Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

First published: 1936

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Gordon Comstock, the protagonist, an aspiring poet who works in a bookstore
• Rosemary Waterlow, his girlfriend
• Philip Ravelston, a wealthy young friend of Comstock

The Novel

In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a discontented and embittered young man, who believes that “all modern commerce is a swindle,” attempts to drop out of the monetary system altogether. He refuses to advance himself in life, obstinately defying pressure from family and friends. He falls willingly into the mire of poverty and self-neglect, until he is trapped by circumstances into embracing the very values that he formerly despised.

Gordon Comstock is twenty-nine years old, is well educated, and comes from a middle-class background. As the novel opens, he is working as an assistant in a bookstore in London. It is a routine job, and he earns only two pounds a week, but he prefers it to his former position at the New Albion Advertising Company, in spite of the fact that he showed promise as a copywriter. He refers disparagingly to this as a “good” job and wants no part of it. He sees himself primarily as a poet and is very proud of his one published volume, which was well reviewed but little read. Having declared war on what he calls the “money-god,” he wants to live by his own values, not those of a corrupt, materialistic system which grinds the life and spirit out of people.

Having declared war on money, however, he soon finds that money is all he thinks about. He does not find happiness having renounced the values that others live by. Forced to live in unpleasant lodgings, with a nosy landlady, he believes that others reject and despise him because of his poverty. He cannot relate to his amiable, moneyed friend Philip Ravelston on equal terms (he refuses even to go into Ravelston’s apartment), and he even blames his poverty for the fact that his girlfriend, Rosemary, will not go to bed with him. Nothing seems to go right. When he and Rosemary manage to scrape together enough money to spend a day in the country, he is humiliated by a waiter at an expensive hotel and this ruins his attempt to seduce Rosemary later in the day.

His situation changes dramatically when he receives a check for fifty dollars from an American journal to which he had submitted one of his poems. He promises to himself that he will give half this amount five pounds to his sister Julia, since he has frequently borrowed from her in the past. The remainder, however, he is prepared to spend. He decides to take Rosemary and Ravelston out to dinner, but to the dismay of both his companions, he is needlessly and ostentatiously extravagant. Later, having become hopelessly drunk, he makes insistent and rough sexual demands on Rosemary in the street; she slaps his face and runs off. After further drinking, he meets two prostitutes, and he and a reluctant Ravelston take a taxi to a sordid hotel where Gordon attempts, but fails, to have sexual intercourse with one of the women. The next day, he awakens in a police cell and is charged with being drunk and disorderly, although he remembers nothing of his behavior.

This episode marks the central dividing point in the novel. Now Gordon’s downward slide begins. He loses his job, and although he eventually finds a position at another bookstore, the pay is even lower, only thirty shillings a week. He is forced to take inferior lodgings, but Gordon no longer cares. In his defeated frame of mind, he actually wants to be dragged down to the depths; he finds himself admiring the world of tramps and beggars, an “underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal.” He believes that he can be freed from his distress only by having nothing in the world to call his own and no prospect of acquiring anything. He enjoys his own apathy and hopelessness.

Gordon is saved from total disintegration only by the loyalty of Rosemary. For some unaccountable reason, she sticks by him, and finally, out of pity, she becomes his mistress, an act which gives neither of them much pleasure. When she later comes to him and confesses that she is pregnant, he is faced with a choice: Either he can refuse to marry her and leave her to face the resulting social stigma; he can marry her and fail to support her; or he can marry her and reclaim his old job at the advertising agency, which is still available. After a day of deliberation, he chooses the last option: The thought of the growing baby has somehow reignited his spirit. The circular structure of the novel now becomes apparent: The couple settle down to enjoy the middle-class existence which Gordon had formerly rejected and despised. He finds that it is what he secretly desired all along.

