A (3:33)

Yeah. So it's a book that really resonated with you. I mean, we'll talk later about you being, in a way, a kind of Orwellian fig. I mean, you wrote a book about being down and out in a certain sense, but. But let's start with this book. So can you just tell folks, what is this book about?

B (3:49)

The first half of the book, Orwell describes his experiences as a young man. He's kind of 23, 24 years old, living in kind of hostels, wards, homeless shelters, and he gets a job in Paris. As the French word, I'm probably mispronouncing it plangour.

A (4:09)

Yeah, it's good enough for me.

B (4:11)

And the word translates essentially to kind of busboy, dishwasher. And some of those passages from the book are the most memorable where he's describing the kind of misery of scrubbing dishes in a hotel basement. People are coming and going, the cooks are screaming at each other, the servers are yelling. All kinds, you know, different languages, all corners of Europe. You hear German cooks yelling at French waiters, yelling at Orwell, who doesn't speak either. And he's just attempting to describe the order that arises out of this chaos. You know, the kitchen of this hotel restaurant, everyone's shouting, there's bells being rung, food that needs to be prepped. There's a nice line in there where Orel describes his restaurant work as it's like sorting a deck of cards against the clock. And I was a dishwasher when I'd read that. And so I'm reading this and I thought, yeah, that makes sense. And essentially Orwell's saying that this kind of work, this menial work in a restaurant, it's simple enough. I mean, it doesn't take a lot of brain power to do, but it's a challenge in the sense that you are pressed for time always. You know, the next dish needs to be cooked, that table needs to be cleared, these plates need to be scrubbed. And every time you turn around, there's another task that needs to be accomplished, and you're constantly pushing against it to prevent the patrons from waiting too long. And so his description of that kind of chaos was fascinating to me. And then his descriptions of living among the people who were down and out in Paris, people who were down on their luck, some of them were born impoverished, others found themselves penniless over and. Yeah, Orwell is just describing this from the vantage point of someone who himself was born into privilege and was attempting to get into the minds of these people, the interior thoughts and reflections and everyday experiences. And Orwell describes what it's like when you're living day to day, week to week. He talks about how your whole world shrinks to your job and to the neck day you have off the next meal you might have.

A (6:24)

This is not a novel in the. In the traditional sense of the term. In other words, you. You began by saying Orwell himself went. Well, how do I put this? He went to Eaton, he went to all the finest schools. And he comes in and. And wants to be a writer and has these writerly ambitions and has written some things. They haven't gone off that well. And so in a way, he goes on a journalistic adventure and we should talk about that and how that might color the book. But when you say he met these characters, when you say there's this dishwasher, when you say these sorts of things, these are things that really happened to Orwell. And so this book is, in a certain way, a piece of journalism mixed with memoir and that sort of thing. And he meets these three characters that really stood out in my mind. The first is that while he's in Paris as a dishwasher, he meets a man named Boris, who's a Russian who has a kind of lame foot, who is sort of eternally optimistic. Always seems to kind of sabotage himself, though, and sabotage their hopes of getting jobs and these sorts of things. And then he meets this in London, this man, Paddy. And Patti seems sort of resigned, maybe resentful, uneducated. And then there's a third character he meets toward the end, which is a man named Bozo. And I think that's how you pronounce it. Could be Bozo, I don't know. I Hope it's not bozo, because I really admire this character who's an intellectual kind of artist and thoughtful poor man. And it occurred to me that what Orwell seemed to be doing, since he himself was not poor, was exploring the pathologies of poverty by way of sort of trying to live the life, but also by isolating different aspects of it and different aspects of the psychology of poverty through the exploration of these characters, These three in particular.

B (8:18)

Yeah. Well, I think it's to Orwell's great credit that he did not attempt to impose any ideological doctrine in advance where he. He tells. So all three of these men have roughly similar sort of physical, material conditions. And Boris had an injury, but in terms of their poverty, they were very similar, and yet they responded to it very differently. And I think Orwell is trying to say here that there's a subjectivity to it, that each person experiences poverty in a different way, that you can't make these blanket statements about the poor and how they're going to react or how they're going to behave, that if you put 10 people in a very impoverished environment, you'll have 10 different unique stories and how they'll react to it. And Orwell himself, I think, struggled with this as well, because he. It was kind of a version of slum tourism, this book, because he himself was not. He was a person who came from relatively prosperous means, his parents and his family, and he was putting himself through these conditions, and I think he was wrestling with. Through each of those stories, what is poverty? How bad is it? How are we to think about it?

A (9:29)

Yeah, I wonder what you make of. I. I thought Boris was particularly interesting. He's the first character in the book who Orwell kind of teams up with. He promises him. He's like, look, man, I know we got nothing, but I know I can get us a job. I can get us a job in Paris. I'm. I'm a waiter. I'm not just a waiter. I've been the head waiter. I got this. So he's always telling Orwell, tomorrow's the day, man, tomorrow's the day. And, like, Orwell finds him living in an apartment with another guy who, like, pays him a little bit of money every day. This guy, Boris, and this guy lives off of, like, nothing. And Orwell comes to visit him every day, and they go and get some small amount of food, and he promises them, hey, you're going to. Tomorrow's the day we get a job. And they never do. And then they get offered a job, and then the Guy's like, well, let's not take it, because there's this other restaurant across the way that's going to be better. We should go work there. And so it occurred to me, I know people. You know, I grew up in a small town a lot of folks didn't go to. I know people who, like Boris, have the best intentions in the world for themselves, but. But they cannot seize an opportunity. And they're constantly victims of self sabotage. And I find this to be pretty common among friends of mine who didn't grow up in affluent circumstances. I did not myself. And they can't see that opportunity. And I wondered if you had a reflection on that, if you've met people like that in your life where they're this close to getting out, there's an opportunity that comes their way and then they sabotage themselves and it happens over and over and over.

