Down and Out in the 4-Hour Life and the Lindy Effect
A Lindy literary analysis of George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London".
Fernet con Coca aims at being something more than a simple food newsletter. I believe restaurants and culinary traditions to be strictly tied to the current cultural scene and trends and for this reason it would make no sense to talk exclusively about food without introducing here and there some more broad topics. In this second issue, we present a small summary of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell, a book that any cook or server should read once in his lifetime. The book is divided in two parts: the first half narrating the ups and downs of the protagonist in a Parisian restaurant, the second following his life in London. It is the former that will represent the focus of the present issue as it well documents the life of a plongeur, or any other restaurant worker, and it provides fertile ground for a lindy analysis: we will see how some concepts introduced in the Lindy Newsletter are also recurrent in Orwell’s novel and we will attempt a parallelism between the 4HL and the life in the kitchen. Along the way we will compare paragraphs from the book with passages from the Lindy Newsletter.
There are few works of art that aptly describe the life of the cook, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell is an essential reading for the 4Hler cook. George Orwell’s background as a dishwasher in a Parisian Hotel provides him with the material needed to write an account of his vicissitudes in the restaurant business. In order to better understand Down and Out, it is therefore necessary to briefly introduce Orwell’s biography in connection to the kitchen environment.
It was 1927 when Eric Arthur Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, decides to give up his job as a policeman in Burma (Myanmar) to move back to London with the intention of becoming a full-time writer. A great admirer of Jack London, he started in his imitation to delve into the poorer parts of London in search of inspiration. Growing up in Burma, he never had a chance to interact with the poorer substrates of the local population for obvious reasons, but in London it was now possible for him to talk to local tramps and beggars and to spend time with them in order to understand that unknown and often forgotten world. Orwell’s experiences in common lodging houses and in the streets of London will be later described in some of his essays and besides making up the second half of Down and Out.
After one year spent in his residence in Portobello Road, Orwell decides to move to Paris – at that time The City of Light was considered the first-rate destination for aspiring artists of all sorts. In Paris, Orwell will start to write some novels although not much from that period has survived, he had more success as a journalist. By publishing articles on a regular basis and pursuing his career as a writer, Orwell managed to carve out a place of his own in the Parisian society. But as in the best of the novels, it was right when things seemed to be working out for him that unfortunate things were afoot. In 1929 he fell seriously ill to the point where he had to be carried to a hospital for treatment; not being particularly wealthy yet, he was brought to a free medical facility where medical students were trained. His experience as a patience in a hospital for the poor laid the foundations for his essay How the Poor Die (1946) and represented his first real contact with poverty in the French capital. But the unfortunate events were far from over. Shortly afterwards he was dismissed from the hospital, all of his possessions and money were stolen from his lodging house during a robbery the circumstances of which remain still unclear, Orwell himself tried to hide the fact and the context in which it had happened.
Right after having lost all of his possessions, Orwell becomes truly down and out barely being able to afford rent in a squalid hotel. After everything he could pawn and sold is gone, he is forced out of necessity to find a job. Eventually he lands a position as a dishwasher in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, little he knew that this change of circumstances was going to provide him with the material he needed to publish his first novel, namely Down and Out in Paris and London.
Orwell didn’t know much of the work in the kitchen, as a matter of fact he thought that it would not be that hard of a job to begin with. As we can already imagine, things turn out to be a little different than expected for him: the job per se isn’t hard, but the hours are unbelievably long and by virtue of being a plongeur (dishwasher) he is placed on the lowest level of the kitchen hierarchy and thus gets randomly cursed by everyone:
“[…] “Do you see that? That is the type of plongeur they send us nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot? From Charenton I suppose?” (There is a large lunatic asylum at Charenton.)
“From England,” I said.
“I might have known it. Well, mon cher monsieur, L’Anglais, may I inform you that you are the son of a whore?”
I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitchen, for I always made some mistake; I was expected to know the work, and was cursed accordingly. From curiosity I counted the number of times I was called maquereau during the day, and it was thirty-nine.”
Despite working in such a classy and high-end environment, Orwell revealed some particulars that shocked him in relation to his expectations, things such as how the chef would repeatedly touch the food before it was served or even taste it using his dirty hands:
“When a steak, for instance, is brought up for the head cook’s inspection, he does not handle it with a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runs his thumb around the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs it round and licks again, the steps back and contemplates the piece of meal like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovingly into place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he has licked a hundred times that morning.”
A common misconception about the kitchens is that everything is tidy and clean. Although we can say that nowadays things have gotten way much better following stricter controls and regulations, it is not uncommon to find restaurants with very old and poorly maintained cooking spaces. Orwell was impressed by how dirty the service quarters were and how untidy the cooks and the servers kept themselves. In one paragraph he describes perfectly a scene where a waiter, impeccable in his look when among customers, would just wash his face in the same sink where dishes were washed and then proceed to take the next order. As already stated, things are now much better, nevertheless Down and Out is a must read for anyone who has worked in the restaurant industry as many scenes depicted in the book have not changed that much with time (the front of house vs back of house conflict, the long hours, the low pay, and so on). I won’t quote here each of those passages to leave you something to find out yourself and ultimately not to give away too much of the book.
