Orwell’s “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”

Limits of Political Imagination

Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying¹(1936) is his second work to be rooted to the concrete socio-cultural setting of the pre-war England. In his first book Burmese Days (1934) Orwell chronicled, as an Imperial Policeman, his mixed response to the colonial experience. The next, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), though dealing with a native English experience, is structurally disjointed and has an insufficient ideological focus. It is only with his Keep the Aspidistra Flying, that Orwell began to show his forte as a major sociological novelist of his era.

Yet, while we must marvel at Orwell’s deft portrayal of the contemporary British society in all its comical aspects, we cannot unfortunately share the same admiration for his social critique in this novel. True, his protagonist Gordon Comstock, makes an unending tirade against poverty and a ceaseless refrain against the sterility of the modern waste land. But an indignant outburst, howsoever clamorous, can hardly be a substitute for an objective analysis of the system. Certainly, a work of fiction is not meant to be an ideological or intellectual polemic, but all sociological fiction of some significance from Dickens² to Dostoyevsky manage to raise seminal questions about the respective societies. In this paper, I shall contend that Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying pays inadequate attention to the examination of the vital underlying forces that generate tyranny and oppression in society. I shall further contend that such a fundamental incapacity could be traced to the lack of necessary political imagination in the novelist himself. I shall show that Gordon’s dilemma was in fact the dilemma of Orwell, the liberal intellectual who cannot make, at this stage of his career, a radical commitment. Gordon /Orwell opts for an easier middle-class compromise since he has no intimate perception of poverty. It’s only after subsequent experiences both real life and fictional that Orwell and his characters succeeded in making a more categorical affirmation.

Orwell’s protagonist Gordon Comstock is by no means a member of the Marxist underdog. He has no intimate contact with the working class life, “An unintended child”, he belongs to a middle-class family to which “nothing ever happened.”

Gordon has literary ambitions; precisely, to be a poet. For a while he holds out against the family members who wanted him to “get on” in life. His mother’s illness, however, forces him to relent and he takes up a more “respectable” job in a red-lid firm. Soon after his mother’s death, Gordon walks out of his job. His contact with Ravelston, the editor of Anti Christ, fetches him sporadic book reviews.

And so Gordon makes war on money. With the help of his indulgent sister Julia, Gordon lands on a job in the Accounts Department of the New Albion Publicity Company. This is where he meets Rosemary, his future lover and fiancee.

Gordon’s mood turns rapidly from surprise, amusement to horror while he works as an apprentice to Mr. Clew, the head copy writer. After all, writing imaginative advertisements for deodorants could hardly be the staple for “creative artists”.

Gordon, therefore, throws up this job as well, and takes up an assignment as a book-keeper’s assistant, with one Mr. McKechnie “a sleepy benign old Scotchman” who wanted somebody looking like a gentleman in order to “impress the more bookish customers.” Gordon has then a windfall publication of his collection of poems called the Mice. The collection receives rare reviews and he naturally thought that “the future was opening before him.”

However, a decaying family of hypochondriacs and a meagre pay of two quids a week quickly brings the reality of the self-chosen “blind alley” to Gordon.

Gordon is equally disenchanted by a self-styled Bloomsbury Group at a place fancifully called the Coleridge Grove. He soon figures out the reason of his neglect in the hands of the literary establishment. After all the Primrose was being run by “a coterie of moneyed highbrows – those sleek refined young animals who suck in money and culture with their mother’s milk”. (84) They are the “moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and Cambridge to the Literary Reviews.” (13)

Gordon’s actual class allegiance is betrayed in a conversation with his friend Ravelston. To the latter’s question that the choice actually is between capitalism and socialism, Gordon’s reply is smug. Socialism only makes him “yawn.” He adds brazenly: “If the whole of England was starving except for myself and the people I care about, I wouldn’t give a damn. “ (97) This attitude of indifference and solipsism is only a shade different from Ravelston’s girl Hermione who cannot stand the lower classes as “they smell”. ³ (100) His concept of socialism is couched in comical terms. Socialism is

“Some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World only not so amusing. Four hours a day in a model factory tightening bolt No. 6003. Rations served out in grease proof paper at the communal kitchen. Community hike from Max hostel to Lenin hostel and . Free abortion clinic on all the corners. All very well in its way of course. Only we don’t want it.” (95)

Gordon’s understanding of the lower classes, the real masses, is equally warped. As a result, his dissociation from them is complete. For, he never felt any genuine pity for the genuine poor. “It is the black coated poor, the middle middle-class who need pitying.” Socialism is only an adolescent pursuit.” It is the price of optimism. Give me five quids a week and I’d be a socialist. I dare say.”

Due to a lack of fundamental ideological clarity, his attitude towards the working class tends to swing to absurd extremes. The working class is either eulogised in patronising terms such as in the following

“How right the lower classes are. Hats off to the factory lad who with four pences in the world, puts his girl in the family way. Atleast, he’s got blood and not money in his veins.”

