English Heritage and the Orwell Society disagree about the inspiration for Willowbed Road, the north west London street where Gordon Comstock, the stubborn, self-pitying idealist of George Orwell’s novel, lives at the start of the story: the former claims it was 50 Lawford Road in Kentish Town, which a blue plaque identifies as a place where Orwell resided; the latter says it was Willoughby Road in Belsize Park. Whichever, Willowbed Road serves Orwell’s purpose as typifying the London of a tatty, interwar “middle middle class” which disguised its creeping poverty with frayed respectability.
Comstock, 29, gifted with words and in destructive, high-minded revolt against a society ruled by money, has opted out of a job with prospects at an advertising agency to become a starving poet earning a pittance working in a bookshop. His descent to a lower level of society – a worse bookshop and worse accommodation in Lambeth – is hastened by his own idiocy when he receives a cheque from a US poetry magazine and by his sanctimonious misuse of loyal friends and family.
Although it becomes hard to sympathise with his main character, there is still lots to enjoy about Orwell’s portrayal of London as a social as well as a geographical landscape, one rich in potential for his satire. He picks another part of the capital for capturing the interactions between Comstock and Philip Ravelston, a soft-hearted upper-class revolutionary whom Comstock genuinely likes yet loathes depending on. Comstock, even when in despair, is insufferably up himself. Yet he correctly perceives that wealth and status compromise even the warmest personal relationships.
“Only in the street or in a pub could he [Comstock] feel himself approximately Ravelston’s equal. It would have astonished Ravelston to learn that his four-roomed flat, which he thought of as a poky little place, had this effect on Gordon. To Ravelston, living in the wilds of Regent’s Park was practically the same thing as living in the slums: he had chosen to live there, en bon socialiste, precisely as your social snob will live in a mews in Mayfair for the sake of the ‘W1’ on his notepaper.”
For his part, Ravelston, while fretting about the destitute of Middlesbrough, can only be ill at ease in London’s proletarian pubs. There are poignant portraits of Comstock’s singleton sister and her dull, frugal life eked out in Earl’s Court, and moany monologues in which he blames women for the power of the money God.
“What does any woman want except a safe income and two babies and a semi-detached villa in Putney with an aspidistra in the window?” he rails at his stoic, doggedly faithful girlfriend Rosemary, who deserves a great deal better. The aspidistra, ubiquitous, near-immortal symbol of dismal English propriety, makes numerous appearances. There is a painful, inebriated West End sequence in which “Piccadilly blazed, a horrible pool of light”. Of the Circus, Comstock cheerily remarks: “The lights down in hell will look just like that.”
Orwell himself does not seem much enamoured of London’s bright lights or anything much else about it. When Comstock and Rosemary take a trip to the countryside, he describes them as escaping the city’s “mean wilderness”. He does, though, albeit bleakly, skilfully evoke a capital enervated by economic depression and facing the impending threat of war. I should have read Keep the Aspidistra Flying years ago. I’m glad I’ve read it now.
I ordered my copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying from Pages of Hackney. You can buy my London novel, Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times, there too. Follow me on Twitter, by the way.