Mr. Orwell is still a victim of that early atmosphere, in his home and public school, which he himself has so eloquently exposed. His conscience, his sense of decency, his understanding of realities tell him to declare himself a Socialist: but fighting against this compulsion there is in him all the time a compulsion far less conscious but almost—though fortunately not quite—as strong: the compulsion to conform to the mental habits of his class.
VICTOR GOLLANCZ
Anthony powell characterized George Orwell as being half in love with the thing he was rebelling against, since Orwell roundly dismissed the socioeconomic hierarchy of England as outmoded and unjust but nevertheless relied upon its tenets for his ideas of a “decent” English society (A. Taylor 13). Orwell was both a contrarian and a contradictory figure. This is evident in the zeal with which he is claimed by both the Right and the Left as a defender of truth and justice. In his contradictory allegiances—his love for the past coexisting with his desire to alter the present inflected by that past—he embodies the transitions of, and within, the English middle class in general, and the devolution and adaptation of English gentlemanliness in particular. The persona of “George Orwell” and his works reveal the protracted unraveling of bourgeois manliness in two registers: on the one hand as it devolves and mutates into a potentially more democratized masculinity, and on the other as it continues to persist as a gender construct—even as it becomes obsolete—that structures and imprisons its belated inhabitants.1
This chapter explores these Orwellian negotiations of a new manly identity in a suburbanized England as consonant with Orwell’s own reworking of his gentlemanly identity to fit the democratizing inward turn to counter the rise of European fascist nationalism and the slow death of empire. This is not to downplay Orwell’s often polemical critique of the class system for which he is renowned, but rather to frame his contradictory politics within the discursive frame of gentlemanliness. To track back briefly to the introduction, Orwell’s location in the “lower-upper-middle-class,” as he details in The Road to Wigan Pier, explains his prejudices and political contradictions.2 To consider what Raymond Williams sees as a crisis of identity through the lens of masculinity is to note that Orwell’s critique of bourgeois ideology and his self-consciousness regarding his own gentlemanliness are very specifically gendered and heteronormative. His intellectual critique and affective responses were products of his belated upper-class gentlemanliness, born just as the comfortable hegemony of the English upper-middle class was coming to an end. In reinventing himself as George Orwell, he abstracted the ideals of gentlemanliness from its middle- and upper-middle-class moorings and remade them into those of the ordinary, decent Englishman, who was apparently classless but grounded in the heteronormative traditions of Englishness.
Orwell embodies the values of gentlemanliness while rejecting the class prestige and hierarchy that constituted the gender identity in the first place: his critique of the gentleman is an insider’s critique. He tries to distill a new masculine identity and a new England from the hierarchical violence of the past. He is the gentleman qua gentleman, as he considers the English bourgeoisie of the 1930s decadent, complacent, and responsible for the grinding poverty of the empire and the English working classes in England. But he nevertheless values the ideals of service, fair play, “decency,” endurance, and cleanliness and the work ethic of the English middle-class gentleman that were structured by the very hierarchies he rejects.
In this regard Orwell’s celebration of “decency” as an English virtue is significant, to reiterate my analysis in the introduction. Orwell uses “decency” to evoke a “great variety of attributes which he held in high esteem: simplicity, honesty, homey coziness, warmth, cleanliness, respectability, stoicism[, and] grit” (Rodden 171). As we saw, these virtues match with those that public schools strove to inculcate in their boys: the virtues of cleanliness, respectability, stoicism, grit, and honesty. Orwell extrapolates “decency” from its hierarchical, bourgeois/upper-class setting and adapts it to include all English people, a virtue, he argues, that all English people inherently possess but don’t necessarily enact.
Orwell’s ambivalence toward the bourgeoisie and its values is manifest in “England Your England.” In this essay, while he condemns the middle and upper classes, his disapproval takes some surprising turns. It is not just an attack on the ruling class; rather, he criticizes the “decay in the ability of the ruling class,” and the cause of this decay, he argues, lies in an end to their “usefulness” (Essays 269). They are disaffected and decadent, having lost the energy or the disinterestedness that made them committed patriots. Hence, it is the Englishman’s obsolescence as a consequence of his loss of purpose, and not his constitutive values, that Orwell condemns. The balancing on the knife-edge of attack and praise is also evident in his essay “Rudyard Kipling,” where he locates Kipling within his appreciation of “men of action.” And though he agrees that Kipling can be “crude” and “vulgar,” he nevertheless admires his “sense of responsibility” (Essays 120). Orwell appreciates the imperial Englishman’s “sense of responsibility,” or the ethics of disinterestedness and service. And while he does not endorse the snobbery and cruelty of either Kipling or “the Blimps,” he prefers it to the bourgeois Left’s hypocritical Socialist dissidence, particularly as they are cushioned by the labors of the imperial Blimps whom they condemn. This paradoxical glorification of the values of a classed gender identity that he hated only serves to emphasize the inescapable and pervasive power of the ideals of gentlemanliness and their coalescence with the ideals of Englishness.
Orwell’s particular reworking of masculinity owes much to his deliberate separation of the intertwined strains of English manliness: the institutionally structured homosocial and potentially homoerotic ideals of manliness linking men, institutions, nation, and empire in an unbroken bond of loyalty and love held in tenuous balance with the homosocial/heterosexual system that sustained the economic and social power of men and the successful imperial nation.3 He distances himself from what he perceives to be homoerotic/homosexual intellectual elites whose decadence and indecency are entirely antithetical to his heterosexual, virile, stoic, decent common man. Thus, Orwell democratizes gentlemanliness by deliberately disavowing the homoeroticism and male intimacy that originally underpinned the ideology of gentlemanliness. What Alan Sinfield calls his “tilt at homosexuals,” which was really venomous homophobia, and his dislike for “softness” and “crankishness” that seeped down from the upper classes—or indeed anything anti-normative—points to an overwhelming commitment to the heteronormative principles of the gentleman (Literature, Politics 79). For him, the common man represented the authentic values of Englishness.
