This week, I've been reading some of those overlooked and often half-forgotten books from the middle of George Orwell's career: the realist novels of the 1930s, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. They are deeply strange and surprising books. I don't say I dislike them. To the contrary, I found them both entertaining and highly readable.
But what strikes one most about them is how different they are from the Orwell we know from the essays and the political writings.
Whereas the Orwell I idolized in my youth was a democratic socialist, compelled to stake a clear moral position on every issue of the day—these two books from the middle of his career are fiercely, provocatively apolitical—with an almost philistine contempt for socialist do-gooders and anti-fascist democracy-defenders, and for many of the causes we now most associate with Orwell.
Of course, this "apolitical" version of Orwell also comes across in the essays now and again. There is his famous piece on the common toad—for instance—in which he defends the right of even a democratic socialist to ramble about the woods on a pleasant day now and again and think about the natural scenery for a change, rather than the sufferings of the proletariat.
An unapologetically political left-wing writer like Brecht once wrote that in times like the present, "a talk about trees seems almost a crime / because it implies silence about so many horrors." Whereas Orwell, in his essay on the toad, vouches for talking about trees: since the whole point of social justice, he says, is to create a world where people can delight in such things, rather than to be harassed every moment by the sting of material necessity.
Hazlitt writes in one of his essays of the sort of person who is capable of only "one idea" at a time. "If you happen to remark" to such a person, "'It is a fine day,' or 'The town is full,'"—writes Hazlitt—"it is considered as a temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going the whole length of the principle."
Orwell, in his essay on the toad, is really just trying to defend his right as a writer to say "it is a fine day"—to take a break for a moment from politics to comment on ordinary life—against the "persons with one idea" who would write in to socialist journals to condemn him for being politically suspect—just because he had let a single column go by without mentioning the iniquities of capitalism.
Orwell also wrote in the essays about how—if he had lived in more ordinary times—he never would have liked to get mixed up in politics to start with. What he actually wanted was to be an aesthete—writing "purple prose" and poetry. As Orwell describes his original intention as an author: "I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound."
I always assumed—however—that this was partly a pose. I figured: Orwell was meant to write about fascism and Stalinism and social democracy all along; otherwise we wouldn't have spent so much time doing so.
If Orwell actually wanted to write apolitical literature, I thought, he would have done so. If he actually just wanted to write about fens and spinneys and flowers and trees, he would have done so.
Well, now—it turns out—he did. Having read Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air, I am more persuaded that Orwell actually meant what he said about these things. And I say this not only because these books are full of genuine nature writing; but also because they are both so contemptuous of political engagement.
It is even said that the latter book—Coming Up for Air—was so ambivalent in its attitude to politics that its left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz expressed some reservations about its contents (though he honored his contract with Orwell by bringing it to press).
If you had told me that anecdote before reading the novel, I (like most people in the "Orwell can do no wrong" brigade) would have assumed this was because Gollancz was an orthodox Popular Fronter, who would not have been able to abide Orwell's independence of thought.
But now—having read the novel—I can kind of see Gollancz's point. If you read this book and knew nothing else about its author, I think you would assume Orwell was headed in the direction of fascism. You'd expect him to endorse Oswald Mosley in the next election—or at best, that he'd be a supporter of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement—even though these are the kinds of positions we least associate with Orwell the essayist.
The question of the extent to which Orwell identifies with the first-person narrator of Coming Up for Air is a bit problematic. Biographically, they are not very similar. Orwell was a scholarship boy at Eton who wrote novels and poetry; whereas George Bowling, the protagonist of this novel, is almost proudly philistine. Orwell is plainly not Bowling, or vice versa. But he is not so obviously not him either.
("And yes," as a character puts it in Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, "I know that there's a difference between characters and authors; but I also know that grown-ups should not pretend that it's quite the difference that they tell their students it is.")
Biographically, Orwell was much closer to the protagonist of Keep the Aspidistra Flying: the impoverished bohemian; the "moth-eaten" intellectual manqué, with authorial ambitions and a chip on his shoulder. Coming Up for Air's George Bowling, by contrast, is not merely another authorial stand-in. But he is still some sort of ego-projection of the author—just of a different kind.
Instead of being Orwell's image of himself—the way Aspidistra's protagonist partially is—Bowling is the sort of "common man" that Orwell pretended to admire: the thick-necked John Bull; the lower middle class embodiment of common sense, whom Orwell hoped would be the natural political base of a distinctly English form of socialism.
And yet, it is impossible to imagine George Bowling—as Orwell gives him to us—evolving into anything other than a fascist.
One gets the sense that—in creating Bowling—Orwell wanted to transcend his own intellectuality by creating a genuine everyman. But Orwell couldn't actually escape his own personality so thoroughly as to create a total philistine. And so, he gives Bowling a modest helping of "highbrow" aspirations. He makes Bowling a reader and a doubter—someone who considers himself an independent thinker who isn't taken in by all the howling propaganda they dish out at political meetings.
