A Room with a View
And if we did get a writer worth reading should we know him when we saw him, so choked as we are with trash? – Keep the Aspidistra Flying
I want this one to be a work of art, & that can’t be done without much bloody sweat. – Letter to Brenda Salkeld, 16 February 1935
Booklovers’ Corner lay on the southern slopes of Hampstead, on what Keep the Aspidistra Flying would describe as ‘a sort of shapeless square where four streets converged’. Occupying a vague hinterland between working-class Kentish Town and the leafier purlieus of NW3, dominated by the nearby Playhouse cinema, it was also on a tram route, the source of one of the novel’s more grotesque ‘modernist’ images – a tram ‘like a raucous swan of steel’ which glides groaning over the cobbles.
No doubt the time spent staring out of the shop window encouraged this kind of hallucinatory simile. In the evenings Orwell repaired to the Westropes’ flat at Warwick Mansions, Pond Street, the society of his employers and his fellow-lodger Jon Kimche. Here, by all accounts, a notably civilised atmosphere prevailed. Mr Westrope, tall and slightly stooped, was described by one of his lodgers as being impressive in appearance, ‘rather like a quiet country solicitor’. His wife – they were in late middle age – was more vivacious. Together they did their best to make the young men who made up the shop’s staff feel at home. There was a pleasant sitting room which they were sometimes allowed to borrow, and Orwell, used to the genteel observances of middle England, was slightly startled when Mrs Westrope asked him if he intended to bring women back to his room, not as a warning shot across the bows but as an indication that his private life was his own. The social circle of the Westropes’ flat was only one of several to which Orwell, newly arrived in London but with several useful contacts, had access. Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying is an isolated figure. Essentially Rosemary, his girlfriend, and Ravelston, his guilt-ridden sponsor at Antichrist are his only friends, and the novel illustrates Orwell’s trick – one carried all the way through to Nineteen Eighty-Four – of setting up a solitary anti-hero in opposition to a hostile world. In contrast, his own life at Warwick Mansions and the addresses to which he subsequently migrated was comparatively lively. Living permanently in London for the first time in his life, he was able to expand his range of acquaintances. He saw more of Rees and the group of writers associated with the Adelphi. He kept up his friendship with Mabel Fierz. Above all, he met the woman who was to become his first wife.
Orwell used Keep the Aspidistra Flying to express certain beliefs about the worlds – literary and emotional – in which he operated. But they were not all drawn from his own life. Most of his friends from the mid-1930s agreed that the bookshop in the novel is the gravest caricature. Here Mr Mckechnie, the shop’s proprietor, slumbers over the gas fire with the snuff speckling his white beard while a dozen feet below his embittered assistant counts his diminishing store of cigarettes, expels tramps, defers to fruity-voiced women in search of dog books, presides with secret contempt over the shop’s lending library and finds emotional release in kicking the spines of the Victorian classics at his side. But the atmosphere of Booklovers’ Corner was markedly different. Past patrons remembered it as an excellent second-hand bookshop with a discriminating stock; its proprietors were a ‘delightful couple’ and only Orwell’s account of the lending library offered any faint connection to the reality of the place. A twelve-year-old boy who browsed there in the mid-1930s recalled its cramped, dusty interior – the stock overflowing the shelves and stacked up to the ceiling – as ‘rather exciting’ for its promise of hidden treasures. Orwell’s routine, set out in a letter to Brenda Salkeld, allowed for around five and a half hours’ work a day (again, this distinguishes him from Gordon, who works a five-and-a-half-day week). Getting up at seven, he went down to open the shop at 8.45 and stayed there for an hour. From 10.30 until lunchtime he got on with his writing, returning to the shop at two and remaining there until 6.30.
There were worse constraints for a young novelist in the 1930s. Like Graham Greene, working on the sub-editor’s desk at The Times, Orwell was fortunate in that his free time coincided with the hours when he was most mentally alert. He could yawn through the long afternoons with the real business of the day already behind him. A few glimpses of him in the role of bookseller’s assistant survive. Kimche, who later fought with him in Spain and went on to become a colleague on Tribune, never saw him sit. Standing in the centre of the shop, he seemed ‘a slightly forbidding figure’. As well as its stock of books and the lending library, the shop had various sidelines, among them secondhand typewriters and stamps. Kimche retained an abiding image of the tall, saturnine shop-walker ‘almost like a gazelle’ with a small boy, far below him, handing up a packet of stamps. There are other testimonies to the shop’s faintly intimidating air when Orwell was on duty. The novelist Peter Vansittart, who visited Booklovers’ Corner as a schoolboy, remembered the ‘slightly ungracious’ assistant trying, unsuccessfully, to sell him a copy of Trader Horn in Madagascar. Vansittart stuck out for a copy of P.G. Wodehouse’s A Damsel in Distress.