Orwell’s early documentary-realist novels are laserlike in their focus on how lower-middle-class Englishmen, who are troubled by their own place in the sociocultural hierarchy of manly Englishness, come to terms with their gentlemanly inheritance in the new shifting terrain of an empire in decline and a nation turning inward. These Englishmen try to remake or abandon constitutive gentlemanly traits such as disinterestedness, chivalry, and manly autonomy that they unwittingly inhabit through new-old theaters of the home, the quest, and the profession. Indeed, the fate of disarticulated gentlemanly virtues in the wake of a crumbling imperial-national grid that articulated them as well as the shifting post–World War I economy is the terrain for his anti-consumerist, ultimately suburban Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). In this early novel, Orwell works through a series of genres as he examines gentlemanly idealism shifting into domestic, suburban, advertising professionalism in the figure of the poverty-stricken Gordon Comstock.4
By analyzing Orwell’s appropriation, adaptation, and dissemination of the classed manly ideals of clarity, decency, honesty, and empirical experiential reality, I demonstrate his desire to work within the parameters of the realist novel as the genre that would adequately speak to, and of, the ordinary Englishman. Raymond Williams has already pointed out in no uncertain terms that the “diagnosis of ‘realism’ as a bourgeois form is cant”; he goes on to show how realism furthered the case of working-class politics (“Lecture on Realism” 64). Following Andrzej Gasiorek’s advice to pay attention to the context of production and consumption of particular realist texts—that is, “they should be seen in relation to the socio-cultural ‘forms of life’ in which they participate” (12)—I consider the gendered “forms of life” that are produced and affected by Orwellian experiments with realism: Orwell’s early engagements with realism are both a direct effect of his democratic adaptations of manliness and a specific effect of the in-betweenness of the interwar years. While both Tyrus Miller and Gasiorek point to the literature of the 1930s as the “world in between” an aesthetic modernism and the gritty realism of the 1950s, my paradigm, while it overlaps with the “space between,” does so through the lens of imperial and masculine decline. In his analysis, Michael Levenson, in partial agreement with Miller, contends that Orwell is self-conscious about his literary belatedness: that is, conscious of writing after modernism and in its shadow while simultaneously beset with a sense of “social emergency.” For Levenson, Orwell’s thirties novels are failed realist novels about failure, signaling that the “form is doomed, as the autonomous individual is doomed” because “the age of totalitarianism is imminent” (59, 74). I argue that rather than signaling the death of the autonomous individual and the realist novel, Orwell’s novels rework the idea of the Englishman and consequentially experiment with a cross-hatching of genres within the realist frame. Orwell’s documentary realism is born out of a gendered political imperative: it emerges from a necessity to reshape both English manliness and Englishness as it turns inward to resuscitate the nation in the wake of imperial decline and change.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is either critically ignored or filed under Orwell’s failed attempts at realism. In terms of the themes that the novel partially explores, such as ersatz modernity, consumerism, and the impending doom of World War II, Coming Up for Air is often read as the better and tighter early novel. In terms of form, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is not so much a failed realist novel as a mixed bag of genres and generic conventions: Orwell mobilizes techniques of documentary realism and ethnographic survey (made famous by the Mass Observation movement just a year later), the suburban, domestic narrative, and a domesticated version of the imperial romance, and he skirts the rules of the “middlebrow” even as he takes on the ideas of artistic and literary merit in relation to commercialized, mass-produced art. This play with genres is an effect of Orwell’s attempt to track the lower-middle-class literary English gentleman as he navigates a new gender identity, working his way through the city, advertising, consumerism, and suburbia in interwar London.
Gordon Comstock, much like Orwell himself, is born into a middle-class family whose prosperity has been in steady decline since his Victorian grandfather’s imperial entrepreneurial success. He is the last in a long line of Comstocks—“a peculiarly dull, shabby, dead-alive, ineffectual family” (38). He sets out to be a poet trying to create art untainted by the crass commercialism he sees everywhere. Unable to fit himself into an appropriately mindless, middling job, and in pursuit of the pure artist’s life, Comstock declares war on the “money-god” and settles into low-paying dead-end jobs. His determination to live outside the upwardly mobile, financially viable social framework leads him to live in dire, masochistic poverty, experiencing the dirty underbelly of London life, complicating his relationships with his long-suffering, kind-hearted girlfriend, Rosemary, and his rich Socialist friend, Ravelston. Comstock’s apparent battle with the respectable life symbolized by the aspidistra is a long and rather arduous exercise in self-pity, anger, frustration, and misogynistic cruelty enacted upon Rosemary and his sister.5 His descent into complete destitution is halted by Rosemary’s pregnancy and his decision to do the “decent” thing and marry her. His return to the (lower) middle-class, now suburban, fold is accompanied by a self-conscious alignment with the values of the “law abiding little cit” and the necessary purchase of an aspidistra (238).