B (10:58)

That's interesting. Yeah, I had it. I hadn't fully connected those dots until you started to describe because Boris is so optimistic and upbeat.

A (11:05)

Yeah.

B (11:05)

And I do know people like that, who I grew up with, who kept getting, in their own way, these self defeating behaviors, but they were, they were optimistic in a, I guess, a less cheerful way, where just almost like this arrogance or bravado, like, it's always going to work out for me, things are going to go well. Whereas Boris was almost kind of, kind of humorous and less confrontational about his feelings about the future. But, yes, I think there is something there. There's a fear, I think, of success, of something if you grow comfortable with the conditions of squalor or poverty or disorder, and then finally there's an avenue out and there's this fear that maybe, maybe you'll have to adjust to a new way of life, that maybe you won't measure up, or that if you succeed and then come back down, there will be a kind of a humiliation or a disgrace. Whereas if you continue at the place that you're at, you never have to worry or set your sights any higher. And I was shocked repeatedly throughout my life. So, you know, trying to extend a hand to some of the guys I grew up with. And sometimes they would say yes, but then they keep putting it off. And in other occasions, they would just flat out say no. They have their own thing going on, like they don't need help. There's a kind of a pride there, too. And it took me a long time to accept that. Most people, even people who are doing well in their lives, they do not like unsolicited advice. They just, you Know, if they come to you and ask, even then it can be risky. How you frame the advice. You never want to seem like you're better than someone else. But people who, you know, just shocked I was 19, 20, 21 years old and just kind of starting to get my foot on the ladder and telling my friends, hey, like, this is working out for me, or why not? Why don't we try that? And I, I had one friend who, who kind of took my advice out of. Maybe I probably tried to give unsolicited advice. Maybe 10 or 15 guys, one of them sort of took the advice. So gives you a sense of, you know, just. Yeah, how, how, how little it can. It can help unless the person is mentally prepared for it. But I guess this is one of the points Orwell makes, too, is that when you've lived that life for. So be hard to capitalize on opportunities when they present themselves. Yeah.

A (13:22)

And I mean, I, I think that's true. And like, I know guys who, they'll get a job and it'll be their whole sustenance, and they don't hesitate to walk away and quit. Like, if they're get. If they get mad at somebody on the construction site that day, they're out of there. You know what I mean? And I, for me, I don't have that in me. Like, if it's. I will do anything you say because I need this money. But I, It's. It amazes me, in other words, the way people who I know, who are, as Orwell might say, down and out, have the kind of courage to stick to that. Like, you could take this job and shove it. So let's talk about Orwell's presentation of poverty. You've alluded to that several times in your remarks. But one aspect of this that I think can't help but bubble to the surface in any discussion of it is, you know, Orwell himself wasn't, as you've said, a man of no means or of low means. And so there's some question, I suspect, especially it would be raised in a classroom in our time, about the veracity of the presentation. You see this all the time. Could a white man write a novel about a black woman having not been a black one? Well, can a rich person write an examination of poor people without having been a poor person? So there's some question here about the veracity of this account, and I wonder if you have thoughts on both that subject, which is such a hot subject today, but also about Orwell himself and his attempt to, in a Certain sense go and embody in a. People might even derisively say role play, you know, a poor person. Is that kind of authentic and legitimate? Is that just what journalism is, simply and so. Or is that, you know, is that something we should take kind of, you know, offense at or something like that?

B (15:03)

Yeah, well, it's probably useful to know that that's what this book is, that you know, something of Orwell's background before reading the book. Whereas for me I felt this, you probably unfair sense of betrayal when. So I read the book, as I mentioned, in high school, I knew nothing of, or I knew wrote Animal Farm, but I knew nothing about his background or how he had grown up, you know, that he was an eaten man. And then I pick up this book and yeah, I found it fascinating, his account and then later discovered, you know, how he'd grown up, but then later, kind of through my own experiences with social mobility, of recognizing that in some ways it's probably helped that he was speaking from the, from the vantage point of someone of relative means, because it got other people to listen and pay attention to him. Whereas, you know, if, if Boris had written this book or a similar account, probably fewer people would have taken it seriously. For better or worse.

A (16:01)

One of the reasons I tell my students to read books is and to read widely and especially to read biography and autobiography, is that one of the things that reading a book allows you to do is live the life of a person who's not you. And you have a boring life. Your life is one. It's, you know, you're going to live your one 80 year chunk and then it's over. But there's a way to become fuller, a way to become wider, a way to become more vital, and that is to take the lives of others into yourself. That's what the imagination does. And so to say that Orwell doesn't have access to, to poor people because he wasn't one, is to deny the power of the imagination, to give to you some transformative insight into the life of another and allow you to contain some piece of them within you. So if I read a biography of George Washington or Frederick Douglass or Sandra Day o', Connor, I teach some of these people. I contain pieces of them in me, even though I'm not a slave from the 19th century, I'm not a guy from the 1700s, and I'm not a woman who's coming up, you know, in the late 20th century. So I just think that criticism denies at its essence the power of what literature is which is to take something that is alien to you and allow it to be metabolized into you through reading.