Although it ends on an up, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the novel that occupied Orwell’s time during his fifteen months at the Westropes’ bookshop, is an end-of-tether book, deeply disillusioned both with the literary world which Gordon Comstock tries to infiltrate and with the wider environment glimpsed beyond the immediate irritations of rejection slips and professional snubs. While damning the rackets that compel him to prostitute his small but genuine talent, Gordon is uneasily conscious – something that perhaps marks him out as a 1930s anti-hero – that his struggles and resentment are increasingly irrelevant when set against the turmoil beyond the window. In some ways Aspidistra is less a novel about a struggling poet who feels himself to be excluded from the citadels of literary power than an attempt to foresee the future by a man who realises that the unsatisfactory arrangements of present-day life are set to be obliterated by something a great deal worse. For this reason it is important to see Orwell in the context of the environments in which he moved – professional, social and political – here in the mid-1930s, with the news from continental Europe growing steadily more alarming. Over six decades later it is easy enough to mark the 1930s down as a single, undifferentiated stretch of time: cloth-capped hordes at the dole queue; bombers sweeping down over fleeing civilians at Guernica; torchlight glinting off spurred boots; the endless tide of lofted flags. These are characteristic images. To move back into Orwell’s own professional terrain, it is impossible to read a serious English novel written after about 1935 without noting a deep sense of unease, often extending to outright dread. And yet contemporary evidence suggests that it is possible to separate the 1930s into several distinct phases: two years of deep depression, from 1929 to 1931, culminating in the formation of the National Government; a period of recovery when Hitler’s rise was something that was going on elsewhere; the moment in 1936 when Franco seized the Spanish colonial possessions and began the three-year civil war; followed by a definite ‘pre-war’ period (again, one sees this in the novels of the time) when everyone knew that armed aggression was inevitable. ‘The years 1933–6 were on the whole pleasant ones,’ Alec Waugh wrote nearly half a century later in his autobiography. Waugh was a playboy novelist with a rich wife who came no closer to the privations of Jarrow than the cinema newsreels, but plenty of other people without four-figure incomes thought so too. It was the age of Kristallnacht and the reclamation of the Rhineland, but it was also the age of Stanley Baldwin’s ‘Safety First’ and Lord Halifax’s suave diplomatising.
The literary context in which Orwell can be located needs a similar readjustment. We tend to see the 1930s as the era of Auden, Spender, Isherwood and, occasionally dominating them to the exclusion of all else, Orwell himself. They were this, of course, but they were also a great deal more. As ever, English literary life offered a bewildering spectacle of contending interest groups, hierarchies old and new, mavericks, wire-pullers and the frankly unclassifiable. The old 1920s power bases operated by Bloomsbury and the Sitwells were still going strong. Newer, fashionable writers could be found grouped around such standards as the short-lived magazine Night and Day (Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Peter Fleming, Cyril Connolly). Beyond London a corpus of narrowly realist and defiantly working-class literature, exemplified by Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), was taking root in the English regions. However, little of this innovation, experiment and political purpose disturbed the placid surfaces of middle-class taste. The great middlebrow bestsellers – Priestley, Walpole, Deeping – all the famous names that Gordon anathematises in Aspidistra, sailed on unbuffeted by the modernist tide. It was the great age of the Boot’s Library, of the literary tea party, of the sedative fireside chats offered up by Ralph Straus, the chief critic of the Sunday Times. The programme of the 1936 Sunday Times Book Club exhibition, staged over a two-week period at the Dorland Hall, Lower Regent Street, gives a fair idea of the kind of material favoured by the contemporary mass taste. Here audiences could listen to A.E.W. Mason on ‘The Historical Novel’, watch Alec Waugh whip the cover from ‘A Story-teller’s Workbench’, hear Peter Fleming describe the experience of ‘Travelling Light’, thrill with Dorothy L. Sayers over ‘The Tendency to Murder’, or respectfully assimilate the Rt. Hon. Duff Cooper’s thoughts on ‘Biography’. Orwell was not a part of this world, either socially or economically – the average advance for a bestselling ‘commercial’ novel in the 1930s was £500, about three times his annual income – but this does not mean that he was altogether excluded from the literary networks. Aspidistra contains a terrific scene in which Gordon, invited to a party by an influential critic, turns up on the wrong day, is convinced that the mistake is deliberate and meant to humiliate him, writes an abusive reply to his host’s note of apology and thereby burns his remaining bridge to the official literary world. Orwell, on the other hand, used the publication of Burmese Days to renew his friendship with Cyril Connolly, a useful man to know in his New Statesman phase. Connolly would become one of his most reliable and supportive patrons. The idea of Orwell as central to the literary movements of his time is a nonsense. But so, too, is the notion of the eternal, embittered outsider.
Above all, it was an age in which literary life became steadily more politicised. This was true even of the literary society perpetuated by the likes of the Sunday Times Book Club. Fact-finding missions to Moscow, under the auspices of the Soviet authorities, became the 1930s equivalent of the modern international literary festival. Even Beverley Nichols, the era’s best-known literary socialite, spent a week in a Glasgow tenement in a fruitless search for copy. While Orwell had not yet arrived at anything resembling a coherent set of political beliefs, the Hampstead job placed him, for the first time in his life, in the day-to-day company of people for whom politics – left-wing politics – was a consuming interest. Part of this immersion was down to Rees (Ravelston in Keep the Aspidistra Flying has been trying ‘for years’ to convert Gordon to Socialism without ever succeeding in interesting him in it) but a greater impetus may have come from the Westropes, who were longstanding and proselytising members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Bernard Crick has pointed out the consistent allure of the ILP to the averagely discontented left-leaning 1930s intellectual. Founded as long ago as 1893 under the aegis of Keir Hardie himself, it had been instrumental in forging the great Socialist alliances of the early 1900s in which trade unions, middle-class Fabians and disillusioned liberals were brought together in the Labour Representation Committee. Scarcely a single ornament of the early Parliamentary Labour Party had failed to cut his or her teeth in the ILP – the notable exception was Attlee – and Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, later to become the first Labour Chancellor, had both been leading lights. Thirty years later, though, the ILP was no more than a tiny and exclusive sect (Aneurin Bevan used to twit his fiancée Jennie Lee over her ‘virginity’ in preferring it to the broad church of the 1930s Labour Party proper) personified in the figure of Ellen Wilkinson, the left-wing MP for Jarrow and author of an incendiary book describing her constituency’s Depression-era poverty, The Town That Was Murdered. Nonetheless, the ILP’s maverick status, anti-reactionary but democratic, not quite pacifist, avowedly revolutionary, gave it a definite appeal to disillusioned Socialists beyond the Labour mainstream. Simultaneously, the Westropes’ contacts went well beyond it, in fact almost to the margins of respectable political discourse. It was through them, for example, that Orwell met Reg Groves, the celebrated Trotskyist firebrand who had preceded him in the shop. At the very least these new connections extended Orwell’s political range. They may not have encouraged him to join a political party, but they prompted him to think about social and economic problems in terms that wouldn’t previously have occurred, or appealed, to him.