The narrative offers a nuanced anthropological background for Comstock’s particular brand of literary idealism and gentlemanly pretensions. The Comstock family’s wealth and status were indelibly tied to the wealth generated by their involvement in imperialism. They “belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the landless gentry … merely one of those families which rose on the wave of Victorian prosperity and then sank again faster than the wave itself. … Gran’pa Comstock plundered the proletariat and the foreigner of fifty thousand pounds” (37). The brief wave of Victorian prosperity defines the status of the Comstock family. Their inability to do anything since—to retain and multiply their fortunes—is directly tied to imperialist recession and the financial crisis that sinks the middle class. The Comstock family’s economic stability is directly related to imperial success, and their decline is emblematic of not only England’s imperial and economic decline but also the necessary negotiation of class identity and status that accompanied such decline. As already mentioned, the period saw tumultuous change as far as the middle classes were concerned: “The ‘middle class’ was undergoing radical revision between the wars,” and this revised class included “the beautician as well as the civil servant, the florist and the lady doctor … [,] and the manifold differences in between” (Light 13–14). As the ranks of the middle classes were expanding from below, the standard of life of the middle classes was slipping, resulting in the crossing of class lines and defensive closing in of ranks. The Comstock family denotes the loss of “caste” that Nicola Humble argues was characteristic of the time. Not just the decayed gentry but a significant portion of the middle class suffered economically as a result of World War I. High rates of income tax, surtax, and death duties introduced during the war and maintained at nearly the same level since affected the standard of living of the middle classes.6
The remaining members of the family, significantly both women, desperately cling to the vestiges of respectability that delineates them from the parvenus, hairdressers, suburban housewives, and secretaries rising from the morass of working classes. In a bid to hold onto whatever caste they can, and in keeping with the Comstock family’s pretensions of Victorian gentility long after they can actually afford it, Gordon Comstock is sent to the “right kind of school (that is, a public school or an imitation of one),” resulting in an appropriately useless education for someone of his background, possessing cultural but no economic capital (40). Because of his public school, gentlemanly background, Comstock sees himself as above such attempts to cling to the middle class. He believes his gentlemanly idealism and the integrity of his literary pursuits free him from both the necessities of the money-making racket and the need to maintain caste. Indeed, his gentlemanliness (however imitation a public school it may be) makes him inherently superior, or so he believes. The novel begins with Comstock as a shop-walker at a bookshop/lending library in the grittier part of town, as he tries to live the life of artistic integrity outside the capitalist rat race. The proto–Mass Observation style of realism that permeates the descriptions of the shop, the street on which the shop is located, Gordon Comstock, the women who frequent the bookshop/lending library, and the books that are read by the different classes of women reveals the novel’s investment in cataloging the changing nature of urban London. To borrow Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge’s words from their Mass Observation manifesto, the narrative here renders visible “the sphere of unwritten laws and invisible pressures and forces.”
Rather ironically, Comstock’s gentlemanly demeanor allows him to be the ideal bookshop attendant. He can speak with the right accent about the right sort of literature, and he can shift attitudes to speak to women (because lending libraries, as the narrative makes clear, are frequented by women) of differing tastes and classes, while maintaining his innate sense of superiority. He adopts a “homey, family-doctor geniality with the library subscribers”—a gendered mode of familiarity, comfort, and indisputable authority (10). With Mrs. Penn, a “red-cheeked,” middle-middle-class female reader who carries her copy of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga with the title facing outward so that everyone knows she was a “highbrow,” he can share an arch, ironic look of “highbrow to highbrow” behind the back of Mrs. Weaver. Mrs. Weaver, on the other hand, is a “dejected, round-shouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a draggled duck nosing among garbage” (10). Her “dim-wittedness” and preference for lowbrow Ethel Dell over the equally lowbrow Deeping produces an awkward moment where Comstock has to juggle and please both women’s tastes without losing face with either. Interestingly, this moment of skillful salesmanship is immediately followed by Comstock’s bitterness at the success of these middlebrow and pulp-fiction writers while his own volume of poems, presumably “real art,” languishes in the dusty upper reaches of the shelves. His chameleon skills of being able to adapt to the demands of the customer contrast with his failure at being an artist of integrity: it is an ironic contradiction between success in the capitalist rat race that he disdains and failure at literary manly autonomy free of the mass market.
The gendered nature of the shop/lending library floor, too, is telling. The women who consume mass-produced novels are clearly uneducated in the ways of true art. Meanwhile, Comstock’s manly authenticity (he also sets himself apart from the Nancy boys who float from Oxford straight to the literary reviews—a not so veiled referenced to Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Harold Acton, and the Bright Young Things) allows him not only to inherently judge good art from bad but also to produce it; it’s just not recognized in the debased world of consumerist, feminized London. This moment of contemptuous but hidden gendered superiority parses very closely to Orwell’s sociological and cultural observations about fiction and the reading public: “It is not true that men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel—the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel—seem to exist only for women. … Dell’s novels, of course, are read solely by women, but women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists” (An Age Like This 244). Orwell’s misogyny and snobbery in this passage are quite ludicrously close to Comstock’s, but they also emphasize both the position of the observer and the ethnographic observations of the narrator. The bookshop is a dense site where the narrative, through Comstock, observes in subtle detail the gendered, classed, and even sexual affect of people from across the spectrum of London society, ranging from the women just mentioned to a “Nancy,” the back of whose neck was “as silky-smooth as the inside of a shell,” flipping through a book on Russian ballet (14); two upper-middle-class women in furs with braying voices scanning the coffee table books on cats and dogs; and the “ugly” salesgirl who wants a “modern” “hot-stuff love-story” (17–18). The descriptions, as they catalog, reveal Comstock and the narrative’s snobbery, misogyny, and homophobic homoeroticism (a regular feature in Orwell’s work). Through each of these separate encounters, Comstock cycles between “gentlemanly servile” and the “insouciant air” of the gentleman (17, 13).
The narrator does not merely categorize the customers, but also turns his anthropological eye on Comstock. The narrative’s deliberate reliance on cinematic foreshortening, its documentary interest in the effects of advertising on young Comstock, not to mention Comstock’s relationship to mass culture (whether literature or advertising), emphasize its investment in anthropological techniques to map and describe the changes in the national cultural terrain. Though Comstock himself is extremely aware of his own performances, the narrative locates his self-conscious mode of gentlemanliness squarely within the purview of advertising and the uncertain middle class. His need for artistic authenticity and integrity lead him to shun the modern world of mass culture, but he is steeped in it. Comstock’s desire to retain his manly independence, “to breathe free air” and “break free of the money-stink,” is juxtaposed with the littleness of the clerical stooge, the “typical little bowler-hatted sneak” iconized as “Strube’s ‘little man’—the docile little cit.” Artistry and “writing” enable “an anchorite existence” while inserting oneself into the commercial engine only leads to the homogenization and diminution of the Englishman (48–49).
