Growing up

Bear with me, please. I will tell you about the book that started it all. But if I merely ripped the wrapping off my story and laid it on the table, it would be incomplete. I would have shown you my after picture, with no image of how I was before. So permit me to start a while back with the author - and work my way forward.

Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motharu, Bengal, British India, to an English father and a Burmese-born, half-French mother. Richard Blair was an Imperial bureaucrat who oversaw the production and sale of opium destined for China. His wife Ida’s job was to raise Eric and his two sisters - Marjorie, five years older, and Avril, five years younger. The family, as Eric later described it, was lower-upper-middle class. This characterization pointed to a once prominent British family that, lacking an estate in England, had made money through commerce but was no longer wealthy.

The boy, his mother, and Marjorie returned to England when he was one. Avril made her first appearance four years later. He attended private schools on scholarships before becoming a King Scholar at Eton - a student whose tuition and board were reduced because he demonstrated academic excellence. While at these schools, the young Eric became aware that while he was socially the ‘right sort’, he was economically several steps down the ladder from the other boys - the next generation of the British ruling class.

Unlike his schoolmates, who almost all went on to university or the military academies after high school, Eric got a job. He returned to the Far East as an Indian Imperial Policeman in Burma. A position he later described in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.”

In 1928, he returned to England with the idea of being a professional writer, a pastime he had pursued as a hobby through his youth - he had won prizes for poetry at elementary school and had been taught French by Somerset Maugham at high school.

He found his subject in the working class of London’s East End; by traveling with the tramps, who made money working odd jobs in the English countryside and London’s slums; and among the underclass in Paris, where he earned his daily crust with menial labor such as washing dishes at a luxury hotel identified alternatively as the Crillon and the Lotti.

Blair assumed different names for his various circumstances. He admitted later he had done so to spare his parents the embarrassment of his subject matter. And because he was so unsure of success, he wanted the possibility of failure to belong to a nom de plume.

Among his pseudonyms were P. S. Burton (a name he used when tramping), Kenneth Miles, and H. Lewis Allways. For his first book, he adopted the name by which the world would come to know him. It comprised a Christian name that symbolized the solidity and tradition of his ancestral land. And a surname borrowed from a river that flowed through Southwold, the area of East Anglia where he then lived.

Thus it was in 1933 that Victor Gollancz published George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London.”

Orwell directed the book at the upper and wealthy middle classes - a society he was intimate with - who, because of England's exclusionary class structure, had almost no knowledge of how the working class and those on the fringes of society lived.

Unlike these hothouse orchids, Orwell had the calloused fingers and dirty nails of a working man and the journalistic eye for detail that gave truth to his early works. In Down and Out, he illuminated a gutter world the mansion-dwellers had only ever seen indistinctly at a distance. These people had no idea or interest in their servants’ inner lives, let alone those of strangers.

Decades later, when I was also a boy at Eton, I read it. I was like Saul on the road to Damascus given sight. The scales fell from my eyes. And Orwell challenged me to see.

Not many things I favored as a youth remain my favorite as a well-seasoned adult. Orwell is an exception. Down and Out was my first and most memorable, but I soon read all of Orwell’s books. His other two non-fiction works,

• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
• Homage to Catalonia (1938)

And his six novels,

• Burmese Days (1934),
• A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935),
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
• Coming Up for Air (1939)
• Animal Farm (1945)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

Then there were the countless essays and pieces he wrote for such newspapers as Tribune, The Observer, and the Manchester Evening News on subjects that varied from how to make a proper cup of tea to the political effect of language.

Today, Orwell is known for his ability to tell the truth through allegory (Animal Farm) and for describing the power of lies (1984). But to a 14-year-old schoolboy whose parents had sent him away to boarding school as an 8-year, Down and Out opened my experience to lives that I had not imagined people lived. The truth made me a better man, as truth always does - a fact the book burners and conservative censors will not grasp.

A Public (private) boarding school education in England is an insular affair. Government education caters to all residents in a school district. As a result, schools in even the wealthiest purlieus have a diversity you will never find in a British boarding school - which in Eton’s case, halves that already limited pool by accepting only boys.

