The Fall 2009 issue of Lapham's Quarterly (that's right, I'm over a year behind reading my subscription) excerpts a George Orwell essay from the 1940s, entitled “How the Poor Die” which references a time in Orwell’s life more fully explored contemporaneously in Down and Out in Paris and London. While Orwell is famous for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, I’d always heard talk of his days fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He seemed to be a Hemingway figure who was less concerned with being a prolific modernist and more with the integrity of both his life and his work.
Most of his non-fiction books have been rather obscured by the fame and ubiquity of his two popular novels, which nearly every American kid read in school, at least back when I was in school. Even New York’s great bookstore, The Strand, which boasts 18 miles of books couldn’t keep a copy of anything else by Orwell on the shelf for more than a few days, according to my friend who has worked there for years. More recently, his Essays, Homage to Catalonia, and Down and Out in London and Paris have been reissued by various publishers.
For “How the Poor Die” Orwell became a pauper, developed an illness, as the poor do, and went to a public hospital in Paris for treatment. Not only the treatment he receives, but also the treatment he sees others receive reveal a healthcare system stuck in a rut of cold, clinical (and often primitive) practice. Orwell seeks treatment for what he believes is pneumonia. When he is admitted to the hospital, he is promptly given a cold bath, a flimsy robe and the order to walk across the open air courtyard in the frigid February air.
All the patients in the pauper’s ward are given numbers. Orwell sees number 57, an old man, dying of natural causes. “As I gazed at the tiny, screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse, waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room, was an example of ‘natural’ death, one of the things you pray for in the Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that’s what is waiting for you, twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old.” This honesty allowed Orwell to fight in wars he felt were just and to live a full life, in fear of living vacantly, not of dying meaningfully
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Seriesofhopes posted an interesting piece called Visualizing George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris" providing pictures of some of the conditions and locales in Orwell's book.
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