One of the larger ironies of the book is that Orwell fled this unjust social hierarchy only to find among the down and out an even more elaborate and rigidly military caste system. The staff of the hotel descended from the exalted heights of the patron and manager, through the maître d’hôtel, head cook, chef du personnel, other cooks, and waiters, to laundresses, apprentice waiters and finally plongeurs (who aspired to become lavatory attendants) and who had only chambermaids and cafétiers below them. And a similar social line existed among the London beggars, “between those who merely cadge and those who attempt to give some value for money” (123).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Orwell's description of the psychology of poverty, as he discovered it in the hotels, hospitals, pawnshops and parks of the mean and degenerate Paris of Zola and of Baudelaire's “Tableaux Parisiens”; and in his “very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse” (5), whose ancient and sinister quality suggests the medieval city of Villon and of Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris.
Orwell seemed happier as a plongeur than as a tramp, perhaps because it was easier to be déclassé outside his own country, and because he was fresher and the life had an exotic tinge despite the patina of antique filth. He speaks of the eccentric freedom from the normal and the decent, the mindless acceptance when you reach destitution after anticipating it for so long, the animal contentment of the simple rhythm of work and sleep. But in the long run, of course, the degrading human effects are disastrous. Hunger reduces men to a spineless, brainless condition and malnutrition destroys their manhood, while extreme poverty cuts men off from contact with women: “The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually” (148).
Orwell's suggestions for the alleviation of poverty are both pragmatic and politic, and he hopes to improve conditions by clarifying common misconceptions in the light of first-hand experience: “You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring” (13). Orwell explodes a number of common prejudices by explaining them. Educated people fear workers because they do not understand them and despise beggars because they fail to earn a decent living. That “money has become the grand test of virtue” (126) is a major theme of Keep the Aspidistra. Tramps tramp because they are compelled by law to do so; they are too docile to be dangerous and too destitute to be drunk.
Apart from improving the harsh and unfair laws governing tramps, Orwell also suggests making the casual wards more comfortable and finding suitable employment for the men, possibly through small farms attached to the workhouses. But all these are minor palliatives; the solution implicit in this book, though not stated until Wigan Pier, is Socialism; and it was Orwell's experience among the poor and outcast in Paris and London that made him aware of the need for that radical solution.
Keep the Aspidistra, like Down and Out, has a balanced structure. Paris and London, Boris and Paddy, the good and bad hotels, the castes of plongeurs and of beggars, and the summaries with practical suggestions at the end of each half are contrasted in the earlier book. The same kind of technique is also used in the novel, where it emphasizes the circular pattern of the book (the return to the advertising office) as well as the two phases of Gordon's life: before and after his drunken spree. McKechnie's and Cheese-man's bookshops, Mrs. Wisbeach's and Mrs. Meakin's rooms, the friendship of Flaxman and Ravelston, the love of his sister Julia and his girl Rosemary,15 and the two sexual encounters with Rosemary are contrasted, though ironically. For the worse job and the dingier room seem “better” to Gordon; though he is closer to Ravelston and Rosemary, he finds it easier to accept help from Flaxman and Julia; and the lyrical seduction scene is a failure while the squalid one is all too successful.
Several other structural motifs emphasize Gordon's resolution to return to the respectable middle-class moneyed world, symbolized by the indestructible aspidistra and the New Albion advertising company. At the end of the novel, Gordon and Rosemary have their wedding feast at the modest Soho restaurant that Ravelston had previously suggested they go to instead of the disastrously expensive Modigliani's (which parallels the fashionable country hotel); they live in a flat with a view of Paddington, from where they had left on their country outing; Gordon sprouts grey hairs to match Rosemary's (a symbol of his “mature” acceptance of life?) and she pulls hers out for the wedding ceremony; and as a comfortably employed writer and prospective father, he relinquishes his apocalyptic wish and no longer craves the destruction of London by bombs.
Despite Orwell's evident care with the form of the novel, the plot has some serious weaknesses. The chance meeting with Rosemary in the open-air market seems too coincidental; and the mystery of how the previously unacquainted Flaxman and Ravelston, Rosemary and Julia, ever got together to “save” Gordon is never explained. Ravelston's inability to resist the “abominable adventure” with the whores seems incredible; and worst of all, Rosemary becomes pregnant after her first sexual encounter, in the archaic tradition of the Victorian novel.
