In a letter to Eleanor, Eric had recalled sitting in Parker’s church in Southwold ‘behind a moribund hag who stinks of mothballs and gin and has to be more or less carried to and from the altar at communion’.
The Southwold curtain-twitching gossip, whoever the original of Mrs Semprill was, would have winced. Or perhaps she would merely have reloaded to keep up blackguarding that awful Blair man to harpies of Knype Hill/Southwold with even more venom. ‘That nice Dennis Collings left our town a museum. And what did that awful young Blair leave Southwold? Knype Hill. He should be ashamed of himself.’
Perhaps, looking at that row of appalled faces, Eric would have been ashamed. There is so much sheer spite in this dashed-off novel that Orwell was quite right, once his anger subsided, to suppress it after its first publication. As he told his agent Leonard Moore in 1944, ‘I oughtn’t to have published it.’
On His Way
Written in months, during his Montague House incarceration, A Clergyman’s Daughter was promptly accepted and published by Gollancz in March 1935, to be followed a couple of months later by his belated ‘first’ novel, Burmese Days. Both were well received. Some of the reviews of the Empire novel, particularly, glowed. Turning a nice phrase, the reviewer in the Fortnightly recommended it ‘to all those who enjoy a lively hatred in fiction’. In The Spectator, V. S. Pritchett (already a confirmed admirer) hailed the ‘cold talent’ on display in A Clergyman’s Daughter. They’d got his measure.63
Orwell was being taken notice of and picking up journalistic commissions. But he had not yet broken through to the first rank as a writer. He would never do so if he stayed in Montague House and the ‘glue-pot’. One thing was clear to him: if he was ever to break through, he must get out of Southwold.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
The money-stink, everywhere the money-stink.
Odo-Ro-No
Orwell got out of Southwold in the habitual way, with the help of friends. There are different accounts of how he got the job at Booklovers’ Corner, which he had from October 1934 to August 1935. The helping hand was perhaps Richard Rees’s, or Mabel Fierz’s (who lived up the road from the bookshop), or shadowy aunt Nellie’s (the Westropes, who owned the shop, were Esperantists). All of them were leaning politically towards the radical (Trotsky-tinged) Independent Labour Party – as, gradually, would Orwell himself.64
Hampstead was relief and release after ten months in the Southwold glue-pot. The job was not onerous. His preferred writing spells were three hours in the morning. His bookshop duties only occupied between 2 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. Business was quiet enough for him to read and browse ‘alone with seven-thousand books’. Fresh air off the heath and the intellectual Hampstead atmosphere were both tonic, and made possible what Crick calls ‘his great creative period’. The Booklovers’ Corner job came with a rent-free room round the corner where he could write and entertain women (something that would have gone down badly at Montague House). He ran a number of girlfriends. He enjoyed literary parties at the Fierzes’ and (more exclusively) at Rees’s flat in Chelsea. Compared to Southwold, it was a different world. But he eventually came to hate the work the Westropes had generously put his way, and the awful literary taste of the shop’s customers. Most of all he hated the sense that he was going nowhere.
It was in this mood that he conceived and wrote his next novel, a masochistic memoir. He had it completed when he gave up work at Booklovers’ Corner in January 1936, to become a writer full-time. Keep the Aspidistra Flying was written fast and fluently, in relative ease. The novel’s hero, Gordon Comstock, by contrast finds himself unable to write because he’s penniless, famished and too busy plotting how to throw the tea leaves from his illicit brew-ups down the loo without his landlady (ear to the door) hearing him break her rules. Orwell’s portrait of himself as a prematurely withered, no longer young man (he was reading Joyce) is self-hating and self-pitying to a pathological degree, grossly falsifying the facts of his own life. Gordon is a ‘short-arse’, the product of a fourth-rate public school, with a family several notches duller than the Blairs. He is a loser. If Orwell was cruel to everyone within hitting range in A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is cruel on himself – a tall, manly, Etonian author making his way rather promisingly in 1934 (when the novel is set).
