I finished Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London several days ago, and had a recurring...
more I finished Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London several days ago, and had a recurring impression as I steadily progressed through the nonfiction work: Orwell has an amazing memory. The book is about Orwell's descent into abject poverty while in Paris, and later into homelessness in London.
A lot of people tend to casually remark how Orwell "volunteers" to be poor and homeless, which is true to an extent; but I really see it as a kind of opportunism. Orwell was already poor to begin with, but he had enough to pay for room, board, and food on a daily basis. However, he had all his money stolen while in Paris, and had "no choice" but to starve days on end, with no job prospects and no steady income to remain comfortable and secure. In London, he volunteers at the opportunity to be homeless, even though he could have borrowed money from his friends.
Half of the book is about his time spent in Paris, and that section alone is mainly split into two phases -- his time being hungry without a job, and his time overworked and sleep deprived with a job. As a plongeur (a dishwasher/kitchen assistant), he describes how he works over 19 hours a day in a squalid cellar with rotten food and insects and rodents crawling everywhere, cramped and tiny, boiling at 110 degrees, running about in the small space (amounting to 15 miles a day, he says), and washing/preparing food and dishes without rest, until his muscles became neurasthenic with fatigue. A quote: "For nothing could be simpler than the life of a plongeur. He lives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think, hardly conscious of the exterior world; his Paris has shrunk to the hotel, the Metro, a few bistros and his bed... Nothing is quite real to him but the boulot, drinks and sleep; and of these sleep is the most important" (91). In another paragraph he emphasizes again the frozen inertia of thought; one's mind couldn't handle any thought in a 20 hour, nonstop work day.
I mention all this to emphasize the specificity of his reportage in his book. Despite being mind-numbingly busy and overworked in a day, he is able to precisely recount his ventures, the names and appearances of the people he meets, and their speeches and the particular vernacular they speak in. He must carry a journal, people may say; but then I consider the second half the book, where he tramps as a vagrant between casual wards in London. He never explicitly mentions a journal in his keeping, but it is assumed that in his life as a homeless bum, his only possessions are the clothes worn on his body. Still, he is able to recall the street names, the geography as he travels; he remembers the names of tramps and their life stories and jokes and examples; he remembers what he does almost on a daily basis, as how the people appeared and the landscape looked the morning he leaves, say, the Cromley spike. I highlight one moment towards the end, where "two young men named William and Fred, ex-fishermen from Norfolk... had a song called 'Unhappy Bella' that is worth writing down. I heard them sing it half a dozen times during the next two days, and I managed to get it by heart, except a line or two which I have guessed" (190). He then writes out 5 full stanzas. I was impressed, because I personally do not foresee myself memorizing lines of a song after hearing it six times. I have poor memory in general; I can never sing-a-long to the lyrics of a song which others have no trouble picking up and remembering after a few listens. I have to make the trouble of reading the lyrics online and familiarizing the lines well enough in my memory, before I can recall them with any degree of effort.
Orwell, who spent at least a solid month tramping in streets and lodging houses without pen or paper (so I assume), seems to have remembered enough details to give the semblance of journalistic, fact-based report, rather than a vague and hazy impression. I find myself, on the other hand, in socially awkward positions when I forget the names of people I had just met. How is your detail memory? Are you able to recall many details effortlessly, seemingly trivial yet important in anchoring names or places or articles of clothing to an imagined world? How about dialogue? Besides purchasing a tape recorder, I can't seem to find a solution to reproducing authentic dialogue or vernacular. How about you?
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