A Merry War
Reviewed by Sandra Contreras
This intermittently amusing but always thoughtful adaptation
of George Orwell's autobiographical novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, features
Richard E. Grant as Gordon Comstock, a would-be poet who supports himself as a
copywriter in 1930s
London. When Comstock's first book of poetry receives a good
review in the Times Literary Supplement, he decides to cast off the trappings
of what he considers to be his demeaning and predictable life (job, marriage
etc.) to become a full-time poet and free man. Comstock's subsequent
free-fall into penury and degradation (remember that
Orwell's nonfiction works include the terrifying Down and Out in Paris and
London ) is, fortunately, leavened with humor. Comstock isn't the most
sympathetic of protagonists: He leaches money from his hardworking spinster
sister Julia
(Harriet Walter), and treats both his upper-class publisher
Ravelston (Julian Wadham) and his devoted girlfriend Rosemary (Helena Bonham
Carter) exceedingly badly, spurning them viciously whenever they try to pull
him back into the safety of the middle-class fold. But Comstock's rants and
whines
about the bitter pills life forces one to swallow will
resonate with anyone who's ever done work they considered morally reprehensible
or without integrity. Less convincing, however faithful to the novel, is the
ending: Spurred by Rosemary's unplanned pregnancy, Comstock happily decides to
take
back his old job and settle into the very life of
middle-class mediocrity against which he railed so vigorously, going so far as
to embrace that emblem of bourgeois conformity and staple of overstuffed
English parlors, the humble aspidistra plant.
Director: Robert Bierman
Writers: George Orwell (novel), Alan Plater (screenplay)
Stars: Richard E. Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Julian Wadham
Produced by
Robert Bierman ... executive producer
Sara Giles ... associate producer
Joyce Herlihy ... associate producer
Peter Shaw ... producer
John Wolstenholme ... executive
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a
socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London. The main
theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god
and status, and the dismal life that results.
Two aspidistra plants – "The types he saw all round
him, especially the older men, made him squirm. That was what it meant to
worship the money-god! To settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a
villa and an aspidistra! To turn into the typical bowler-hatted sneak –
Strube's 'little man' [-] What a fate!" (Ch III)
Orwell wrote the book in 1934 and 1935 when he was living at
various locations near Hampstead in London, and drew on his experiences in
these and the preceding few years. At the beginning of 1928 he lived in
lodgings in Portobello Road from where he started his tramping expeditions,
sleeping rough and roaming in the poorer parts of London. At this time he wrote
a fragment of a play in which the protagonist Stone needs money for his child's
life-saving operation. Stone would prefer to prostitute his wife rather than
prostitute his artistic integrity by writing advertising copy.
Orwell's early publications appeared in The Adelphi, a
left-wing literary journal edited by Sir Richard Rees, a wealthy and idealistic
baronet who made Orwell one of his protégés. The character of Ravelston the
wealthy publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying has much in common with Rees.
Ravelston is acutely self-conscious of his upper-class status and defensive
about his unearned income. Comstock speculates that Ravelston receives nearly
two thousand pounds a year after tax—a very comfortable sum in those days—and
Rees, in a volume of autobiography published in 1963 wrote: "... I have
never had the spending of much less than £1,000 a year of unearned income, and
sometimes considerably more ... Before the war, this was wealth, especially for
an unmarried man. Many of my socialist and intellectual friends were paupers
compared to me..." In quoting this, Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden
commented "One of these 'paupers'—at least in 1935—was Orwell, who was
lucky if he made £200 that year ... He appreciated Rees's editorial support at
the Adelphi and sincerely enjoyed having him as a friend, but he could not have
avoided feeling some degree of resentment toward a man who had no real job but
who enjoyed an income four or five times greater than his."
In 1932 Orwell took a job as a teacher in a small school in
West London. From there he would take journeys into the country at places like
Burnham Beeches. There are allusions to Burnham Beeches and walks in the
country in Orwell's correspondence at this time with Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor
Jacques.