Advertising—especially in its ubiquitous avatar of the billboard that sold the idea of a modernized, homogenized England—symbolizes for Comstock the death and decay not only of English culture but of the independence of English manhood. According to Don Slater, “The burgeoning advertising and marketing of this era were not just selling consumer goods, but consumerism itself as the shining path to modernity: they incited their publics to modernize themselves, modernize their homes, their means of transport.”7 Comstock’s successful salesmanship is followed by his contemplation of a sea of billboards that sell the amenities and luxuries that would modernize life and remake the Englishman himself through mass-produced goods. The one he finds most oppressive is a Bovex advertisement: “A spectacled rat-faced clerk, with patent-leather hair, sitting at a café table grinning over a white mug of Bovex. ‘Corner Table enjoys his meal with Bovex,’ the legend ran” (5). The young clerk, as focalized through Comstock, is likened to a rat with artificial, shiny hair, symptomatic of ersatz modernity engendering an aestheticized unnaturalness.8 Within the diegetic space of the advertisement, the clerk’s individuality is reduced to his location in the café: he is the Corner Table. This metonymic move displaces personhood, and the narrative reveals how advertising and consumer culture reduce individuals to the objects they consume. For Comstock, this image symbolizes English masculinity at the moment of England’s immersion in consumerism and mass-culture modernity. Significantly, in a move that replicates the cinematic sweep of the camera in the burgeoning 1930s documentary-film industry, the narrative and the protagonist shorten focus from a vision of the rat-faced clerk to the protagonist’s reflection in the glass. He does not seem to fare much better than the Corner Table: unlike the false homogeneity of the clerk, Comstock is faded, unkempt, and mousy with no defined features. Both the Bovex man and Gordon Comstock, perceived as they are on the same visual spectrum, represent the opposite ends of English manliness within the context of the “money-world.” Comstock, in declaring war on the “money stink,” thinks he embodies the residual manly ideals of authenticity and independence, while the Corner Table signifies the illusory ideal of upward mobility and “making good” in an increasingly mechanized and formulaic world.
Though Comstock desperately tries to play up the idea of gentlemanly autonomy, in apparent contrast to the homogeneity of the Bovex man, his mode of occupying the city and its streets emphasizes the ludicrousness of the idea. Comstock attempts to be the urbane flâneur, a detached observer at ease in the urban jungle of modernity, someone who is capable of reading the signifiers of modernity as well as the streams of London’s humanity. He wants to be the undomesticated spectator, not bound by the discourses of class, caste, or money, but is, nevertheless, deeply interpellated within all three. It is instructive to rehearse Baudelaire’s description of the fin de siècle modern male urban figure here, to foreground how the narrative situates Comstock within the conventions of the flâneur only to reveal his being a flâneur manqué: “The crowd is his element. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitudes, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” (9). Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway to some extent embodies the Baudlerian and Benjaminian flâneur; in fact, he has frequently been read as such.9 He is self-contained and revels in his walk through bustling urban London, sexualizing and romanticizing it from his perspective on high. However, Peter, though he walks the streets of London as if he owns them, is nevertheless shaped by what Peter Kalliney calls “the imperial geography of the metropole” (82). The city’s architecture, its monuments, its park spaces, and its inhabitants all serve to reinforce and bolster Peter’s identity as an imperial Englishman, even as it reminds the city’s inhabitants that they are in the heart of a great and powerful empire.
Comstock’s experience of the city is the exact opposite. He is a part of the crowd even as he is a spectator, but he does not take pleasure in it, nor does he seem to do so out of choice. His poverty and his helplessness make him feel homeless, bereft, and frustrated: “In the deadly glare of the Neon lights the pavements were densely crowded. Gordon threaded his way, a small shabby figure with pale face and unkempt hair. The crowd slid past him; he avoided and was avoided. There is something horrible about London at night; the coldness, the anonymity, the aloofness. The street swarmed with pretty girls. By scores they streamed past him, their faces averted or unseeing; cold nymph-creatures, dreading the eyes of the male. That too was money” (71). Comstock is both part of and distinct from the Eliotic undead crowds that flow over London. Here, the women who would ordinarily constitute accessible objects of aesthetic and sexual contemplation for the flâneur—indicated by the fact that Comstock does indeed note the astonishing number of pretty women—are cold and aloof. The pretty girls do not flirtatiously seek his gaze, because such interactions are determined by the sheen of money and caste, which neither Comstock nor the other poor men in the crowd have. The narrative implicitly echoes the pleasures of the stroll and the blasé cosmopolitan attitude through Comstock’s long walk through the streets of London—Covent Garden, Waterloo Bridge, Embankment to Westminster, Trafalgar Square, the Strand, and Charing Cross Road—but his walk of observant contemplation is not a pleasurable stroll. Familiarity with the city does not breed comfort but rather its opposite; his poverty, lack of status, and generally unprepossessing demeanor render him more like Leonard Bast than Baudelaire’s dandy as he contemplates every aspect of city life available to the young urban man but utterly inaccessible to him—women, restaurants, the theater, the talking pictures, and the pubs. The city’s architecture and its consumer palaces contribute to his alienation and precariousness; they remind him that he is not the imperial gentleman who makes the city and is in turn made by it. The city underscores the fact that he is one of the castoffs. Even as he walks along thinking of lines for his poem—an act of the urbane artist if ever there was one—he is more concerned with “the Joey, or the three-penny bit” that symbolizes his potential emasculation and humiliation at the hands of the shopgirl. The unrelenting gritty realism, in stark contrast to the modernist pleasures of the stroll, draws attention to the pain and uncertainty of Comstock’s ambiguous gendered, classed location in his attempts to inhabit the city. Because of his gentlemanly background, shaky though it may be, he is self-consciously aware of how he could own it: hence the casual listing of names, places, and people, but his own precarious position within the hierarchy prevents any such autonomous detachment.