B (17:20)

Well, what Orwell did, I thought was, and a lot of other authors who've adopted this journalistic approach is it can also help those very people they're writing about understand their own circumstances in a different way. So one passage I really like from down and out in Paris and London is when Orwell arrives at a Spike, a government run homeless shelter, and he's nervous because he's not technically homeless, he's got his parents, and so he's taking a bit of a risk and he was risking arrest potentially for taking a bed in one of these shelters, which maybe there's some ethical kind of a dubious quality there, but he tries to enter this shelter and learn what it's like to stay in a place like this. And the person who oversees the shelter asks him his occupation, or what was his occupation? And Orwell says, a journalist, I guess. And the guy says, oh, so you're a gentleman? And Orwell says, oh, I suppose so. And then the guy says, you know, very bloody bad luck, Governor. Like that's really bad. Like, suddenly he expresses this immense sympathy for Orwell. Like, oh, a journalist, a gentleman in a homeless shelter. That's awful. And he. So usually when they were processing the intakes, the new arrivals, they would search their belongings and their bags and make sure they drugs, weapons, contraband, whatever, and they didn't. They skipped the invasive search for Orwell, let him in later, they give him a clean towel. They don't do this for the other wards. And Orwell, he's kind of reflecting on this ingrained class prejudice that, you know, they, they treated him differently, even though materially he was apparently no different than anyone else. He was down on his luck, but his background, his accent, his occupation, suddenly he's, you know, he'. He's being treated in this very different way. And that this respectability is a kind of a resource on its own. And I think a lot of people, poor people included, wouldn't necessarily connect those dots until they saw someone writing from that perspective.

A (19:17)

Yeah, yeah. So his difference gives him access to something in the inquiry that he wouldn't have had access to had he not been different from those folks.

B (19:26)

Exactly.

A (19:26)

Which is another benefit. The book is really split in two. I mean, we've talked about the characters with, you know, Boris and Patty, and you've got this guy Bozo. But I was curious to get your thoughts on why Orwell thinks it's important to present Paris And London, in other words, down. And it's not down and out in Paris and it's not down and out in London, it's down and out in Paris and London. And the kind of poverty that he experiences in each place is different. So in Paris he's working like a dog. I mean it's, he is working for, you know, what is it, 14 hours a day. I mean, he goes through his whole schedule and it's just like, you're just like, geez, my God. At this restaurant, as this kind of dishwasher, as you've pointed out, you know, just has time to like sleep and get back to work sort of a thing he gets. So he, he does that for a while, it wears him out. He hears from a friend in London that there's some kind of disabled child there that needs a caretaker. And if you can get to London, you can get a good wage by being a caretaker for this child. And so he resigns his job. And I mean, resigns, that's a very formal term for a dishwasher. But leaves his job in Paris and comes to London. He gets there and there's a hold up, the parents have decided they want to wait or they're out of town. I don't really remember what happened. There's a holding. So he's got to kind of hang around London and just kind of be idle and bored and get by on very little money and nothing in the street. And so you get this half of the book that's work, work, work, no time for thought. You're not bored because you're working so hard. And then this half of the book that's like, what am I doing? I'm just, I'm just here, I don't, I'm bored. I don't have a job. Those are two very different aspects of poverty and two very different kinds of poverty.

B (21:09)

Yeah, in Paris, Orwell is kind of what people might today call like the working poor living on the margins of society, very sort of working class poverty, struggling to make ends meet. And you know, he talks about foregoing laundry and all of the like, the accompanying and petty humiliations along the way of, you know, now that you don't do laundry, you smell differently and you smell differently, so people treat you differently and people treat you differently and it affects how you see yourself and so on. And then in London it's much more of a like sort of unsheltered poverty. You know, he's, he's homeless, he's struggling, he's sleeping on a bench along the embankment, and he's staying in these homeless shelters. There may be some cultural component there as well, that there are sort of layers of poverty, depending on how you look at it and what your experience is, but then also which country you're in, what city you're in, what incentives are. Are in place for you.

A (22:02)

Yeah, I got. It's interesting you bring up that cultural point, because when he says toward the end of the book that one of the problems is that people seem to think that these folks who are out in the streets, the tramps, as they're called, that's his term, that they don't want to work. He says, no, they do want to work. And that got me to thinking, because you mentioned, well, is there a cultural thing I wondered about America? What is the character of American poverty? Is the character of it that people don't want to work and that's the cause of it, or is it they do want to work and they can't get a job because he claims these folks are working people, especially someone like Patty. He would have been a great laborer. He can't hold down a job. And so the cause of his poverty is not idleness, it's not vice. He's a virtuous man in the sense that he wants to work.

B (22:49)

This book was published nearly a century ago, 92 years ago. And my suspicion is that you probably didn't have to make that many mistakes to be down and out into the early 30s, late 20s, early 30s, especially if you were already sort of barely making ends meet. And so the people who were poor, they did want to work. They were different. It was a different time. You know, developed Western countries were less prosperous, fewer social services available, far fewer powerful recreational drugs. I mean, Orwell talks a lot about, you know, the pleasures of a cigarette, tobacco. When you're poor, you gotta take what you can get. These sort of small joys. But. And alcohol, you know, alcohol plays a role in the book as well. But, you know, there's no fentanyl, there's no opioids, there's no heroin. And I do wonder if today, you know, the character of homelessness is different because of those reasons that, you know, do they want to work? Some of them maybe do. But if you're, you know, motivational systems are hijacked by substances and mental illness and all these other things that were seemingly less pervasive, at least the kind of poverty that Orwell was writing about, that, you know, people are responding differently and. And maybe, you know, back then, work was also Emphasized as a sort of a cultural norm. It was valorized. If you didn't work, you were a bum, you were a tramp, you were all, all these pejorative names for a young, able bodied male who wasn't working. Whereas today a lot of those, you know, it's, it's less stigmatized.

