I’ve been reading D.J. Taylor’s enormous overview of 20th-century English literature on and off for four or five years. It’s called The Prose Factory, which isn’t a great title for a book that also covers poetry, but it’s certainly been interesting. Like anybody with a private interest, some things loom larger than perhaps they ought – and with Taylor it is George Orwell. He’s obviously a significant figure of the 30s and 40s, but it’s astonishing how often Taylor manages to mention him.
I’m actually thirty years further forward in The Prose Factory, but picking it up reminded me of its Orwell-dominance, which in turn reminded me that I wanted to read more Orwell. I’ve read the big-hitters – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – and I’ve read Homage to Catalonia. I thought all of them were brilliant, and have had several others for many years. Simply because it’s been on my shelves the longest, seventeen years, I took down Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) recently.
I think Orwell might fall in that category of author you don’t see mentioned that much in the blogosphere, simply because we all read him long before we started book blogs. I don’t remember seeing a review of this one, or any of the lesser-known novels, and it’s a pity because it’s rather brilliant. I’d love it for the opening scene alone.
Gordon Comstock is the ‘hero’ of the novel, and as it opens he is working in a secondhand bookshop that also functions as a library for twopenny books. He is working on his own poetry, and has had a volume published that the Times Literary Supplement said showed promise. The extended scene in the bookshop/library is effectively to set up Gordon’s position on a scale of intellectual snobbery. I’m glad I read it now rather than seventeen years ago, because I think most of the names in the passage below would have meant nothing to me then – whereas now I can understand them as Orwell intended the reader to: as a barometer of the reading taste Gordon is setting himself against.
Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright. They were ranged alphabetically. Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell, Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole. Gordon eyes them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. Pudding, suet pudding.
Some of these names might only be familiar if you’ve studied popular culture of the period – does anybody read Warwick Deeping now? – but others have lingered. It’s a mix of the middle-class and the lower-middle-class, all with pretensions above their stations. Those who read Galsworthy thought themselves intellectuals; those who read Ethel M. Dell probably thought themselves above those who read westerns. All of it makes bitter Comstock feel angry and repelled – and bitterness is the keynote of his personality.
He lives in poverty – or, at least, poverty for someone of his education and intelligence. The only people he sees are a rich friend called Ravenstock, who tries to help get his poetry published and offers (and is refused) to lend him money, his girlfriend Rosemary, and an aunt Julia who is ever poorer than him, but from whom he still borrows money. It fits his code of pride that he cannot borrow from a rich friend, but will from a poor relative.
Pride is the other keynote, alongside bitterness. His stubbornness is infuriating. He won’t let Rosemary pay for dinner when they go out, because the man must pay for the woman – even if it means he can’t pay his rent or can’t afford to eat for the rest of the week. Rosemary puts up with an awful lot, and sticks with him despite all his moroseness.
Iterated through the novel, either in Gordon’s dialogue or in his internal dialogue, is that everything comes down to money. He can’t marry Rosemary because he doesn’t have money. She won’t sleep with him – so Gordon argues – because he doesn’t have money. He can’t work as a poet because he doesn’t have money. And he doesn’t have money because he left a relatively well-paying job in advertising in order to get out of the capitalist machine.
What’s so impressive about Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that Orwell has a mouthpiece for a point of view with which he evidently has substantial sympathy – and bravely chooses to make that mouthpiece objectionable. As well as bitter and proud, Gordon is stubborn, selfish, and often unkind to the long-suffering Rosemary. But there is also enough good in him to make the reader (this reader, at least) not hate him. He loves the beautiful and noble. He partly cares so much what people think of him because of his own low self-esteem, and his recognition that others have achieved much more. On the whole, he falls down on the side of being unpleasant. But it is so well-judged a portrait that he does not become a villain – rather, he is a friend that we are frustrated by and beginning to be sick of, even if we agree with him in essentials.
Orwell apparently thought little of the novel, and didn’t want it reprinted. I don’t agree with him. It doesn’t have the sophistication of Nineteen Eighty-Four but it does have the same brilliant prose. He is the best writer I’ve read for writing that is entirely unshowy and is yet superlatively good. The plot is simple but perfectly judged, and I’m all the keener to read those other Orwells I’ve got on the shelves. In some ways, it’s a shame that his dystopian novels are the only ones that are widely remembered, because he so strikingly observed the real world too.
