Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

London!  Mile after mile of mean lonely houses, let off in flats and single rooms; not homes, not communities, just clusters of meaningless lives drifting in a sort of drowsy chaos to the grave!  He saw men as corpses walking.  The thought that he was merely objectifying his own inner misery hardly troubled him.  His mind went back to Wednesday afternoon, when he had desired to hear the enemy aeroplanes zooming over London.   

During my ill-fated pursuit of a doctorate in History I had a class on Modern Britain.  The professor was an expert on the press and publishing industry, and one class session was devoted to George Orwell.  I read Down and Out in London and Paris and Road to Wigan Pier for this session, both of which I heartily recommend for being well-written, interesting, and fun.  (I'd read 1984 and Animal Farm in junior high, and remembered them well enough that I thought I could wing it in class if the prof asked me about them.)  A woman in the class mentioned Keep the Aspidistra Flying, warning us all it was very bad and nobody should read it. Inquiries as to why it was so bad yielded no details--"It is just bad," she assured us.

This exchange stuck in my mind due to its mysteriousness; why did this student object so heartily to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and with so little specificity?  Years later, I guess in the early 2000s, I read the novel myself, and developed theories as to what about the novel had inspired her distaste.  I found the novel quite good, and recently decided to reread it.  Last week, during rare moments of solitude on a cross-country road trip, I read an old hardcover university library copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company and printed in the USA.  The novel first appeared in 1936.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is one of those novels in which an artist or writer has no money and is struggling to survive and achieve recognition for his art.  There are lots of these out there; Henry Miller's oeuvre comes to mind, as does Charles Bukowski's. There's also Knut Hamsun's Hunger.  Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage also includes some of this kind of material.  Even though these books are pretty thick on the ground, I tend to fall for them; there is something about the idea of the down and out writer, railing against society and counting his pennies, unsure of what tomorrow might bring, that appeals to me.

Prefacing the text proper of Keep the Aspidistra Flying is half a page of Bible verses, I Corinthians xiii, with the word "love" replaced with "money" (e.g., "abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money"), a childish sort of joke that gives us a foretaste of the book's theme.

Gordon Comstock, our hero, is an unsuccessful poet, "aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already," consumed with envy of those with money, and convinced that everything worth having--charm, love, sex, a successful career--is the product of access to money:  "It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write.'  He clung to that as an article of faith."  "All human relationships must be purchased with money.  If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you...."  The first two dozen pages are full of lines like that, as well as descriptions of Gordon toying with the coins in his pocket and fretting because he can't afford as many cigarettes as he would like to smoke, and so has to ration them out, resist smoking some today so he won't have to face a day without tobacco on the morrow.

One of the things I enjoy about Miller's and Bukowski's stories about down and out artists and writers is how the protagonists are total and absolute jerks.  They may rail against the evils of the world or capitalism or society or whatever, but they are no better-- they steal, they abuse women, they take advantage of friends, and so on.  This sets up dramatic tension, as the reader has to wonder to what extent the impoverished artist is the victim of our allegedly horrible society, and to what extent he has made his own bad luck.  (It also matches the reality of writers and artists I have met, a disreputable and snobbish lot who are always taking advantage of people, taking temporary jobs at art supply stores or bookstores so they can steal supplies, and moaning that the taxpayers should subsidize their decadent lifestyles because the art-buying public is too obtuse to voluntarily part with their lucre--which the artist himself of course has contempt for--to buy their paintings and sculptures.)

Gordon Comstock fits comfortably into this mold; he hates everybody and everything, from the advertisements pasted on the walls, to the books in the bookstore and lending library where he works, to the customers of the store, who come in two types; the educated snobs he hates for their money and polish, and the middle-class and lower-class readers of thrillers and romances whom he despises for their lack of taste and refinement. Comstock even hates Greta Garbo and Arthur Rackham!  He is so angry at the modern world that he looks forward to the inevitable mass war that will see bombers blasting civilization to rubble!  Gordon's seething hatred, his inexhaustible store of criticisms, complaints and calumnies, is amusing; some specimens of his spleen are funny in their own right, and the sheer volume of off-the-wall complaints creates, in Gordon, a laughably absurd, but still quite real, character.