Orwell’s novel kicks off with an epigraph of bloody-minded blasphemy: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal . . .’. This biblical travesty goes on, unamusingly, for half a page. There follow diatribes against the ‘money-stink’ on virtually every page.
Orwell’s title has dated catastrophically. Aspidistras, and what they represent, are rarer in households today than Venus flytraps. The joke in the title about the Marxist anthem (‘Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We’ll keep the red flag flying here’) makes it muddier for modern readers. The ‘rather moth-eaten’ hero is a victim of the damnable British class system cursed, as most of its victims lamentably aren’t, by a clear sense of what that system is. The Comstocks are lower-middle class. Pooters with pretension. They do nothing, and nothing happens to them except slow generational decay. They have no more social will than jellyfish. Gordon has published a volume of poetry, which, because he didn’t go to the right school or university, has sunk without trace. It is pointless for the likes of Gordon Comstock to submit his poems to the top magazines: ‘He might as well have dropped his card at Buckingham Palace.’ ‘The sods! The bloody sods! “The Editor regrets!” Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, “We don’t want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with.”’ One knows the feeling. D. J. Taylor makes the sly point that Orwell was currently publishing his poems with a chap he was at Eton with – Richard Rees.
Orwell’s protestations are unrealistic and flavoured with the bitterness of a man, closing in on middle age, who feels his career has gone nowhere. As Walter Bagehot said in The English Constitution, money alone, however many pots you have, won’t get you into the top tier of English society: ‘The experiment is tried every day, and every day it is proved that money alone – money pur et simple – will not buy “London Society”.’ Forget the Cavalry Club and Buckingham Palace if money is all you’ve got. The entrance fee is a lot higher. Money ‘is kept down, and, so to say, cowed by the predominant authority of a different power’. That power, Bagehot believed, was ‘aristocracy’. Modern sociology gives it a different name, the ‘Power Elite’.65
Having given up a job as a copywriter, at which he might have risen to a fiver a week (the ceiling for the Comstocks of the world), Gordon scrapes a living as a counter-jumper in a Hampstead bookshop. Gordon takes the job as an opportunity to write the great poem he has in his head: ‘London’. But the squalid conditions of pigging it, on the breadline, in fifteen-bob-a-week lodgings, make ‘creativity’ impossible. Artistically, he’s a eunuch. Without money you can’t think. The point is reiterated time and again in the novel.
Gordon has a loving girlfriend, Rosemary. They meet, glumly and sexlessly, in Lyons Corner Houses. Neither of their landladies will allow ‘visits’ and creaking bed springs. An attempt at love in the wild begins promisingly, then goes all wrong when it’s discovered she’s forgotten her diaphragm (Orwell loathed French letters). It gets worse. They are humiliated in a roadhouse restaurant by an uppity waiter who sees them for what they are, carless people of no importance and bad tippers.
Gordon can see through the sham of the British class system but lacks the will to break through it. Finally, in the spirit of Winston Smith loving Big Brother, he sells his writing talent to Big Business, in the shape of that most corrupt sideshow of capitalism, the advertising industry. ‘Vicisti, Aspidistra.’ He marries and sells out, taking up a job as a copywriter again, earning £4.10 a week, with the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites, Co. He’s good at the job and comes up with a winner: ‘pp’ (‘pedic perspiration’, or f
oot odour), a variant on the never-fail ‘BO’ (‘body odour’, the acronym that sold soap for armpits and crotches).
Among the many points of interest in the novel is, as usual, the Orwellian obsession with smell. Gordon’s invention of ‘PP’ satirizes the great hoax played (to huge commercial profit) on the U.S./UK populations, convincing them that they stank and that, for a small outlay, they could do something about it. Gordon’s firm have decided that ‘B.O. and halitosis were worked out’ as anxiety generators: ‘What was needed “was a really telling slogan; something in the class of ‘Night-starvation’ – something that would rankle in the public consciousness like a poisoned arrow.”’ ‘pp’ is the poisoned arrow. A monster ad campaign is mounted, centred on the bleak question:
‘P.P.’ WHAT ABOUT YOU?