Outside working hours Orwell was far from being the bedsit-bound recluse of Aspidistra, clandestinely flushing used tea-leaves down the WC when his landlady’s back is turned. Evening chats with Kimche focused on Roman Catholicism and its baleful influence on public life: Orwell was reluctant to talk about his work, Kimche remembered. He was off, too, on his habitual quest for female company. ‘Sally’, a commercial artist who provided the professional background for Gordon’s girlfriend Rosemary, kept him at arm’s length, but he was on much more intimate terms with a girl named Kay Ekevall, whom he met in the shop some time in the autumn of 1934. Eight years younger than Orwell, independent-minded to a degree with which he would not have been familiar (Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jaques, by comparison, were nice middle-class girls living in provincial sequestration), she seems to have been fond of him while finding many of his attitudes faintly ridiculous. Kay was struck by her boyfriend’s bad health. He was ‘a nice-looking fellow’ but somehow desiccated, with a pale, dry skin ‘as if he’d been dried up in the Burma heat’. Liking Orwell, and prepared to go to bed with him, which many of her contemporaries would not have been, she was conscious of a relationship impeded on the surface by what to her seemed archaic social observances and beneath by a much more fundamental divide. Going Dutch on a date, for instance, was always problematic in the light of Orwell’s ‘ultra-masculine’ tendencies. Beyond this she believed that while Orwell liked women well enough, ‘I don’t think he regarded them as a force in life’.
The real action, Kay implies, was to be found in all-male literary chat or at the solitary writer’s desk. Strolling with him across Hampstead Heath or lounging in the nearby cafés, Kay noted several other distinctive traits. One of them was an obsession with money, frequently colliding with, or perhaps only offering a symptom of, a profound self-pity. Orwell, according to Kay, imagined himself ‘the victim of injustice because he was poor and couldn’t afford the things he felt he ought to have and had to struggle for things …’ Rather like Gordon, who gets riotously drunk after cashing a cheque for an American magazine, he was fond of making a splash when in funds. There was a suspicion, too, of a man who though broadly progressive in outlook (Kay had to listen to many an anti-Imperial harangue) failed to confront many of the shibboleths of his upbringing: ‘I don’t think he faced up to a lot of his prejudices. I think he preserved them carefully.’ Prone to portraying himself as rather a rebel, Orwell remained inextricably welded to the upper-middle-class value system he had grown up with, affecting to despise the advantages of a public school education but, Kay observed, finding it difficult to talk to anyone who was not on his intellectual wavelength. Undoubtedly much of the gap between them was generational – one notes a similar tone of amused affection in the reminiscences of other younger friends from this period in his life – but there is also a sense of someone failing to meet the exacting standards of the 1930s progressive package, still happily mired in the conditioning of his early life.
Much as he enjoyed his evenings with Kay, and the after-hours chats with whichever guests the Westropes might happen to have on the premises, Orwell’s chief concern in the latter months of 1934 was his professional life. He was continuing to write for the Adelphi and still absorbed in rather esoteric theological works. The November issue found him reviewing Christopher Dawson’s Medieval Religion (‘What a relief to find that even in England there are Roman Catholic writers who can give us something better than the braying of Belloc or the twittering of Knox’). But his principal interest lay in the progress of A Clergyman’s Daughter, then making its way through the legal and editorial minefield laid around it by Victor Gollancz. The ever-wary Gollancz had commissioned no fewer than three readers’ reports, all of which praised the novel while expressing certain reservations. Gerald Gould, the firm’s chief reader and an influential figure on the reviewing circuit (he was chief critic of the Observer) thought the book an extraordinary piece of work while considering the school scenes overdrawn and the ‘Night town’ pastiche, though powerfully done, an artistic mistake. Harold Rubinstein, appraising the manuscript from both a forensic and an aesthetic angle, thought that the legal difficulties might be overcome, while complaining that the novel’s five different sections were too loosely connected. Norman Collins, Gollancz’s junior director, advised changes which he suspected that Orwell would be unwilling to make. Though Orwell was agreeable to revisions, Gollancz continued to worry about libel for several months, almost until the eve of publication the following spring. In a letter of mid-November Orwell admits to Moore that the school scenes are ‘overdone’. Having seen Gollancz in Henrietta Street five days later, he agreed to tone them down. The typescript went back in mid-December (‘Reference to Roman Catholic priest cut out … Reference to Sunday Express cut out’), the Ringwood House extravagances blue-pencilled. As late as February Gollancz was still torturing himself over the Blifil-Gordon sugar-beet refinery, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, Miss Mayfill, Mrs Semprill and countless other minor points of detail.
Meanwhile, inspired by his new surroundings and the dusty atmosphere of the shop, Orwell had begun a new novel. Initial progress was slow, although he did manage to complete a poem, ‘St Andrew’s Day’, ultimately attributed to Gordon Comstock in Aspidistra, first published in the Adelphi in late 1935 but undoubtedly going back to the November of the previous year. Though conservative in form, it is one of Orwell’s best performances in verse, vividly evoking the sweep of the north London roof-tops:
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over
The bending poplars, newly bare,
And the dark ribbons of the chimneys
Veer downward, flicked by wisps of air,
Torn posters flutter; coldly sounds
The boom of trams and the rattle of hooves,
And the clerks who hurry to the station
Look, shuddering over the endless rooves …
The poem then turns into a mordant appraisal of ‘the money-god’ who, among other iniquities, is responsible for contraception, laying ‘the sleek, estranging shield’ (i.e. a condom) ‘between the lover and his bride’.
