Re-read George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying recently. Orwell may be best known for 1984 and Animal Farm but he wrote a huge amount of other fiction and non-fiction which has a resonance today. Sandwiched between A Clergyman's Daughter and The Road To Wigan Pier, Keep The Aspidistra Flying from 1936 addresses that age old dilemma for the creative free spirit - do you sell out and work for "the man", or keep your dreams alive and live in penury?
The novel's main character (hero or anti-hero?) "aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already" Gordon Comstock is a poet who has had one slim volume "Mice" published, to decent reviews, and is living in his garrett (Orwell describes the squalor in some detail) "working" on his next project, the sprawling, unrealised London Pleasures.
More importantly, Gordon is at war with "the money god". He has come to the conclusion that everything in society comes down to money. You can't function without it and it has a power over you which goes beyond its mere worth. Orwell effectively describes the benefits, social and practical, that come from money. "Money and charm; who shall separate them?".
Gordon eschews the whole materialist, money-orientated world of western civilization. Perhaps in sixties London, he might have met up with some like minded spirits, hung out with the beautiful people in Ladbroke Grove or crossed the Atlantic and sold London Pleasures for a room at the Chelsea hotel. He would also have had a welfare state to fall back on. But the nineteen thirties were not like that. He was on his own, his alternative to be one of the army of "clerks scurrying underground like ants into a hole...newspaper in left hand, and the fear of the sack like a maggot in his heart." And later "Did THEY know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings?".
He has given up a "good job" at advertising agency the New Albion, and despises the crude advertisements he sees on billboards. His loyal yet despairing girlfriend Rosemary doesn't understand his motives. His friend Ravelston, a wealthy dabbler in aesthetic and socialist issues, publisher of "alternative" magazine The Antichrist (in the sixties it might have been Oz or IT and he would now be described as a champagne socialist) helps him where he can. But nothing can lift him out of his squalid life except money and the power it brings.
And he rejects money. The very notion of it.
Some of Keep The Aspidistra Flying has dated over the decades. But there is much that resonates with the contemporary world. There are the clerks in fear of the sack, people underselling themselves and the all pervading temptation of money as glamour. And the night in the watering holes of central London, going from pub to pub, could almost have been written today. Orwell was certainly an aficionado of the English public house (see his essay The Moon Under Water) and he conveys the bonhomie of pub culture admirably.
There are also hints of ideas that, for Orwell, would develop into something bigger. The advertisements on city walls that influence opinion, the power of the corporate organisation over the individual, who can easily be crushed by the might of the corporation, the downtrodden masses in the city's outer limits (echoes of the proles in 1984?). Gordon Comstock and Winston Smith inhabit the same section of society; the salariat lower middle class, and each are as vulnerable as each other, in their own way. (Gordon does, of course, reject the notion of a salary. But the crucial point is that it is his choice. A return to his natural place in the social order is for him to choose, should he ever decide to do so).
Fast forward almost a century. There are millennials taking jobs for which they are overqualified, unable to find deposits for mortgages. Office workers in fear of takeovers and redundancy. Billboards offering the temptation of the latest fad. And the pile of papers that formed the manuscript London Pleasures put me in mind of Benjamin Trotter's life's work in Jonathan Coe's latest novel Middle England.
"There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows." You could substitute various phrases today. "Sky boxes underneath televisions", "talent shows on TV screens", "digital downloads for instant purchase". Pick your own.
And read Keep The Aspidistra Flying to see which choice he takes.