Through flashbacks about his family and exemplary episodes chronicling Gordon's relationships in the mid-1930s with such people as his friend Ravelston (a wealthy and ineffectual socialist who edits a leftist periodical nobody reads called Antichrist), his long time girlfriend and office worker Rosemary (they have been dating two years and have not had sex yet), and his sister Julia (she barely makes a living for herself, but has been lending Gordon money for years which he has never paid back), we learn the hows and whys of Gordon's poverty.  As we expected, he has made his own bed, but blames society for his troubles.  When he does get fifty American dollars from selling a poem he doesn't use it to buy new clothes or pay back his sister Julia; he blows it all on booze and a whore within hours of cashing the check!  He blames this selfish and idiotic behavior on the fact that he can't be expected to know how to wisely spend money because he's never had money before.  When Gordon had a decent job he was good at (as copywriter at the ad agency where he met Rosemary) he quit, a decision he rationalizes as "declaring war on the money god."  He never finishes his second book of poetry because he's "too crushed by poverty to write." And so on.

Things get worse for Gordon as the novel progresses; he loses his crummy flat and lame job at the bookstore and lending library after, while inebriated, punching a police officer, so he has to take an even crummier apartment and an even lamer job at an even worse lending library, one which only caters to the lowest dregs of society, providing them books which are"published by special low-class firms and turned out by wretched hacks at a rate of four a year, as mechanically as sausages...."

Eventually, Rosemary has sex with Gordon out of pity.  ("It was magnanimity, pure magnanimity, that moved her.  His wretchedness had drawn her back to him.")  When Rosemary turns up some weeks later with news that she is pregnant with his child, Gordon suddenly comes to his senses. He abandons his war on the money-god, gets his job at the ad agency back, throws the unfinished manuscript of his second book of verse down a storm drain, and marries Rosemary. After resisting bourgeois life and its rules for years, the appearance of his child has inspired him to embrace middle-class life. To Rosemary's amazement, he even buys an aspidistra, the hardy plant which to him has long symbolized boring middle-class pretensions.

There is a lot to like about Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  I've already told you I enjoy Gordon acting like a total jerk to everybody.  Numerous minor characters are also entertaining.  At the same time that Gordon's misadventures are funny, Orwell manages to convey to the reader a sense of his desperation and frustration as he faces cold and uncomfortable residences, doubts about his poetry career, boring jobs, and guilt at how poorly he treats Ravelston, Rosemary and Julia, who are always trying to help him despite his trespases against them and his self-destructive behavior.  The book is also full of interesting tidbits about literature and literary life, like a quick rundown of authors popular in the 1930s, many of whom are largely forgotten today, and a description of lending libraries, which, unlike the free public libraries I have been familiar with all my life, are private businesses that charge a few pennies to their customers for each book "borrowed." 

Orwell makes a number of surprising and interesting choices with the novel.  It is definitely strange for Gordon to throw his manuscript, the product of years of work, down the drain!  We expect writers to glorify writers, and we expect lefties like Orwell to denounce advertising, but in the end of the book Gordon turns his back on literature decisively and embraces a job producing deceptive ad copy.  Orwell's attacks on advertising seem sincere, so the reader wonders what he is trying to say by having Gordon's salvation come from producing catchphrases and slogans that will fool people into purchasing items they don't need, like foot deodorant.  (Deodorant, like advertising, is apparently a hot button issue with socialists; at Rutgers a history prof in a 19th century class told us that the selling of deodorant was a scam, and just recently we had Bernie Sanders disparagingly bringing up deodorant.  At the CUNY Grad Center there was a perennially disheveled Marxist prof who famously smelled bad.)

There is a real ambiguity about the book's attitude about capitalism and the bourgeoisie; to what extent does Orwell share the at times contradictory criticisms he puts in Gordon and Ravelston's mouths?  Should we see Keep the Aspidistra Flying as the story of a man who is stupidly rebelling against capitalism and then makes his peace with it and lives a better life thereby, or as the story of a brave man who follows his principles as long as he can, and is eventually crushed?  This ambiguity is stark when one considers that Gordon's character arc is similar to that of Winston Smith in 1984; Smith wages a (pathetic) war on the Big Brother government, and in the end of the novel embraces ("loves") Big Brother, while our man Gordon Comstock pursues his own quixotic struggle against "the money god" only to rejoin the ranks of the strap hanging army of salarymen at the end of the book because he loves his wife and baby.