Work, both at Booklovers’ Corner and at his desk at Warwick Mansions, together with an exhausting social life, left him tired. He was keeping odd hours, he told Brenda early in the New Year, coming home from a friend’s house on a Sunday night, forced to walk several miles in drizzle owing to the absence of buses or trams, and then arriving in Hampstead to find himself locked out. But there was encouraging news about Burmese Days. Having nervously considered the matter and balanced his fear of the law with the conviction that Orwell was one of his most promising younger writers, Gollancz was prepared to go ahead if, in Orwell’s words, ‘time was taken’. Effectively this meant Orwell producing, with the help of contemporary directories, concrete proof that no roman-à-clef element survived. These negotiations coincided with a move from Warwick Mansions – Mrs Westrope was ill and the presence of a lodger was inconvenient – to a flat at nearby 77 Parliament Hill, found for him by Mabel Fierz, who knew the landlady, Mrs Rosalind Obermeyer. The removal aside, Orwell was concentrating on work. Not much was happening, he reported to Brenda at the end of February. As for the work in progress, ‘I want this one to be a work of art, & that can’t be done without much bloody sweat.’ That Orwell was prepared to devote ‘bloody sweat’ to what was to be his fourth published work suggests that he had a slightly rosier view of his professional prospects. A Clergyman’s Daughter was in the press. Burmese Days – provided he could convince Gollancz that it was fiction – would follow shortly afterwards. Publishers’ lead-times were shorter seventy years ago. An author who delivered his manuscript in late summer could usually expect to see it in print in October. In the event Orwell would end up publishing three novels in a year. Another meeting at Henrietta Street, to which Orwell took a sketch map of ‘Kyauktada’, presumably to demonstrate its detachment from Katha, cleared the way for Burmese Days. ‘A few trifling changes which will not take a week,’ Orwell reported to Moore, a shade airily in the circumstances as the revisions ultimately enforced by Gollancz and his advisers were relatively extensive.
An advance copy of A Clergyman’s Daughter went off to Brenda early in March 1935. Orwell pronounced it ‘tripe’ with the exception of the Trafalgar Square section. An account of his routines at Mrs Obermeyer’s was appended: the purchase of a gas stove known as a ‘Bachelor Griller’ which could grill, boil and fry and allowed him modestly to entertain; a trip to the Coliseum to see the modish Negro dance troop the Blackbirds (‘bored stiff’); book-buying excursions for the Westropes. He was also, both through the Fierzes and his landlady, making new friends. Chief among them was Rayner Heppenstall, a young Yorkshireman, recently graduated from Leeds University and a passionate balletomane, first encountered at a dinner at Bertorelli’s in a party where the young Dylan Thomas was among the guests. Both Heppenstall and Kay Ekevall were part of a circle that included the young Communist poet Michael Sayers, who cemented the alliance by reviewing A Clergyman’s Daughter (favourably) in the Adelphi. Orwell, though later prone to complain about literary rackets, was not above using his own connections in the marketplace.
A Clergyman’s Daughter was officially published on 11 March, to mixed reviews. L.P. Hartley in the Observer found the thesis ‘neither new nor convincing’ but was impressed by the treatment (‘sure and bold’) and the dialogue. V.S. Pritchett in the Spectator, while approving the Trafalgar Square scene’s ‘immense knowledge of low life’, regretted the ‘stunt Joyce’ style. Orwell was essentially a satirist, Pritchett thought, who by the end of the novel had been lured away into ‘the glib amenities of caricature’. Peter Quennell in the New Statesman noted Dorothy’s curiously cipher-like quality, complaining that ‘she is a literary abstraction to whom things happen … We have no feeling that her flight from home and her return to the rectory have any valid connection with the young woman herself.’ As critical judgement most of this is unarguable, but Orwell could perhaps have consoled himself with the distinction of the reviewers. This, after all, was his fictional début in England, at a time when most first novelists were lucky to be reviewed at all: however far short he may have fallen of Olympus, at least he was being taken seriously. Victor Gollancz remained upbeat, telling Moore that he thought Orwell had the talent to become one of the half-dozen leading authors on a list that in the 1930s included Dorothy L. Sayers and A.J. Cronin.
Looking at Orwell’s life at this time – mornings at his desk in Parliament Hill, afternoons in the shop, evenings spent over the Bachelor Griller or sauntering around Hampstead Heath – one is struck by its compartmentalisation. Throughout his adult life, Orwell maintained numberless different ‘sides’ of which even close friends were barely aware: in more than one case the realisation was knocked to the surface only at his funeral. Even here in his early thirties the alliances he formed and the worlds in which he moved followed no set pattern. He was an Old Etonian who worked in a second-hand bookshop, an ex-Imperial policeman who wrote interesting but old-fashioned novels and whose younger acquaintances reckoned him rather quaint, a conservative but self-consciously rebellious young man moving towards the outer fringes of the Labour Party. Doubtless the 1930s literary scene offered stranger juxtapositions than this – Anthony Powell, the regular army officer’s son carousing in the Wheatsheaf with the bohemian artist Nina Hamnett, or Major Connolly’s heir loafing among the expatriate bohemians of the South of France (the background to Connolly’s solitary novel, The Rock Pool). With Orwell, though, the oppositions seem starker, more incongruous. An account of his activities over the May Bank Holiday weekend granted to mark George V’s Silver Jubilee, supplied to Brenda, gives some idea of the various levels on which Orwell was capable simultaneously of living. On the Saturday he went down to Brighton for the day, picked bluebells, inspected birds’ nests and returned to London to spend the evening in Chelsea. Short of funds for the rest of the weekend, and with the banks closed, he called at Richard Rees’ flat in the hope of borrowing money. Here a kind of Socialist discussion group was in progress. Orwell found himself being harangued by seven or eight left-wingers, including a South Wales miner who told him, ‘quite good-naturedly, however’, that if he were a dictator Orwell would be instantly shot. There is something faintly mysterious about the distancing procedure that the letter sets in motion. Brenda is invited to regard Orwell as a naïve passer-by walking in off the street to be subjected to a bizarre left-wing shouting match. But the real Orwell knew Rees intimately, knew the kind of people likely to be meeting at his flat, would not have stayed for the three-hour period mentioned had he not been interested in and reasonably au fait with the issues at stake. It would be overstating the case to say that Orwell is trying to conceal something in this account of practical politics chez Rees, but there is a distinct sense of someone trying hard to preserve an air of detachment.