And yet—this is exactly the psychological profile of the sort of person who would end up voting for Oswald Mosley.
On the one hand, after all, Bowling is still philistine enough to be basically brutal. His nostalgia for his childhood in the countryside revolves around pleasant boyhood memories of torturing animals with bicycle pumps and stomping on birds' nests. Likewise, he is awfully cruel on the subject of women—reflecting for pages on how disappointed he is to encounter a woman he once dated as a lad, only to discover that she has become—in middle age—a "fat hag" with a face like a "bulldog" who has "let herself go to pieces." (Bowling himself has put on a few pounds with the years as well, it must be said.)
Meanwhile, Bowling's half-hearted "highbrow" aspirations seem only to get him as far as smirking sardonically at the lectures of an anti-fascist speaker. The First World War has made Bowling into a cynic. He was stuffed full of propaganda and atrocity stories about the Germans in 1914—and then ended up discovering that the war was absurd and fought over nothing; so he can't bring himself to get bothered and het up over foreign affairs any more. He thinks the anti-fascist lecturers, with all their warnings against Nazi brutality, are just trying to "stir up hate" because they secretly want an excuse to "smash the faces" of fascists with "a spanner."
But this is, of course, the attitude that underlay Chamberlain's appeasement policy: the sense that atrocity stories were always exaggerated or made-up; that conflict was never worth it; that England should let continental European countries destroy each other as much as they pleased and not get involved, because the First World War had proved to be so much bunkum.
Bowling's would-be "clever" take on the anti-fascist lecturer is that he is a man who makes his living off of apocalyptic warnings about fascism, and therefore he ought to be grateful to Hitler for keeping him employed. He says that the arrival of fascism wouldn't make much difference to himself, George Bowling, but only to the intellectuals—who will be "smashing faces, or having their own smashed, according to who's winning[.]"
Likewise, Bowling can only shake his head and chuckle when a young Communist activist at the Left Book Club tries to tell him about "the concentration camps and the Nazis beating people up with rubber truncheons and making the Jews spit in each other's faces" and asks: "doesn't it make your blood boil?" To this, Bowling reflects to himself: "They're always going on about your blood boiling. Just the same phrase during the war, I remember." He tells the Communist activist: "I went off the boil in 1916 [...] And so'll you when you know what a trench smells like."
Bowling is frankly astonished that anyone could care very much what happens to Jews in a foreign country. While speaking to the activist, he reflects to himself: "for a moment he actually got tears in his eyes! Felt as strongly as all that about the German Jews!"
This is precisely the same cheap cynicism that Arthur Koestler found in France in 1939—and which prepared the way for the country's ignominious surrender to the Germans. As he writes in his memoir of wartime France, Scum of the Earth, the typical lower-middle-class Frenchmen at the time—the George Bowling equivalents of that country—had developed a nihilistic attitude to politics as a result of the war. They therefore assumed that all the warnings about fascism and Nazi atrocities must be made up by the Jews in order to orchestrate a conflict. People were just "stirring up hate," as Bowling would put it.
And it's not at all clear that Orwell disapproved of this attitude, in 1939. Bowling is not on some sort of redemption arc or path of political awakening in the novel. It's not like he realizes, by the end of the book, that one should have tears in one's eyes about the fate of the German Jews after all. To the contrary, the author seems to endorse and identify with Bowling's cynicism about do-gooder causes.
To be sure, the book is partly a prophetic warning about the coming of the next world war; but it certainly does not endorse anti-fascism as a program to avert it; to the contrary: it continually mocks it.
One can understand why Orwell—after his experience in Spain—might have gotten a bit cynical about Popular Front rhetoric by 1939.
But one can also understand why Victor Gollancz—Jewish and anti-fascist as he was—might have felt personally attacked by the manuscript Orwell sent him. I think Gollancz was basically correct in his assessment of the political stance of Orwell's novel.
I recall reading Judith Shklar's essay on Orwell years ago and thinking it was deeply unfair, at the time. Shklar's assessment of Orwell was that—for all his public anti-fascism—he was basically fascist at an emotional level— even confessing at one point that he found Hitler a relatable figure whom he couldn't entirely dislike. (And indeed, if you see those early photos of him from Burma, Orwell does bear an eerie resemblance to Hitler.)
I rejected this assessment angrily at the time I read it—how dare Shklar spurn my hero Orwell in this way!
But having read Coming Up for Air—I am forced to confess now that I can see her point. In its emotional and sociological tenor, this is a fascist novel.
