Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers Page A

novels. Punning on the Limouzins’ exotic name, as a boy Orwell called them “Lemonskins” or “Automobiles.”
    In July 1927, sailing home after five years in Burma, Orwell disembarked in Marseilles, planning to travel across France by train. There he witnessed a massive political protest in what was for him a defining moment. A vast crowd had turned out to support Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a highly controversial case. “All these people,” Orwell wrote, “—tens ofthousands of them—were genuinely indignant over a piece of injustice, and thought it quite natural to lose a day's wages in order to say so.” He contrasted the passion of the French crowds to comments of the English bank clerks in Marseilles, who didn't care if the men were guilty or innocent, and crassly exclaimed: “Oh well, you've got to hang these blasted anarchists.” He admired the instinctive sense of justice in the French people.
    After returning from Burma Orwell became estranged from his parents, who were furious when he gave up his secure government job. They felt they had done their best for him, and had no sympathy with his ambitions to be a writer or with his political views. In the spring of 1928 the twenty–fiveyear–old Orwell put some distance between himself and his disappointed family, went to Paris to test his resolve and his abilities, and lived there for nearly two years. In 1929 he saw Philippe Pétain, the defender of Verdun, at the state funeral of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme commander of the victorious French armies in World War I. He contrasted his own experiences in Paris with that of thousands of American expatriates who flocked there in the 1920s, when everything was cheap for those with dollars to spend. As he wrote in his essay on the controversial American novelist Henry Miller: “During the boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchés and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen.”
    Orwell's Paris was altogether different from that of the expatriate authors Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, and he had no contact with French or English-speaking intellectuals. He lived in the squalid rue Pot de Fer (Iron Pot Street) in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway had lived in the district with his first wife in the early 1920s, but by the time Orwell arrived he'd moved on to a richer wife and a better address. Orwell did not frequent the fashionable restaurants and cafés, though he thought he once saw Joyce in one of his favorite hangouts, the café Deux Magots (Two Apes). Other expatriate writers wanted to enjoy the good life for very little money. Orwell wanted to endure a harsh life with no money at all.
    Orwell's grim experiences in Paris gave him the right to condemn the English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton, who ignorantly idealized “Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not spent much time in France, and his picture of it—as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the
Marseillaise
over glasses of red wine—had about as much relation to reality as [the popular musical]
Chu Chin Chow
has to every-day life in Baghdad.” Reviewing Cyril Connolly's hedonistic novel
The Rock-Pool
, which takes place among expatriates in the south of France, Orwell—in a finely tunedsentence—defined the moral chasm between himself and his comfortably decadent old school friend: “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.” Orwell was interested in French politics and literature but he did not go to France for pleasure. When contemporaries like Connolly were studying at Oxford and spending