George Orwell, the Manchester Times, and the Paris Adventures of Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith
George Orwell did not go to Paris merely as a young Englishman in search of poverty, authenticity, and copy. He went as a semi-official correspondent of the left-wing Manchester Times, a paper so advanced in its sympathies that it believed hunger should be investigated personally, though preferably by a junior contributor. As the contributor, Orwell's assignment was to report on the working poor of Paris: dishwashers, hotel drudges, Russian émigrés, and clerks fallen on hard times.
There was one editorial condition. Orwell was to be accompanied everywhere by Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith, an energetic Capuchin monkey on loan from the primate house of the Manchester Zoo. The arrangement was part journalism, part educational outreach, part circulation scheme. The newspaper had discovered modern promotion, and the zoo had discovered that a capuchin photographed better than a hungry socialist.
Thus Orwell arrived in Paris with notebooks, shabby clothes, moral seriousness, and a monkey wearing a tiny press badge and possessing, according to the handbill, a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.
This credential caused immediate difficulties. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith could not read, write, or speak English. Yet whenever Orwell sat down to describe the poor, the monkey climbed onto the table, dipped one paw into the ink, and produced bold black smears across the checkered tablecloth. Orwell bristled at the monkey continuing to share equal writing credit.
The Paris half of Down and Out is built on the mathematics of deprivation. As Orwell loses money he discovers how quickly life contracts to bread, lodging, pawned clothes. Poverty is repetitive, technical, and full of small humiliations. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith has no sense of money.
But the monkey did have an expert sense of opportunity. When Orwell counts his remaining coins, the monkey stacks them neatly and steals the largest. As Orwell and Boris, an unemployed Russian waiter, discuss survival, the monkey opens a drawer, finds a crust, and appears to endorse the political protest of direct action. Boris takes this as a good sign. “He is small,” Boris says, “but he understands the restaurant business.”
Eventually Orwell becomes a plongeur, a dishwasher and kitchen drudge in a grand Paris hotel. Above stairs, the hotel is polish, ceremony, mirrors, napkins, and service. Below stairs, it is heat, grease, curses, fatigue, and dirty water. Luxury, writes Orwell, depends on keeping labor out of sight.
And keep the monkeys out of sight. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith is not suited to being kept out of sight. He darts through the scullery, steals vegetable peelings, riding briefly on a tray of dirty plates. A few times a week, he enters the dining room holding a silver spoon like a parliamentary mace. The management is horrified. The guests assume it is some English custom.
His Columbia degree becomes a joke below stairs. Whenever the patron issues an impossible order, someone says, “Ask the American professor.” Orwell points out that the monkey cannot write, but this carries little force in a polyglot hotel where nearly everyone is illiterate in someone else’s language.
The plongeur’s life is the heart of the Paris section: fourteen-hour days, endless washing, aching feet, missed sleep, and the slow narrowing of the mind. Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith alone seems immune to mere proletarian exhaustion. He swings from pipes, overturns pitchers, and picks and grooms the hair of a sous-chef who has lost the will to resist.
The publicity campaign from Manchester grows more absurd as conditions worsen. Telegrams ask whether Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith can be photographed with “authentic Parisian workers,” preferably cheerful ones. Orwell replies that the workers are not cheerful. The paper asks whether they might be made cheerful by a modest honorarium. On queue, the monkey offers a handful of coins purloined from a nearby street performer.
At the end of the year, Orwell publishes. In the usual account, this lesson comes through Orwell’s clean, hard prose. In the Manchester Times account, it comes through scenarios repeatedly interrupted by a capuchin monkey with a press badge, excellent balance, and an instinct for appearing just where European civilization is trying to hide the dirty plates.
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SIDEBAR - THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
What if Throttlebottom-Smith had held an honorary, rather than earned, degree?
Had Mr. Throttlebottom-Smith held only an honorary degree from the Columbia School of Journalism, the joke would change materially — a distinction of real importance in the academic classification of imaginary monkeys.
An earned degree suggests toil. It implies that he had once endured seminars, deadlines, faculty criticism, and perhaps a difficult but much-cited thesis on municipal banana distribution. It suggests late nights, poor drafts, marginal comments, and a tense final meeting with an adviser who felt the chapter on peel allocation among the workers lacked sourcing.
An honorary degree, by contrast, would make him not a journalist but journalism’s ceremonial monkey: processed across a commencement platform, photographed beside a dean, applauded by trustees, and gaudily praised for “historic contributions to tree-based observation,” while understanding none of it except possibly the buffet.