Nor is Orwell in full control of his style in this novel, which is repetitive to the point of boredom and exasperation (“Money, money, always money!”) and liberally sprinkled with poetic allusions (Gordon is, or was, a poet!) which are rather forced and banal: “Novels fresh from the press—still unravished brides, pining for the paperknife to deflower them—and review copies, like youthful widows, blooming still though virgin no longer, and here and there, in sets of half a dozen, those pathetic spinster-things, ‘remainders,’ still guarding hopefully their long preserv'd virginity” (11–12).16 But the worst example of Orwell's “poetic” style is his metamorphosis of the countryside, where Gordon attempts to seduce Rosemary, into a sexual landscape. While pheasants (which Gordon considers the embodiment of ferocious animal lust [110]) loiter “with long tails trailing,” he says the trees are phallic, the knobs on the bark are “like the nipples of breasts,” and the boughs “like the wreathing trunks of elephants” (135–137). And just before he “screws himself up” for the effort of seducing the virgin, “the warm light poured over them as though a membrane across the sky had broken” (147, 149).
The third major flaw in the novel is the character of the hero, Gordon, whose self-pity, envy and need to expose the wounds of poverty are very like Paddy's, the tramp in Down and Out: “Self-pity was the clue to his character. The thought of his bad luck never seemed to leave him for an instant. He would break long silences to exclaim, apropos of nothing, ‘It's hell when yer clo’es begin to go up de spout, eh?’ or ‘Dat tay in de spike ain't tay, it's piss’ as though there was nothing else in the world to think about. And he had a low, worm-like envy of anyone who was better off.”17 But it is not only this spineless self-pity that so alienates the reader from Gordon (when asked what he does on Sunday, he answers, “Moon about and look miserable” [124]). He lacks character, will, integrity and honor. He is selfish and “horribly unfair” to Rosemary about the use of contraceptives; parasitic with Julia and Ravelston; cowardly with waiters and servants; improvident and lecherous, callous and cold-blooded, without self-respect or principles. But Gordon is more ridiculous and weak than wicked, and Orwell suggests these traits stem less from personality defects than from poverty.
Orwell was well aware of the weaknesses of this novel, but published it anyway because he needed the money. As he wrote in 1946: “There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that [Keep the Aspidistra] is one of them. There is an even worse one called ‘A Clergyman's Daughter.’ This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I came to write ‘Keep the A.’ At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.”
In spite of t
hese weaknesses in plot, style and characterization, there is an undoubtedly poignant and moving quality about the novel that results from Orwell's perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary's tender response to Gordon's mean misery.18 His final affirmation of ordinary life is achieved through her selfless acts: the thrusting of cigarettes in his pocket and her sacrificial sexual surrender. Her love vindicates his self-respect and disproves one of Gordon's idées fixes, first stated by Orwell in Down and Out: “there is no doubt that women never, or hardly ever, condescend to men who are much poorer than themselves.”19
The novel of poverty is as old as Defoe (Balzac is the French master of this genre), but the main English tradition runs from Dickens through Gissing and Orwell (both of whom wrote insightfully on Dickens) to John Wain20 (Orwell's best critic), the “angry young men,” and the plays of Pinter and Wesker. Orwell's acknowledged master and (sometimes baneful) model for the novel of poverty is George Gissing, who wrote that his aim was to depict “a class of young men distinctive of our time—well educated, fairly bred, but without money.”21 Like Gordon, the writer-hero of Gissing's New Grub Street “knew what poverty means. The chilling of the brain and heart, the unnerving of the hands, the slow gathering around one of fear and shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the world's base indifference. Poverty! Poverty!”22 For Orwell, Gissing's “central theme can be stated in three words—‘not enough money.’ Gissing is the chronicler of poverty … the cruel, grinding, ‘respectable’ poverty of underfed clerks, downtrodden governesses and bankrupt tradesmen.”23
Other literary influences are equally significant, though perhaps less obvious. The self-tortured and compulsive craving for the lower depths, the self-repudiating and futile “insulted and injured” syndrome, are most powerfully expressed in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Like the underground man, Gordon “wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to sink. … It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground” (217). Gordon also suffers intense humiliation when he is not informed that the time of a party has been changed.
Gordon's powerful “sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time” (21) and his acute longing for a cleansing holocaust is very like Birkin's in Women in Love. And Gordon's favorite subject—“the futility, the bloodiness, the deathliness of modern life…. Dead people in a dead world” (90)—is close to “The Burial of the Dead” section of The Waste Land. There is a similarity in the response of English writers recovering from the First World War and those, like Orwell, apprehensive about the impending Second War.