In his escape to the underworld, Comstock turns inward to the private, as distinct from, indeed, antithetical to, the domestic. He tries to live out the ideals of integrity and independence of both artist and Englishman in a less restrictive setting. Comstock hopes to enact the residual traces of a gentlemanly self-sufficiency in his travels. I refer, of course, to Raymond Williams’s theorization of residual and emergent cultural processes that I outlined earlier in the book. Comstock and his quest embody the necessary negotiations among residual, dominant, and emergent masculine stylizations: Comstock negotiates between the residual traces of the dominant gentlemanly ideal and the emergent masculine values of a consumerist society.10 He endeavors manly self-sufficiency as he journeys through the underclass without the safety or anchor of either bourgeois values or the solidity attributed to the working class. He considers it a liberating experience that offers him a vantage point from which to judge those who are still caught within the vicious hierarchy of money. Though he wallows in endless self-pity and resentment for his chosen poverty-stricken state, he still feels an extraordinary righteousness in apparently holding himself aloof from the demands of economics.
The discursive national turn toward the private and the domestic, though not new, took on a new significance as an effect of the destabilizing of hegemonic manliness by World War I and waves of resistance across the baggy behemoth of empire. This discourse of privacy penetrated to the very core of subject-citizen and self as evidenced in the Orwellian examination of Comstock’s gendered, classed sense of self. Lynette Hunter points this out when she says Orwell’s thirties fiction explored the private self within a nation-state structured by “the commodification of need” and “the commodification of the individual,” but her argument elides the ways in which gender constitutively alters the terms of the private and public in Orwell’s fiction (203–6).
Orwell’s protagonists are primarily male, with the exception of Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter, and the narratives focus on precisely why these young men are caught within the tension of the private and public. It is noteworthy that most of them are gentlemen of some type, born into various strata of the middle class. Comstock, for instance, due to the pressures of his economic and, indeed, historical circumstances, is forced to shape his masculine identity through a definitive split between his private self and his public self: the private self is the independent, manly, anti-consumerist poet, and the public self is the competent advertising copywriter. This split when read within the discourse of English hegemonic manliness reveals both the continuity and the folds within masculine identity as the dual pressures of imperial decline and consumerist, capitalist modernity alter the very delineations of nationhood and male subjectivity. As Larkinesque poetics of a later period illustrate in their extreme emphasis on solitude, the realm of the private—which has become even more enclosed—is the only viable space of masculinity, free from the heteronormative demands of family and the socioeconomic pressures of labor.11
Comstock’s separation of his private masculine self from the expectations of a public corporate masculinity emphasizes his distance from his Victorian/Edwardian gentlemanly inheritance. The Englishman’s disinterested commitment to nation and society did not disrupt his role as husband and father, as evidenced by Gran’pa Comstock, who built up a successful business plundering “foreigners and the working class” while managing to father eleven children over whom he ruled with an iron fist. In fact, the one contributed to the other—private and public integrity coalesce. For Comstock, the opposite is true: the integrity of his private masculine self is antithetical to what he obviously considers the conformity and intellectual prostitution of his public self or the increasing commodification of the Englishman. In rejecting this public self, he attempts to de-link the private self from the realm of domesticity. However, this particular perspective undergoes a radical revision toward the end of the novel, as it shifts genres from a mutated documentary-realist narrative of descent to the sentimental novel of domesticity. However, during Comstock’s anti-capitalist drift into the wilderness of London’s underbelly, domesticity becomes the conduit through which the fragmented and untrue public self infiltrates and subverts the integrity of the private, masculine self, thus jeopardizing manly independence.
Indeed, his constant rants against women and domesticity, synonymous in his declamatory tirades, are central to his construction of manly self-sufficiency. Alison Light points out that the “outpourings of virulent misogyny in the inter-war years signal an implicit anxiety about the treacherous instability of former models of masculine power” (8). I agree that such misogyny is a product of the crisis within older models of hegemonic masculinity, but, more important, it also constitutes the recoding within middle-class manliness as it seeks to mold those older models to fit the constraints of a domestic, privatized ideal of Englishness and consumerist modernity. In his attempt to establish his private masculine self, Comstock categorizes women and the domestic as part of the public self; the foul demands of consumerism structure women and their essentialized desire to establish a home. To Comstock, the domestic itself is a product of capitalism. This phenomenon, of masculine integrity forged in opposition to feminized domestic space, is also an integral part of the postwar literary landscape, at least in the culturally elevated novels by the Angry Young Men. Women, in a post-suffrage, post–World War I flapper era, are no longer the passive recipients and submissive complements to manly honor. Their entry into consumerist and labor publics make them an integral component of the national public. Comstock points out this link between women and homogenized consumerism that leads to the emasculated masculinity of the “law abiding cit”: “‘That’s what women say. “Chuck away your decency, and suck the blacking off the boss’s boots and buy me a better fur coat than the woman next door.” Every man you can see has got some blasted woman hanging round his neck like a mermaid, dragging him down and down—down to some beastly little semi-detached villa in Putney, with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the window. It’s the women who make all progress impossible. Not that I believe in progress,’ he added rather unsatisfactorily” (114). Drifting in the in-between spaces of poor lodging houses and bookstores allows Comstock to see all relationships with women resulting in corporate masculinity, of being a “docile little cit,” of keeping up appearances, and the acquisition of useless, uniform worldly goods. Heterosocial relationships mean the end of masculine independence, both psychological and physical. The semi-detached villa and the aspidistra that signify lukewarm prosperity and stability imprison and destroy the freedom and gentlemanly integrity of men. As Judy Giles states with reference to Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, “Suburban domesticity, symbolized by the family, colludes with the forces of tyranny which are in turn linked to the techno-bureaucratic manifestations of state control” that constrain masculine identity (41). Women, it seems, are enthusiastic collaborators in the emasculation of men as women, in their biological need to nest and reproduce, “believe in the money-code” and through the trap of sexual intercourse and marriage make the “men obey it” (114).