Late June, barely three months after his last date with the critics, brought the UK publication of Burmese Days. The novel was positively received, barring the odd sniff from conservative quarters such as the Times Literary Supplement, whose anonymous reviewer – possibly an old Burma hand – thought that ‘the inaccuracies are no worse than in pleasant books which idealise the East’ and that, additionally, Orwell’s strictures on the work-rates of colonial bureaucrats show that ‘he can hardly have mixed with the men who really run the country’. Sean O’Faolain in the Spectator, alternatively, thought that ‘Mr Orwell has his own merits and his own methods and they are absolutely competent in their class’. The book had important personal consequences. Among the correspondence it provoked was a letter from the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, who remained a close friend for the rest of Orwell’s life. Cyril Connolly had admired the novel too – he reviewed it in the New Statesman – and the upshot was a reunion at Mrs Obermeyer’s flat where the Bachelor Griller was pressed into service to provide bifteck aux pommes. Thirteen years on from his last sighting, Connolly was taken aback by his old friend’s prematurely aged look. ‘Well, Connolly, I can see you’ve worn a good deal better than I have,’ was Orwell’s opening remark. Connolly supposed that Orwell would be quite as discountenanced by his own fat, cigar-smoking persona, but the alliance, once reforged, persisted until death.
Presumably Connolly’s appearance on Mrs Obermeyer’s carpet – the epitome of the well-connected young literary man – brought some of Keep the Aspidistra Flying’s subject matter into sharper focus. The novel wasn’t getting on too badly, he told Moore in May. He was also exploiting a recently acquired outlet for his literary journalism. Though by no means as prestigious as the Spectator or the New Statesman, the New English Weekly offered a venue for some of Orwell’s best pieces of late 1930s criticism. His review of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer – a book which made a lasting impression on him – appeared there later in the year. Another early piece for the paper’s editor Philip Mairet, was a round-up of three recent novels, including one that he might have been expected to like. This was the single-volume edition of Patrick Hamilton’s enormous London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. Orwell’s initial distrust (‘a huge, well-meaning book, as shapeless and inert as a clot of frogspawn’) is odd, as the milieu, a compound of mean streets, desperate love affairs and shabby-genteel parlours, was one in which he specialised himself. The likelihood is that he was simply put off, if not by envy (Hamilton’s stage play Rope, later filmed by Hitchcock, had made him a wealthy young man) then by the comparisons to J.B. Priestley, who contributed a foreword: in later life Hamilton was one of the contemporary novelists that younger Tribune writers remembered him admiring.
It was at about this time – though the original stimulus came a month or two before – that Orwell’s vagrant emotional life underwent a decisive shift. The affair with Kay had now been going on for some time. The fervent sign-offs to the regular letters to Brenda Salkeld (‘With much love and many kisses’) suggest that Orwell still hoped for some consolation in that quarter. But in the spring of 1935 Orwell and his landlady gave a joint party at Parliament Hill. Mrs Obermeyer was studying Psychology at University College London. She invited several of her fellow-students, one of whom was a dark-haired, pale-skinned girl named Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Eileen, two years younger, talkative and lively, made a distinct impression on the co-host. That was the kind of girl he would like to marry, he informed his landlady before the evening was out. Orwell being Orwell, with serious intentions on display, the early stages of their courtship included horse-riding on Blackheath, near the O’Shaughnessys’ home at Greenwich. Within three weeks Orwell had as good as proposed. He got an equivocal response. Eileen was intrigued, without being at all ready to commit herself.
Rather like her angular suitor, Eileen had a varied career behind her. Of Irish descent, but born in South Shields where her father worked for the Customs and Excise, she was unusual among women of her generation in possessing an Oxford English degree. Subsequently she taught in a girls’ boarding-school, took odd clerical and administrative jobs and then ran her own typing agency, giving it up in her late twenties to study for the UCL Master’s degree. Of medium height, with a ‘heart-shaped face’ and ‘Irish colouring’, pretty rather than beautiful, Eileen never quite comes wholly into view in the recollections of Orwell’s closer friends. Anthony Powell and his wife were fond of her while remembering her ‘defensive’ side. A friend puzzled over her ‘curiously elusive personality’. Publicly, cheerfulness and efficiency were well to the fore. An ILP volunteer who came across her two years later in Spain, likened her to ‘a pleasant young schoolmistress’, briskly setting the affairs of the ILP contingent in order. Cyril Connolly’s compliments are sincere but unrevealing: charming, intelligent, independent. However enigmatic she may ultimately have been, however ineluctable her qualities, there is widespread agreement among Orwell’s friends at the time that Eileen cheered him up, took him out of himself, gave him confidence in his abilities. Kay, who met her once or twice, was happy to recede into the background: ‘she was gay and lively and interesting, and much more on his level’. At the same time Eileen was under no illusions. Devoted to her brother Laurence, a thoracic surgeon to whom she occasionally acted as secretary, she was aware that blood ran deeper. ‘If we were at opposite sides of the world and I sent him a telegram saying “come at once” he would come,’ she once told a friend. ‘George would not do that. For him work comes before anything.’ Eileen’s letters, of which several survive, are wonderful things: full of wit, affection and exuberance. Yet in the retrospective glare of Orwell’s reputation, she never quite exists in her own right. One could read Orwell’s account of the time they spent together in Morocco – sedulous nature notes and climatic observation – without ever realising that another person was there.
