that produced them. For this is part at least of what industrialism has done for us. Columbus sailed the Atlantic, the first steam engines tottered into motion, the British squares stood firm under the French guns at Waterloo, the one-eyed scoundrels of the nineteenth century praised God and filled their pockets; and this is where it all led -- to labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like blackbeetles. It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.

Also in The Road to Wigan Pier he describes the excruciating labor required to extract coal from underground mines to run the machine of modern civilization, the way the miners must stoop and crawl and dig amidst the heat and coal dust for eight to ten hours on a shift. He observes the pain and torture he must go through just to visit the coal face in one of these mines, and then remarks that this is what the miners must do every day of their entire working lives. And then he reminds us:

But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence. More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins. In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants -- all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

And, of course, he's right. He has made me question what I have come to accept as the natural order of things, especially my own superiority. And I begin to wonder what it must be like to do hard manual labor for little reward other than food and shelter so that I can continue to labor. Or then to be out of work and cast aside, no longer useful or needed by superior persons such as ourselves. And I wonder how we have even managed to hold such a system together for as long as we have? And I wonder how much longer it can hold? And I wonder if any of those fools who are running for political office and proposing solutions even have the faintest clue what they are proposing solutions for? And I certainly wonder if they have ever even read George Orwell's essays and books, to say nothing of taken the time to observe some of what he has observed? Perhaps that is why so many people seem to be so upset, because they recognize, even without necessarily realizing it, the great disconnect between the appearance and the reality of our politics.

Reading Orwell makes one realize how fragil our civilization really is, but more on this sometime later when I've had more time to digest what I have been reading. For now suffice to say, reading Orwell is an education in the power of observation and the ability to describe alternate realities in plain English. Indeed, Orwell almost makes one smell the filth that so much of our so-called civilized world is built upon. And he makes one think, as few writers are able to do. But the distance between Waugh and Orwell is perhaps not so great as one might expect. Both saw the absurdity of their existence, although they described that absurdity from very different perspectives. And both reported back as they watched the fraying of what they had taken for reality.