Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "siegfried-sassoon"

As promised, I have returned late this Tuesday night to wind up "Orwell's Other Novels" by examining two of his very best: KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING and COMING UP FOR AIR.

KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING (1936): Written only a year after A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER, this novel shows for the first time an inkling, if only a remote one, of the events brewing in Europe which would eventually lead to the Second World War. I do not mean that it has anything whatever to do with war or makes any mention of contemporary European politics; simply that its protagonist has a vague awareness that the civilization in which he lives is about to be blown to hell with bombs -- not that he doesn't welcome the prospect!

Gordon Comstock, at the age of thirty, is already a decisive failure. The grandson of a robber baron who died with £50,000 in the bank, Gordon makes slightly less than £2 a week working in a flyblown bookstore in the dark and anonymous heart of London. Once he was an up-and-coming writer at an advertising agency, the last hope of a family of losers who squandered Gran'pa Comstock's fortune and left him with nothing but a legacy; but he threw all of that away to become a full-time poet. Gordon had a theory, you see: that no artist could make art when kneeling before what he calls "the money god" (i.e. capitalism). Therefore he would "chuck up" his well-paying job and work in a bookstore by day, while writing scintillating poetry at night, all the while smug in the knowledge that he had not sold out to the almighty dollar -- or rather, the almighty pound sterling. Only after he has quit and begun to embrace life on not-quite £2 a week does he come to the horrifying realization that without money -- in other words, without tobacco, hot food, comfortable lodgings and access to women -- he cannot summon up the creative energy to write. At the same time he is bitterly disappointed that his girlfriend, Rosemary, will not sleep with him, and that he cannot see his rich friend Ravelston more than once in a fortnight because good-hearted old Ravelston will inevitably offer to buy him dinner or loan him money, and the only thing worse than being offered charity is the temptation to accept it.

The plot of ASPIDISTRA is quite simple. Gordon "has made war on money," believing this to be the only ethical thing for an artist to do, and he is determined to carry his war to the poorhouse and, if necessary, the grave. At the same time, his war on money has rendered him so poor -- "so down at heel," as Orwell puts it -- that when he stumbles home from his seventy hour a week bookstore job, he has no energy to do anything but furtively brew a cup of tea, read a Sherlock Holmes story, and go to bed. Everyone in his life -- sister Julia, girlfriend Rosemary, friend Ravelston -- is nagging him to take a different course, but to Gordon, poverty is synonymous with credibility. If he cannot actually be an artist, he can at least starve like an artist, and go "down into the muck, into the sub-world where decency (capitalist respectability) was impossible." When Rosemary gets pregnant, however, Gordon must make a choice -- pay for an abortion (something he regards as an abomination), leave her to raise the baby alone so he can continue to make war against the Money God, or sell out and return to the British equivalent of Madison Avenue, to write jingles for soap, perfume and breakfast cereal.

ASPIDISTRA is a vivid, occasionally black-comic and often deeply depressing look on the effects of poverty on an intelligent and well-educated man. There is scarcely a social humiliation which Gordon does not experience because he lacks money, and, being English, humiliation is to him much worse than physical pain or even death, (Orwell writes an excruciating chapter in which Gordon recklessly spends money to impress a snobby waiter at a second-rate hotel restaurant), and yet it is the gritty, everyday details which really stick: Gordon's landlady forbids him to brew tea in his room, so he must do it on the sly, listening at keyholes and dumping the used tea-leaves down the toilet as if committing a crime. Gordon desperately wants a beer and some companionship after twelve hours in the bookstore, but he is too embarrassed to pay with his sole coin, a threepenny bit, which is traditionally given to children with their Christmas pudding ("How can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit? It isn’t a coin, it's the answer to a riddle.") Gordon takes Rosemary to a high-class restaurant, is brutally snubbed by the waiter, and spends his entire wad of cash trying to save face, only to discover he has not enough money to pay for their trip home.

There can be no doubt that the reason why ASPIDISTRA rings so true as a story is because Orwell lived every moment of it in his real life: the dirty, shabby clothing, the perpetual shortage of cigarettes, the filthy meals taken in third-rate little restaurants, the dingy furnished rooms presided over by nosy, mean-minded landladies, the sexual starvation, the endless stream of rejection letters, the ghastly Friday-night loneliness, and worst of all, the constant social snubs. Hemingway once famously quipped that "a man shouldn't write what he doesn't know" and Orwell knew this subject like the back of his ink-stained hand. It is true that ASPIDISTRA has a few issues: Gordon, though sympathetic in some ways, is not always very likeable, and it is true that most of his woes are self-inflicted, which will make it hard for some readers to care about his fate. Orwell, too, repeats his main themes too often in the narrative and perhaps contrives to humiliate Gordon one too many times, just as he did John Flory in BURMESE DAYS. On the whole, however, this picture of artistic near-poverty in the middle 1930s is as timely today as when it was written.

COMING UP FOR AIR (1939): The last of Orwell's "other novels" is also his best. It is at once an almost heartbreakingly nostaglic portrait of life during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a stinging commentary on "modern" (meaning pre-WW2) English life, and a dire warning about the future -- a terrifying future Orwell would later discuss with nightmarish clarity in his masterpiece, 1984.

