Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Orwell's 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' and Nigel Dennis's 'Cards of Identity' Before the success of Animal Farm, few of George Orwell's books had been...
...Thinking of his unborn child, he reflects--and this is the novel's last line: "Well, once again things were happening in the Comstock family...
...The 'never the time and the place' motif," Orwell observes, "is not made enough of in novels...
...After some blundering around, he got a job with an advertising agency, and, to his own amazement and everybody else's, turned out to be something of a success...
...But, he warns, what is imagined must have more reality than what is real...
...Like his creator, Gordon has a character that is fixed in its basic patterns...
...The second, a fantasy based on theories of sexual abnormality, is even more sharply satirical and is at the same time a vivid nightmare...
...There are still several books that have not been published over here, and I hope that Harcourt will get around to them...
...Gordon quickly finds he has not won the opportunity to write as he pleases because he cannot write at all: "His mind was sticky with boredom...
...Keep your parole...
...It determines his relations with his girl, Rosemary, for she cannot go to his room nor he to hers, and he has no money for entertainments or excursions...
...There is some amusing business about the other members and their preparations for the work at hand, but the heart of Part II is a series of imaginary case-histories...
...Indeed, there is no solution so far as this book is concerned...
...Writing lies to tickle the money out of fools' pockets...
...The book, like so much else that Orwell wrote, moves between the poles of intransigence and common sense...
...Now the same company makes available (at $3.75) his fourth book and third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying...
...At the time of his death in 1950, Harcourt, Brace issued three of the early books--Down and Out in Paris and London, Burmese Days, and Coming Up for Air--and two years later it brought out Homage to Catalonia...
...After the third of the case-histories, the members begin to quarrel and the president is deposed...
...In due season it appears that the strangers are members of a club specializing in problems of personality, and they have occupied the mansion in order to make it ready for the arrival of the other members...
...The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras--they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency...
...When he decides to go back to the advertising agency, he throws the manuscript of his long poem into a drain...
...In what might be called the first act of this comedy, three mysterious strangers take up residence in a long empty mansion in rural England...
...Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which appeared in England in 1936, has been described by Lionel Trilling as "a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made...
...But Orwell does rescue his hero from the impasse in which he finds himself...
...Keep the Aspidistra Flying, on the other hand, deals with poverty on the fringes of the middle class, poverty among the would-be respectable, and its theme is mental anguish rather than physical suffering...
...The combination of poverty and pride determines his relations with his well-to-do friend Ravelston, for he will not allow himself to be put in a position of accepting favors he cannot return...
...As the president explains, the club has learned how to overcome the nuisance of dealing with real patients...
...Gordon Comstock, as both Ravelston and Rosemary try to tell him, is a difficult young man...
...He couldn't cope with rhymes and adjectives...
...George Gissing did something of the sort in New Grub Street, but his treatment of struggling men of letters seems almost romantic in comparison with Orwell's dry, hard bitterness...
...He tries the experiment, only to discover that poverty is even more incompatible with creativity than prosperity is with integrity: "Mental deadness, spiritual squalor--they seem to descend upon you inescapably when your income drops below a certain point...
...So he threw up the job and went to work in a bookstore at a miserable salary, choosing integrity and poetry--and poverty...
...And so we have "The Case of the Co-Warden of the Badgeries,'' "Dog's Way: A Case of Multiple Sexual Misidentity," and "Secret Agent: Multiple Confessions and Singular Identities...
...Dennis can be serious enough, but his mind is inventive rather than analytical, and he throws off outrageous ideas with wonderful aplomb...
...Then the servants present a pseudo-Shakespearean tragedy dealing with problems of identity, and this, ingenious as it is, is really too much...
...It is as funny as a story by J. F. Powers and as pointed as Koestler's Darkness at Noon or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four...
...Gordon reflects: "Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler...
...This, of course, is by no means a happy ending, but neither is it, as one might suppose, an ironic stroke...
...The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Orwell's 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' and Nigel Dennis's 'Cards of Identity' Before the success of Animal Farm, few of George Orwell's books had been published in this country...
...Gordon has courage enough to try to find an alternative...
...But he realizes that he has gained as well as lost...
