Book Review: Down and Out in Paris and London
A couple of weeks ago I emailed John Birmingham. I was blunt. “Is there a future in writing [in Australia]?” I asked. I should have been more specific. Birmingham has set himself the task of cranking out five (!) books this year so clearly he thought yes. When I wrote that question I was inwardly referring to a particular paragraph he wrote in the closing chapter of Leviathan, his unauthorised bio on Sydney published in 1999. To connect with the Down and Out of Kings Cross - he had lived on the street with these wild-eyed locals by the fetid air belched from Kings X station. “Is there any future in that sort of writing?” I should have asked.
Of course, then, the Cross was a different place. Darlinghurst road was a throbbing gauntlet bathed in a lurid neon glow, the spruikers from the strip club “hey boys you out for a good night?”, the twitching, blistered junkies by the fountain, “give us a dollar mate”. You could still score weed from the right cafe. How banal to linger in the nostalgia of junkies, strippers and crooked cops. Sure it was ugly but it was human too. Human in a polar opposite way to the strip today - sterile and silent, neon bleached to fluorescent white out front of towering apartment blocks. It’s a corporate other-dimension, icy and unreal - the residents siloed off in their fifty metres squared.
Times have changed for writing too. If Birmingham, a straight white male tried to understand the under-class by a few nights scal range, and enriched the timbre of the Aussie chorus. It some ways it has and new voices were sorely needed. Yet today all voices are not heard at equal volume. The loudest by far is self-flagellating whitey. He or she is rooted firmly inside their loathed milieu, roaring condemnation fired off in blocks of 800 words at anyone else in that milieu that seeks to embrace the universal and move outside the zone demarcated by their native conditions. It becomes didactic, reflexive and soon very dull.
They say there’s only two stories: a stranger comes to town and someone takes a journey. They’re really the same story from two different perspectives. Both rely on a step outside one’s world because this is where normality is upset and senses are heightened.
Take Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell for instance, where Orwell spent months living below the baguette line on the cobblestones of Paris and then London. Orwell’s authority stems from his personal experience, his deprivations were real - he went hungry, begged for work and when he found it the conditions were appalling - yet they were also contrived - Orwell could always send a telegram to his parents to bail him out. Today we go easy on him because history has validated his overwhelming humanity. So much so that both the right and the left claim him as theirs. Yet now, if an unknown Orwell, a straight white bourgeois man, “played poverty” in a foreign country for the purpose of gathering material for a book, what reception could his work expect?
It’s a brilliant book that glows with humanity, humour and above all honesty. His experiences in London are different from Paris. Yet not too much. His innate repulsion from the lower class fades as it becomes clear that they differ by their conditions rather than their character. There are scoundrels as anywhere but he find easy camaraderie and those who share the little they have with him. And so we arrive at the book’s moral punch - universal humanity - the French beggar, separated by class, language and nationality is not a separate species to Orwell.
Down and Out in Paris and London, together with Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier written to an audience divided by class and nationality on a scale we struggle to understand today. He could only find universal humanity when he stepped out of his upper-middle class reality to experience the other. It was an act that made his book far richer and more honest than the reams written about the lower class written by socialists that had never slept in a bug-infested boarding house or went without a meal or wandered the streets searching for some horrendous menial job. It’s a lesson in writing and humanity we’d do well to heed today.