Orwell concentrated his gaze on Eileen in a way that, with the possible exception of Eleanor Jacques three years previously, he had never done before. Their relationship developed steadily through the summer, presumably furthered by another change of address. Early in August, Orwell established a male ménage à trois consisting of himself, Heppenstall and Sayers at 56 Lawford Road NW5. This was in Kentish Town, a resolutely working-class district to the south of Booklovers’ Corner, and consisted of a three-bedroom first-floor flat; the ground floor and basement were occupied, respectively, by a tram-driver and his wife and a plumber and his family. Though the rent was split three ways the flat mostly contained only Orwell and Heppenstall, Sayers, ‘the generally absent third tenant’ in Heppenstall’s words, preferring to use the premises only for assignations. In an atmosphere of mild semi-bohemianism – both Heppenstall and Sayers were aspiring literary men – Orwell figured as the somewhat more responsible senior partner. It was he, for example, who had his name on the rent book. Sayers recalled a somewhat ‘severe’ flatmate, strict about routine but happy to put himself out on his friends’ behalf. Bringing Sayers a cup of tea as he lay in bed in the morning – cigarette always drooping from his mouth, the younger man remembered – he would deliver himself of such statements as ‘Don’t let me do any writing today, Michael. I’m full of malice and spite.’ Looking back Heppenstall conceded that the younger men rather exploited ‘old Eric’: their attitude to a man eight years older and without the benefit of a university education contained a certain amount of condescension. Nevertheless Orwell was prepared to confide his romantic aspirations to Heppenstall, telling him in September that ‘You are right about Eileen. She is the nicest person I have met for a long time.’ Lawford Road was also the scene of a famous, and from the point of view of the injured party prophetic, incident. Late one night Heppenstall, whose interest in ballet extended to the pursuit of ballet girls, came back from the theatre so drunk that he was forced to crawl noisily up the stairs. There he found Orwell waiting for him. According to Heppenstall, writing the encounter up twenty years later, Orwell’s monologue went as follows: ‘… Bit thick you know … This time of night … Wake up the whole street … I can put up with a lot … A bit of consideration … After all …’
Heppenstall, having remonstrated rather feebly, woke up ten minutes later with a bloodied nose. After crawling into the absent Sayers’ room, he discovered that Orwell had locked him inside. Heppenstall battered at the door. He was then confronted by the sight of his flatmate brandishing a shooting-stick. Orwell first hit him across the legs, then raised the stick above his head with what Heppenstall describes as ‘a curious mixture of fear and sadistic exaltation’. Rolling aside to dodge the blow, which descended on a chair, Heppenstall managed to evade further punishment, eventually being tidied up by the tram-driver and his wife.
It is a bizarre episode, but before erecting it as a monument to the ‘darker side’ that more than one critic has detected in Orwell several points should be borne in mind. The first is that the incident certainly happened. Mabel Fierz, with whom Heppenstall took refuge the next morning, confirmed this. The second is that it was recast many years later and in the light of new information about Orwell, and Orwell’s writings, that was not then to hand (Heppenstall could not, for example, have produced a phrase like ‘sadistic exaltation’ before Nineteen Eighty-Four, to which the words clearly relate). The third is that in his writings about other writers Heppenstall nearly always has a secret agenda concealed below the surface. Famously touchy, liable to resent the superior literary talents that he came across in the course of his later professional life at the BBC – Evelyn Waugh was a notorious example – he was not above belittling their achievements indirectly. The question ‘How can a man who hits a drunken friend with a stick still be a great writer?’ is never stated in so many words in Heppenstall’s account of the scuffle on the Lawford Road stairs, but it lurks there all the same, along with the retrospective glosses of fear and sadistic exaltation. Undoubtedly the middle-aged Heppenstall saw it as a great symbolic climacteric, and yet the evidence suggests it was simply a momentary quarrel between two friends, neither of them known for their flexibility. Michael Sayers’s memory of the incident is that it had a political context, and was sparked off by Heppenstall’s friendship with Middleton Murry, whom Orwell currently (and almost certainly wrongly) suspected of Mosleyite leanings. Significantly, the friendship endured and Orwell’s letters from later in the year bear no trace of any lasting grievance. Confronted with a genuine sadist, you feel, Heppenstall would have kept him at arm’s length.
Unquestionably, Orwell had an authoritarian side: he could scarcely have survived for five years in the Burma Police without one. What he said of Jack London – that he could foresee Fascism because he had a Fascist streak in himself – is probably quite as true of the mind that produced Big Brother, Room 101 and the cage of starving rats. Orwell’s insights into the psychology of totalitarianism rarely look as if they were garnered second-hand – he knew all this, the reader feels; he worked it out for himself – but it would be a mistake to turn the lofted shooting-stick into the symbol of Orwell’s totalitarian shadow.
