George Orwell - Keep the Aspidistra Flying

N.B. This is not my copy. Mine is in much better condition but I haven't got a decent scan of the cover.

London: Secker & Warburg, 1936 (this ed. 1954)

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I must admit this is a bit of a cheat - I’ve read this book several times already, but not since I was at university. But my wife gave me a gorgeous copy of the book on the morning of our wedding as a present, and I just had to read it again. It came from the estate of Harold Whitaker, an animator who worked on Animal Farm, When the Wind Blows and The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, all of which I adore, and also The Poddington Peas, which I merely admire. This edition originally cost 12 shillings and 6. Worth every penny.

About the Author - Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name of George Orwell, is one of Britain’s most-admired literary figures. A novelist, journalist and essayist, his adventurous life took him from Imperial India, Revolutionary Spain, and many points between, where his sense of social justice and critical instincts sharpened his prose until he was known as one of history’s most formidable men of letters. He is best known for Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose ideas and images have entered the global lexicon. He died in 1950 from complications from tuberculosis.

Plot - Gordon Comstock, librarian and sometime poet, is living a miserable hand-to-mouth existence since quitting his job at an advertising agency. He is living in a single room, having to ration out his cigarettes and hide his nocturnal tea-making from his landlady, who rules with a rod of iron, occasionally working on a longstanding epic poem, 'London Pleasures'. He has been seeing Rosemary, though their relationship is chaste. Devoid of inspiration, optimism and above all, money, Gordon is nearing thirty and drifting under the stormclouds of war. Instead of aspiring to better his station, Gordon has long since declared a private war on money. It is society’s convention in pursuit of money which ties him down, and it is his intention to live outside of that world as much as he can, reliant on the hope his stubbornness will somehow lead him towards a world not dominated by how much he has in his pocket.

Review - Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published in 1936, and was informed by George Orwell’s experiences over the preceding decade or so. His tramping around the capital, which coloured Down and Out in Paris and London; his time working in a Hampstead bookshop; his small commissions for the Adelphi journal – Orwell, like Comstock, wobbled between respectability and penury. Aspidistra was one of three early works of which George Orwell claimed to be ashamed (he labelled his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter “a silly potboiler”), but while this novel would never challenge the peerless and celebrated works in his canon, Aspidistra is a biting and self-conscious book, and that’s because it’s largely targeted at Orwell himself.

Orwell was a deeply contradictory figure: former Imperial policeman and socialist guerrilla; Old Etonian and itinerant bum; BBC journalist and creator of the monolithic Ministry of Truth. A writer whose work is suffused with appalled fascination with dirt, smell and poverty yet at once repelled by it. One of Britain’s greatest ever authors, associated with the Lion and the Unicorn, and yet scornful until his dying days of patriotism and the myths of Great Britannia.

All of his characters are hiding something: Winston Smith’s inner war over his human soul; George Bowling’s flit with his horse racing winnings away from his frustrating married life. And so it is with Gordon Comstock (incidentally, how expert was Orwell at naming his everymen?). Gordon’s world is utterly dominated by the evils of money. It is the reason he cannot be happy, because he cannot afford the basic pleasures which would allow him the mental freedom to be creative. He cannot afford to treat his girlfriend, and it is for this reason she will not sleep with him. He can’t stop into pubs and have a beer, he can’t heat his room and concentrate on his writing, he can’t replace his worn clothing and feel respectable.

And yet Comstock is obsessed with the dream of having money enough not to worry about it. There is never any suggestion in Aspidistra that work or talent is enough to create that lucrative end: Gordon wants to go from poor to rich and miss the many and varied stations between. Aspidistra’s London hums with the ring of cash tills, the rustle of notes and the clink of pockets of shrapnel. The opening chapter, Gordon considering how best to make his five and a half pence stretch to the end of the working week, is a brief lesson as to the inner snob of Comstock – he will not spend his threepenny bit, not because it is worthless, but because it embarrasses him. He eventually throws it into the gutter.

Orwell contrasts Comstock with Ravelston, a man of regular means and not a little wealth. Ravelston considers himself a socialist and runs an alternative journal called Antichrist, which sometimes publishes Comstock’s work, and the writing of other furious, poor poets, all of whom you suspect are clones of Comstock. Ravelston is embarrassed by his own wealth. Too rich to enjoy it but not silly enough to give it all away, he instead assuages his own guilt by drip-feeding it to the likes of Gordon. In this way Orwell is able to satirise both sides of the equation: the faux-working classes for their petty jealousy and the moneyed for their mean, bleeding hearts. Not until the end of the novel, when Comstock has been sacked and taken a job right in the heart of underclass Lambeth, does he feel some kind of peace. However, Ravelston swoops in and insists on plucking Gordon from the foul pile in which he rests, taking him home, bathing him and insisting on providing charity.

So how do we feel about this? Is it a mere plot device to hasten Gordon back to respectability, or is Orwell commenting on the Dickensian trope of the philanthropist saving the deserving poor while leaving the rest to fester? Orwell the man always seemed far more comfortable in the muck and bullets, even if it sometimes disgusted him: the Republican trenches, the flophouses and restaurant kitchens, the workers’ front rooms. In fact, Gordon’s descent into real life, even if the characters who accompany him there are well dressed in cliché, allow the man to breathe properly. No restrictions, no mean-spirited regulations for the sake of appearance. Contrast this sharply with the potted history of the Comstocks in Chapter Three: the family name made because of a frugal ancestor and expectation carried on regardless of talent or application. Gordon himself, because he is a boy who attended a minor school, is expected to make the name great again, and the pressure on his petit bourgeois body is considerable.