Besides 1984, Keep the Aspidistra Flying reminded me of Don Quixote, the tale of a mad man sometimes seen as the portrayal of a man who suffers (and makes others suffer) because he has noble values in our corrupt world, and A Clockwork Orange, in which the evil protagonist is reformed by the prospect of becoming a father.
     

So, if I am giving a big thumbs up to it, why did that student in my late 1990s class object to the novel?  I'm guessing it is because the book is a resounding endorsement of traditional family values and, by 1990s (and 21st century) standards, totally "politically incorrect."  In that first chapter in the bookstore Gordon heaps scorn on feminists, homosexuals, and women who like to read popular fiction about love and sex.  The book is full of what I guess you would call "essentialist thinking."  Gordon, like "all small frail people hated to be touched," while we are told fat men typically have a good humor and never admit to being fat: "No fat person ever uses the word 'fat' if there is any way of avoiding it....A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as 'robust.'"  Scots get a similar treatment.  Gordon's competition for title of "Most Villainous Character" in the novel is a physically deformed businessman of low scruples; his physical ugliness represents his moral ugliness in a way that is common in literature, but which nowadays is likely to be seen as declasse or even a "microaggression" against people with disabilities.  

At the end of the book we get an unambiguous, unalloyed indictment of abortion. First the emotional case against abortion.  Gordon, even though his modus operandi though the whole novel has been to act selfishly and to hope English society will be obliterated by enemy bombs, finds abortion unthinkably revolting: "'Whatever happens we're not going to do that.  It's disgusting....I'd sooner cut my right hand off than do a thing like that.'"  Then a few pages later the scientific case against abortion. Gordon goes to a public library and looks at medical textbooks with illustrations of fetuses; Orwell describes in detail a six-month-old and a nine-month-old fetus--Gordon is "surprised" that "they should begin looking human so soon."  He'd thought it would look like a blob with a nucleus!  Finally the moral case against abortion.  "Its future, its continued existence perhaps, depended on him.  Besides, it was a bit of himself--it was himself.  Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?"

Women in the novel are less interesting and well-rounded than the male characters; there are briefly sketched women we are supposed to find repellant (the feminist bookstore customer, a suspicious public library employee, the whores, or "tarts" as Orwell styles them), while the important female characters (Julia and Rosemary) are there to be Gordon's victims; they are there to demonstrate what a creep Gordon is and lack inherent interest.  Gordon is not punished for treating Julia and Rosemary so poorly, and a minor character (the good-natured fat man alluded to above) cheats on his wife repeatedly, but after hitting him in the head with a glass decanter she takes him back.  

I believe I have diagnosed my former classmate's allergy to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and I "get" why she wouldn't like it or recommend it to a class of grad students in the humanities and social sciences, but I will have to disagree with her overall assessment of the book.  I love Orwell's clear writing style, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a fun novel, full of laughs and period interest, and its somewhat ambiguous and idiosyncratic take on social and political issues may offer surprises to today's readers.  Definitely worth a read.

Post Office by Charles Bukowski

Yesterday I reread Charles Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office, copyright 1971.  This slim volume (the 1974 Black Sparrow edition I read is just 115 pages) is the semi-autobiographical story of Bukowski’s alter ego “Henry Chinaski,” who works on and off for the postal service in Los Angeles as a carrier and then a clerk, taking time off to go to Texas where he marries an heiress (she divorces him) and then to try to live off his winnings at the racetrack.  The book describes Chinaski’s generally sad, and sometimes brutish, relationships with women, as well as his encounters with various strange characters.  There is little overarching plot; for the most part Post Office is a series of humorous anecdotes, written in a simple, smooth style that employs short and direct sentences.  As these anecdotes pile up, however, they do succeed in generating a sense of the sadness and futility of life.

