DERVLA MURPHY

A Note on the Text

Down and Out in Paris and London was first published by Gollancz on 9 January 1933 and by Harper & Brothers in New York on 30 June of that year. A French translation–of considerable importance in the establishment of the text of this edition–was made by R. N. Raimbault and Gwen Gilbert, entitled La Vache enragée, and published by Gallimard, 8 May 1935. Unmarked page proofs (the Proof) of the first London edition came to light some forty years later. They carry the date, 1932, on the title-page, the title is given as Confessions of a Down and Out in London and Paris, and the author simply as ‘X’. Eric Blair’s choice of the name ‘George Orwell’ stems from his letter of 19 November 1932 to his agent, Leonard Moore. This edition is based on the first London edition amended in the light of La Vache enragée, a translation which Orwell greatly admired, in contrast to that of Burmese Days, which he described as ‘VERY BAD’. (There is a second translation into French, Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres, by Michel Petris, 1982, which sticks much more closely to the English-language edition.)

Victor Gollancz, who encouraged Orwell as a writer and published his first books, was very cautious of running up against the law, a danger even more prevalent for publishers at that time than it is today. It was not so very long before the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London that Henry Vizetelly had been jailed for publishing the novels of Emile Zola, an experience that ruined his health. On 1 July 1932 Orwell told his agent what Gollancz required:

Names are to be changed, swearwords etc. cut out, and there is one passage which is to be either changed or cut out. It’s a pity, as it is about the only good bit of writing in the book, but he says the circulation libraries would not stand for it.

That ‘good bit of writing’ (Charlie’s story, chapter II) was not, in the event, lost, though it was evidently modified. On 6 July 1932 Orwell told Leonard Moore, ‘I have crossed out or altered the phrases that seemed to show too definitely what was happening & perhaps like this it might pass inspection.’ Evidently it did, though no details have survived. (Leonard Moore’s last surviving letter to Orwell, written a couple of month’s before Orwell’s death, requested the cutting of 140 lines from the Spanish translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four which, it was feared, would strike the Argentinian authorities as immoral.) The Proof shows that there was a further glossing-over of swearwords and a couple of interesting passages of rewriting. On page 68, line 11, ‘he farted loudly, a favourite Italian insult’ was changed to ‘delivered a final insult in the same manner as Squire Western in Tom Jones’. On page 82, lines 23–4, ‘Hôtel——, after some famous prostitute who was born in the quarter, I expect’ had to be changed to ‘Hôtel Suzanne May, after some famous prostitute of the time of the Empire’. The Proof also shows that Orwell added three more footnotes.