The Empty Breadbasket

 Gordon Comstock—the (anti?)hero of George Orwell's excellent novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying—about the dilemmas of the would-be starving artist—suffers from a fate that many of us can relate to. 

On the one hand, Comstock's family perceives him as "clever." He is good in school. He reads books. He has intellectual aspirations. They therefore assume he will go far and "Make Good." Indeed, Comstock's sister trusts that he will be the one to redeem the family fortunes. 

Yet, all Comstock's education actually manages to do is to ill-suit him for earning a living. His intellectual aspirations make him a critic of mere commercialism—the "money sty," as he calls it (borrowing the phrase, I assume, from D.H. Lawrence)—and he renounces all remunerative employment.  

Precisely because he is clever and reads books—he cannot imagine being able to tolerate working in a "good job" as most people understand it. He knows he has to support himself somehow—but he insists it must not be in a career that would distract him from his true calling as a poet and writer. 

Surely this is a familiar dilemma for anyone who ever received—or gave themselves, auto-didactically—a humanistic education. On the one hand—we were encouraged to do so. We were applauded for winning prizes in history and spending our free time reading books and essays. 

Yet, the more time we devoted to these activities—which the adults in our lives seemed to approve—the further we got from being able to support ourselves—which they did not seem to approve. 

As Samuel Butler once summarized the paradox, in his The Authoress of the Odyssey: "Our children too; they cannot show too many signs of genius, but at the same time we blame them if they do not get on in the world and make money as genius next to never does." 

Henry Miller points to the experience of a friend of his, who could quote from memory the complete works of Goethe—but who couldn't manage to feed himself or find a change of underwear. 

"There's something obscene in this love of the past which ends in breadlines[,]" Miller concludes. "The insanity of it!" he writes in a passage just above this one (in Tropic of Cancer)—"Learning, the empty breadbasket!"

We were all encouraged to read things like Goethe. The adults in our lives seemed to take this as a sign of promise on our part. But promise to do what? To "go far"? To "make good"? Hardly! The further we went into the realms of literature, the further away we got from ever being able to land a job!

In the end, Comstock "sells out." He decides that there are worse things in life than having to write sleazy advertising jingles rather than serious poems for a living—such as being unable to marry the woman you knocked up or to support the child you just accidentally fathered. 

That's how the "money god" gets you in the end—Comstock says. If he merely tempted you with luxury yachts, it would be easy to turn him down. But instead, he gets you "through your sense of decency." And against that—there is no defense. 

And so, Comstock succumbs to the "money sty." He builds for himself "a dear little home with its cost, its cost / that you will have to pay," as D.H. Lawrence would put it. He even puts an aspidistra houseplant in the window, in order to symbolize his willing defeat at the hands of philistine commercial values. 

"Vicisti, O aspidistra!" as Comstock puts it. 

One can read this conclusion to the book as a defense of common sense pragmatism—a version of the same insight that Philip Carey comes to at the end of Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage: "the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect [...] It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories."

Indeed, this is how I interpreted the novel's message in my first post on this subject, earlier in the week. 

But now I find myself wondering if Comstock's submission to the "money god" is not intended—actually—rather more like Winston Smith's submission to Big Brother, at the end of 1984 (this is an Orwell novel, after all)—a tragedy, in short. A defeat that really is a defeat, and not a disguised victory. A surrender to intellectual cowardice, rather than to "happiness." 

After all—did Orwell really favor Comstock's solution in the end? Certainly, Orwell's own biography bears little resemblance to Comstock's. He never sold out to an advertising firm. He lived the life of the freewheeling bohemian—trudging off to Spain to fight the fascists, and wandering around between prisons and flophouses in order to gain "experience" for writing. 

Orwell in practice—then—plumped for Lawrence-style revolt—rather than for the aspidistra. 

"To abjure money is to abjure life," Gordon Comstock insists, at the conclusion of the novel—in defending his choice to submit to its dictates. 

One is reminded of Philip Larkin's observation in his poem "Money": "So I look at others, what they do with theirs [money, that is]: / They certainly don’t keep it upstairs. / By now they’ve a second house and car and wife: / Clearly money has something to do with life."

Indeed, money does have a great deal to do with life. It is the substructure of all those "dear little homes" that Lawrence wrote about. And Lawrence urged us to abjure it regardless. If "to abjure money is to abjure life," we may say, with Lawrence—so much the worse for life!

And was this not Orwell's own conclusion—as reflected in his actual choices? 

Orwell publicly disowned such a Lawrentian attitude, of course. In all his writings on the theme of sainthood—in "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool," for instance—he protests against the "anti-life" attitude of some artists and sages. 

He claims to plump, instead, for "the ordinary, belly-to-earth selfishness" that is inseparable from living. He disavows all claims to sainthood, for—as Comstock puts it in this novel, "the saints and the soul-savers" never beget children. 

They don't "have dear little, dear little boys / whom you'll have to educate," as Lawrence would put it. They don't build "dear little homes." They don't get "a second house and car and wife," as Larkin put it.

And so much the better for them, these poets seem to imply!

Orwell—much as he protests otherwise in his essay—seems, in practice, to have agreed with them. A man who wanders off to Spain to fight the fascists is not actually someone who has submitted with grace to the reign of the aspidistra. 

So what, then, if all of our intellectual aspirations and ambitions are futile? So what if they get us further away from the stuff of life, the more we pursue them? So what if they are an "empty breadbasket" in the end—just as Miller wrote?

Has that ever stopped any of us?