I think Post Office is laugh out loud funny, but it is crudely sexist, and I do not doubt that some might find it offensive on that score. The unflattering picture Bukowski paints of the black men he meets over the course of his postal career may also raise the ire of readers. Part of the appeal of Post Office is Bukowski’s effort to shock us. Through a little intellectual jujitsu one could perhaps claim that Chinaski’s objectifying women and treating them shabbily is Bukowski’s way of indicting our sexist society. I doubt you could convincingly claim that, when Bukowski describes how blacks at the post office do no work because they will assault any supervisor who gives them an assignment, he is criticizing the racism of our society.

I have no idea how accurate his depiction is, but I found Bukowski’s description of what it was like working in the post office in the 1960s interesting. But I’m also the guy who enjoys the scenes in Moby Dick about whaling. On the other hand the paragraphs about horseracing: the odds, how to choose the winner, etc., bored me.

Bukowski is similar in some ways to Henry Miller. In both men’s most successful fiction we find the first person narrative of a writer, living down and out, casually describing to us his misbehavior and unconventional and/or uncouth opinions, implicitly justifying his misbehavior by pointing out how corrupt and absurd the world and people in general are. Where Bukowski differs from Miller is in how unpretentious he is; Miller repeatedly tells us how his friends proclaim him a genius, Miller talks about his love of such great cultural figures as Proust and Dostoevsky and cult authors like Hamsun, Miller thinks we are interested in his opinions about India and the theories of Spengler, Miller regales us with page after page of his surreal dreams. For the most part Bukowski sticks to funny anecdotes which reveal (revel in?) how much of an outsider and how much of a jerk he is, and sticks to his straightforward pithy style.

I read all of Bukowski’s novels in the 1990s, thinking Ham on Rye the best and Pulp the worst. Post Office made me laugh quite a bit, so I am considering rereading more of Bukowski soon.

Notes on Henry Miller

I first encountered the work of Henry Miller while at Rutgers.  Not in a class, of course.  I was killing time between classes in the Alexander Library and took a paperback copy of Sexus off the shelf and flipped through it, looking for the pornographic scenes, of which there were quite a few.  Years later, while living in New York, I bought new editions of the three volumes of the Rosy Cruxificion trilogy, Sexus, Plexus and Nexus, and read them for real, from start to finish.  I can still remember sitting on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Guggenheim, my back to Central Park, laughing as I read the scene in Sexus in which Miller, sitting in the passenger seat of a car speeding through Long Island, tries to convince his friends to drive him to Walt Whitman’s birth site.

                “What about visiting Walt Whitman’s birthplace?” I said aloud.

                “What?” yelled McGregror.

                “Walt Whitman!” I yelled.  “He was born somewhere on Long Island.  Let’s go there.”

                “Do you know where?”

                “No, but we could ask someone.”

                “Oh the hell with that!  I thought you knew where.  These people out here wouldn’t know who Walt Whitman was.  I wouldn’t have known myself only you talk about him so goddamned much.  He was a bit queer, wasn’t he?  Didn’t you tell me he was in love with a bus driver?  Or was he a nigger lover?  I can’t remember any more.”

Just typing that passage (from page 123 of my edition) made me laugh.  In that passage you find the appeal of Miller (to me at least) in a nutshell: funny, literary, and shockingly coarse, crude and offensive, or as we say today, “politically incorrect.”

Last year I reread the Rosy Crucifixion and read for the first time several other Miller books, and then filled my e-mails to friends (among them poet and playwright Jason Irwin, immortalized as the first commenter on this blog) with discussion of Miller.  In the interest of keeping all my literary notes in one place, I paste below excerpts relating to Miller from my correspondence. 

JULY 18, 2012

I read Tropic of Capricorn, which has some good parts, and one part I found very surprising, in which Miller complains that after they built the Williamsburg Bridge the Jews invaded his beloved Brooklyn neighborhood and ruined it. Then I reread Sexus, which I think is probably Miller's best book. It has the most sex, the fewest bizarre surrealist sequences, and has a more structured plot than Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. The Tropic books are mostly disconnected anecdotes divided by the weird surrealist transports and irrational hateful rants about how he wishes the world would explode or drown in blood, how he respects a man who murders his neighbor more than a man who has a 9 to 5 job, etc. I love the anecdotes, and the insane misanthropic diatribes can be fun, but those surrealistic sequences put me to sleep. I suspect, however, that Miller thinks that those nonsensical scenes are his best work.

