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 because he was not 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 (£10 in 1934 equates to £592.20 in 2023.). He intends to set aside half for his sister Julia, who has always given him money and support.
He treats Rosemary and Ravelston to dinner: it begins well, but deteriorates as Gordon, drunk, tries to force himself on Rosemary. 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 five-pound note has been given to, or stolen by, one of the prostitutes.
After Gordon makes a brief appearance before the magistrate Ravelston pays Gordon’s fine, but a reporter writes about the case in the local paper. The ensuing publicity results in Gordon losing his job at the bookshop. As he searches for another job, his life and his poetry stagnate.
After living with his friend Ravelston, Gordon ends up working, this time in Lambeth, at another bookshop and lending library owned by the sinister Mr Cheeseman, where he is paid thirty shillings a week, ten shillings less than he was earning before. Yet 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. Since she and Gordon reject the idea of an abortion (which would have been both illegal and dangerous at that time), Gordon is presented with the choice between leaving Rosemary to a life of social shame at the hands of her family or marrying her and returning to a life of respectability by taking back the job at the New Albion agency that he once so deplored.
Gordon chooses Rosemary and respectability, and experiences 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.
Characters
Gordon Comstock – a “well-educated and reasonably intelligent” young man possessed of a minor “talent for writing”
Rosemary Waterlow – Comstock’s girlfriend, whom he met at the advertising agency, who lives in a women’s hostel and who has a forgiving nature, but about whom little else is revealed
Philip Ravelston – the wealthy left-wing publisher and editor of the magazine Antichrist who supports and encourages Comstock
Julia Comstock – Gordon’s sister, who is as poor as he is and who, having always made sacrifices for him, continues to be so: “A tall, ungainly girl [–] her nature was simple and affectionate.”
Mrs Wisbeach – landlady of the lodging house in Willowbed Road who imposes strict rules on her tenants, including Comstock
Mr Flaxman – Comstock’s fellow lodger, a travelling salesman for the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Company who is temporarily separated from his wife
Mr McKechnie – the lazy, white-haired and white-bearded, teetotal and snuff-taking Scot who owns the first of the two bookshops that Gordon works at
Mr Cheeseman – the sinister and suspicious owner of the second bookshop
Mr Erskine – a large, slow-moving man with a broad, healthy, expressionless face who is the managing director of the New Albion Publicity Company and promotes Gordon to a position as a copywriter
Literary significance and criticism
Cyril Connolly wrote two reviews at the time of the novel’s publication. In the Daily Telegraph he described it as a “savage and bitter book”, and wrote that “the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention”. In the New Statesman he wrote that it gave “a harrowing and stark account of poverty”, and referred to its “clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist’s chair with the drill whirring”.
Orwell wrote in a letter to George Woodcock dated 28 September 1946 that Keep the Aspidistra Flying was one of the two or three of his books that he was ashamed of because it “was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for money. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.” Orwell did not want either this book or A Clergyman’s Daughter reprinted during his lifetime.
For an edition of the BBC Television show Omnibus (The Road to the Left, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer. Bragg said that he “just assumed Mailer had read Orwell. In fact he’s mad on him.” Of Keep the Aspidistra Flying Mailer said: “It is perfect from the first page to the last.”
The novel has won other admirers besides Mailer, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it “a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made”.
Orwell’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers finds the novel flawed by weaknesses in plot, style and characterisation, but praises “a poignant and moving quality that comes from Orwell’s perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary’s tender response to Gordon’s mean misery”.
Tosco Fyvel, literary editor of Tribune from 1945 to 1949, and a friend and colleague of Orwell’s during the last ten years of Orwell’s life, found it interesting that “through Gordon Comstock Orwell expressed violent dislike of London’s crowded life and mass advertising— a foretaste here of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell has Gordon reacting to a poster saying Corner Table Enjoys His Meal With Bovex in a manner already suggesting that of the later novel:
Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred…. Corner Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. —For can you not see [—] Behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there’s nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? And the reverberations of future wars.
Catherine Blount points to the theme of a London couple needing to go into the countryside in order to find a private place to have sex, which has a significant place in the plot of Aspidistra and which is taken up prominently in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell’s biographer D. J. Taylor writes of Gordon Comstock that, “Like Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter and like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he rebels against the system and is ultimately swallowed up by it … Like Winston Smith, he rebels, the rebellion fails, and he has to reach an accommodation with a world he’d previously disparaged.”
Film adaptation
A film adaptation of the same title was released in 1997. It was directed by Robert Bierman and stars Richard E. Grant and Helena Bonham Carter. The film was released in North America and New Zealand under the alternative title A Merry War.