It is not exaggerated. The deodorant industry did not in Orwell’s day, and does not today, mince words in its proclamations to the buying public about its quotidian stench. ‘Body Odour’ had been given wide currency by ‘monster’ advertising campaigns for Lifebuoy soap in the 1920s and after. The soap, scarlet in colour and reassuringly abrasive, worked on the simple policy of covering up a bodily odour with the powerful chemical scent of carbolic. It conveyed the comforting impression that science had solved the carnal problem. And you must use it daily. The term ‘BO’ had actually been invented in 1919 by the Odo-Ro-No firm, American deodorant pioneers. It was they who bluntly advocated the ‘armhole odor test’. Listerine, around the same period, did the same for halitosis, with campaigns in the 1920s. The mouthwash had the added kick, as its advertisers pointed out, that you did not know you had bad breath, and ‘even your best friends won’t tell you.’ Until, that is, you wonder where all your best friends have gone. The early deodorant industry was aimed at women, principally, but gradually became a man thing in the era of 1930s middle-class insecurity. What if you ponged at a job interview, or your boss picked up a whiff?
Orwell, who had suffered the smell of tramps’ plates of meat in his down-and-out days (‘I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet’), realized that the deodorant industry had yet to get round to what lay, seething, within the male sock and shoe. Oddly, the pp initiative wouldn’t take off, in any very successful way, until the 1970s, when Johnson and Johnson came up with ‘Odor-Eaters’ – footwear insoles that gobbled up ‘pp’. It would have caused Orwell grim mirth.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published in April 1936. Critics pronounced it interestingly disgusting. William Plomer wrote in The Spectator that Orwell ‘spares us none of the horrors of sordid loneliness and a hypertrophied inferiority complex expressing itself in physical grubbiness and stupid debauchery’. Covertly gay, Plomer cannot have liked the crude depiction of ‘nancies’ in the novel, but he registered its raw power. So did Cyril Connolly, with whom Orwell was renewing an old friendship. Reading it, Connolly wrote in the New Statesman, one felt ‘as if one was sitting in the dentist’s chair with the drill whirring’. But dentists are necessary in a civilized society.66 The same point was made, less wittily, by the TLS: ‘If this book is persistently irritating, this is exactly what makes it worth reading.’ On home ground, Richard Rees in The Adelphi observed that ‘Mr Orwell is a good hater’ (he may have been thinking of the Ravelston spitefulness).
The Road to Wigan Pier
The lower classes smell.
The Road to Wigan Pier
Gollancz, who was assembling a stable of congenial authors, accepted the latest novel without objection, other than possible libel (taking on Unilever with the BO stuff wasn’t a pleasant prospect). He wasn’t over-impressed with the novels, preferring the reportage of Down and Out in Paris and London, but he didn’t want to lose Orwell and he had plans to use him, directly or as an adjunct to his great venture, the Left Book Club. The right books, Gollancz thought, could inform and revolutionize the masses.
On delivery of Keep the Aspidistra Flying in January 1936, Gollancz commissioned the kind of book he really wanted from Orwell: a trip to the slump-depressed industrial regions of the mining, manufacturing and dockland north, once but no longer ‘the workshop of the world’. A generous £500 was promised. Orwell was armed with letters of introduction from Rees, the ILP and Gollancz’s well-placed communist comrades. Travelling up by bus through the Black Country, he went on to visit the Lancashire coal mines, the Yorkshire textile region, the Sheffield foundries and the Liverpool docks. It was a modern-day Cobbett’s ride – at the gallop. Orwell would spend only two months in the north, an area that was wholly foreign to him. They were the cruel months of February and March, and he was clad in what even one of his working-class informants unenviously called a ‘threadbare’ overcoat, ‘shivering from head to foot’.
