Keep the Aspidistra Flying

September 30, 2020 to October 11, 2020  Keep the Aspidistra Flying is another of Orwell's novels written and published in Great Britain during the mid-1930s. It is set in London, in a society recovering from economic depression while laboring under a sense, an understanding perhaps, that war is coming.

Orwell knows that this next war will be "total war," that is, war made on civilians. It's goals will be to dispirit the nation, create political division, and hinder war production. And his novel's main character, Gordon Comstock, is looking forward to the bombs falling. Comstock is the sort of person one of my old Irish uncles would have called "a proper little shit." But there is more to Comstock than that.

To begin with, he comes from a family which never held enduring wealth or social standing, but had a run of good luck some short time ago which pushed them into a tenuous upper middle class status, from which they have been slowly descending over two generations or so. The attenuated decline of the Comstocks is mainly due to lassitude rather than, say, the loss of a bold investment or inveiglement in a financial scandal. No; no true shock-to-the-system such that Gordon might have been forced to swim or drown in this world.

Comstock is educated (at the expense of his family and his older, genteelly impoverished, sister Julia) and fancies himself a writer and a poet. When we meet him he is in his late twenties, has published his first (and only) book of poetry, is working in a small but respectable bookshop owned by a Scottish miser, and is living in a boarding house.

Comstock is obsessed with money. Not acquiring it but rather shunning it. He states several times that he is "at war with money." However, he is not unaware of money's ability to facilitate an easier, if not more fulfilling, life. But his attitude toward money and its "redemptive" quality is radically different from the common attitude today.

Many of today's celebrities, for example, produce the most vulgar music and art they are capable of for a system which turns their effluent into money. It is not their art, but the sale of their art which redeems them. It is the money they and their handlers and promoters and investors get which washes them of clean of their idiocy and their narcissism like the River Jordan once cleansed. Cardi B, for example, rises up from "WAP" washed by an abundant flow of money, to follow the admonition of her own John the Bapti$t: "Go Forth and Sin Some More," and "Interview Joe Biden."

Gordon Comstock, however, is "at war" with money and with a particular genus of green, leafy, waxy houseplant; the aspidistra. He sees them both playing roles in British society which correspond to bombardment (money) and the flag of surrender (aspidistra). He rails against the lack money as the reason why he can't write, can't enjoy a day in the country, can't make love to his girlfriend. But he can't bring himself to actually get even a sufficient quantity to alleviate his most urgent, pressing needs. He is constantly aware of how much money is in his pocket, how much he will need for each meal, each bus ride, each cigarette. He lives with the constant awareness of how close he is to homelessness and hunger, and he bears that burden as proof that he has walked away from the social norms which money represents.

At the same time, he is unwilling to join his friend Ravelston in the struggle for socialism, or give in to the romantic view of his girlfriend Rosemary, who feels that if they have love, they will find a way to make the economics work out. He doesn't look to any cultures beyond his own which have not placed money at the center of social and moral worth. He can't adopt a religious faith which exalts poverty as a path to spiritual enlightenment. He rejects the salvation of money and the purification of poverty.

Through a series of misadventures which have to do with the misuse of money, Gordon ends up in jail, jobless, homeless, and dependant on the charity of his girlfriend, his best friend, and even a casual acquaintance. All this goes against his principles and his constant vows to never let money poison the relationships he has with those closest to him (even though money inevitably does, because most of the poison actually accumulates in his mind).

Gordon eventually reaches a separate peace with both money and the aspidistras through the intercession of a child. His poetry behind him, the world of advertising copy awaits. After all, somebody has to come up with the #hashtags for Cardi B's tweets.

From Keep the Aspidistra Flying: "Money writes books, money sells books."