In October 1934, after nine months at his home in Southwold,
Orwell's aunt Nellie Limouzin found him a job as a part-time assistant in
Booklovers' Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead run by Francis and
Myfanwy Westrope. The Westropes, who were friends of Nellie in the Esperanto
movement, had an easy-going outlook and provided him with comfortable
accommodation at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street. He was job sharing with Jon
Kimche who also lived with the Westropes. Orwell worked at the shop in the
afternoons, having the mornings free to write and the evenings to socialise. He
was at Booklovers' Corner for fifteen months. His essay "Bookshop
Memories", published in November 1936, recalled aspects of his time at the
bookshop, and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, "he described it, or revenged
himself upon it, with acerbity and wit and spleen." In their study of
Orwell the writers Stansky & Abrahams remarked upon the improvement on the
"stumbling attempts at female portraiture in his first two novels: the
stereotyped Elizabeth Lackersteen in Burmese Days and the hapless Dorothy in A
Clergyman's Daughter" and contended that, in contrast, "Rosemary is a
credible female portrait." Through his work in the bookshop Orwell was in
a position to become acquainted with women, "first as a clerk, then as a
friend ... and with whom, if circumstances were favourable, he might eventually
embark upon a 'relationship' ... This for Orwell the author and Blair the man,
was the chief reward of working at Booklovers' Corner." In particular,
Orwell met Sally Jerome, at this time working for an advertising agency (like
Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying), and Kay Ekevall, who ran a small
typing and secretarial service which did work for Adelphi magazine.
By the end of February 1935 he had moved into a flat in
Parliament Hill; his landlady, Rosalind Obermeyer, was studying at the
University of London. It was through a joint party with his landlady here that
Orwell met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy. In August Orwell moved into a
flat in Kentish Town, which he shared with Michael Sayers and Rayner
Heppenstall. Over this period he was working on Keep the Aspidistra Flying and
had two novels, Burmese Days and A Clergyman's Daughter, published. At the
beginning of 1936 Orwell was dealing with pre-publication issues for Keep the
Aspidistra Flying while on his tour in the North of England collecting material
for The Road to Wigan Pier. The novel was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd on
20 April 1936.
PLOT
Gordon Comstock has 'declared war' on what he sees as an
'overarching dependence' on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter
for an advertising company called 'New Albion'—at which he shows great
dexterity—and taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so he can write
poetry. Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited
wealth has now become dissipated, Gordon resents having to work for a living.
The 'war' (and the poetry), however, aren't going particularly well and, under
the stress of his 'self-imposed exile' from affluence, Gordon has become
absurd, petty and deeply neurotic.
Comstock lives without luxuries in a bedsit in London, which
he affords by working in a small bookshop owned by a Scot, McKechnie. He works
intermittently at a magnum opus he plans to call 'London Pleasures', describing
a day in London; meanwhile, his only published work, a slim volume of poetry
entitled Mice, collects dust on the remainder shelf. He is simultaneously
content with his meagre existence and also disdainful of it. He lives without
financial ambition and the need for a 'good job,' but his living conditions are
uncomfortable and his job is boring.
Comstock is 'obsessed' by what he sees as a pervasion of
money (the 'Money God', as he calls it) behind social relationships, feeling
sure that women would find him more attractive if he were better off. At the
beginning of the novel, he senses that his girlfriend Rosemary Waterlow, whom
he met at New Albion and who continues to work there, is dissatisfied with him
because of his poverty. An example of his financial embarrassment is when he is
desperate for a pint of beer at his local pub, but has run out of pocket money
and is ashamed to cadge a drink off his fellow lodger, Flaxman.
One of Comstock's last remaining friends, Philip Ravelston,
a Marxist who publishes a magazine called Anti-Christ, agrees with Comstock in
principle, but is comfortably well-off himself and this causes strains when the
practical miseries of Comstock's life become apparent. He does, however,
endeavour to publish some of Comstock's work and his efforts, unbeknownst to
Comstock, had resulted in Mice being published via one of his publisher
contacts.