Rosemary, Comstock’s girlfriend, is subjected to Comstock’s near-hysterical diatribes against women. Rather interestingly, she represents the selfless and commonsense counterpoint to Comstock’s self-indulgent escapism in the novel. As mentioned earlier, while the narrative shares Comstock’s distaste for the Bovex man and the mangy owner of the Putney villa, it nevertheless ironizes Comstock’s fetishization of money. Rosemary views money as a necessity for a comfortable and decent life—a position that the narrative endorses. She is credited with “common sense” over Comstock’s more childish “abstract ideal,” when in an attempt to stem his self-destruction—once she realizes that his poverty and self-pity have nullified his own search for artistic integrity—she encourages him to return to work at the New Albion (195). As noted earlier, both “common sense” and “abstract ideal” are loaded phrases within Orwellian discourse: common sense is always weighted over and above abstract ideals, as the former is rooted in the experiential, empirical, and quotidian existence of the common man, while the latter is a product of intellectual and economic elitism. It is the same argument that weights Comstock’s naïve abandonment of money over Ravelston’s platitudinous mouthing of Socialist doctrine even as he lives in economic comfort.
Comstock attempts to establish himself through his opposition to and separation from women, as they are the tools of the money-god. Though the narrative—through the sympathetic treatment of Rosemary—reveals this ascription as callow and youthful, it nevertheless shows Comstock’s journey as a necessary component in his transition from the gentlemanly code to corporate masculinity. On the one hand, it is his attempt to consolidate his independence in the face of an assault from a new form of capitalist uniformity; on the other hand, it is part of his movement from an imbrication within the residues of an earlier public school manliness to a realization of his own inability to fully enact those ideals due to his economic and social circumstances.
The duality that haunts Comstock also propels his journey downward through the many layers of urban life. If Waugh’s novels described the rarefied realms of the aristocracy and those in power, Orwell’s map the downward trajectory of the gentleman who has cultural capital but no wealth to shore up a gentlemanly life. Orwell’s focus on the ordinary man and the uncertain middle class as they come to terms with an island nation in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929 occasions Comstock’s quest narrative. Orwell’s domestic journeys were indubitably part of the larger anthropological, domestic move. Orwell himself embarked on these journeys in such nonfiction accounts as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, which were part anthropological documents, part Socialist manifestos, and part quest narratives that try to reach and examine the limits of a bourgeois masculine self. While I would hesitate to characterize Comstock’s journey into the London underclass as a full-on imperial romance, I nevertheless see it referencing some of the traits of that genre. If Susan Jones’s handy enumeration of the characteristics of the imperial romance is accurate, where “the identity of the protagonist is at stake, undergoes a ‘test,’ temptations in the encounter with the ‘other’ in exotic and hazardous locations and ideally (but by no means exclusively) remains secure and attached to the mores of his society on the return,” then Comstock’s journey is very much a domesticated quest romance (408). Jones draws on Richard Patteson’s “twelve most recurring plot functions of the imperialist romance.” I will rehearse the ones that are most relevant here: Comstock journeys into the unknown wilderness with “clearly defined goals” that are “idealistic,” not “materialistic”; he descends into the “caves” of the female-dominated lending libraries, where he is smothered by crass anti-intellectualism; he encounters “the other” in the drifters and vagrants of the underclass, over whom he establishes superiority through his bourgeois intellectual superiority and classificatory mechanisms; he is apparently trapped by prostitutes (indigenous women) during his drunken debaucheries who strip him of his money; and finally, though he does not establish order in the wilderness, he does return to the bourgeois purlieu changed and yet intact (Patteson 112–13).
Moreover, as James Buzard has argued, the auto-ethnography of the 1930s drew on nineteenth-century “bourgeois literature of social exploration” in which “the poor” are always present waiting to be discovered. Often enough, “the objects of exploration tend to be defined (in the sense of ‘fenced in’) in contrast to the explorer’s and the novelist’s free-moving persona” (105). Comstock’s journey downward into the slummy quarters of Lambeth rehearse this story of exploration, only in the case of Comstock, even as he goes “native,” that is, even as he abandons fastidious personal hygiene, respectable clothing, and the routines of a fulfilling work ethic—traits constructed as inherently bourgeois—he remains detached. He does not go native to the extent that he becomes entrenched in the routines of manual labor or the concerns of a working-class existence. He fancies himself a self-righteous man, but he is really a gadfly who repudiates corporate expectations but at the same time does not accept the apparently ennobling values of a proletariat existence. He is, to appropriate Buzard’s phrase, “a free-moving persona” who crosses borders, inhabits liminal spaces, and is a reluctant participant-observer. Both the narrator’s and Comstock’s categorizing eye, as the analysis of the lending library reveals, is trained on the world’s unseen (London’s poor) and seen (gradations of the bourgeoisie). While the quest narrative focuses on how far Comstock can and will go in search of literary manly autonomy, the ethnographic eye is also quite emphatically concerned with “the condition of England”—hence, the appropriation of techniques of Victorian novels of exploration as well as the newly pervasive methodology legitimated by the consolidation of anthropology as a discipline, thanks to the popularity and influence of Bronislaw Malinowski. On the one hand, the dark unknown of the urban underworld mimics the imperial theater; on the other, the urban underclass is a more appropriate terrain for exploring identity in an era defined by the domestic, anthropological turn most visibly embodied by the documentary film and Mass Observation movements, where historical and economic momentum had turned English attention from the empire to England in an effort to “capture the whole national culture” (Esty 45).12
Comstock never quite fits into the world that he enters. His relentless desire to sink leads him to a Dickensian “underground” where his fellows are the criminals, prostitutes, and vagrants, and little better than domesticated animals. Indeed, he is on a desperate adventure to leave “decency” behind, and he is adamant that he not fit into any type of community whatsoever. In deliberately inhabiting a “world where decency no longer mattered,” Comstock’s journey mimics the dangers and uncertainty of the imperial periphery (203). He considers his separation from respectable society and his sinking into anomie an appropriate means to access both his literary talent and his socially suppressed masculine independence. While the narrative and Comstock detail the “huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever” and the “murky streets where sepia-shadowed faces of tea-drunkards drifted through the mist,” in which he experiences the feelings of being “submerged” in ever grungier lodging rooms with all the zeal of the anthropologist, Comstock always remains distinct from the objects of his gaze (204). Though he is tempted to join the ranks of the great unwashed—symbolized by his succumbing to the mindless “escapist” fiction that he peddles—he is always aware of the distance between what he used to be and what he is. Indeed, it is this awareness that emphasizes the romance quest aspect of his spiral into sloth and indecency: the door is always open to his return. Even as he succumbs, his bourgeois values are held as hidden threads that tie him back to the world of ambition and self-respect. More so, as both Comstock and the narrative consistently invoke the names of Rosemary, Ravelston, and, less effectually, Gordon’s sister, even when Comstock is at his most debauched and disaffected.