The Characters

There is a strong autobiographical strain in George Orwell’s portrayal of Gordon Comstock. Like Gordon, Orwell had a middle-class upbringing, which he resented, and was sent to a school where all the boys were richer than he. This experience shaped his later political attitudes. Like Gordon, Orwell had deliberately allowed himself to sink into a life of poverty (his Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, is a record of his own experiences), and also like Gordon, Orwell had worked part-time at a bookstore (in Hampstead, London, in 1934 and 1935). The parallels, however, have a strict limit. Gordon is a far lesser figure than the real-life Orwell. Resentful, badly adjusted, and immature, Gordon soon alienates the reader, who can hardly be expected to sympathize with a man who so willingly embraces a job in which there is “no room for ambition, no effort, no hope.” In fact, Gordon is so mentally disturbed that he often hopes for a war in which the whole of London will be destroyed by bombs. Yet, in spite of this, he is blessed with two friends who go to extreme lengths to help him, although he does nothing to deserve or encourage them.

The first of these is Ravelston, the easygoing, charming aristocrat who edits a left-wing magazine. He is based on Orwell’s close friend Sir Richard Rees, who was in the 1930’s the editor of the Adelphi magazine in London. Ravelston moves easily through the world because of his inherited wealth, and although he tries hard to escape his class origins and identify with the proletariat, he never succeeds in doing so. Gordon is extremely sensitive to the disparity in their incomes, and their friendship involves subtle rituals designed to conceal it; they have an unspoken agreement that whenever they meet they will do nothing that involves spending more than a small amount of money.

There is more to distinguish one from the other than money. Ravelston’s kindness, gentleness, humility, and extreme tact make him a strong contrast to Gordon, with his selfishness and boorish manners. The contrast is also apparent in their relationships with women. Whereas Ravelston and his girlfriend, Hermione, bask in material comfort and languid sensuality, Gordon’s sexual encounters with Rosemary are full of misunderstanding and frustration. Yet in Gordon’s eyes it is money that makes the difference between sexual success and failure.

Rosemary’s loyalty and her simple good nature make Gordon’s cruel, unfeeling behavior toward her particularly unjustifiable. Rosemary is also from the middle-classes, but she accepts without question the social system which Gordon despises. Genuinely humble and fair-minded, lighthearted and yet full of common sense, she never puts pressure on Gordon to find a lucrative job, even when she is pregnant with his child. Yet simply by being who she is, she continually invalidates Gordon’s philosophy. For example, her touching gesture at the end of their disastrous day in the country, when she thrusts a packet of cigarettes into Gordon’s pocket and runs off before he can protest, shows what goodness is possible in someone who in Gordon’s terms is enslaved by an inhuman system.

Critical Context

Keep the Aspidistra Flying was Orwell’s fourth book, and its major themes are also to be found in his other works from the same period. All are concerned with poverty and its debilitating effects on the human spirit and with Orwell’s belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way human society was organized. A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) has the same circular structure as Keep the Aspidistra Flying: Dorothy Hare is forced to escape her middle-class background, she gains firsthand experience of poverty, and then finally returns to her former life with renewed vision. In The Road to Wigan Pier, which followed in 1937, Orwell reports on his own experiences of life with the working-class poor in northern England, and it is in this book that he first advocates socialism as a way of reforming society. Although Orwell’s subject matter during the 1930’s was always grim, he had not yet reached the pessimism of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Orwell disliked Keep the Aspidistra Flying and refused to allow it to be reprinted or translated. He had only allowed it to be published in the first place, he said, because he needed money. There is no doubt that the novel has serious flaws; the plot is sometimes unconvincing, the symbolism is heavy-handed, and there are lapses in the presentation of character (in particular, Ravelston’s failure to extricate himself from the encounter with the prostitutes, which is so unconvincing that it undermines the credibility of the whole episode).

The novel does at times possess considerable force, however, a force which lies in the honesty and directness of Orwell’s writing. He is ruthless and unsparing in his portrayal of the sordidness of poverty, down to its smallest detail, and it is this which gives Keep the Aspidistra Flying a place in the tradition of the novel of poverty, a tradition which includes Charles Dickens (on whom Orwell wrote a perceptive essay), George Gissing (whom Orwell acknowledged had an influence on his own work), Honore de Balzac, and the contemporary novelist and critic John Wain.

Bibliography

Alldritt, Keith. The Making of George Orwell, 1969.

Lee, Robert A. Orwell’s Fiction, 1969.

Meyers, Jeffrey. A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, 1975.

Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, 1975.

Woodcock, George. The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell, 1966.