Class Traitors

I bought a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London for T while we were at the big bookstore in Bonn. It occurs to me that I often don't take the bother of jotting things down any more - just highlight stuff on Kindle. But it's a good habit and taking the time to type it out is basically reading it again carefully. So here's some bits. 

Also today I felt a bout of anxiety when I woke up and sometimes having the voice of someone else (George Orwell) in my head for a while damps down my own thoughts. 

... 

This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now got to live at the rate of about six francs a day, and from the start it was too difficult to leave much thought for anything else. It was now that my experiences of poverty began - for six francs a day, if not actual poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is a shilling, and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business. 

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping. 

... you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life... meals are the worst difficult of all. Every day at meal-times you go out ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pidgeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets...Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food...  All day you are telling lies, and expensive lies. 

... never be sorry for  a waiter... He is not thinking as he looks at you, "What an overfed lout"; he is thinking, "One day, when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate that man." He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughly understands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldom Socialists... They are snobs, and they find the servile nature of their work rather congenial.

The plongeurs, again, have a different outlook... They have no way of escaping from this life, for they cannot save a penny from their wages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves them no time to train for anything else... And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge - the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work... Débrouillard  is what every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when he is to do the impossible, will se débrouiller - get it done somehow. One of the kitchen plongeurs at Hotel X, a German, was well known as a débrouillard. One night an English lord came to the hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lor had asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late at night, and the shops would be shut. "Leave it to me," said the German. He went out, and in ten minutes he was back with four peaches. He had gone into a neighbouring restaurant and stolen them. 

... why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody must work in the sewers. And similarly with a plongeur's work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilisation, therefore unquestionable. This point is worth considering. 

... We have a vague feeling that it must be "honest" work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made  a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. 

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary "working" men. They are a race apart - outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes.... Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people... Why are beggars despised? ... I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. IN practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; they sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.... what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legall, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue... If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately... He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich. 

The whole business of swearing... is mysterious... as irrational as magic... Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning in something that should be kept secret - usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word... 

... an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty... That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have "come down in the world" are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.