Comstock’s spiral into death, decay, and the reading of trashy novels halts when he finds out that Rosemary is pregnant. His horror at her planned abortion catalyzes his return. While this trope is usually seen as a convenient plot device—indeed, Alok Rai has read this as another instance of formal “deformative, disjunctive violence” (41) symptomatic of Orwell’s early novels—I view it as a necessary twist in the narrative, since the narrative trajectory already signified this inevitability; Comstock’s obsession with the absence of a bourgeois life was too marked to be dismissive. The novel’s examination of the middle-class Englishman’s crisis of identity necessitates the generic shift through the trope of pregnancy and impending fatherhood. It signals Comstock’s shift from his delusions of being an independent literary gentleman to being a decent, ordinary, lower-middle-class advertising man. This shift is manifest in the narrative’s generic turn from the ethnographic narrative of the slide into the wilderness to the conventions of the middlebrow domestic novel. The middlebrow domestic novel, as Nicola Humble argues, tracked the subtle shifts of middle-class gender identities through this period of middle-class turmoil (59).13 Keep the Aspidistra Flying morphs into a middlebrow domestic novel that pays careful attention to the shifts in gendered bourgeois identities through its portrayal of the necessary alterations in Comstock’s understanding of a masculine self.
This attention to the nuances of bourgeois values is evident when the seeding of the nuclear family kick-starts Comstock’s dormant sense of chivalry and decency, where decency is a democratized Orwellian rendering of a constituent trait of gentlemanliness: disinterestedness. While the narrator had been sympathetic to Comstock’s war against the standardization and commodification of people, Comstock’s abandoning of decency had been treated with narrative disdain. “Decency,” or doing the right thing, thus becomes the force that binds Comstock back into the social framework. It is the scaled-down quotidian version of manly disinterestedness (constitutive of the imperial gentleman) that enables him to see beyond his private crisis to the larger questions of family and community. In Comstock’s striving to be decent, the narrative returns him to the respectability of the home and its attendant social hierarchies, engendering a masculine identity produced by and fitted into the reduced frames of a lower-middle-class, suburban citizenship.
The modes in which modernization changed the idea of the home directly shaped female and male subjectivities within the domestic space. This, coupled with the national discursive turn toward the “private life” in the wake of imperial decline and World War I, made the domestic space a significant site for the renegotiation of gender and class identity. In her materialist cultural studies analysis of how women’s histories and experiences have been written out of the theorizations of modernity, Judy Giles points out that “for millions of women the parlour and the suburb rather than the city were the physical spaces in which they experienced the effects of modernization. These were also the spaces that shaped the imaginations from which came their expressions of modernity” (11). Comstock’s reconciliation with his new “businessman,” lower-middle-class identity, through the acquisition of a flat of his own and the ability to “keep” Rosemary and the baby, occurs in and through the modernized domestic space. His return to the domestic space is made possible through his corporate instrumentality, and as a consequence it disrupts Giles’s narrative of the domestic as a space for women’s encounter with modernity. Indeed, it is corporate masculinity that enables domestic modernity. Comstock capitulates to corporate masculinity and sheds his gentlemanly autonomy in order to make possible the warm hearth; he becomes a responsible patriarch of the home through his advertising job. Comstock’s gender identity, layered as it is with an awareness of the manliness that he has consciously shed, occurs through the parlor that is interpenetrated by capitalist modernity writ large in the advertising world of which he is a part.
This switch from the lone artist who despises the domestic consumerist space to proud homeowner and husband is both expected and not, as illustrated by Comstock’s extreme self-awareness. The return to the middle-class fold, and acceptance of familial, manly responsibilities in the heteronormative institution of the nuclear family, signifies growth and maturity—a maturing process that was protracted, but one that was never in doubt. The logic of the realist quest narrative always impelled Comstock toward this bourgeois return. And yet the narrative’s playing with the conventions of the middlebrow, whether in content (the library sequence) or in form (Comstock’s happy immersion in domesticity), means that this maturity is necessarily fraught. He has not abandoned or forgotten his reservations. Indeed, his continued skepticism toward the life to which he commits reveals the layering of the old and new manly identities. Comstock at the moment of his capitulation thinks:
Quite quickly, now that he had taken the first step, he would develop the cynical, blinkered business mentality. He would forget his fine disgusts, cease to rage against the tyranny of money—cease to be aware of it, even—cease to squirm at the ads for Bovex and Breakfast Crisps. He would sell his soul so utterly that he would forget it had ever been his. He would get married, settle down, prosper moderately, push a pram, have a villa, and a radio and an aspidistra. He would be a law-abiding cit like any other law-abiding cit—a soldier in the strap-hanging army. Probably it was better so. (238)
The duality of Comstock’s middle-class masculine identity is more than evident here: whereas the earlier border crossing illustrated his earnest, if self-pitying, commitment to independence and integrity, his new lower-middle-class identity demands a narrow-minded, cynical commitment to the powers-that-be of capitalism. His identity comprises simultaneously the remnants of, and nostalgia for, that earlier independence and earnestness, and the outlines of a newer identity formed by the demands of consumerism. He moves from gentleman to “businessman,” a term that he reiterates as he heads off for his interview. Indeed, the very ethos of the advertising man denigrates the ideas of gentlemanliness and disinterested public service, as his specific province is the selling of goods and lifestyles to a susceptible public. The shift from culture and autonomy to trade and corporate cog harks back to Harold Perkin’s theorization of the shifts in the 1930s, of the professional move from public service to corporations so scathingly illustrated in Scoop.