A (24:29)

There's a character in the, in the book named Boso who is educated in the sense that he's reflective. In other words, he's the only character who Orwell meets, so far as I recall, who, when he meets him, he has admiration for him. And he seems to say, this guy's special. And there's, I can't remember the exact line, but he, he deeply enjoys these conversations with him. And one of the things that Bozo has, so his job, as jobs go, is that he seems to be a kind of artist. He draws in chalks, like apparently just beautiful pictures on the sidewalk. People come by and sort of pay him or something like that for these. But he also has a peculiar capacity to make sense of his circumstances. In other words, he's impoverished, he's down and out on his luck, but that doesn't bother him. In other words, he's not resentful about it. Not only is he not resentful about it, he seems to think in a way. I mean, he's almost kind of like a Zen sense making apparatus. It's the way of the world and we shouldn't be upset about these things. And there's a kind of depth and peace and comfort in his poverty because it permits him to devote himself to certain, I don't know, I don't want to say philosophic sort of reflective and artistic pursuits. And so there's this difference between educated poverty and uneducated poverty. In that Orwell, who is himself educated and Baso, who is at least reflective, seem to be able to reflect deeply on this poverty, make sense of it. And it doesn't touch their hearts in a kind of corruptive and demeaning way. The other characters, Boris and others, I mean, it's really degraded them. They do very degraded things. And so I wondered about the kind of difference between being impoverished as a person who's educated. There's a great example of this in the Western tradition. A man by the name of Socrates who has no money and is yet somehow rich in his reflection versus being impoverished and being uneducated and how that shapes one's understanding of one's circumstances.

B (26:36)

I also wonder if there's maybe an increased sympathy for the less educated Poor, because it almost seems like Baso, and especially in the case of Orwell, that their decision to live this way is more of a choice, that if you are educated, you can find a way. I mean, maybe you're not going to, you know, basically making these drawings and these paintings and these artistic works, but he could probably find a way to acquire work in some other way to sustain himself. But he chooses to do this. There seems to be an element of agency involved there. Whereas for someone like Boris, far fewer options. It seems like less of a choice. There's more sympathy that he elicits and we feel worse for him, I think. Yes, like the example of Socrates, too. And you're able to make peace with it, maybe in a different way too, because you're so reflective, this sort of metacognitive, and stepping back and observing my circumstances and maybe using them as a way to. Or turning these experiences into a kind of art or creative expression, as Baso does with his artwork and Orwell does with his writing. Whereas most people aren't especially creative and aren't especially interested in the intellectual expressions of their suffering.

A (27:52)

Hey, y'.

B (27:52)

All.

A (27:52)

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B (28:16)

Nope.

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B (29:17)

Oh man. Well, I have a couple of different passages that encapsulates the book.

A (29:22)

That one or some point that you think is profound and worthy of chewing on for a little bit.

B (29:26)

Well, so one that I really liked and I think we alluded to it earlier where he says there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced 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. And I think there is, if there is a passage that encapsulates the book, that might be one of them because he's describing here how much his world has shrunk. He's in Paris now and he's working and he's struggling to make ends meet and he's. You said working these 14 hour days and that's everything. He doesn't have to worry about his future anymore. He just has to worry about tomorrow and maybe this coming weekend, his next day off, the next cigarette, the next meal. And there's a feeling of liberation there. You know, all of the status anxiety has been lifted and you don't have to compare yourself to anyone anymore. You just have to think about survival. And yeah, there's an interesting sort of feeling of freedom that accompanies that.

A (30:39)

What does that mean when he says you've got this fear of being down and out? Like, and I think, I think anybody, anybody who is well off even can have that fear. But he says once you become it, it's kind of like relief in what does that relief? I mean, I'm trying to get a hold of that a little bit more because I think from the vantage point of the outside looking in, that's the last thing on earth that you want. And it's terrifying. But he's sort of saying no. When you've got it, you guys make it actually worse than it is. When you actually become the thing and you're poor and you're on the street and you got 50 cents in your pocket, that's what you got. And you're not, you're not scared of it anymore. It's like, so what is that? What does that relief consist in?

B (31:21)

You don't have to make choices anymore. Your choices are made for you. If you have money and options and prosperity and a lot going on in your life, you have to make often Sacrifices, trade offs, compromises, tough decisions, decisions how you're going to spend your time, what you're going to prioritize in your future. And when you're poor, it's just, you have no choice. Just you go to work tomorrow and then you eat, smoke your cigarette, eat your meal, visit your friend, maybe have your, you know, a cup of tea. And that is the extent of your world.

A (31:51)

Yeah.

B (31:52)

And there is a. A strange feeling of, of relief there. And I think the fear of that may be actually worse than the experience itself might be that the fear of losing everything can be more powerful than when it actually occurs. And realizing, as Orel says, well, here are the dogs and you can stand it and you're okay. And you learn something new about yourself as well. Sort of this maybe inner resources you didn't know you had.