Unable to find it in any of the libraries out here in the wilderness, I bought Crazy Cock at the Half Price Books just west of Des Moines. I love the cover; I wish my copies of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus had such nice covers. I have not read Crazy Cock yet.

I got Moloch from the Simpson College Library. It also has a nice cover. Unfortunately, it is the worst book by Miller I have yet read. A lot of the usual Miller stuff is in there; he works for the messenger company, he cheats on his wife (in one scene he has to borrow money for his wife's abortion from his mulatto girlfriend), there are several characters from his other work, like the mulatto girlfriend and the fat Jewish medical student (I think he's called Kronski in Sexus), there is an Indian, other people keep telling Miller he is a great guy and a genius, etc. But the style is not there, partly because it is written in the third person, so it is not nearly as fun.

The most interesting things about Moloch are the fact that the whole book is an anti-Semitic diatribe, and Miller's more sympathetic treatment of his first wife and his child. The book being in the third person, Miller not only says again and again that Jews are ugly and dirty, but has Jewish characters themselves admit this. As for the first wife, the Miller character loves her and tries to reform, tries to stop cheating and make things work out right with her. He also goes on about how he loves his little daughter. In his other work I don't recall Miller showing any sympathy or affection for his first wife and their daughter. In fact, in Sexus Miller takes credit for improving his wife by making her more sexually liberated; in Moloch it is just the opposite, the wife gets the husband to behave.

Perhaps the best scene in Sexus is when Miller gets a letter from his hero, Knut Hamsun, a stupid and embarrassing letter which breaks Miller's heart but of course had me laughing out loud. I read Hamsun's Hunger in the '90s and have decided to reread it. It turns out that Robert Bly translated it in the late 90s... I doubt it was his translation I read, I think I read an old mouldering hardcover. Anyway, today, when I take the laundry I will seek a copy of this Bly trans at the Franklin Street branch of the Des Moines library.

I'm reading Thomas Mann's “The Black Swan.” I liked The Magic Mountain and “Death In Venice” but this thing is damn lame. It is mostly two women talking about humanity's relationship with “Nature,” largely as reflected in the menstrual cycle and menopause! Thank heavens it is short.

AUGUST 23, 2012

I just finished Plexus, book two of The Rosy Crucifixion.  It was good, because there were lots of scenes of Miller being down and out and being a dick to everybody.  He and his second wife Mona try to sell candy door to door, try to run a speakeasy, hurry down to Florida during a real estate boom, and other crazy schemes, all of which end up with them stealing money from their creditors.  Most of the time they live on money Mona extracts from her "admirers" (she assures Miller that she never has sex with them, but also insists he never meet them.)  Fortunately the many long scenes in which Miller's friends tell Miller he is a genius don't bother me.   

Unfortunately, way too many of Plexus's 640 pages are given over to surrealist and Dadaist scenes, including dream sequences and a scene in which Miller retells the story of Goldilocks; in Miller's version Goldilocks is stripped, cooked, and eaten by the Three Bears.  There is also lots of mystical doubletalk, especially after Miller discovers Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West.

Next week I will start Nexus, the third volume of The Rosy Crucifixion.  I think I will read some Thomas Mann stories this weekend.

SEPTEMBER 2, 2012
I read Thomas Mann's "Tonio Kroger," a story Miller specifically praises in Plexus.  I liked it, but, as usual, I found Mann too long-winded, thought he was belaboring his points, and included too many long "philosophical" dialogues.  I am almost finished with Nexus, the third volume of The Rosy Crucifixion.  After reading the anti-Semitic Moloch it is kind of funny how every good character in The Rosy Crucifixion is Jewish, and how Miller will say things like "I have never met a Gentile of genius" and "every Jewish doctor I met was a man passionately interested in music, art, and literature."  Miller is a wacky character, it is hard to take much of the stuff he says seriously.