Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers Page B

the long summers enjoying art, architecture and music in Paris, the food, the scenery and the shimmering beaches of Provence, Orwell was doing a tough and lonely job in Burma.
    For most of his time in Paris Orwell survived on his savings, supplemented by teaching English. “When you are in a foreign country,” he observed, “unless you are there because you are obliged to work there, you do not live fully and you do not usually mix with ordinary people. You tend to spend your life in cafés or brothels or picture galleries rather than in ordinary homes, and if you're also short of money your experiences will be more sordid than they would be in your own country.” He lived a more or less solitary existence, finding his own kind of dissipation in low life. Instinctively masochistic, he sought out the most uncomfortable place he could find and reveled in his ability to live on only a few francs a day. We know almost nothing about the first twenty-two months of Orwell's life in Paris, nothing about the ordinary people he met and homes he visited while teaching English. He made no lasting friends and had no serious relationships with women. He wrote two novels, but threw them away. He didn't think his commonplace existence was worth mentioning in
Down and Out.
His money dwindled, he became ill and he was robbed. First he pawned most of his belongings, then he got work as a dishwasher. He couldn't admit failure and ask his parents for money.
    Orwell used to visit his mother's bohemian sister, Nellie Limouzin, a militant Socialist and suffragette. Though he rarely sought her help, his aunt could always be counted on for a small handout. She'd acted in vaudeville and was married to a Frenchman, Eugène Adam, who'd been involved in the Russian revolution in Petrograd in October 1917. “The marriage was not happy,” according to one of their friends. “She had no character. She was soft, without backbone, without willpower.” Adam, a fanatic who refused to speak any language but Esperanto, later abandoned Nellie, wound up in Mexico and killed himself in 1947. If Orwell had gone to Paris with the idea of exploring the French half of his heritage, he must have been disappointed, for he had little contact with French people of his own social class. He inhabited the underworld of downtrodden foreign workers, and Paris reinforced his Englishness.
    His memoir of those years,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(the metaphor in the title comes from being knocked unconscious in a boxing match), emphasized “the sour reek of the refuse-carts,” the extreme decayof the place and the bizarre consolation of desperate poverty: “I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.” Though his extreme poverty was the result of bad luck, it was inevitable. The miracle had not happened, the novels were no good, and Orwell still had no idea what he was going to do with his life. And yet, in a typical Orwellian paradox, the experience of being doubly an outsider, in nationality and in poverty, inspired the particular angle of vision, political and social, that set its stamp on his writing. There would be false starts, and he would have difficulty publishing
Down and Out
, but it was his first authentic prose.
    Despite Orwell's “pre-tubercular condition,” a friend recalled, he exposed himself in cold weather “in totally inadequate clothing. It wasn't just poverty. It was suicidal perversity.” This stubborn self-testing endangered his always precarious health, and in Paris he suffered a serious bout of influenza. In March 1929 he spent two weeks in the public wards of the Hôpital Cochin, which he later described in his