A (32:20)

Yeah, there's a kind of hardening and calcification that comes with the, the school of experience. Yeah, very good. I. Let me do something. I've got a passage that I want to read to you. I don't normally do this, but it reminded me of you or at least of some of the work that you do, and I wanted to get your reaction to it. I'm going to abbreviate, if you don't mind. But let me, let me just read this out loud. This is when he's talking about the reason that well off people, or maybe even middle class people, they can't, they sort of can't stand or can't understand people who are down and out, poor people. And he says this fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races. But in reality there is no such difference. Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? And so I wanted to ask you about that quotation because one of the things that he's saying here is there is a, a problem in that people who are well off and who supposedly have liberal opinions don't mix with the poor. In his work, the conclusion is they're scared of them. They think they're a mob, they think they're terrifying. They're supposed to be these people of liberal opinions, but when a homeless person comes around, they're like, that's a guy's a piece of trash. Get him away from me. Somebody arrest this guy. In your work. It's a kind of different insight. It's that people of so called liberal opinions, just like Orwell says, they don't mix with poor people either. But then what begins to happen is that they have views of what's good for these people that they can hold themselves, that these people don't have the luxury to hold. And so Orwell's saying it makes them scared of these folks and makes them, you know, get these dirty people away from me. And I can of course see that you're sort of saying the same lack of mixing happens, but they then begin to like attribute to these people what they think is good in ways that these people themselves might not think is good. Does that make sense? So I want to get you to reflect on, on that difference and that insight from Orwell.

B (34:43)

Yeah, and if anything, things are probably worse than in Orwell's day. Sort of class stratification has hardened even more. I think, at least in the US context, Things might be different in the UK but that same pattern holds. And it's funny, it's a different country, it's a different time, it's a century ago and yet still it resonates, it's familiar to us, that same way of thinking, those same sort of behavioral and mental habits. Well, it's true, I would say today very few people who have a bachelor's degree, especially from a selective university, probably never had a 20 minute conversation with someone who didn't go to college. No one in their network hardened more and more along education and socioeconomic status. And so as that distance grows though, the confidence that you know what to do for everyone else seems to either sort of maintain itself or even increase. And this I think introduces a lot of potential cultural political instability where you don't know these people, you don't spend time around them, but you have an idea of how they should be living or what's good for them or what policies might be helpful. Not only do a lot of, you know, upper middle class people believe they know what's good for these people despite never having spoken with them, they don't even look at the data. I mean, okay, fine, you're not going to go into these neighborhoods, you're not going to spend time with them, you're not going to rub shoulders with them. Okay, at least read about them, at least look at the data. What do they believe generally? And I mean, this was famous examples which I described in many different forms of the whole. The defund the police thing, decriminalizing drugs, decarceration, all of these things that are very popular among, you know, supposedly sophisticated, credentialed people. You see far less support for those ideas among people who have less education, who are, you know, low, lower income people, you know.

A (36:48)

While reading this book, I couldn't help but think of your own memoir. We invited you out to Princeton this past year to give a talk on your memoir, which is troubled. And I wonder if you might kind of tell people what that's about because I think that will help people understand why this book affected you so much.

B (37:10)

Well, you know, it's a 300 pages. I'll try to condense it very briefly. I open the preface of Troubles, introducing myself to the reader through my. My full name. And so my full name is Robert Kim Henderson. And my first name, Robert, comes from my biological father, who I never met. The only information I have about him is his name, which was given to me later by some social workers. My middle name, Kim, comes from my biological mother. So she came to the US from Seoul, from South Korea as a young woman and became addicted to drugs and her life very quickly unraveled. So we, when I was a baby, we were homeless for a time, lived in a car. Eventually we moved into this slum apartment in Westlake, which at that time in the early 90s, was a pretty rough part of Los Angeles. And when I was three, some neighbors called the police and they saw the squalor we were living in. My mom was shooting up and strung out. So the police and some social workers arrived and put me into the Los Angeles foster care system, where I spent the next just shy of five years living in seven different homes all around la. And then this is where my last name comes from, which was. The Henderson family adopted me and we moved to this kind of dusty blue collar town in Northern California called Red Bluff. Very working class town. Most of the adults didn't go to college. I was situated in Tehama county, which is one of the poorest counties in the state. It's a part of California no one knows about. It's very rural, very kind of provincial, remote part of California. A lot of crime, a lot of poverty. At that time in the 90s, meth was becoming popular. The opioid crisis was kind of kicking off and becoming more apparent. Um, and in the book I describe the, you know, my, my adoptive parents divorced, a lot of financial catastrophes and drama, turmoil and so on. And my friends in this town, despite, you know, they weren't Foster kids, like the kids I'd known in la, but they had kind of family lives that were also fragmented and difficult and neglectful and abusive. And so I describe kind of how we grew up and how we reacted to this in different ways. I had two friends from high school who went to prison, another friend who tried to join a gang and was shot to death. And so one reason I fled as soon as I could. Why I enlisted was to just attempt to get away from all of that.

A (40:06)

And then you found yourself in the military, you get out and then tell me about what happens when you get out.

B (40:13)

Yeah, well, I. Yeah, so I enlisted for. It was eight years in total in the Air Force. And I needed all eight of those years to figure. Figure out what I wanted to do, to develop, to mature, and then finally started to take my future seriously. I describe how in high school, I was a very unfocused student. You know, I read books, but I wouldn't do the homework. It was very scattered, where I'd get an A in a class, one class because I liked it. Then I'd get a D plus in another class because I didn't like it. That's kind of, you know, where my head was at as a teenager. And finally, 24 years old, I realized, oh, I can use the GI Bill. And, you know, long story short, ended up going to Yale. At Yale, despite the fact that this was the place where people had lived, you know, and all the institutions I've been through, unquestionably, these were the most, whatever, affluent, privileged, comfortable group of people, but they loved talking about themselves more than anyone I'd ever met in my life.

A (41:18)

I love it. Yeah.

