Theodore Adorno captured the sense of desperation and anxiety of our epoch in his Minima Moralia when he wrote that “Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be ‘after’ something is almost suspect: no help to others in the rat-race is acknowledged unless legitimized by counter-claims.” Perhaps that is why there is something remarkably intriguing about the homeless, the under-employed, and those lingering on the edges—bear-trapped outside society in the cold borderlands. Orwell understood this region and mapped it, tracing its odors and occupants, describing it in his famously clipped prose.
In Depression-era Paris, Orwell, disguised as a hobo, describes a life unknown to “respectable” bourgeois society. It is a world of poverty freed from “ordinary standards of behavior.” “Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words,” he writes. The amazing feat of so slim a text is Orwell’s powerful skill at making you scratch your arms from fear of the begbugs that crawl over him in his fleabag flophouse, or push away your dinner plate as he describes an indecorous meal, and, most potently, feel implicated in the horrors of the world. “This is your society,” he seems to accuse, “you are culpable.” Though, not much happens to him. For pages and pages I sat in rapt attention at the description of a boozy night with pals or the tedium of waiting for a charity meal. The interest he makes of boredom was surprising. Really, can poverty and being “down and out” really be boring? Tony Judt who verbally “wrote” two books while he was dying of Hodgkins disease commented that the disease was wicked, sure; he had lost the ability to move his limbs or breathe on his own. But he argued that it would be devastating to a laborer who hadn’t conducted a life of the mind.
“An educated man can put up with enforced idleness,” Orwell writes, “which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. 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.”
This is what is most cruel about the millions who sit at home, jobless and exhausted by poverty. The unemployed are holders of a secret that those who are employed just don’t or won't understand. Even the memory of unemployment seems to soften the blow. The isolation of American society is much fiercer and more evident without the necessity of work. In today’s America, where else does one spend the majority of social time? For the unemployed, the world seems to be preparing for a party for which he is not invited.
When Orwell does find work it is in the most filthy conditions. He labors in the basement of a hotel and in the greasy kitchen of a sloppy restaurant. But the most wonderful parts of the book would also be the most uncomfortable to witness in person. When Orwell and his comrades trudge from one charity to the next, the calumny they show their patrons is delicious. As the men are compelled to fall to their knees and be thankful for handouts, they mutter, grumble, and later declaim their disgust at the process. What would be seen (I’m sure) in some quarters as guttersnipe ingratitude is actually the truest expression of humanity.
“A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor,” Orwell writes. “It is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.” Charity is the poison not the cure, according to Oscar Wilde. But Orwell reveals the origins of this contempt. When he works 17 hours a day at the restaurant only to spend a charitable night upon a concrete slab next to a malnourished tramp who wants to nothing more than to roger him, well, a cup of swill and a plate of stale bread is little consolation. (Although, the coldness and quiet scorn of the robed virgins holding the ladles does make the process of hating a bit easier, too.)
Down and Out is a book that most journalists will be drawn to. Orwell’s pithy writing, dry humor, and realism is exactly what is needed to counteract the sugar and diversions of the worst popular trash our media proffers each day. Orwell did much to discredit the comforts of charity and (what Auden called) the “lie in the brain” that any work is good work. Actually, most of what Orwell spent his days doing was not productive at all. The tasks were tedious and meaningless. But such was the labor the free market desired. I ended this book not only admiring such unique reporting but feeling a bit sad—how many wasted lives of sweat and toil have been exhausted serving and living for others. How many children must be born and grow and live their brief blink of life shackled to the whims of those a bit luckier.
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