Gordon and Rosemary have little time together—she works late
and lives in a hostel, and his 'bitch of a landlady' forbids female visitors to
her tenants. Then one evening, having headed southward and having been thinking
about women—this women business in general, and Rosemary in particular—he
happens to see Rosemary in a street market. Rosemary won't have sex with him
but she wants to spend a Sunday with him, right out in the country, near
Burnham Beeches. At their parting, as he takes the tram from Tottenham Court
Road back to his bedsit, he is happy and feels that somehow it is agreed
between them that Rosemary is going to be his mistress. However, what was
intended as a pleasant day out away from London's grime turns into a disaster
when, though hungry, they opt to pass by a 'rather low-looking' pub, and then,
not able to find another pub, are forced to eat an unappetising lunch at a fancy,
overpriced hotel. Gordon has to pay the bill with all the money he had set
aside for their jaunt and worries about having to borrow money from Rosemary.
Out in the countryside again, they are about to have sex for the first time
when she violently pushes him back—he wasn't going to use contraception. He
rails at her; "Money again, you see! ... You say you 'can't' have a baby.
... You mean you daren't; because you'd lose your job and I've got no money and
all of us would starve."
Having sent a poem to an American publication, Gordon
suddenly receives from them a cheque worth ten pounds — a considerable sum for
him at the time. He intends to set aside half for his sister Julia, who has
always been there to lend him money and support. He treats Rosemary and
Ravelston to dinner, which begins well, but the evening deteriorates as it
proceeds. Gordon, drunk, tries to force himself upon Rosemary but she angrily
rebukes him and leaves. Gordon continues drinking, drags Ravelston with him to
visit a pair of prostitutes, and ends up broke and in a police cell the next
morning. He is guilt-ridden over the thought of being unable to pay his sister
back the money he owes her, because his £5 note is gone, given to, or stolen
by, one of the tarts.
Ravelston pays Gordon's fine after a brief appearance before
the magistrate, but a reporter hears about the case, and writes about it in the
local paper. The ensuing publicity results in Gordon losing his job at the
bookshop, and, consequently, his relatively 'comfortable' lifestyle. As Gordon
searches for another job, his life deteriorates, and his poetry stagnates.
After living with his friend Ravelston and, during his time of employment, with
his girlfriend Hermione, Gordon ends up working, this time in Lambeth, at
another book shop and cheap two-penny lending library owned by the sinister Mr.
Cheeseman, where he's paid an even smaller wage of 30 shillings a week. This is
10 shillings less than he was earning before, but Gordon is satisfied;
"The job would do. There was no trouble about a job like this; no room for
ambition, no effort, no hope." Determined to sink to the lowest level of
society Gordon takes a furnished bed-sitting-room in a filthy alley parallel to
Lambeth Cut. Both Julia and Rosemary, "in feminine league against
him," seek to get Gordon to go back to his 'good' job at the New Albion
advertising agency.
Rosemary, having avoided Gordon for some time, suddenly
comes to visit him one day at his dismal lodgings. Despite his terrible poverty
and shabbiness, they have sex but it is without any emotion or passion. Later,
Rosemary drops in one day unexpectedly at the library, having not been in touch
with Gordon for some time, and tells him that she is pregnant. Gordon is
presented with the choice between leaving Rosemary to a life of social shame at
the hands of her family—since both of them reject the idea of an abortion—or
marrying her and returning to a life of respectability by taking back the job
he once so deplored at the New Albion with its £4 weekly salary.
He chooses Rosemary and respectability and then experiences
a feeling of relief at having abandoned his anti-money principles with such
comparative ease. After two years of abject failure and poverty, he throws his
poetic work 'London Pleasures' down a drain, marries Rosemary, resumes his
advertising career, and plunges into a campaign to promote a new product to
prevent foot odour. In his lonely walks around mean streets, aspidistras seem
to appear in every lower-middle class window. As the book closes, Gordon wins
an argument with Rosemary to install an aspidistra in their new small but
comfortable flat off the Edgware Road.
How not to succeed
An introduction to Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the first
modern classic title for our new Observer Book Group
Sunder Katwala
Sunday 6 July 2003 03.16 BST First published on Sunday 6
July 2003 03.16 BST
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell's third novel
published in 1936, is a savagely satirical portrait of the literary life.
Orwell chronicles the struggles of Gordon Comstock, who gives up a successful
job in an advertising - "the rattling of a stick inside a swill
bucket" - to become an unsuccessful poet, taking refuge by day in a
failing bookshop as he descends into genteel poverty.