Moving on to another topic often discussed at the lindy table, Orwell perfectly describes the condition of the plongeur as a modern slave:
“I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem world”
This last passage is consistent with the view we hold at the lindy table that modern employment is ancient slavery. In the Lindy Newsletter Basic Concepts (4HL), Paul outlines the position of the 4HLer as it follows:
“Hired for reliability
No optionality
Downside
No upside
Consistency
Ability to be disciplined”
This is exactly what is asked to line cooks and kitchen staff in general. The plongeur is not hired for his particular skills or personality, to the employer, this does not matter. What is being asked to the plongeur is to be efficient and consistent with the job, to show up in time, to take all the downside of a mistake but no upside if the job is well done; there is no “good” plongeur, only plongeurs that do their job and those who don’t. Again, from Down and Out we read:
“One cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR; they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible.”
This sounds much like the mantra “you are a complete slave, you are a complete victim”. Another accurate observation coming from Orwell is how the work of the plongeur is unnecessarily prolonged: the daily routine is made up of a series of small tasks that could be reduced with a better overall organization, therefore also reducing the working hours and the workload:
“A PLONGEUR is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure.”
Although it would not be feasible for a cook to work from home, it would be possible for him to have reduced hours, to get a longer lunch break, to enjoy an extra day off. If you are a cook or a waiter, most of the times you have the feeling that the employer wants to forcefully keep you at work. This could well be because it’s cheaper to have four cooks working 80 hours per week than having six working 50 hours per week, and so on; but the doubt still remains: make the cook one with is job and he won’t have time to be idle.
Take also into consideration that the life of the cook does not entail any Sunday or “pull of the weekend”, on the contrary, holidays and weekends are usually the hardest days in the kitchen. In the Lindy Newsletter The Weekend and the 4HL we read:
“Friday is a big day for the people in Consistency Space. Everyone can feel the impending weekend rise over them like a warm glow. Manipulating their gait, posture, thoughts, words. The pull is invisible but everyone feels it.”
Cooks don’t participate in this collective euphoria unless they are lucky enough to get the weekend off, in that case many of them would go out for a drink and eventually end up getting wasted. It is definitely not a healthy behavior, but it’s a coping mechanism, a way to counterbalance the overstressing working conditions. We talked about this with Kab in the previous issue of the newsletter.
It is of our particular interest to note how Orwell spends quite a few paragraphs describing not only the labor conditions, but also the atmosphere on the job. We often hear from our mutuals stuck in white-collar jobs about how the working environment plays a huge role in further demoralizing and depressing the 4HLer: vertical lighting, low ceilings, non-tactile materials, and so on. In the passage portraying the first time the protagonist enters the kitchen, the place is unsurprisingly described as a “low-ceilinged inferno”:
“The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps.”
We had a special issue of the Lindy Newsletter entirely dedicated to ceiling height (Ceiling Height Matters) where we read:
“High ceilings may not cure a crippling drug addiction or a gunshot wound. But it certainly seems to have mattered to my mental health and how my thoughts are generated.”
Is it only by chance that cooks are squeezed into small kitchens mostly filled by stoves and shelves and with the air reaching prohibitively high temperatures? Sure, it can be because kitchens are often housed in old buildings or in the basement as the best-looking part of the structure is rightly reserved to the floor and the customers. It can be all a matter of coincidences, but the effects are real and take a toll on the cook: spending 12 hours in a kitchen with no natural light and few small windows is detrimental in the long run. More frequent breaks would help the cook by allowing him to go out for a breath of fresh air more often than he currently does, but to many employers this does not seem to be a priority.
Down and Out in Paris and London is definitely a must read for all those stuck in consistency space and even more for those who have worked or are still working in the restaurant industry. In this issue we did not address the second half of the novel, namely the account of Orwell’s life in London amongst tramps and beggars; I still highly recommend reading the whole book, although the first part alone could be enough to give a good intuition of the connections between Orwell’s account of the life of the plongeur and the 4HL concepts we so often discuss.
I want to conclude this issue with a quote that perfectly summarizes the 4HL, the Consistency Space vs Payoff Space dichotomy, and the modern condition of the 4HLer:
In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except ‘Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it’? Money has become the grand test of virtue.
Dear reader, thank you for reading this issue of the Fernet con Coca newsletter. As usual, I wish you buon appetito e buon lavoro.
Good article. Will need to check out that book
i liked this post. do you plan on writing anything more soon? if so Ill give oyu a sub if this blog is still active