...Besides, they were alive...
...When Gordon is well on his way to becoming really down and out, Rosemary intervenes so effectively that he funds himself married to her and back at his old job at the advertising agency...
...Why not, he asks himself, renounce the world of money altogether, abandon the whole idea of making good, and live in poverty...
...He was successful enough to be scared stiff: "This, then, was what he was coming to...
...It is a funny book, one of the funniest I have ever read, but it is also a book that sharpens our wits...
...It is the story of Gordon Comstock, who was born into a decaying middle-class family and left unprepared for life by an education beyond the family's means...
...Orwell was far too honest not to realize that, in spite of the dilemma so forcefully described in this book, life does somehow manage to go on...
...Faith, hope, money--only a saint could have the first two without having the third...
...They were bound up in the bundle of life...
...This is true, but it is less true for Gordon than it would be for most men...
...In one of his many bitter moments, Gordon says to Rosemary: "If I had more money I should be a different person...
...If the book is, as Trilling says, a powerful indictment of commercialism, it is also a merciless exposition of the meaning of poverty...
...Their life was pretty nasty, but at least they didn't have to waste any energy in keeping up appearances...
...Never, so far as I can recall, has there been anything quite like it...
...how to make an illicit cup of tea under the nose of a dictatorial landlady...
...Orwell himself had experienced poverty to the very edge of starvation, and written about it in Down and Out, but this was the poverty of the Lumpenproletariat, of people who had given up...
...For it is a bitter book...
...A writer cannot make money in our society without exposing himself to corruption, and if many good writers aren't corrupted, heaven knows there are plenty who are...
...Although he was a stern critic of the Philistines, he was anything but complacent about the intellectuals, himself included...
...No, no...
...and it seems to be inspluble...
...You can't with only two pence halfpenny in your pocket...
...Orwell, on the other hand, was always deeply serious, and I suspect that he would have regarded Cards of Identity as rather dilettantish, even though there are parts of it he would have admired...
...His distinguishing characteristic, however, is his playfulness, a quality with which Orwell was not richly endowed...
...And they are responsible for the fact that, when he lays his hands on a little money, he spends it most unwisely...
...This device interrupts the flow of the narrative, but the stories are so amusing in themselves that one has no trouble in forgiving Mr...
...Dennis as having joined, "in one magnificent leap, that fine and savage company of Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell...
...The first is more purely comic than the others, but it has a nice satiric edge...
...Gordon Comstock, like Orwell himself, has no gift for compromise...
...He is the kind of person you want to shake, for he has a talent for making bad matters worse...
...he is not an adjustable young man...
...They had their standards, their inviolable points of honor...
...But the book winds up neatly enough when the members of the club flee from the police and the servants begin to return to their old identities...
...Many people, however, in this era of other-direction, change so drastically with the circumstances in which they happen to be placed that an observer is bound to wonder what the real person is like and whether there is a real person...
...But that doesn't mean that his problem isn't a real one...
...The third, dealing with life in a monastery devoted to ex-Communists, is the best of the lot, one of the shrewdest commentaries on the totalitarian mentality I have ever encountered...
...but the greatest of these is money...
...Requiring domestic servants, they kidnap five men and women of the vicinity, engage in some skillful brainwashing, and endow them with new personalities suited to the tasks they are to perform...
...So there the problem is...
...They 'kept themselves respectable'--kept the aspidistra flying...
...It is amusing to note that the blurb describes Mr...
...On the flyleaf is a paraphrase of the famous thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, ending, "And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three...
...They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do...
...Poverty and pride lead him to regard a simple misunderstanding as an outrageous affront...
...He learns all the dodges of the respectable poor: how to cadge cigarettes without appearing to do so...
...This is the situation that Nigel Dennis has wittily and ingeniously exploited in Cards of Identity (Vanguard, $3.75...
...Either surrender or don't surrender...
...We write out case-histories,'' he observes, "with a purity of invention and ingenuity impossible in those days when someone was always coming into the room...
...how to disguise the raggedness of clothing...
...All this is described with quiet audacity and appalling plausibility...
...In his satirical force and his meticulous ordering of details, Dennis does remind one a little of the Orwell of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 4