B (41:19)

And I realized, okay, I became more comfortable talking about myself after spending time with them. And then I think that did lead me to becoming more open to the possibility of writing a book. Whereas prior to those experiences, I think I would have thought, oh, this is. There's something immodest or something. I don't know. I had this sort of resistance to talking too much about my life.

A (41:42)

Our producer used a really interesting phrase when we were going over this. We were talking about you, that you're kind of a reverse Orwell. Namely, he starts out at the. Kind of at the top with the Eaton and goes down and sort of, you know, gains insight into the phenomenon from the trip up to the bottom. You start out from your memoir at the bottom and go up to, you've been to the Ivy Leagues, now we're sitting in New York. All these things. We could talk. So I'm curious. And there's a sense in which you're flipped, right? You're both circling around the same social problem in two different eras, to be sure, and you're both writers, but you're coming at it from an inverse perspective.

B (42:24)

I think there's the similarity. Yeah, there's something there where we start in different places and then end up opposite. Although Orwell kind of had he kind of loop back around, you know, after the successes of his book, although he died in sort of relative poverty. I mean, it wasn't, it was like a genteel poverty towards the end of his life. But yes, I think that's right also in the sense that Orwell started, you know, he said kind of at the top and then attempted to describe poverty from the position of someone who wasn't poor. Whereas in my case, you know, especially a lot of my commentary about elite universities, elite institutions, where I'm attempting to describe what I'm witnessing, the culture of elites from the position of someone who wasn't born an elite. And so we're doing maybe this kind of. There's a reverse anthropological ethnographic thing here where he's describing the poor to the rich and I'm attempting to describe the elites both to people who are not elite, but also to elites themselves. And that's been. I receive emails and messages from people who are also first generation college students or people who grew up poor, people who had rough lives or immigrants to America. And they say, oh, I read this essay or whatever and they say, oh, like this helped me to understand what I'm seeing. And so I wasn't trying to do that, but I think kind of class differences are always sort of inherently interesting, especially to people who are outside of that class, but even to people within that class, because sometimes it does take an outsider to, you know, illuminate something that maybe you wouldn't otherwise see because you're, you're adjusted to it, you're habituated to it, it's just your life. And for me, that was a challenge. You know, you were writing about my early life because none of it stood out to me when I was growing up in foster homes and in poverty and so on, that none of it seemed especially notable or interesting. And for me, the interesting thing is elite universities, because that's so foreign to me. And I'm looking at this and I'm trying to take it all in and point out all the differences and details and everything, but I noticed for a lot of people who went through those institutions, they're interested in that, but they're more interested in the early part, the part that they're unfamiliar with. So we like those things that we are not ensconced in.

A (44:36)

So what do you make of this? This is kind of a body point, but I can't resist it. You know, toward the end, Orwell finally comes out and makes some kind of theoretical claims. So the whole thing has, in a way, been, for the most part, he occasionally stops and makes an observation, but it's mostly been kind of, you know, narrative journalism. Here's what's happening, here's what I was doing, here's how this went. But at the end, he basically says, look, there are really three problems of poverty. One is hunger, another one is idleness, that these people need a purpose. And he, you know, especially he talks about Patty and his willingness to work, but he just didn't have a job. And we've got to find a way to give these people purpose. But the central one is most interesting to me, and that is that one of the deepest problems that people who are down and out face is their access to women. And he says, you will find in society that those who are down and out are majority male. And it's like an extraordinary proportion. And I don't. You may know the statistics about this in America today, I don't, but that they're mostly men. There's not that many women. He says women can find somebody to work for, to marry, to take them in, whatever the case may be for men, it's not true. And so he says, you get a lot of men who don't have access to women. And throughout, you know, Boris and Patty and all these people are talking about women and fantasizing about women. There's a terrifying. When you call it a rape scene or something in the beginning of a woman. And so women. And the. The problem that down and out men are for women, like, is pretty frontwards in this book. So I wanted to ask you about. I mean, you know, this has the kind of culminating insight on Orwell that a lot of these men turn to homosexuality because they don't have access to women. And so I don't know if you have thoughts on this, but I saw this and thought this is a pretty interesting psychological feature of poverty that I think a lot of folks aren't thinking about.

B (46:33)

Yeah, yeah, I remember those passages, especially in London, when he's talking about the tramps and how, you know, women go out of their way to avoid them, the male tramps, the male homeless, and Yeah, I. It's, It's. It's interesting because it. If you read something similar today, it would immediately you'd think, oh, this is sort of incel. Incel related kind of commentary here of people who like men who are down on their luck and are romantically unsuccessful. And it's interesting that he talks about that because you would think, oh, hunger is the priority, right? Like, you need to eat first, and then you can worry about, you know, romantic partners and, and intimacy and those things. But no, he. He says that that might be even more humiliating in some ways to be unwanted as a person. And to your earlier point, you know, so. So there are more. I don't know the exact figure, but there are more homeless men than homeless women, at least in the US and then there are women's shelters and all these services available that men don't have, and probably that too plays some role, that you feel you're on your own in some way, and you got to make it work. And I've often wondered if in some ways that kind of rejection is especially hard. Roughly speaking, it seems like men are evaluated more holistically than women are, at least at first glance. Where men in some ways are more superficial, where they'll look at a woman and oh, do I like her? Do I not like her? And base it a lot on appearance. Whereas when women evaluate a man, there's. Appearance plays a role, but all these other factors. And if you're rejected, in that case, it can be painful because you're not just rejected for being unattractive, but you're rejected because as a person, we don't really, you know, we evaluated you on a bunch of different categories. Still. Still uninterested.