Comstock resolves to become “a soldier in the strap-hanging army” of commuter businessmen living identical lives in identical suburban houses, as he realizes that “it was probably better so.” This is a telling summation: being a cog in the machine is redeemed by the promise and intimacy of family. While he is entirely aware of the fact that “civilization is based on greed and fear” brought on by a fetishization of money, he believes that “in the lives of the common man the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler” where “they have contrived to keep their decency” (239). The narrative’s and Comstock’s final celebration of the quietist life of the ordinary man who does not concern himself with larger global issues—capitalist greed, standardization, “the fear of being blown to hell by bombs”—is the final turn away from the imperial Englishman and imperial England’s grandiloquent perceptions of itself.14 In this turn, Comstock nevertheless maintains an awareness of that earlier model of manliness that is no longer viable. Within the private space of the home, which is also the defining space of Englishness, the “natural” processes of life—“of being born, being married, begetting, working, dying”—ennoble the public, professional identities of men and women defined through their relation to consumerism (239). Moreover, the nobility of the quotidian is enabled by succumbing to the market. The narrative moves from the relentless whine against the forces of the market to the cautious celebration of the modernized hearth.
Drawing on the conventions of the sentimental middlebrow novel, the narrative addresses the material and symbolic significance of interior decorations and the brands of furniture and appliances acquired. The young newlyweds rush into their furnished flat, their first, having lived only in lodging houses. The narrator records their “absurd raptures” over their possessions, which are enthusiastically itemized—the double bed, the linen, towels, the chest of drawers, the gate-leg table, the divan, four hard chairs, the coal scuttle—hired on the never-never, or the hire purchase scheme (245). The possessions they are finally able to own constitute a large part of the young couple’s happiness. The scene of domesticity that follows where they try out their new saucepans and have coffee served on their new “red lacquer” tray in the lounge seems to be from another novel altogether. The narrative here embraces the middlebrow novel of suburban domesticity complete with the aspidistra; though the flat is near the center of London, the quietness of it and the evocative mood of cozy warmth make the unfriendly city spaces that Comstock walked seem spatially and psychologically distant. Thus, capitalism and modernity are not shut out to make this an atemporal space of comfort; rather, they determine the home.
It would seem incomplete to end this analysis without a note on the significance of the aspidistra. The meaning of it changes in tandem with Comstock’s engagement with different models of manliness. In the beginning the aspidistra symbolizes the pathetic, slavish respectability embodied by his sister and the Bovex man: a respectability that is antithetical to Comstock’s own inherited and institutionally consolidated gentlemanly independence and integrity. Comstock only notices the aspidistra as it appears in lodging rooms and bedsits, never in homes. The aspidistra signifies the worst of transience and “making good.” His gradual realization of the impossibility of gentlemanly autonomy, the power of the ineffable bonds of family, and the “decency” of a lower-middle class lead to a self-conscious reconciliation and entry into a masculine public identity structured by consumerism. The aspidistra, at the end of the novel, stands for the ordinary but “noble” aspirations of the “common man” that are integral to the family hearth. The title is densely evocative: the motion gestures, of course, to the relentless march of modernity, but it also suggests the folding of middle-class modernity into Englishness—keep the flag flying—speaking to the inward turn within a nationalist frame.
Gordon Comstock is the Englishman as he transitions from one model of hegemonic manliness into another. He is belatedly inscribed within hegemonic gender ideals that are gradually waning in power even as the contours of the imperial nation shrink. The novel illustrates the relationship between the narrative form and the negotiations of manliness and national identity in the long twilight of empire. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying and in the creation of George Orwell from Eric Blair, there is a deliberate transition from the expansive gentlemanly disinterestedness enacted for the purpose of imperial- and self-governance to a contained idea of decency more fitting to the 1930s. Orwell’s explorations within the realist form to meditate upon the articulation of the shifts in manliness and national reconfiguration lead to a mixed bag of genres: from Mass Observation–style documentary realism to toying with a domesticated imperial romance, and culminating in a suburban domestic narrative, along with the invocation of both the modernist flâneur and the conventions of middlebrow sentimentalism.
Orwellian representations of masculine tussles with domesticity, women, nation, and English manliness as England gradually democratizes itself are significant, not only because of how they depict this particular phase of transition but also because they offer a paradigm for postwar cinematic and literary analyses of English masculinity. This link with Orwell, evident in works by Philip Larkin, John Wain, and Kingsley Amis, reveals the continuity of manly negotiations and the deep underlying thread of “conservative modernity” that characterize the representations of national gender identity in a “new class” of male writers in the 1950s, and their engagement with narrative and poetic form. In the following chapter on Philip Larkin’s poetry, I examine the series of dualities (raised in different ways in both Orwell and Waugh) that continue to structure masculine negotiations and the reworking of the lyric in the postwar period: domestic/manly independence, older ideals of manliness/newer models of masculinity, empire/home, restraint/action, and men/women. Further, the move from gentleman as hegemonic model to ordinary “decent” man, begun with George Orwell, shifts into high gear in the postwar period, foregrounding underlying tensions as England turns from imperial power to postwar nation.