King Coal was the foundation on which the Industrial Revolution was founded (via Britannia’s steam-propelled navy and coal-fired steel foundries) and still held the fraying Empire together. It was, as Orwell put it in a famous passage, as vital to England as air to the lungs. And you had to see it to know it:
It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants – all of us, really, owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
He did not have muscles of steel. After the trip to the coalface, which inspired the above rhapsody, he had to be ‘half-carried’ to the surface. Proving, one might say, his point. As does his magnificent prose. The book itself is structurally jumbled by its strong passions. It was framed originally as a diary, which might have worked as regards impact, but it was reframed as reportage. It opens, vividly and smellily, with a disgusted description of the lodgings over a tripe shop where the reporter spends his first night. It stinks ‘like a ferret’s cage’. (For the long trail of nauseating stink that runs through the book, see the appended smell narrative.)
It was a long-lasting complaint by Wigan folk that he overdid the squalor and stench. Crick’s chapter ‘The Crucial Year’ (the strongest in his biography) separates fact from exaggerated fact with surgical precision. Orwell gothicized the general character of the working-class town with shuddering stress on such things as the brimming chamber pot under the breakfast table. Like the turd in the plunge bath, it’s an Orwellian icon. But, once read, it sticks in the mind for ever.
The second section of The Road to Wigan Pier moves into social analysis. Orwell is less readable when he gets into statistics, but his main point is supported by them. It’s immortalized in the folk-song:
It’s the same the whole world over
Ain’t it all a crying shame
It’s the rich what gets the pleasure
It’s the poor what gets the blame.
The world did not need a man of letters dispatched from literary London to reveal that British miners were getting a raw deal. Or that if, on an industrial scale, you cram a family into a small miner’s cottage on thirty bob a week it won’t be the Ritz and there will be trouble with hand-washing (Orwell lingers on the black smear in the butter dish), sanitation and clean underwear. These facts were known, but then wilfully forgotten by England’s luckier classes on the grounds that there was nothing one could do about it. But the power with which Orwell writes rubs the nose of the complacent into the social facts of working-class England, AD 1936. Mining and trawling were the two most dangerous lines of work in interwar Britain: casualties ran at wartime levels. Invisibly. The middle class, Orwell’s class, gave it not a thought – or suppressed any thought – as they warmed their rumps at the roaring fire, or tucked into their breakfast kippers.
There is a large component of memoir in The Road to Wigan Pier. The reminiscence about Burma is revealing. But the crux of the book – what makes it stick in the craws of so many readers of all classes – is the smell question,
particularly Orwell’s thesis about what lies behind the British class system: ‘It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.’ The standard king-four-to-king-four defence is that Orwell is not himself asserting that the lower classes actually smell but that we have been fooled, by social conditioning, into falsely thinking they do.
The fifty occurrences of the word ‘smell’ in the text don’t quite support this apologetic explanation. Later, for example, Orwell asserts: ‘I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does.’ He goes on, however, to argue that the working man stinks not because of class but because of work, or – worse still – worklessness. Orwell himself had stunk like the proverbial polecat when he was living in dosshouses and tramping the road. It’s remediable. Indeed, albeit slowly, remedy is happening: ‘The English are growing visibly cleaner, and we may hope that in a hundred years they will be almost as clean as the Japanese.’ And, one may add, as fragrant as the Burman. Give the poor and unemployed a decent, well-paid job and the smell problem will be solved.
The manuscript was sent, oven-ready for publication, to Gollancz in December 1936. He was appalled at the gross departures from the party line, but he went ahead. When the proofs came back in March, compañero Orwell was in the trenches at Huesca, with more to fear than a cutting review.
The Great Unwashed
From his earliest days he grew to associate smell with oppression.
Orwell's Nose Page 14