Orwell's central vision of total grimness and despair, born amidst the sense of approaching disaster in the Thirties and intensified by the greater horrors of the Forties, is repeated throughout his works like a fatal portent of dissolution and doom. In Keep the Aspidistra, it is Gordon's vision of London slaving under capitalistic oppression: “He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money. The earth is plowed, ships sail, miners sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at their vitals. And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood, the pin-faced masters of the world. The Upper Crust” (160–161). In Wigan Pier, it is the vision of the industrial slums of Lancashire, a compound of the moon and hell: “On the outskirts of the mining towns there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains, and underfoot is mud and ashes and overhead the steel cables where the tubs of dirt travel slowly across miles of country…. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.”24 In Coming Up for Air, it is Bowling's vision of an Ersatz universe, culminating in a disgusting explosion: “Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles gazing under neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.”25 In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is Winston Smith's hopeless vision in the Ministry of Truth—vulgar, squalid, dreary, arid, painfully unnatural: “In any time that he could actually remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-colored, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient—nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.”26
Orwell's hopeful parallels to these dreadful visions are the joyous scenes in each of his fictions of escape from the domination of urban technology to the freedom and simplicity of peaceful nature: Flory meditating in the jungle pool in Burmese Days; Dorothy worshipping nature in A Clergyman's Daughter; Gordon and Rosemary, Winston and Julia, making love in the countryside in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four; Bowling fishing in Coming Up For Air; and the joyous freedom of the animals when they first take over the farm.27
The kind of affirmation that is stated in these scenes is also expressed in the conclusion and theme of Keep the Aspidistra, after Gordon realizes one cannot “live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself” (225). Faced with a choice between the New Albion, the fungus of decaying capitalism, or an abortion for Rosemary, he is secretly relieved to be able to reintegrate himself into a decent, fully human life. He throws his destiny in with that of the common men who mysteriously transmute the greed and fear of modern civilization into something far nobler. This much is convincing, indeed, inevitable.
But Gordon's movement from a dying to a flying aspidistra is less plausible and too insistently “symbolic”; and the first stirring of the baby within Rosemary is a terribly sentimental cliché that denies, through its pleasant prognosis, the entire tenor of their unhappy sexual relationship: Rosemary's frigidity and “rare sexual desire,” Gordon's alternation between gross lechery and impotence, and her ultimate “magnanimous yielding” with neither pleasure nor satisfaction for man or woman. This situation cannot be remedied by a raise of two pounds a week.
A number of important ideas in Keep the Aspidistra reappear in Orwell's reportage of the following year. Gordon's belief that poverty kills thought, and that cleanness and decency cost money, is reaffirmed; and the same sense of disintegration, decay and despair (which culminates powerfully in Nineteen Eighty-Four) is manifest in Wigan Pier: “We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and remain alive…. We live, admittedly, among the wreck of a civilization” (149, 160). Gordon's desire to break out of his family's middle-class insulation and submerge himself in the sprawling smoke-dim slums is exactly what Orwell did in Wigan Pier.
Though Orwell had never seen these impoverished northern industrial slums before, he knew them well from books. Engels’ The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845), especially the chapter on “The Mines,” Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903) were his sociological models; Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), Zola's Germinal (1885) and Lawrence's Midlands novels were his literary ones. Orwell is obviously drawn to Dickens because of their similar social attitudes, and he repeatedly describes Dickens in a way that forcefully applies to himself as well:
In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root.
From the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of laissez faire capi
talism.
His whole “message” is … if men would behave decently the world would be decent.28
The strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.
Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it.
[He is a] man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened … who is generously angry.
Orwell's grim vision of Wigan, quoted earlier, is very close to Dickens’ famous description of the unnatural ugliness and mechanical uniformity of Coketown, and to Lawrence's portrayal of the insentient corruption of Wiggiston, the mining village that is contrasted to Ursula's hopeful vision of the rainbow. The very extinction of organic life, of vital sources being choked off, terrifies all three novelists, and the heart of this problem exists in the crucial social issue of whether the poor should marry and have children. In Hard Times, the “hateful” Bounderby tells the worker Stephen Blackpool, “You had better have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married”;29 and the ironic conversation of Bitzer and Mrs. Sparsit expresses the selfish and moribund attitude of the middle classes: “‘I am quite sure we are constantly hearing, ma’am, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families,’ said Bitzer. ‘Why look at me, ma’am! I don't want a wife and family. Why should they?’ ‘Because they are improvident,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.”30
It is precisely this view, so hostile to life, which Orwell attacks in both Keep the Aspidistra and Wigan Pier. In the former, Gordon (who violently, and unfairly, objects to Rosemary's wish for contraceptives) says, “Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in a family way! At least he's got blood and not money in his veins” (49); and Orwell writes in the latter, alluding to Walter Greenwood's popular play of 1933, “getting married on the dole annoys old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being” (78). In The Rainbow, the colliery manager Tom Brangwen, who exploits the miners, marries the lesbian schoolmistress Winifred Inger, a strange union of perversion, sterility and corruption. And in Women in Love, the ugliness, poverty and suffering that Gerald Crich inflicts on the miners is symptomatic of his radical failure as a human being. In Dickens, Lawrence and Orwell the emotional sterility of the mine owners, who impose a deathly ugliness on both landscape and people, is contrasted to the inextinguishable warmth and vitality of the oppressed working classes.
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