You can tell the effect this has on his world-view: Gordon loathes those with money but his real ire is trained on those who don’t have enough of it but live as if they do: the aspidistra owners, in their tiny units and partnerships who fall into the money trap. That will never do for Gordon Comstock, poet of “exceptional promise” and author of Mice. He will never fly the aspidistra in the window of a soulless suburban hell, and this is how he convinces himself he is content with a kind of mocking working-classness. But he cannot see that the real underclass live hand to mouth, worrying about food and lodging, not cigarettes and whether a landlady will laugh at his thru’pennies. He even calls his poem 'London Pleasures', trying to contrast the capital’s modernity with the misery of its unfortunates, even though he is expert in neither.

In all sorts of ways, you could read Comstock for Orwell, but a large number of wannabe writers, me included, will identify with him. The trope of the artist in the garret, wanting the wider world to notice their immense talent and blaming their isolation on shitty luck, is a well-worn one yet nowhere near played out. The thing that lies beneath undeserved success is almost always a case of hard work: conservative in outlook, perhaps, but nevertheless true. It is a fact of life that a great book will always go unpublished if you wait for somebody to ask to read it – Comstock of all people should know this, being published as he is. Mice, his unlamented collection, has arguably put him off but in reality what scares Gordon is the notion that he’s not really a writer at all, at least not one he cares to be.

As a copywriter at the New Albion Gordon shows a flair for snappy and memorable soundbites and is thus in demand. This idea, often mentioned by Aspidistra’s protagonist, turns his stomach. Writing for profit? Ugh. But Gordon likes the idea of lump sums for writing something he loves, but not a regular income for writing something he thinks is beneath him. It’s this snobbery which drives the book, not money. That’s why the central target is a harmless Victorian affectation rather than banks or government: an aspidistra is something you buy because it fills a house, which demands in most cases a regular upkeep. Comstock is a childish, mothered fantasist, and in large part unloveable. His logic frustrates: I find copywriting undemanding, ergo the money I earn for it is worthless.

Caught in the middle of this is the naïve Rosemary, a old colleague at the agency who for some reason has kept faith with Gordon, his pathetic reasons for immaturity and his whining about his money philosophy. Rosemary is the humanity in Aspidistra. She has no real airs, save for wanting to get married, have a baby and a nice suburban home. When you’re a teenager, that ‘surrender’ is perhaps unpalatable but not when you’re Gordon’s age, and I’d wager in 1930s Britain not uncommon.

You feel for Rosemary, reaching that dangerous spinster age (Gordon’s sister, Julia, works a miserable job in a tea shop and seems to be playing out her last years decades too early) and attached to Gordon. Even when he gets a juicy cheque from an American magazine, he declines to spend a portion of it treating his long-suffering partner (or even proposing) and instead tries to blind her and Ravelston with a meal he cannot possibly afford. It’s this event which precipitates his final decline, but until Rosemary submits to his physical desires they remain nothing but adolescents.

If a criticism can be levelled at Rosemary it’s that she places Gordon on much too high a pedestal, but mores at the time could explain that. They are, after all, from the same class (regardless of the association in his name, Gordon is far from being of the common stock), and while critics will always argue over Orwell’s portrayal of women, it’s not really Rosemary’s story. Her later pregnancy shows how strong she really is, telling Gordon she will keep his baby whether he marries her or not, and for the time I cannot imagine how difficult a life that would have been.

Eventually Gordon comes to his adult senses, goes back to New Albion and marries Rosemary. They rent a flat, place an aspidistra in the window and furnish the rooms, and it’s the first time they seem like a partnership. The aspidistra, for so long the flag of defeat, is their flag in the ground as the Comstocks. It’s bitterly ironic that in a few short years, flags of all nations will hugely affect their happiness, but then who ever gets their timing exactly right?

As I mentioned before, for better or for worse I see a hell of a lot of myself in Comstock. I pushed maturity away through fear, and continue to battle confidence and worth in my working and creative life. Having recently gotten married myself, I can state that adult decisions are some of the hardest yet most rewarding things you navigate in life, and personally my only regret is that I didn’t take some of them sooner.

However, I also recognise how annoying it must be for the other party waiting on you, and Aspidistra is that thought process in print. In the years since I read it, Gordon has started to annoy me a lot more (much like Holden Caulfield), with his denials and his moaning about things well within his control. What I remembered was a man raging against the dying of the light, and what I actually read now is a character wanting to be spoon-fed. I suspect this is encroaching middle age, but I also see shades of what Orwell talks about in his criticism of his work: in later hands, Orwell’s Comstock could have had some nobility, but as it is he’s skewered and stuck, like a squealing piglet.

This is not to say Gordon is not self-aware about some of his peculiarities, but rarely does he spot his Achilles heel: that ingrained snobbery about every aspect of his life. He is his own worst critic and his greatest champion. No surprise to see a man with such difference in another George Orwell novel.

It’s perhaps unfair to compare this Orwell with the battle-worn, highly politicised writer of Animal Farm, given at the time he was a teacher, bookshop worker and working out who he really wanted to be. But I wouldn’t dismiss Keep the Aspidistra Flying out of hand because of this. It’s still biting and is a lot more lyrical than perhaps it needs to be: a London between the wars, on the brink of social chaos, clinging grimly on in a stiff breeze. Like the tatty advertising posters in 'London Pleasures', we all eventually give in to forces stronger than ourselves, but Aspidistra’s central moral is within the book’s title and the opening lines of Gordon’s poem: like the sharply bending poplars, those who survive move in life’s storms, and like the hardy aspidistra, you are stronger than you realise.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - Of course. I can’t see me ever getting rid of this book, for both its sentimental and literary value.