Having vowed to "make it his especial purpose not to
'succeed'" Comstock rails against how "The Money God" dominates all
aspects of life. "Don't you see that a man's whole personality is bound up
with his income? His personality is his income. How can you be attractive to a
girl when you've got no money?", he asks his somewhat disaffected
girlfriend Rosemary. The aspidistra of the book's title comes from the pot
plants to be found on every window sill which, for Comstock, symbolise all that
is wrong with the "mingy, lower-class decency" he is desperate to
escape.
D.J. Taylor, in his recently published biography, writes
that "of all the fiction that Orwell produced in the 1930s, Keep the
Aspidistra Flying is the one most closely associated with him as a
writer". Orwell was himself a struggling writer working part-time in a
Hampstead bookshop. His journeys around England and beyond - chronicled in Down
and Out in London and Paris - do often resemble Comstock's circumstances and
attitude. But the facts of Orwell's own life were rather different -
considerably more sociable and quickly becoming more successful - to
Comstock's.
The novel is perhaps a better guide to Orwell's intellectual
development than it is autobiographical. It is the novel in which Orwell is
most directly influenced by one of his heroes George Gissing, the late Victorian
novelist whose New Grub Street remains the seminal description of literary
failure. In his later essay on Gissing, Orwell describes the quintessential
flavour of Gissing's world - "the grime, the stupidity, the ugliness, the
sex-starvation, the furtive debauchery, the vulgarity, the bad manners, the
censoriousness" - which sums up the world Orwell sought to capture and to
criticise in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Comstock can also be seen as something of a predecessor of
the Angry Young Men of the 1950s - though Comstock was, if anything, angrier
still. Christopher Hitchens' recent book Orwell's Victory offers an
illuminating comparison of of the many parallels between Orwell's novel and
Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, which did much to define postwar British fiction,
although the two books are markedly different in tone and it is Orwell's comic
essay 'Confessions of a Book Reviewer' which resembles the comic spirit of the
Amis novel.
The publication of Keep the Aspidistra Flying was not a particularly
happy one for Orwell. He had numerous run-ins with his publishers, who insisted
on changes to the book late in the process because of the fear that many of the
real advertising slogans which it contained were too risky to print. Orwell
therefore had to produce new, fictitious slogans which would take up exactly
the same amount of space because of the inflexibility of lead typesetting - and
complained that the book had been "ruined". Peter Davison's Complete
Orwell in 1998 finally reversed these changes which meant, for example,
restoring the genuine 'New Hope for the Ruptured' instead of Orwell's
substitution 'The Truth about Bad Legs'.
The book received mixed reviews. Cyril Connolly complained
that the book's obsession with money prevented it being considered a work of
art. The Daily Mail praised the novel's vigour but was unconvinced by its
demolition of middle England: "among the aspidistra, Mr Orwell seems to
lose the plot". The misfortunes did not end there. Many of the first print
run of 3,000 were lost in a bombing raid in the early years of world war two.
Whether Orwell would have been impressed with the film
adaptation, released in 1999, is another moot point. Much of the grimness of
the novel has been replaced by a warm period gloss. Richard E Grant's Comstock
is a considerably more comical figure - particularly well-suited to the
disastrous Soho binge when some money does come in - while Helena
Bonham-Carter's Rosemary has become considerably more sexually confident. This
is definitely a case where anybody employing the ruse of relying on the film to
take part in our book group discussion may be found out rather quickly.
Orwell refused to allow either Keep the Aspidistra Flying or
his first novel, the considerably weaker A Clergyman's Daughter, to be
reprinted in his lifetime. His dislike of his early novels arose from his
incredibly strong sense that he would always be a literary failure, which
enabled him to empathise so strongly with his creations like Comstock.
Orwell's six novels make just a small part of his nearly two
million published words. Many critics, including biographer Bernard Crick, see
Orwell's claim to literary greatness resting much more upon his talents as an
essayist - on everything from Politics and the English Language to the perfect
cup of tea - than on his novels. Yet while Orwell's first four novels are not
nearly so completely realised as their more famous successors Animal Farm and
1984, they offer many important insights into the development of the most
important English novelist of ideas of the last century.
No comments:
Post a Comment