George Orwell’s novels are not exactly where you turn when you are looking for uplifting reading with happy endings. The one lesser known exception is his short, bright novel, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” I would go as far as to call it charming and delightful.
Most people, when asked if they’re familiar with the works of George Orwell, will answer that they had read “Animal Farm” in high school. Perhaps they have also read his futuristic (when it was written) “1984.” Orwell’s name has become synonymous with dystopian political fiction. Even for people who haven’t actually read these works, the adjective “Orwellian” elicits thoughts of oppressive, government-controlled society, where “Big Brother” is watching. The phrase “Big Brother” itself is a literary creation of Orwell.
All of Orwell’s work touches on politics and class structure. He was, in addition to a novelist, a journalist and essayist, primarily concerned with the wrongs in the world and their effect on individuals. With his keen mind and sharp sense of humor, he critiqued, dissected, and roasted authors, readers, the use of the English language, Gandhi, the British Empire, Socialism, Fascism, being a child, etc. He is exceptionally good at splitting hairs, dissecting, with surgical precision, the problems others had got wrong. He is less good at suggesting solutions.
Orwell’s novels are not exactly where you turn when you are looking for uplifting reading with happy endings. The one lesser known exception is his short, bright novel, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying.” I would go as far as to call it charming and delightful. It was published in 1936, following “Down and Out in London and Paris,” “Burmese Days,” and “The Clergyman’s Daughter,” and nine years before “Animal Farm.” It may be fair to consider it the best of his fiction, as it is a marvelous story, unencumbered by analogy and didacticism. It is all sardonic humor and affection for all his characters.
Even more than most of Orwell’s writing, this story offers smooth reading—uncomplicated prose, so exacting and direct that it verbally brings to life scenes in which the words themselves almost disappear. Almost, because his judicial and dexterous use of them elicits a pleasure that often compels the reader to go back to take in a delightful phrase once more. It is, perhaps, not ironic that the protagonist of “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” is an aspiring poet.
Gordon Comstock is already twenty nine, the youngest of, and last hope for the Comstock family to make anything of itself. Not one of its members had had any guts, any success. Only his father, among the ten children of the last Comstock to have done anything, had produced any offspring. On Gordon, the younger of his two children—and the only son—was hung the burden of “making good”. He is the end of the Comstock line—an unproductive and dead-in-life family. Fruitless in wealth, accomplishment and progeny, all the family looked to Gordon with expectation and sacrifice. And he resented it.
Gordon had shown promise, too. His older sister was sacrificed so Gordon could be sent to goodish schools. His uncle had secured a “good job” for him. But Gordon despised the English middle-class world into which he was born, where the pursuit of and enslavement to a “good job” seems to be the very purpose of life— respectability as a death sentence. He wanted to be a writer. He aspired to make his mark on the world as a poet. And so, Gordon, selfish and ungrateful, waged war on the money-god.
He left his “good job” writing sales slogans at an advertising agency, and took to subsistence living as a clerk in a bookshop, writing evenings in a rented room of a bachelors-only, lower-middle-class, boarding house. The flagstaff of Middle-class respectability, a potted Aspidistra plant, was stationed in the front window.
Throughout the first six of twelve neatly packaged chapters, Gordon’s thoughts beliefs and desires are revealed as the stage is set and the characters introduced, carefully, thoroughly, and engrossingly. Every circumstance and conversation shows the self-imposed catch-22 that he has entered into through his war on respectability. He chose to reject the middle-class striving for money and now hasn’t enough to meet the desires that make life worth living.
Every penny (and half-penny) is counted and represents a pleasure he is denied. If he smokes his last cigarette today, it will mean the agony of none until Friday when he’s paid. If he uses his oil lamp for heat and light too long, then he can’t afford to get a shave. He mustn’t accept a chap’s invitation to the pub because he’s not able to pay—and you can’t have other people buy your beer without paying for a round yourself. Gordon is trapped (by his own choice) in a shabby existence and has become bitter, always blaming the money-god he will not serve.