A (48:27)

Yeah.

B (48:28)

And I wonder if maybe Orel was describing something like that, about the idleness and the feeling of. Because he talks about the smell. Being poor. You smell bad, you look bad, your mindset shrinks. Everything about you becomes less attractive.

A (48:53)

The word of the day today is tramp. It came up in my conversation with Rob because the whole book is about tramps. Orwell goes and becomes a tramp. A tramp is somebody known sort of as a vagrant who wanders around, not much, but the clothes on their back, maybe a little pack, looking for work, just the change in their pocket. There's a movie, 1915, Charlie Chaplin, called the Tramp, which encapsulates this concept. Well, but of course, the Disney movie with the cute dogs, lady and the Tramp. So a tramp, you should avoid being one.

C (49:36)

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A (50:05)

This book is full of sort of peculiar insights that you just, on a daily basis, you don't think about. You said at the top of the show that you found this thing when you were what, 15? This is something I ask everybody, but. And it's, I mean, the baldest way to ask it is who is this book for? You know, I see books sitting on a shelf and I walk through a Barnes and Noble. It's like walking through a pharmacy. I think every book is a medicine for a certain kind of ailment. Maybe you're there and you're going through something in your life. I don't know, you lost your job, you got a divorce, you don't know what to do, you know, and you find a book, maybe it's a novel, maybe it's a self help book and you pick that up, you pick this thing up at 15 at a pretty vulnerable time in your life. Who is this book for? What is this book medicine for?

B (50:47)

Well, for me, it was attempting to make sense of my own experiences. You know, I mentioned growing up in foster homes and in poverty and in kind of chaos and family squalor and you know, to see, oh, like this is a famous author who went through, you know, these impoverished circumstances and attempted to make some meaning out of them and some interesting reflections and insight and recognizing, oh, you can go through this and can come out and rise above those circumstances. So I think I was, I wouldn't have been able to articulate this at 15, but I think that's what I was attempting to pursue. I was searching for stories like that. I wasn't trying to understand poverty as a concept. I wasn't trying to understand, you know, the man behind in 1984. I just wanted to understand, you know, someone else's experience and brush with poverty and what, what they got from that and, and, you know, hopefully to turn, turn it around.

A (51:40)

Yeah, I think that's the most profound way of reading this book. You know, I was thinking earlier, I taught Animal Farm recently and you know, the students in there, we had read some marks. You know, everybody wants to like, have this theoretical insight. And I thought Well, I could teach this book down and out, but everyone would just sort of say in some highfalutin, you're talking about elite universities, some highfalutin way that this is really the beginning of Orwell's flirtation with socialism. And he goes on to be, you know, famously democratic socialist, but a staunch anti solonist. And we could go over all these isms and these sorts of things about Orwell and his socialism and his Stalinism and we could academize this thing. But I like what you said so much because it humanizes the book. Don't come to it for that.

B (52:19)

And I think it's one of the beauties of the book is that he doesn't attempt to impose a doctrine of, oh, I'm going to take a socialist approach or a Marxist approach or anything. He only mentions communism once. Very briefly, this group approaches him asking him to write articles for their English language newspaper in Paris, and they offer him 100, 150 francs per article, which I think today I looked this up when I read the book, those passages recently, it was something like US$180 equivalent. And that's like really good money when you're down and out. And so he agrees immediately. And then he returns to this organization and finds that they're gone, they've boarded up, and essentially it turned out to be they were swindlers attempting to scam people out of membership dues. Yeah. So, you know, that's the only time he mentions it. And he doesn't use this as a reflection of, oh, they're exploiting the idea of communism or egalitarianism or anything. He just says, well, all right, back to the kitchen, wash more dishes. And that is what you would think if you were someone in that circumstance. You wouldn't start to have all these highfaluting, abstract ideological thoughts. You would think, oh, well, there's my chance. Make 150 francs just went out the window. Back to work.

A (53:28)

One feature of Orwell, famously that brings readers back to him is his humor. I mean, Animal Farm, which I've recently read, is sort of hilarious. I mean, it's animals talking, first of all. And one of them is called Napoleon. I mean, the whole thing. And it's Stalin as a pig. And so, I mean, clearly Orwell is irreverent. This book has a kind of, I don't know, today you'd almost call it a black comedy or a dark humor. And I wondered if you might reflect for a moment on the way Orwell uses humor to acquaint readers with the phenomenon of being down and out.

B (54:02)

Yeah, well, I think a lot of it is. It's a British kind of humor, English humor. It's very dry. And I remember there was one line that stood out to me when I read it for the first time and still resonates now. Orwell's reflecting on returning to London from Paris, and he says, the thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. And that line stood out because at that time, I was thinking, what am I going to do after high school? And that line jumped out at me when I was thinking about enlisting, which I later did when I was 17. And it's a very kind of cynical, you know, oh, I'm patriotic for these kind of materialistic reasons. You know, he has an interaction with a shopkeeper, he's trying to sell his coat, and the guy refuses. And Orwell thinks something like. You could see his French soul reveling in the pedantry of it. And, you know, he has a kind of a biting anti French, this kind of ethnic humor that maybe you wouldn't see as much today. And, yeah, it's refreshing. And you can sense there's a kind of a deeper frustration whenever you see those kinds of lines that are kind of darkly amusing.

A (55:22)

Some of the things I found most funny in the book were his observations about Boris and just the way Boris took such concern over his appearance, but has basically nothing and has, like, one shirt collar that he turns inside out and like. But, you know, he wants to appear like a head waiter in a man of pride and dignity at the same time that he's, like, a total vulgarian when it comes to, like, his thoughts about women and eating. He eats like a pig, and he's kind of a crook, but he. You know what I mean? And so just to see the juxtaposition of this man, both his vices and his virtues, I thought was quite comical.