Well, people are always at their worst when they are most insecure; and the insecurity that haunts all of Orwell's writings—bringing out the worst in him—is a class insecurity. He wants to be of the common people, but isn't. He wants to drag himself down to the level of philistinism—itself often the low road to fascism (just as avant-gardism can be a high road to it)—but he can't. He wants to convince himself that he admires the sort of bluff everyman that George Bowling represents—and that such a person is really the salt of the Earth who will one day build English socialism and defend the country from fascism. But the image completely fails to persuade.
It's impossible to believe that a person like Bowling would be anything but sympathetic to Mosley's fascists—or even to Hitler directly. And it's impossible to believe that Orwell himself actually liked this type of suburban philistine as much as he claimed. (Note, as mentioned above, that Orwell can't help but give Bowling some vaguely intellectual aspirations; he does attend Left Book Club meetings, after all—even if he often sneers at the things he hears there.)
At the same time that Orwell wanted to be of the people and wasn't—he also wanted to be of the upper class intelligentsia and wasn't part of that either.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying reflects this side of Orwell's internal class ambivalence; just as Coming Up for Air reflects his ambivalence toward the "common man."
Orwell—with his Eton education but no university degree—the poor scholarship boy with half-a-gentleman's-education under his belt and a desire to "write"—was also beset by status anxiety when it came to the upper classes. His biography had furnished him enough claim to the intellectual class to wish to belong to it; but not quite enough to feel securely anchored to its ranks.
One can feel this anxiety breathed from every page of Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Its protagonist is torn between an aspiration to join the intelligentsia, on the one hand, and a nostalgie de la boue—a desire to "sink into the muck," as he puts it—on the other. What he can't stand is being stranded in the middle—which is exactly where Orwell was.
This leads to a devouring insecurity and profound ambivalence. Orwell's protagonist, Gordon Comstock, admires his moneyed and cultured literary friends with their university educations; but he also dismisses them (as the real life Orwell did too, at times) with philistine (and homophobic) contempt as "Nancy boys" and "Parlour Socialists" who were never able to overcome the impressions left upon them by their miserable public school educations (Orwell wasn't ever able to overcome his own either, by the way).
Gordon Comstock longs to rebel against commercialism and the "money god"—but at the same time, he realizes that he is at a disadvantage in doing so because he doesn't himself have money. Those who are best able to transcend the values of money civilization are those who don't have to worry about money, because they've always had enough of it. And so, in the very act of trying to spurn money, he finds himself ever more subject to its tyranny.
The dilemma Orwell examines in Keep the Aspidistra Flying will be familiar to every aspiring artist or intellectual. It is a novel about the fear of "selling out," as we would now call it. It is a novel of revolt against consumer society. But it's a fundamentally apolitical, romantic aesthete's revolt (indeed, the book is pretty contemptuous of socialism as a solution).
More than anything, the book bears marks of the influence of D.H. Lawrence. Comstock's rebellion takes the form of Lawrence's poem "Don'ts"—with its commandment not be a "good little boy" who allows himself to be caught in the snares and toils of domesticity as a strategy to trap him in a sleazy, money-making job that claims his soul. Rather, Lawrence says, one must "fight / with a hit-hit here and a hit-hit there," to let in "a little fresh air in the money sty[.]"
Indeed, the phrase "money sty" comes up a lot in this novel, whenever Gordon Comstock is denouncing the values of modern civilization.
But Comstock's rebellion against money fails because he discovers that one is still just as much subject to the whims of money without it as one is with it—if not more so.
And this vision too—that of money civilization as a prison from which there is no possible escape—owes much more to Lawrence's romantic rebellion than it does to the democratic socialism that we would later come to associate with Orwell. Lawrence's poem "Wages" reflects the political tenor of this novel—and the crucial point in that poem is that there is in fact no way out of the money sty, whether one has money or lacks it, because: "the work-prison covers almost every scrap of the living earth[.]"
(Henry Miller was also a considerable influence on Orwell in the '30s, and his attitude toward this subject in Tropic of Cancer —published the same year as Aspidistra—is reminiscent: "The same story everywhere. If you want bread you've got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production!")
Even though this is a novel of rebellion—then—it is equally a novel of submission. The book does not actually contemplate a liberation from the "money sty," but rather suggests that Comstock finds a kind of happiness at last by bowing his neck to the yoke—by "putting himself in harness," as Miller would put it.
He accepts his destiny as a member of the lower-middle-classes. He tries to become one of Orwell's precious "common men." He decides to work in a job he despises in order to support a family. He embraces the values of respectability—as symbolized by his insistence in the book's final pages that he and his wife put an aspidistra houseplant in the front window for all the neighbors to see.
In short, he does all of Lawrence's "Don'ts": he builds himself "a dear little home, with its cost, its cost / that you have to pay." He embraces it. He accepts—just as he interpreted Miller to counsel acceptance and submission to the cosmic fate; which is here identified with the inevitable rule of the "money god" and his values.