All the students speak with “received pronunciation” (RP) - the accent of the Princes William and Harry (but not King Charles, who uses a strangled, frozen lip, royal version that is no longer in fashion). The accent defies geography and marks membership in a club whose entry fee is a proper birth. It is the one Americans most often try to imitate when talking as they imagine the English do. Unfortunately, despite becoming famous in a time of radio and movies, there is no recording of Orwell speaking.

Socially, the British upper/upper middle classes flock together. Public school boys date public school girls. The cast at balls and dinners is invariable. They use an affected vocabulary, combining classical allusions with ironic street slang, which bars entry to those not in the know. And heaven chastised the interloper, unsure which fork goes with which dish.

There have been changes at Eton since I was there. But the uniform, patois, and customs remain largely the same. The top hats and bum freezers (Eton Jackets) of Orwell’s time are gone - as they were in my day - but the tail coats remain.

The custom of first-year boys (fags as they were called, with none of the homophobic American sense of the word) working as servants for the senior boys was fading out and is now gone. Corporal punishment, aka “canings” or “beatings,” is no longer permitted. Yet the school still produces supremely well-educated morons, epitomized by Boris Johnson.

Orwell died years before I was born. But I feel a kinship with him more so than with many other Old Etonians (OEs) because he was a product of the colonies. And I am an American. Not that I considered myself one, as I had lived in England since before I was aware, and I sounded like the rest of the RP speakers. Now I live back in New York, my natal city, and my American wife says I sound like I am from Brooklyn.

I beg the reader's forgiveness for the time it has taken to get to the point, but for me to try to explain why Down and Out affected me as it did, it was necessary to set the stage.

When I first read the book, I did not know Orwell was an OE. However, it was evident that his narrator was not working class. He had none of the ornamentation of the poorly educated. His English was too simple, too direct to have been the product of a second-rate education. As another famous Englishman said, “Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.” And Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize for Literature.

There are similarities between Orwell’s early work and Charles Dickens. However, for me, the very richness of Dickens’ text sanded the edges off his observations. I could appreciate his literary craftsmanship. And craft it was - layer upon adjectival layer. Dickens constructed ornate palaces of words. His delivery was operatic. And like the finest practitioners of that art, he could take the lives of file clerks, misers, common criminals, and the rest of demimonde and build towering works of literature.

Orwell had little of Dickens’ artifice. His writing was that of a blacksmith hammering iron. There was little nuance and few frills. He wrote, without distraction, about what people did, how they spoke, and what they looked like. In fairness, Dickens wrote novels, while Down and Out is journalism. But both authors told stories and Orwell’s stories painted pictures so vividly that even a boy coddled in an expensive school could see poverty’s dirt and smell the desperation of need.

Orwell gave the poor humanity and showed me they were, in the ways that count, just like the rich. A lack of funds did not strip a man of his self-regard - or his vanity.

“In spite of all this Boris managed to keep a fairly smart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a razor-blade two months old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, and carefully stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally, when he was dressed, he produced an ink-bottle and inked the skin of his ankles where it showed through his socks. You would never have thought, when it was finished, that he had recently been sleeping under the Seine bridges.”

I was not blind. When I took the train from my home in London’s West End to school, I could see the miles of featureless brick houses of London’s industrial periphery. As the train traveled slowly and stopped often, I could see life outside the window - as I might see it on television. The English did not hide poverty so much as sanitize it.

The classic American TV shows “All in the Family” and “Sanford and Son” were remakes of the British shows “Till Death Us Do Part” and “Steptoe and Son.” In the first, a working-class racist reactionary, Alf Garnet, offered the world his opinions. In the second, a father-son team ran a rag-and-bone business. The language, dress, and settings were working class. But the shows revealed as much about their condition as a postcard view of the Acropolis did about life in ancient Greece.

Orwell, on the other hand, did not write to entertain. He wrote to inform. To force the wealthy to pause and consider the emotional range of his characters. Dickens made no bones about writing for money and died a rich man. His books are replete with mysterious benefactors and Horatio Alger-style tales of boys made good.