We learn of his girl, Rosemary, who won’t sleep with him, and anyway, there is no opportunity, since her boarding house doesn’t allow men and his ever watchful, prudish landlady, Mrs. Wisebeach, forbids women to set foot even in the parlor. But, more than that, carnal pleasure may lead to babies and, outside of marriage, she daren’t risk it. And Gordon can’t afford to get married. Always money.
Upper-class Ravelston is big-hearted and longs for class equality… in theory. It’s easy to be a Socialist when you’re rich. He publishes Gordon’s poetry—when he produces any—in his Socialist magazine, “Antichrist”. Gordon values Ravelston’s intellectual friendship, but refuses to take monetary assistance from his friend beyond the publishing of his poems.
Ravelston, like Gordon, has lowered his living style in keeping with his cause, but his lowered state is really quite comfortable, even compared to Gordon’s previous Middle class station. Unlike Gordon, Ravelston can indulge in his luxuries at will. Try as he might to champion equality, he is, nevertheless, a wealthy member of the upper class and the money is always available to him. He can’t escape this embarrassment.
At the midpoint of the book, the characters have been introduced, Gordon’s situation has been made clear and the real battle begins in his war on the money god. Gordon’s true desires—love, creativity, freedom, happiness—have been thwarted. He blames money. He rejected the system in which he believes serving the money god is necessary to live a meaningful life. He is tested by a windfall and suffers an ignominious defeat.
One of his poems is accepted by an American magazine and payment issued. Gordon has become a man of relative means! He carefully put 5 pounds aside in his jacket to pay back his sister, Julia, a portion of what he has borrowed. Gordon has always borrowed from his sacrificed sister, but is never able to pay her back. With ten pounds in his wallet, he feels like a living man. His plan is to take Ravelston and Rosemary out for a fine dinner to celebrate.
At the upscale restaurant, champagne is ordered, clever conversation flows, but Rosemary and Ravelston are uncomfortably conscious that Gordon is losing all self-control. The money had gone to his head along with the champagne, of which a second expensive bottle is ordered. The night turns disastrous—a drunken debauch. Rosemary departs in disgust with his behavior toward her, leaving Ravelston to attempt to save Gordon from committing further turpitudes. He fails, losing Gordon in a seedy hotel with a prostitute, himself narrowly escaping the tawdry encounter.
Next morning, Gordon awakes in a jail cell, to a ruined life, again broke—even Julia’s money pilfered by the prostitute. Sacked from his job and ejected from Mrs. Wisebeach’s respectable rooms, he descends into the lowest social sector. Surprisingly, here he also loses his self-pity. Rather than grasping at life, he becomes complacently hopeless and listless—and finds a certain satisfaction at finally breaking free from serving the money-god, even if his room does have bugs in the walls. At least women aren’t forbidden here. To his dismay, even here he finds the potted Aspidistra.
Gordon gave up everything—his writing, his girl, a decent living—for the victory of declaring his non serviam to the money-god. That the miserable two-penny lending library where he now works is next door to an undertaker is appropriate to his thin, but satisfied existence. He has hit bottom and doesn’t care.
But, Orwell does not leave Gordon in his pathetic victory. In the pit of social death, Rosemary returns to prove that her love for him is greater than the question of money. He is stirred to life, but not as she might have hoped. Rosemary visits again to confront Gordon with her pregnancy, leaving the decision of how he will respond fully with him. The result is unexpected. The new life stirs Gordon to new life. He has finally produced something. He has produced real life. A Comstock.
Responsibility, and respectability, beckon; he answers. Gordon has had life breathed back into him, by the life within Rosemary. For the first time, Gordon sees clearly what he had got wrong all these years. Money is meant to serve life, not to be served at the expense of life. He embraces the responsibility and, with a new spring in his step, goes back to the good job. He has something to work for. And, in the happiest of twists, most unexpected in an Orwell novel, Gordon insists on flying the very flag of respectability, an aspidistra in the window of their flat.
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The featured image, uploaded by Cassowary Colorizations, is a photograph of George Orwell, c. 1940. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.