George "Fatty" Bowling is an insurance salesman who lives in the inner-outer suburbs of London. He has a nagging wife, two pain-in-the-ass kids ("Unnatural little bastards!" he calls them), and mouthful of false teeth. As his nickname implies, he's also extremely fat. To add to this list of woes, George also suffers from a strange condition, which he calls "a hangover from the past." Lately, as his marriage has become more intolerable and the shadow of world war has fallen over Britain, he has begun to obsess more and more about his childhood in Lower Binfield, an idyllic market town on the Thames River where he grew up around the turn of the twentieth century. At the same time, he broods incessantly over visions of postwar Britain: "It's not the war I'm afraid of," he says over and over again. "It's the after war." He's convinced that the civilization he grew up in, which is already dying, will be finished off once and for all by the conflict and replaced, in its aftermath, with something which is the precise opposite of his fondly-remembered childhood world -- a world where things like the radio, the bombing plane, the secret police, and even motor cars were not only unknown but unimaginable. George develops a longing to "get back into the past," and, when a lucky bet at the racetrack puts £17 (three weeks' pay) into his pocket, he decides to sneak away from his wife and family for a week and return to Lower Binfield, which he hasn't seen in twenty years. George wants to know if, in a world as noisy, crowded, uncertain and anxious as the one he lives in now, it is still possible for a man to catch his breath and find peace.

COMING UP FOR AIR is a remarkable novel in two separate ways. Orwell's reconstruction of small-town life in the late 1800s-early 1900s (the very heart of the late Victorian-early Edwardian eras of which we spoke in the last blog) is so wonderfully atmospheric and evocative that you would swear you were right there, amidst the smell of Sunday soap and hay, beer and horse-droppings. This was the time of Orwell's own childhood, and while he makes it clear that life was in many ways harder in 1901 than 1939, he also makes it clear that it had something 1939 lacked: an inner peace that came from the belief that the world you lived in would survive you -- that everything you believed in and loved was in essence immortal, even if you were not. I could quote endlessly from the boyhood-young adulthood chapters of this book, passages on fishing, making mischief, cutting school, laboring in a shop, reading adventure stories, and so forth, but a single passage, in which George observes his mom making dinner, will probably be sufficient: "I used to like to watch Mother rolling pastry. There's always a fascination in watching anybody do a job which he really understands. Watch a woman -- a woman who really knows how to cook, I mean -- rolling dough. She's got a peculiar, solemn, indrawn air, a kind of satisfied air, like a priestess celebrating a sacred rite. And in her own mind, of course, that's exactly what she is. When she was cooking, all her movements were wonderfully precise and firm. In her hands egg-whisks and mincers and rolling pins did precisely what they were meant to do. When you saw her cooking you knew that she was in a world where she belonged...So far as meals and so forth went, ours was one of those houses where everything went like clockwork. Or no, not like clockwork, which suggests something mechanical. It was more like a kind of natural process. You knew that breakfast would be on the table tomorrow morning in much the same way you knew the sun would rise...Our meals were ready on the tick. Enormous meals -- boiled beef and dumplings, roast beef and Yorkshire, boiled mutton and capers, pig's head, spotted dog and jam roly-poly, with grace before and after...Sometimes the heat of the fire, or the buzzing of the bluebottles on Sunday afternoons, would send her off into a doze, and at about a quarter to six she'd wake up with a tremendous start, glance at the clock on the mantelpiece, and get into a stew because tea was going to be late. But tea was never late."

In addition to his past, however, George gives a swift if deadly assessment of modern (1930s) life in Britain -- a place ruled by anxiety over money and fear of unemployment, with the rich getting steadily richer while the middle class fight desperately to remain middle class while hanging over an abyss of poverty. The disillusionment of Bowling after he returns from WWI and discovers "nobody wanted to pay me two thousand a year to sit in an office with streamlined furniture dictating letters to a platinum blonde" turns into a kind of grim horror as he realizes jobs that pay even a pound a week are scarce, and that he will have to fight tooth and nail to get one, much less keep it. Yet the really astonishing quality of the novel is its unexpected, farseeing political angle. Fatty Bowling's view of the postwar future is terrifyingly similar to that of 1984, and shows how long Orwell was meditating on the idea of a totalitarian ultra-state (he didn't write the latter novel until 1949) -- a world of "slogans and colored shirts and voices over the loudspeakers and crowds screaming about how much they love the Leader even though deep down inside they hate him so much it makes them want to puke." Though this fear is in the background of the story and is not its focus, it forms a sort of shadow, like the shadow of the coming world war, which chills George and perhaps adds impetus to his desire to escape back into the warmth of the past.

I have tried in these last two blogs to give the reader a sense of George Orwell before he came to fame and immortality, when he was a struggling young writer often living in, or on the fringes of, real poverty. I have also tried to explain how his early novels are quintessentially English in character, and chronicle a class of people -- specifically a timber merchant, a clergyman's daughter, a failed poet and an insurance salesman -- who make up a strata of English society which many other "quintessentially English" writers ignored, or otherwise rendered in purely comic fashion. In doing so -- in tackling the anxiety and humiliation of poverty, and the things it drives human beings to do to themselves and to others -- Orwell managed to achieve something which Charles Dickens and Jane Austen did not: specifically, he managed to write about people who, rather than being fascinating specimens of an extinct era, occupy at once an entirely foreign and yet hauntingly familiar world.