From the corner
of Mouffetard, the Rue du Pot de Fer
in the
Quartier Latin.
Down & Out in Paris
Orwell's Fact or Fiction?
By Richard Erickson
Paris Kiosque - September 2000 - Volume 7, Number 9
Copyright (c) 2000 Richard Erickson - used with permission
George Orwell returned to England
on leave from his posting as a colonial policeman in
Burma, at the end of August 1927. In England he
could say what he thought, and it felt better to
him after silently serving and loathing imperialism for five years.
After a month's holiday, he told his family he was
going to resign his post. His father had served his
entire career for the Empire in its Indian opium monopoly.
Orwell's family were horrified to learn that he was giving
up a solid government job worth £660 annually - to
be a 'writer.'
Orwell was so determined to leave the
Imperial Police that he cut his eight-month fully-paid sick leave
short, sacrificing nearly £140; a considerable sum in 1927.
He quickly moved from comfortable suburbia to a cheap, unheated
room in London's Portobello Road. When friends realized he was
using a candle for warmth, they found him an old
oil stove.
His over-respectable landlady did not know that
Orwell was searching for 'the poorest of the poor' in
London's East End, disguised as a tramp. Worried at first
that his public-school accent would give him away, he found
that nobody saw beyond the shabby clothes.
He went out
on three-day excursions to London's outskirts; sleeping in flophouses and
dormitories for the unemployed. In the beginning his intentions were
vague, but were definitely based on Jack London's 'The People of
the Abyss,' also set in East London.
But he wasn't
truly 'down and out.' He was there as a visitor,
an observer; when he had enough he could wash his
face and return to his own semi-respectable room.
Sweeping up after the marché in the Place Monge.
This, he
tired of. Seeking extra inspiration, in the spring of 1928
Orwell moved from the Portobello Road to a cheap hotel
in the Rue du Pot de Fer, just off the
Rue Mouffetard in Paris' Quartier Latin.
At the time
the narrow street was 'cobbled and dingy,' the hotel's walls
were 'thin,' and dirt and bugs were everywhere. As crummy
as it was, it wasn't - and still isn't -
far from the Jardin des Plantes, the Panthéon and the
classier boulevards of Saint-Germain, Saint-Michel and Montparnasse.
Hemingway and his
first wife had lived not far away, for a time
in 1922; on the other side of the Place de
la Contrescarpe, in the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine.
In
1928, when Montparnasse was still having its decade-long party, attended
by a few artists and many impostors, and Samuel Beckett
was beginning his two-year stint as a 'lecteur' of English
in the nearby Ecole Normale Supérieure, Orwell circulated in an
altogether different Paris.
He said the Jardin des Plantes was
so infested with rats that they almost became tame enough
to feed by hand; until they were such a nuisance
that cats were imported to wipe them out.
Meanwhile, in
his book 'Down and Out in Paris and London,' the
tone was more solemn. His room was burgled and his
money was stolen. Nearly penniless, what little he had 'oozed
away' and eventually went hungry for three days.
The effect
of this he described as, 'hunger reduces one to an
utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza
than anything else.'
The Paris part of 'Down and Out'
is mainly about Orwell's last three months in Paris, in
the period before he returned to England just before Christmas
in 1929. Earlier in the year, he went into the
Hôpital Cochin with a bad attack of bronchitis, which turned
out to be pneumonia.
In the hospital he spent three
weeks in a public ward with 60 other patients. About
this stay, it was later described in his essay 'How
the Poor Die.'
In late 1928, two different articles he'd
written were published on the same day; one in Paris
and the other in London. Early in 1929 a literary
agent in London became interested in Orwell's work, and they
met in Paris.
The agent gave Orwell some advice about
fiction - 'cut the tedium and put in some action'
- but didn't manage to place any of the pieces
written by Orwell.
Although the agent was encouraging, the
meeting in April was the high point of his career
as a writer in Paris, and none of the stories
he wrote while here were ever published.
