Karl Marx didn’t invent the alienated worker, capitalism did. Marx simply identified him. In George Orwell’s embittered, angry novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which has only been embraced because some critics have called it a comedy, the hero George Comstock has declared war on money, and he has accepted the consequences: “To spend your days in meaningless mechanical work, work that could be slovened through in a sort of coma...”
In this, Orwell’s third novel, the word money appears 393 times. Published in 1936 and set in 1934, it presents to the reader one man’s struggle against the thrall of money. Plainly, Gordon Comstock, Orwell's hero, is a principled ass who is so committed to keeping away from a ‘good’ job that he finds a way to live on £2 a week that forces him to deprive himself of love and friendship because, in his circular reasoning, nobody could possibly love or be friends with a man with so little money.
Orwell goes to some lengths giving the reader Gordon’s background and the origin of his feud with the money-god.
In a crude, boyish way, he had begun to get the hang of this money-business. At an earlier age than most people he grasped that all modern commerce is a swindle. Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first brought it home to him. He little knew, as the biographers say, that he himself would one day have a job in an advertising firm. But there was more to it than the mere fact that business is a swindle. What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion--the only really felt religion--that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers--the elect, the money- priesthood as it were--'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed--the slaves and underlings--'Thou shalt not lose thy job.'
Gordon thought it all out, in the naive selfish manner of a boy. There are two ways to live, he decided. You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it. He took it for granted that he himself would never be able to make money. It hardly even occurred to him that he might have talents which could be turned to account. That was what his schoolmasters had done for him; they had rubbed it into him that he was a seditious little nuisance and not likely to 'succeed' in life. He accepted this. Very well, then, he would refuse the whole business of 'succeeding'; he would make it his especial purpose not to 'succeed'. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven; better to serve in hell than serve in heaven, for that matter. Already, at sixteen, he knew which side he was on. He was against the money-god and all his swinish priesthood. He had declared war on money; but secretly, of course.
At the back of his mind was the idea that he could somehow live by writing poetry; but that was too absurd even to be mentioned. But at any rate, he wasn't going into business, into the money-world. He would have a job, but not a 'good' job.
It was said of him that he was worth his wages but wasn't the type that Makes Good. In a way the utter contempt that he had for his work made things easier for him. He could put up with this meaningless office-life, because he never for an instant thought of it as permanent. Somehow, sometime, God knew how or when, he was going to break free of it. After all, there was always his 'writing'. Some day, perhaps, he might be able to make a living of sorts by 'writing'; and you'd feel you were free of the money-stink if you were a 'writer', would you not?
But, by the age of 30, Gordon has not managed to make a living as a writer. He must keep a dead-end job without the possibility of promotion or a raise in pay. His closest friend, Ravelston, and Rosemary, a girlfriend who obviously loves him listen to his diatribes against the money-code with patience but without understanding.
In one chapter he is a few days away from payday and walks around London agonizing about all the things he cannot have for want of just a few pennies more in his pocket. Like the fool he is, when Rosemary consents to have sex with him on a sunny December day in the country, everything is perfect when the moment arrives – except Gordon neglected to purchase a condom. Fearing pregnancy, lying naked on the cold grass, Rosemary can’t go through with it. And, once again, Gordon blames money.
Weeks later, after he finally lands a check for a published poem (a $50 check in 1936 was worth exactly £10), he squanders it in celebration of his re-birth.
Why does one do these things? Money again, always money! The rich don't behave like that. The rich are graceful even in their vices. But if you have no money you don't even know how to spend it when you get it. You just splurge it frantically away, like a sailor in a bawdy-house his first night ashore.
Two days later, fined £5 for drunk & disorderly (he punched a police sergeant in the ear) he is sober and wondering how he can take advantage of his misfortune by sinking still lower.
Finally, after having sunk to his lowest point, down to a job paying 30 shillings a week (£1.50), and living in an attic with a dying aspidistra, Rosemary arrives out of nowhere and they make love – unprotected.
After all, she was too much for him. He had wanted her so long, and he could not stop to weigh the consequences. So it was done at last, without much pleasure, on Mother Meakin's dingy bed.
The rest is predictable. Three months later Rosemary shows up in his shop to announce to him that she’s pregnant. Knowing only as much about Rosemary as Orwell tells us, her pregnancy clearly isn’t part of a plan on her part to trap Gordon into reforming. But it changes everything. Even when she mentions the alternative:
'Not necessarily. That's what you've got to decide. Because after all there is another way.'
'What way?'
'Oh, you know. A girl at the studio gave me an address. A friend of hers had it done for only five pounds.'
That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words 'a baby' took on a new significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers. They had a strange moment of sympathy such as they had never had before. For a moment he did feel that in some mysterious way they were one flesh. Though they were feet apart he felt as though they were joined together--as though some invisible living cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they were contemplating--a blasphemy, if that word had any meaning. Yet if it had been put otherwise he might not have recoiled from it. It was the squalid detail of the five pounds that brought it home.
Of course, money supplies the one squalid detail that “pulled him up” and makes him regard aborting the pregnancy as unthinkable. Orwell shows him no pity:
He looked back over the last two frightful years. He had blasphemed against money, rebelled against money, tried to live like an anchorite outside the money-world; and it had brought him not only misery, but also a frightful emptiness, an inescapable sense of futility. To abjure money is to abjure life. Be not righteous over much; why shouldst thou die before thy time?
Regarding the 1997 film adaptation (called A Merry War in the US simply because Americans don't know what an aspidistra is), Stanley Kauffmann commented about Orwell’s novel:
Why this Orwell novel now? Well, it's comic about a pertinent perennial theme. Toward the end, after his two-year flight from convention, Gordon reflects: "Everyone rebels against the money-code, and everyone sooner or later surrenders." That idea is still a consolation for many, although it's no more true now than it was then: everyone does not rebel, and not everyone who rebels surrenders. Gordon himself might not have gone back into harness if he had had a condom on a certain afternoon. Still, the novel and the film remind us that doubts about the Bitch Goddess, which seem so ultra-mod, are not. (1)
Where the novel completely fails is Orwell’s apparent blaming capitalism for all the preposterous and disgusting outrages that Gordon commits. Christopher Hitchens even likens Gordon to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. The scene in which Gordon gets roaring drunk and drags poor Ravelston to a hotel with two prostitutes is improbably funny, whether it’s supposed to be or not.
Some Orwell readers have mistaken Gordon for some sort of hero, and that his capitulation at the novel’s end is somehow tragic. It shows just how pervasive Gordon’s attitude is. I should know, because I myself have spent my life backing away from the world of money. I never sought – and never held – a “good” job. And, consequently, I have known long periods of what most people would – quite rightly – call hardship. It's one of the reasons why I now find myself marooned on a foreign tropical island. I haven’t gained my soul in the bargain, but neither have I lost the whole world.
Interestingly enough, Orwell didn’t like Keep the Aspidistra Flying. He didn’t want it and his previous novel A Clergyman’s Daughter republished even when his writing came into vogue. He’d only written them for the money!
(1) “From London to Louisiana,” The New Republic, September 7, 1998.
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