B (55:58)

Yeah. There's another funny line in the book, too. So it just occurred to me where. And he uses the humor. It's somehow inoffensive, the way he does this, where he's describing, there's one poor guy. I don't think it was Boris, but he is describing how this guy, he put on his tie, and he tied it in such a way as to hide the holes in his shirt.

A (56:19)

Boris. Yeah.

B (56:20)

Was it Boris?

A (56:20)

I think so.

B (56:21)

Okay. Okay. Yeah. And then he puts on his sock, but the sock has holes in it. And so then he puts shoe polish on his ankles.

A (56:27)

That's Boris.

B (56:28)

When he pulls the Sock up. And then you. And then by the time he was all finished up with all these tricks, he actually looked like a half decent, respectable man. And you're laughing as you're reading all of these different ways that Boris tries to present himself and yeah, it doesn't feel like he's mocking him in any way. There's an admiration of wow. He's put himself together because he's touching.

A (56:52)

On something sort of deeply human about all of us. You would do the same thing if you needed to have your socks trucks, you know, look good. Let's move to a lightning round.

B (56:59)

Sure.

A (57:00)

First question for you. What place would you choose to be down and out? Paris? London? I don't know.

B (57:07)

Oh, man. Maybe, maybe la, weather's nice. Or San Diego. You know, I, I, you know, if you're, if you're sleeping outside, the worst places to do it than, than the beach.

A (57:19)

Yeah. What is, this is an odd question, but what is the best thing about being poor?

B (57:26)

You don't have to think as deeply about your future. And on the one hand, that's it. There's a misery associated with it, but also a feeling of liberation of, I mean, even the kinds of jobs, the job where you clock in and clock out, where you're paid by the hour, once you clock out, you're done, you just brain dump everything. You don't have to think, you don't have to look at your email. There is, I sometimes think about that, think, you know, the job itself sucked, but once I clocked out, I was done. I was like a different person in work and out of work. Whereas now you're always on.

A (57:52)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, now that you've, you know, worked your way to the, to the place that you have, what's the best thing about not being where you were when you were a kid?

B (58:04)

Everything. Everything. You know, I know I just said, oh, E. Bell, whatever, but those are, those are such trivial complaints. Yeah. Just being able to, you know, do what you like, spend time with the people you enjoy being around, not having to worry about bills. Yeah. Just everything about it. You know, I, when I, when I first got a house with some of my, my friends when I was enlisted, we moved into this house off base. And at the time I didn't know this, but, you know, I had to pay first month's rent, last month's rent and a security deposit paid all of this and that drained my bank account entirely. And I remember just feeling kind of embarrassed because I thought, I'm in the military, I'm very patriotic. I'm no longer poor or whatever. And then my bank account is drained. This is in 2009. So all my roommates are like, oh, we're gonna go see Avatar. The Avatar movie had just come out. I'm like, oh, I can't go, I have things to do. I made up some excuse and just feeling like even then, oh, I thought I made it. And still I'm struggling and unable to do something like that. But on the other hand, during that two week period when I was waiting for my next paycheck, I could just say no to everything. And there was something nice about that too.

A (59:18)

So, you know, you, you have gone around the country talking about your, your life and of course this concept that you came up with, the luxury beliefs and that sort of thing, which is, you know, people who can afford to hold beliefs that others can't for various reasons. I'm curious, what's the most harmful? As you've been talking about this and people ask you this question, what's the most harmful luxury belief that you think has kind of emerged in our culture?

B (59:41)

The most harmful? Well, they're all harmful in varying ways, but I think one, the one that I've probably discussed the most is the denigration of marriage of two parent families, of that kind of family unit as being important because all the other luxury beliefs, flooding the streets with drugs and removing police and all these other kinds of things, you know, those will always present difficulties. But it's much more difficult to bear something like that when you have no family, when you have no loved ones, when you feel sort of disconnected. And I think it's having all kinds of downstream effects. I think the denigration and disintegration of the family also is related to the decline in marriage, fertility rates, all kinds of things. But maybe that's a separate conversation.

A (60:40)

We're going to end on two book questions because this is a books podcast. What is the book that our listeners should read but they probably haven't read yet?

B (60:48)

Well, I guess the book that we've been discussing down and out in Paris and London since we're discussing Orwell, if you read this book and you enjoy it, he wrote another kind of journalistic memoir, this kind of account of poverty, the Road to Wigan Pierre, which was published four years later in 1937, where he's describing coal miners and in this case he doesn't actually live as a poor person, but he's just describing, and it's much more reflective as well. And he does describe politics, socialism, social class. It's a more mature kind of book instead of just, you know, here's what I'm going through and here's what I'm experiencing. It's here's what I'm witnessing and here's what it means. And so in a way, they're kind of two pieces of this puzzle of at least Orwell's account of poverty.

A (61:40)

Now let's turn the question on yourself. What's the book you should read but you haven't.

B (61:44)

Oh, man. Fifty Shades of Gray. I don't know. There's a stack of books on my shelf that I should be reading. None of them. I mean, there's a lot reading Montaigne's essays. I'm like 10% of the way through that book.

A (62:02)

Well, that's an amazing book.

B (62:04)

Yeah. I mean, it's superb.

A (62:06)

Rob Henderson, thank you for coming to Old School. It's been a pleasure.

B (62:09)

Thank you. Shiloh.