His last article,
bought on the day he left the hospital, was published
by 'Le Progrès Civique' in May. Near the end
of September he wrote to Max Plowman, the editor
of London's 'Adelphi,' bluntly asking for information about a story
he's sent in.
Orwell's hotel at 6. Rue du Pot de Fer is no more.
It was after this time
that Orwell was robbed and became 'down and out.' He
and his pal 'Boris' pawned their overcoats, and 'Boris' eventually
helped Orwell to get a miserable job as a 'plongeur'
in the depths of a fancy Paris hotel.
In a
classic move - I've done this too - Orwell went
along with 'Boris' scheme to get 'much' better conditions and
pay by working in a small restaurant, with a mainly
Russian clientele.
This turned out to be worse - it
really was - and Orwell finally wrote to a friend
in England, to ask for a bail-out. The friend came
through with passage money, and Orwell gave a day's notice
to the Russians and fled.
But. But, what is fact
and what is fiction?
Orwell had an aunt living in
Paris and they were on good terms. She was not
well off, but she did manage to give him some
help. She gave him money for seeds, but suggested he
borrow or steal gardening tools. It is likely he need
not have starved for three days.
In 'Down and Out'
his money is stolen from his room - but it
is possible that the thief was Orwell's goodtime girlfriend Suzanne,
or she was helped by her other boyfriend.
Did his
passage money come from a friend, or did it come
from Max Plowman in late November, after the 'Adelphi' had
decided to publish Orwell's piece about tramps?
In 1989, a
first edition presentation copy of 'Down and Out' given to
a friend turned up. Orwell had personally annotated its margins
16 times, usually with the phrase, 'this happened very much
as described.'
When I first read 'Down and Out in
Paris and London' I thought it was all true. Even
now, I know it was true enough.
The Rue du
Pot de Fer in 2000
The Rue du Pot de
Fer started out as an alley, which was called 'Prêtres'
in 1554, then 'au Prêtres' in 1559. In 1603 it
was known as the 'Bon-Puits' which has led people to
think it had something to do with the fountain at
the corner with Mouffetard which was renovated in 1671.
The
fountain replaced a simple well, which was probably appreciated in
this always populous quarter. Sometime about 1625 the street acquired
its present name, but it is not known if it
refers to a cooking utensil or a fireman's helmet.
In
the second paragraph of 'Down and Out' Orwell sums up
the narrow street with this little dialogue:
'Madame Monce: "Salope!
Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash
bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the
hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out of the
window like everybody else? Putain! Salope!" The woman on the
third floor: "Vache!"'
These tables in the Rue du Pot
de Fer did not figure in Orwell's Paris 'feast.'
Today,
the fountain still begins the street, which otherwise doesn't seem
to be infested with bugs - but it does have
a lot of restaurants.
In 'Down and Out' the
street was called the 'Rue du Coq d'Or.' The hotel
Orwell stayed in at number six may have always been
merely a number, just as in the book it was
merely 'the hotel in the Rue du Coq d'Or.' No
Rue du Coq d'Or exists in Paris.
There is also
no grand plaque marking the location of Orwell's Paris residence;
even though in the forward to the French edition of
'Down and Out' Orwell wrote that he had 'no animosity'
towards Paris, and had 'very happy memories' of it.
The Books:
Down and Out In Paris and London by
George Orwell. First published in London by Gollancz in 1933,
and by Harper in New York, also in 1933.
'Orwell
- The Authorised Biography' by Michael Shelden. Published by William
Heinemann, London, 1991. ISBN 0 434 69547 3.
George Orwell's
last novel,
1984
was published in both Britain and America
in June of 1949. George Orwell died on Saturday, 21.
January 1950 at the age of 46.
Richard Erickson, living in Paris for the last twenty years, has been putting
Paris online as long as anyone. More of his writings can be found in
Metropole Paris
where this article first appeared.
He can be contacted via
erickso@world-net.sct.fr.
Your Cellphone in Paris