Orwell used no deux ex machina to move the plot along. There were no contrived happy endings. Sometimes good things happen to his characters in the way all of us, no matter our circumstances, experience. However, he was a far more honest writer than Dickens. And it was his unsparing descriptions that opened doors my naïveté did not know existed.

Orwell also offered his opinions. In doing so, he challenges the reader to either sit and accept them or think for themselves if they agree. Take his thoughts on restaurant dishwashers.

“I think one should start by saying that a plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a plongeur; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.”

To me, slavery had happened to Black Africans transported to the New World. I thought the whole thing had been done and dusted and consigned to the trash heap of history. I had never considered that at the very bottom rung of society - and perhaps several rungs higher - the conditions of a worker were closer to that of an antebellum field hand than they were to my experience.

In the second half of the book, Orwell returns to England. In France, he had known penury. But he mostly kept a rented roof over his head and usually had a few francs in his possession. Back in his home country, he was destitute, homeless, and reliant on charity. Any pretense of maintaining form was discarded. He described what it was like to wake up after a night in a “spike” or homeless shelter.

“Naked, and shivering, we lined up in the passage. You cannot conceive what ruinous, degenerate curs we looked, standing there in the merciless morning light. A tramp's clothes are bad, but they conceal far worse things; to see him as he really is, unmitigated, you must see him naked. Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chests, sagging muscles—every kind of physical rottenness was there. Nearly everyone was under-nourished, and some clearly diseased; two men were wearing trusses, and as for the old mummy-like creature of seventy-five, one wondered how he could possibly make his daily march. Looking at our faces, unshaven and creased from the sleepless night, you would have thought that all of us were recovering from a week on the drink.”

As a boy, I was a reflexive Tory - a supporter of the British Conservative Party - until I read Down and Out in Paris and London. Afterwards, I was not. I did not become a Labour supporter. I have the same antipathy to organized politics as I do to organized religion - but I did become a liberal in the American sense.

Down and Out also changed my literary tastes as much as it did my political philosophy. I read books like Emile Zola’s Germinal, Studs Terkel’s Hard Times and Working, Nathan C. Heard’s Howard Street, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Heard introduced me to something even further from my experience - the lives of Black Americans in Newark’s ghetto. And Achebe showed the effects of British colonialism from a perspective my schooling never admitted. It was the other side of the coin Orwell had explored in Shooting an Elephant and Burmese Days.

In England, class works both ways. As impenetrable as upper-class society is to tradespeople, so is the working class to the people at the summit. As much as I was curious, I had little opportunity to learn. My naive attempts to talk with the school cooks and cleaners caused defensive bemusement.

I did sneak across the River Thames on a railroad trestle to frequent a local pub in Windsor - the Duke of Connaught (affectionately known as “The Aristo”). There, as an underage drinker in a cloud of smoke and beer fumes, I drank with the regulars and discovered a class of people I had hitherto granted no individuality - a group of drinkers distinct in their personality, character, and experience, and of whom no two were interchangeable.

Later, when I went to university in London, I embraced the intellectual diversity that permeates the English class structure. My good mate George was the most literate person I knew. He was a Northerner, which in a Londoner’s estimation, is a stroke of bad luck. He came from a coal-mining family - a profession Orwell described in The Road to Wigan Pier.

Yet he had read the books that the great writers had read. He had even read Joyce’s Ulysses - voluntarily by the time he was 18. And could identify Elliot’s references in The Wasteland without a crib sheet.

Orwell demanded I tear up my prejudices and judge the world for myself, one person at a time. It was his genius that he could imbue the meanest characters in his reporting with substance.

Now, I ask people about themselves - which means I am often called a good conversationalist because I have steered them to a topic they are familiar with. It is extraordinary what you learn. Everybody has done something, thought something, met someone, or been somewhere notable. Everyone whom a casual appraisal might pigeonhole will surprise you if you get them to talk.

I never became a socialist. I was too young to pursue that well-trodden rebellious path some scions of old English families chose. And I cannot say my politics and philosophy would have been different had I not read Orwell - I like to think I would have arrived at the same place anyway. However, Down and Out in Paris and London taught me lessons more valuable than anything I ever learned in a classroom.

The most important might be, as Orwell wrote, “the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”