Or more frequently, it meets with scorn and disfavour as Gordon’s disparagement of the working class habitation:

“Tenement houses where families slept five in bed and when one of them died, slept every night with the corpse until it was buried, alley ways where girls of fifteen were deflowered by boys of sixteen against leprous plaster wells.” (27)

Gordon thus raves on relentlessly, pursuing a single obsession – money – with a maniacal fury. Too much of money creates as much a problem as too little. Literary pursuits, mate selection, success in courtship, a genteel and “respectable” life, all seem to revolve around money. Money, may not really have much to do with some of these but the thought that it does is as potential. The thought may even cripple a man’s actions as it apparently does to Gordon in his sexual encounter with Rosemary in Farnham Common (“How can you make love when you have only eight pence in your pocket and are thinking about it all the time?” (149)

While money remained the cause paranoid, it is only paradoxically, amidst poverty, and destitution on Mother Meakin’s dingy bed that Gordon and Rosemary come together. Yet this consummation, long awaited, satisfies neither party. “She felt dismayed, disappointed, very cold.” (236)

From this point, the ending could only be a foregone conclusion. Rosemary manipulates Gordon to accept marriage and domesticity. Her announcement of her “pregnancy” decisively clinches the issue in Gordon’s hesitant mind. Here, as in most other instances, Gordon’s pose of a rebel crumbles and he is revealed in his true colours – basically as a conformist. The Volte-face is complete. Yet he must clothe his option for the commonplace in a suitably philosophical vesture:

“It occurred to him that he was merely repeating the destiny of every human being. Everyone rebels against the money code and everyone sooner or later surrenders ……. Somebody or other had said that the modern world is only habitable by saints and scoundrels. He, Gordon, wasn’t a saint. Better then to be an unpretending scoundrel, It was what he had secretly pined for, now that he had acknowledged his desire and surrendered to it, he was at peace.” (254)

Notice the expression, “it was what he had secretly pined for,” which reveals the real self of Gordon. Along with his transfiguration, there comes about a change in his perception of the world as well. For instance, the aspidistra flower, that stood all along for an insipid way of life, suddenly takes on a different nuance: “The aspidistra is the tree of life he thought suddenly.” (255) “It’s the proper thing to have,” he explains to Rosemary, “It’s the first thing one buys after one’s married. In fact, it is practically part of the wedding ceremony.” (262)

The novel ends with a perfect, tour de force: “Well, once again, things were happening in the Comstock family.” This must be seen as a counterpoint to the earlier declaration on page 44: “Nothing ever happens in the Comstock family.”

Thus, when Gordon hungers for the “sluttish under­world”, (217) “where failure and success have no meaning, a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal,” it is clear to us that by so doing, he can safely avoid all questions of choice and commitment.

We therefore realize that behind all the angry and satirical outburst of Gordon, there actually lurks a desire to belong to the establishment. His answer to the snobbish waiter of the Ravenscroft Hotel is his equally supercilious behaviour at the Modigliani Restaurant.

It is thus clear that despite its avowed concern with diagnosing a sick society, Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying in fact revolves around the problem of a middle class poet manque who after making a great show of rebellion, tamely gets down to a life of quiet conformism. As Jenni Calder aptly remarks:

“We suspect continually that it is not anger at monopoly capitalism that urges him (Gordon) to opt out from the rat race but boredom and self-resentment. There is no political consciousness in his action at all”.⁴

As an intensely autobiographical novelist, Orwell’s middle­class career shares many interesting parallels with his creature Gordon. Orwell explains his middle-class dilemma and ambiva­lence in his Road to Wigan Pier. “At the age of seventeen or eighteen,” he says, “I was both a snob as well as a revolu­tionary.” He could “agonize over their (working class) suffering” through the medium of books but “I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudeness⁵.”

Similarly, in his essay on Charles Dickens,⁶ Orwell discus­ses Dickens’ criticism of society and postulates two ways of changing it: change of the human consciousness or change of the system; Needless to say, Gordon Comstock subscribes to neither. He is only an escapist and a conformist, usually taking refuge behind a subterfuge of words. For instance, he tells Ravelston, on page 95, that he has three options before him: socialism, catholic church and suicide. And yet he pays sustained attention to none, preferring instead self-flagellation and morbid self-pity.

Orwell declares that the Burmese experience had made him aware of the working class but it was inadequate to lend him any definite ideological support. “By the end of 1935,” he admits, “I had still failed to reach a firm decision.” This may explain why Gordon fails to enunciate any social activism in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). The Spanish civil war⁷ and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter he declares, “I knew where I stood”. ⁸

Orwell saw literature and politics as inseparable and considered all art to contain in them “a political bias.” In his essay “Why I write” he went on to say:

“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself I am going to produce a work of art. I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention”. ⁹

In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the evil that Orwell sees manifest in society appears to be the money code, the “cash-nexus” of Carlyle. But this evil cannot be suitably exercised as the novel suffers from a basic lack of political imagination.

Notes and References

¹ All quotations of the text pertain to the Penguin edition of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, London, 1962 and the page references are parenthetically cited.
² Dickens and his contemporary Victorian novelists show a great deal of concern with the role of money in society in their fiction. Dombey and Son, Hard Times and Little Dorrit are only typical instances.
³ In his Road to Wigan Pier, an autobiographical account, Orwell describes how class prejudices are instilled into a middle-class child: that the working classes were stupid, coarse and violent. “It is summed up in four frightful words which people now-a-days are chary of uttering but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: “The lower classes smell.”
Compare this with Hermione’s remark, in Keep the Aspidirtra Flying.
⁴ Jenni Calder, Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, London, Secker and Warburg. 1968. p. 91.
5 In his essay on Arthur Koestler, Orwell explains the reasons that may account for the absence of long-lasting political fiction in England. To understand such things as tyranny, he says, “One has to be able to imagine oneself as the victim and for an Englishman to write Darkness at Noon would be as unlikely an accident as for a slave trader to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” George Orwell’s essay on Arthur Koestler in Collected Essays, London: Mercury Books. 1961. p. 220.
⁶ George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens in Collected Essays, London: Mercury Books. 1961. p. 48.
⁷ I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler: “History Stopped in 1936.” George Orwell’s essay on “Looking on the Spanish War,” in Collected Essays, London: Mercury Books. 1961. p. 195.
⁸ George Orwell’s essay, “Why I write” in Collected Essays, London: Mercury Books. 1961. p. 424.
⁹ Ibid.