Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 

 “COMING UP FOR AIR” by George Orwell ( written 1938; first published1939)

After considering on this blog George Orwell’s first three novels, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, I admit to a certain degree of trepidation in attempting to examine his fourth novel Coming Up For Air. It was written (as all his biographers confirm) when Orwell and his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy were staying in Morocco for some months as Orwell was trying to recuperate from his worsening tuberculosis. Quite a number of literary critics have lauded Coming Up For Air as Orwell’s best novel and have suggested that it’s the only novel in which Orwell freed himself from speaking and editorialising in his own voice. Coming Up For Air is the only novel Orwell wrote in the first person, and it is narrated by a character very different from Orwell in his interests, attitudes and social class. Nevertheless, I see it very much as a tract for the specific time and place in which it was written, and there are some awkward moments when the mask slips and the narrating character does speak in Orwell’s voice.

George Bowling is 45, fat (he often refers to himself as fat and some people address him as “Tubby”) and bored, bored, bored with both his job and his family. He lives in a new suburb of London, West Bletchley, and sells insurance or checks on insurance claims, which means he has to spend much time driving around different parts of the country. Of course he wears a bowler hat. He earns about eight pounds per week which only just makes him part of a “respectable” class – lower middle-class – but his house is small, mortgaged and cramped, his wife Hilda nags him, and their two children (mentioned only in passing) are a nuisance. He is of an age – his forties – in which a man for the last time seriously considers running away from it all. Although he hasn’t told his wife, he has won 17 pounds on the races – a big sum in 1938 – and he plans to disappear with it for a while. He is disgusted by suburban conformity, stating: “You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses – the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to 212 and ours is 191 – as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, the Myrtles, the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue. And perhaps at one house in fifty some anti-social type who’ll probably end up in the workhouse has painted his front door blue instead of green.” (Part 1, Chapter 2) Shoddy mass-produced food also disgusts him and so does a scene in which he sees a pompous store-walker verbally abusing a young woman clerk.

Yet there is another preoccupation. Seeing (R.A.F.) bombers flying overheard he (like others) is aware that another major war is looming. Everyone believes war will come in 1941 and George Bowling prophesises that: “I can hear the air-raid sirens blowing and the loud-speakers bellowing that our glorious troops have taken a hundred thousand prisoners. I can see a top-floor-back in Birmingham and a child of five howling and howling for a bit of bread. And suddenly the mother can’t stand it any longer, and she yells at it, ‘Shut your trap you little bastard”, and then she ups the child’s frock and smacks its bottom hard, because there isn’t any bread and isn’t going to be any bread. I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows… I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.”  (Part 1, Chapter 4) This vision of coming desolation can only have been encouraged by Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War. So even if he is sick of conformity he knows that something worse may be coming.

He begins to think how much better the country was before the [First] World War especially in the Edwardian age, and the second part of the novel – all ten chapters of it – has him reminiscing on his early life. 

Of course there was hardship back then, and people had to work very hard for a wage - George Bowling doesn’t deny it – but in those former days there was some sort of cohesion holding society together. He remembers what it was like when he was a little boy, when there were open fields and much opportunity to go rambling. His home town, Lower Binfield, was a farming town where his father was a seed merchant. Newspapers were the only way of learning the news, and there were sometimes heated discussions between Imperialists and Little Englanders. Young George Bowling did well at junior school and then at grammar school, but his older brother Joe was at best a slow learner and finally took to criminality and disappeared from the country. George never goes to university as he has to earn money to help his family. But his real passion is fishing in local pools.  He remembers: “I’ve still got, I’ve always had, that peculiar feeling for fishing. You’d think its damned silly no doubt, but I’ve actually half a wish to go fishing even now, when I’m fat and forty-five and got two kids and a house in the suburbs. Why? Because in a manner of speaking I am sentimental about my childhood, but the civilization which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about its last kick. And fishing is something typical of the civilization. As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pond – and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside – belongs to a time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler…. Does anyone go fishing nowadays, I wonder? Anywhere within a hundred miles of London there are no fish to catch… Now all the ponds are drained, and when the streams aren’t poisoned with chemicals from factories they’re full of rusty tins and motor-bike tyres.”(Part 2, Chapter 4) When he was an adolescent, he knew of a hidden pond that was teeming with fish, but he never got a chance to fish in it. In a way, the image of pond-fishing becomes a metaphor for how good the earlier times were – or at least seemed to be. When he was a squaddie in France in the First World War, he and a fellow soldier found a beautiful pool to fish, but they were moved off to another front before they could catch anything. Both George’s parents died during the war, and George spent a year-and-a-half having to guard a depot of no importance – a triumph of misplaced bureaucracy.

Post-war, from 1918 on, things got worse. The golden memories of the Edwardian age are gone. George Bowling has a pessimistic idea of society : “If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.” (Part 2, Chapter 8) There’s a slump. Respectable shopkeepers and farmers are now in a losing conflict with competitive corporations. Former soldiers are begging on street corners. Horses have largely disappeared and cars dominate streets. George’s only pleasure is seducing and cohabiting with a buxom woman called Elsie. The best job he can get is “on commission” as a travelling salesman. Only by chance does he meet someone who gives him a real job in insurance with a guaranteed salary of eight pounds a week…and 18 years later, passing through the even bigger depression, he is still stuck with the same salary. In 1923 he marries Hilda, who comes from what George thinks of as the officer-clergy-colonial-official class – meaning a family with pretentions to gentility but who are in fact very short of money. George remarks: “Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether you’ll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda. Of course in practice one never does those things, they’re only a kind of fantasy one enjoys thinking about. Besides, Chaps who murder their wives always get copped…” (Part 2, Chapter 10) And the suburbs are now expanding and creeping nearer and nearer to rural areas.