By rebelling against money, Comstock admits at last, he was really just protesting against life. As Philip Larkin once put it in a poem: "Clearly money has something to do with life." As so by implication, Comstock realizes: "To abjure money is to abjure life."
Some of us still have enough residual Lawrentianism and Flaubertianism in us to say, at this point: well, so much the worse for life! Let it be abjured, then! (That seemed to be Larkin's answer too: the connection between money and life, once he'd realized it, was one he found "intensely sad," he writes in the poem—and I find it so as well.)
But it was always one of Orwell's tenets—and this applies to the Orwell of the essays as well—that the path of renunciation is a dead end. "The glow of renunciation never lasts," Comstock observes in this novel—and Orwell would make the same point in his essay on Tolstoy. The Russian sage's great problem, as Orwell put it, was that he renounced life and power, and then expected the renunciation to make him happier. So too, Comstock's great error was to think that by abjuring money he would become more comfortable rather than less so.
Orwell's book is in part a rejection of aspiration for sainthood—a theme of his later essays as well, such as the pieces on Tolstoy and Gandhi. Those who reject life, domesticity, "the harness," etc., end up leading a death in life. Whereas the lower middle class people who "keep the aspidistra flying"—who submit to the yoke and try to preserve their suburban respectability—the George Bowlings of the world whom Orwell tried to persuade himself he so admired—at least "were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do."
Of all the book—of course—this final section is the least convincing. I can quite believe that Orwell rejected otherworldliness and sainthood (his essays on Gandhi and Tolstoy are ones I've always found persuasive). But I can't believe he ever actually saw it as a salvation to join the ranks of the George Bowlings of the world—to submit to the aspidistra.
Orwell of course tried to persuade himself to the contrary. All his life, he believed that if he could only achieve a mystic union with the common man; if he could only shed his lingering intellectual trappings and submerge himself fully among the ranks of the philistines—then vulgar wisdom and common sense would triumph throughout the world.
But he never could do it. He never could fully believe his own romanticized image of the aspidistra-flying class.
For Orwell, "common sense" would inevitably mean support for a decent, humane democratic socialism and a rejection of totalitarianism. But what are we to do when the George Bowlings of the world become foot soldiers for totalitarianism instead—as they so often do? (Bowling, with his consuming woman-hatred, his contempt for Jews and anti-fascist intellectuals and his indifference to their fate, his incapacity to see why England should involve herself in foreign affairs, would absolutely be a MAGA supporter if he were alive and living in the United States today.)
And so, in order to persuade himself that the "common man" would inevitably support democracy when it counted, Orwell had to endow him with more intellectual traits and virtues than such a person would actually convincingly possess. His common man would have to subscribe to the Left Book Club. He would have to read a spot of "highbrow" fiction now and again. He would have to attend anti-fascist meetings. (And so, Orwell's common man comes to look ever more like himself, as Orwell actually was: a footloose, undomesticated writer, with intellectual aspirations, who did things like run off to fight for democracy in Spain.)
And even with all this help—even with all these extra intellectual trappings—Orwell's idealized "common man" in the form of George Bowling still comes across as a fascist.
The terrible fact that every liberal intellectual has been forced to confront in the Trump era is that there is no great grassroots force of "common sense" slumbering under the mountain, ready to rouse up and save us from the barbarian invasion when it counts. Even Orwell couldn't make such an image plausible. When he gave us his best sociological depiction of a middle-class traveling salesman, in Coming Up for Air—far from giving us a plausible image of the sort of person who would cast his ballot for decency and democracy—all he managed to do was give us a sociological profile of the typical fascist shock-trooper.
All his life, Orwell was in flight from what he actually was: a leftist intellectual who liked books and cared about foreign politics and couldn't actually understand anyone who didn't. I knew this about him, from the essays. But it took me reading these novels from the '30s to see just how deep the conflict and ambivalence within him went—and into what a political impasse it led him, at least for a time, in the middle of his career.
A world ruled by the George Bowlings would not in fact be less totalitarian or more humane than one ruled by the intelligentsia that Orwell simultaneously envied, identified with, and despised. It would probably, in fact, be a great deal worse.
The philistines are not coming to save us. The aspidistra in the window will not offer salvation in the end. Surrendering to its rule will not redeem us.
Instead, I still plump for Lawrence and rebellion—even if it be every bit as futile as Orwell plausibly portrays it as. I still say: reject the aspidistra and the "money sty" and domestication and the reign of the George Bowlings, even if there be no alternative.
I still say, with Lawrence: "Fight your little fight, my boy, fight and be a man. / Don't be a good little, good little boy / being as good as you can / and agreeing with all the mealy-mouthed, mealy-mouthed / truths that the sly trot out / to protect themselves and their greedy-mouthed, greedy-mouthed / cowardice, every old lout."
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