Autumn came, and with it more work on Keep the Aspidistra Flying. It is a mark of Orwell’s rising status that Moore had begun negotiating for him to write a serial for the News Chronicle. This kind of engagement for a popular newspaper was an accepted part of the pre-war literary man’s routine. The formula was outlined by the celebrated literary agent A.D. Peters: ‘A serial is 80,000 words. You write a five-thousand word first instalment, setting out the situation; the hero meets the heroine in the course of it; it must have a punch in the last line. Then you write a second instalment of three thousand words; that must have a punch-line too. The editor will commission it on the first two instalments.’ These were lucrative commissions – the going rate was £350 – with an opportunity to turn the end result into a novel. Orwell, perhaps predictably, was singularly unsuited to the work. A letter of late September to Heppenstall talks of ‘unspeakable torments’ over its composition. No trace remains either of the story or of what it may have been about, though presumably the Peters template was followed. Finally after a week of ‘agony’, the ‘beastly thing’ was forwarded to Moore with ‘small hope’ that it would be any good. Orwell was right: it was his only attempt to write fiction for the popular press. But there was much else to think about. His novel was moving towards completion. He was planning a holiday in Southwold, from where he could travel up the coast to see Heppenstall who was staying with Middleton Murry in Norfolk. Eileen would not marry him as things stood – she had no real income and did not wish to be a drain on his resources – but held out hope for the following year, once she had finished her course. Testimony to his professional status came in an invitation to address the South Woodford Literary Society, from whose platform he spoke to over 400 people about Down and Out (‘went over big’, he told Heppenstall). The Lawford Road ménage was breaking up. By mid-autumn only Orwell remained, and the rent was putting a strain on his finances. Was there any prospect of an advance from Gollancz? he wondered to Moore at the beginning of November: money worries were the last thing he wanted while he laboured over the closing sections of his book.
The New English Weekly review of Tropic of Cancer gives a hint of the direction in which his mind was moving. Fascinated by Miller’s matter-of-fact recapitulation of bedrock bohemian life in 1930s Paris, he was quick to relate the novel’s worm’s-eye view of the world to the decay in religious belief. One result of this breakdown, Orwell suggested, had been ‘a sloppy idealisation of the physical side of life’. A book like Tropic of Cancer, which dealt with sex by brutally insisting on the facts, probably swung the pendulum too far, but it was swinging it in the right direction. Man was not a Yahoo, Orwell concluded, but he was rather like a Yahoo and needed to be reminded of it from time to time. The same interest in lives examined from within stirs in an Adelphi review from earlier in the year of the working-class writer Jack Hilton’s Caliban Shrieks. The book dealt with its subject from the inside, Orwell noted: instead of a catalogue of ‘facts’ relating to poverty the reader was left with a vivid notion of what it felt like to be poor. Orwell responded to books of this kind because they pushed him in a direction he wished to go himself, even if, as in A Clergyman’s Daughter, the requirements of fiction occasionally got in the way.
And what, by extension, did it feel like to be Gordon Comstock, a moth-eaten young poet working in a dingy bookshop by day, frowsting in Mrs Wisbeach’s ghastly boarding-house by night and pursuing the loving but virginal Rosemary – in other words, not at all like Orwell, who by the end of 1935 had published three books, lived in his own flat and was more or less engaged to be married? Of all the fiction that Orwell produced in the 1930s, Keep the Aspidistra Flying – the title tracks backwards to the mock-hymn warbled by the defrocked cleric Mr Tallboys in the Trafalgar Square scenes of A Clergyman’s Daughter – is the one most closely associated with him as a writer. And yet it exists at a decidedly odd angle to the kind of person he was and was becoming – on the one hand providing yet another view of the world that can be identified with Orwell’s own, on the other moving light years beyond it to magnify his obsessions and produce, in the end, a terminally ground-down feeling that many critics have linked to the immensely gloomy late-Victorian novelist George Gissing. Aspidistra is a transitional novel, the beginnings of a route out of the environments in which Orwell had previously dealt to a time when, as Anthony Powell put it, the Gissing had to stop. Gordon Comstock is the grandson of a self-made Victorian plutocrat whose vitality has dissipated itself among a tribe of ineffectual and by now impoverished descendants altogether crushed by the weight of his oppressive personality. A well-regarded poet – his solitary collection is thought to show ‘exceptional promise’ – Gordon is at war with both the appurtenances and the ethics of ‘respectable’ life (the aspidistra, which lurks in every room he has ever inhabited, is a potent symbol of this struggle) to the extent of giving up his job as an advertising agency copywriter (advertising is characterised as ‘the last rattling of the swill-bucket’) and taking refuge in Mr Mckechnie’s bookshop. Gordon is supported in this endeavour by his chief professional patron, Ravelston, and his girlfriend Rosemary, the one because he respects Gordon’s pursuit of principle, the other because she, albeit chastely, loves him. Each, though, is increasingly conscious – as also, deep down, is Gordon himself – that days spent in the dreadful pastiche version of Booklovers’ Corner and nights husbanding his cigarettes chez Wisbeach don’t offer the conditions in which poetry, or at any rate ‘good poetry’, gets written. Born of an atmosphere of penny-pinching, sexual frustration, envy and seediness, Gordon’s serial fulminations on the state of the world, the literary rackets which he believes discriminate against him, women and money have a dreadful circularity. However much the reader is prepared to sympathise with him – and Gordon for some reason is a curiously attractive figure – one senses that he is quite unappeasable, that most of what he has to say is simply the projection of a vast inner dissatisfaction.
Before very long Gordon’s affairs lurch towards crisis. Had up in court after a calamitous drinking bout – the result of an unexpected cheque from an American magazine – he loses his job and ends up staffing a threadbare twopenny lending library run by the rapacious Mr Cheeseman. Even by the standards of second-hand bookselling this is something of a comedown, but Gordon is defiant. The warm, careless ‘underground’ world of life on a few shillings a week is what he ardently desires. Ravelston, approving the principle, affects to support him while privately thinking Gordon’s retreat from the pretence of a civilised life a mistake. Rosemary is merely uncomprehending. Then, visiting him one afternoon in his shabby lodgings (‘Even in the bad light of the lamp she could see the state of filth the room was in – the litter of food and papers on the table, the grate full of cold ashes, the foul crocks in the fender, the dead aspidistra’) she consents, finally, to sleep with him. Later, confronted with the inescapable fact of her pregnancy, Gordon is faced with a stark choice: either he abandons her or takes the path back to respectability. Not without certain private misgivings he settles for respectability and resumes his old job at the agency. The novel ends with them, newly married, in their tiny flat off the Edgware Road, and an ironic sign-off: ‘once again, things were happening in the Comstock family’.
The chief flaw in this luminous exercise in the shabby-genteel – as Orwell, schooled in the fiction of the gloomy early twentieth-century American naturalist tradition, would have known – is how little the ending convinces. Gissing, to take the novelist with whom Aspidistra-era Orwell is most frequently compared, is nearly always true to his aesthetic principles. Having established an inexorable progress, or descent, he sticks by it. Reardon, the unsuccessful novelist of New Grub Street, and Peak, the frustrated anti-hero of Born in Exile, fail in their ambitions: they die conscious of not having achieved the goals in life they set out to capture. A proper determinist finale would have seen Gordon simply frittering away his days in the slum bedsitter or engaged in some squalid liaison with a woman of the streets, and Rosemary ending up in a home for unmarried mothers. As it is, Gordon merely turns over a new leaf, is miraculously given back the ‘good’ job he so capriciously threw over and assumes, in the way that one puts on a new overcoat, a system of values that he has spent the previous 200 pages of the novel angrily repudiating.
Orwell’s own personal circumstances are infinitely removed from the essentially solitary world stalked by Gordon Comstock, the author of Mice, but Keep the Aspidistra Flying is full of unobtrusive nuggets of autobiography – Gordon’s schoolboy ‘rebellion’, the long poem on which he desultorily works (‘two thousand lines or so, in rhyme royal, describing a day in London’); even the description of the police cell where Gordon comes to ground is derived from the Adelphi essay of 1931. Simultaneously it offers a series of snapshots of how Orwell was developing as a writer: the early aestheticism still much in evidence but being steadily overlaid with an ominous, prefigurative gleam. Idling at an evening street market, for example, Gordon watches three teenage girls, their faces ‘clustering side by side like a truss of blossom on a Sweet William or Phlox’. When he stares at the most arresting of the trio, ‘a delicate flush like a wave of aquarelle flooded her face’. Elizabeth’s face in Burmese Days was described with exactly the same painterly precision. Some of the rapturous nature notes that accompany Gordon and Rosemary’s excursion to Burnham Beeches would not look out of place in the earlier novel:
Down the road the mist-dimmed hedges wore that strange purplish brown, the colour of brown medlar, that naked brushwood takes on in winter. Suddenly, as they came out on to the road again, the dew all down the hedge glittered with a diamond flash. The sun had pierced the clouds. The light came slanting and yellow across the fields, and delicate unexpected colours sprang out in everything, as though some giant’s child had been let loose with a new paintbox.
The curious, though in Orwell’s case by now predictable, thing about this is that it exists side by side with an habitual and ever more exaggerated fastidiousness about smells, squalor and decay. Here, for example, Gordon returns from the bar of the determinedly down-market working-class pub into which he has dragged the unwilling Ravelston, with two pint glasses of beer:
They were thick cheap glasses, thick as jam jars almost, and dim and greasy. A thin yellow froth was subsiding on the beer. The air was thick with gunpowdery tobacco smoke. Ravelston caught sight of a well-filled spittoon near the bar and averted his eye. It crossed his mind that this beer had been sucked up from some beetle-ridden cellar through yards of slimy tube, and that the glasses had never been washed in their lives, only rinsed in beery water.
Here in his early thirties half of Orwell is still hankering after an old-fashioned 1890s aestheticism, while the other half cheerfully extracts a Swiftian horror from the processes of ordinary life. Above them sounds a small but insistent prophetic note. ‘Presently the aeroplanes are coming,’ Gordon reflects early on in the proceedings. ‘Zoom-whizz-crash! The whole world is going up in a roar of high explosive.’ ‘My poems are dead because I’m dead. You’re dead. We’re all dead. Dead people in a dead world,’ Gordon lectures Rosemary in an uncannily accurate foreshadowing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even the poster advertising a preventative against sweaty feet that Gordon works on after his return to the agency – ‘P.P. [pedic perspiration] WHAT ABOUT YOU?’ (the slogan is reckoned to have a ‘sinister simplicity’) – seems only a short distance away from the world of Big Brother and the Thought Police.
Above all, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a novel about the condition of being a writer and the environment in which the average literary life is lived, an inter-war instalment in a literary tradition that goes back to Pendennis and New Grub Street and then on to a novel like Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room. As he reached the closing stages Orwell heard of something that would dramatically change his own writing environment, indeed have a decisive effect on the whole course of his future life. It came from Victor Gollancz and consisted of a proposal that Orwell should spend time researching social conditions in the north of England with the aim of producing a piece of extended reportage.
It would be wrong to present Orwell’s acceptance of the offer that produced The Road to Wigan Pier as a Damascene conversion – the first step on the road to the full-blooded Socialism of the later 1930s. Neither, apparently, was there any strong financial inducement (although Orwell told Geoffrey Gorer that he could not have made the journey without Gollancz’s support). Everything to do with the venture, in fact, was provisional. There was no guarantee that Orwell could produce a book about the depressed industrial heartland nor any undertaking that what he wrote would be published. Nevertheless early in 1936 he left Lawford Road, and camped for a few days at Warwick Mansions. The stay with the Westropes lasted just long enough for him to hand in his manuscript and write an essay on Kipling’s death for the New English Weekly – a shrewd appreciation in which regret at Kipling’s Imperialist tendencies is balanced by an awareness of the profound effect his work had had on Orwell’s boyhood. Then, on 31 January, with the first salvoes over the new novel’s potential for libel ringing in his ears, he left London for the north.