Snapping back to the present (1938) era, in Part 3, George considers the meanness of his wife, the fads she and her women friends fall for, and how they will go to any event so long as entry is free. George and Hilda and Hilda’s friends go one evening to a talk sponsored by the Left Book Club  - the distribution arm of left-wing political books published by Gollancz. The address is given by “a well-known anti-Fascist”. The speaker lectures on preparedness for war, but George is most aware of the savagery with which the lecturer speaks, and his apparent lust for violence. George is disgusted. [Footnote: Coming Up for Air was published by Victor Gollancz, who was angry that Orwell included this passage which ridiculed his book club, but he let it be published anyway.] At the end of the lecture, a small group of Stalinists and Trotskyites – all of them middle-class of course – have a pointless squabble. George Bowling [and Orwell] regards Hitler and Stalin as cut from the same cloth… but when he attempts to be soothed by on old civilised chap called Porteous, all he hears are fusty cliches about old England and its glory, which is obviously a lie of another sort.

So, at last, after deceiving his wife that he has business to do in Birmingham, he sets off (with the 17 pounds he won) to visit Lower Binfield, the rural town which he hasn’t seen for decades. En route he has an epiphany when he stops at a hedge row, admires the beauty of primroses and feels a sense of peace in the bosom of Nature. He feels he is “coming up for air”, escaping horrible crass suburban-ism. He dreams of catching fish in the hidden pool he once knew. But (Part 4) everything becomes disillusion. Lower Binfield has been swallowed up by suburbs. Nobody living there recognises his family name. He goes to a Tea Shop and then to a restaurant and sees nothing but newly painted decorations pretending to be Ye Olde. He goes to the church and finds the same old vicar who was there thirty years earlier but who does not know him. He sees a bullying Girl Scouts leader, marching with uniformed children holding signs saying “England Must Be Prepared” [for war]. He sees the tow-path from which he used to fish on his own with nary another person in sight. Now it is crammed with visitors and tourists and punts and motorboats and noise. He recognises a woman who is the Elsie with whom he once cohabited, but she is now fat and blowsy, a drudge married to a man with a small tobacconist shop. She does not recognise him. Finally he ventures to go to the great hidden pool in which he hoped to fish, but inevitably it no longer exists. It has been drained and is used as a rubbish dump. Where a mansion used to stand, there is now a psychiatric hospital (George calls it a “loony bin”) and clustered around it there is yet another suburb, only this is a suburb for wealthier and more pretentious people, with so many Mock Tudor houses and a plethora of vegetarians (one of George Orwell’s pet hates) all of whom delude themselves that they are living with Nature. At which point an R.A.F. bomber accidentally drops a bomb on the town and in the explosion, destruction and some deaths we have a clear foretaste of the coming war.

George Bowling scarpers back to his London suburban home where he has to face the wrath of his wife, who has worked out that he never was doing business in Birmingham and who suspects him of having a surreptitious affair with another woman. The novel ends with George bracing himself for another domestic barney… and life goes on.

One obvious message of all this is that “you can’t go home again”. Nostalgia can be a drug based on false memories. On the other hand, the past is a reality and not to be denied or disregarded. [Remember in Orwell’s 1984, a totalitarian regime frequently attempts to wipe out historical facts of the past when they no longer suit the regime’s current policies.] Besides, while George Bowling’s memories are sometimes too rosy, he is aware of the flaws of the past and is often critical of the past. He is not a naif. Putting together his memories and his awareness of the present moment, we get a sort of popular history of England from the 1900s to the 1930s, even if it is told from a particular point of view – the perspective of a lower-middle-class employee just managing to be acceptable to the middle classes. And of course he’s a bit of a wit. Coming Up for Air is as much a work of comedy as it is a social commentary.

Yet there are problems in the narration. There are still those moments when Orwell’s own voice is the ventriloquist’s voice pretending to be George Bowling’s voice. Take the moment when “George” describes the type of books he’s enjoyed reading, showing what might be defined as upper-middle-brow reading: “Don’t run away with the idea that I suddenly discovered Marcel Proust or Henry James or somebody. I wouldn’t have read them even if I had. These books I’m speaking of weren’t in the least highbrow. But now and again it so happens that you strike a book which is exactly at the mental level you’ve reached at the moment, so much so that it seems to have been written especially for you. One of them was H. G. Wells’s The History of Mr Polly, in a cheap edition which was falling to pieces. I wonder if you can imagine the effect it had on me, to be brought up as I’d been brought up, the son of a shopkeeper in a country town and then to come across a book like that? Another was Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street…. Conrad’s Victory… a short story of D. H. Lawrence’s…”  (Part 2, Chapter 8) “The mental level you’ve reached”??? Would Bowling have used such a phrase? Here Orwell is obviously recalling his own reading agenda when he was a young man, and the inclusion of Wells’s The History of Mr Polly is a sort of give-away in that it tells the story of a middle-aged man, bored with this humdrum life, choosing to run away and find something better, just like George Bowling – although, dare I say it, Mr Polly’s story is a lot more anarchic than poor George Bowling’s journey into disillusion. [ For the record, in my posting H.G. Wells Contemporary Social Novels  I nominated The History of Mr Polly as “the best and most entertaining novel [Wells] ever wrote, and certainly my favourite”.]

There are other flaws in Coming Up for Air. It is amazing that, though mentioned, George Bowling’s two children simply disappear from the story and are not really characterised. A chastising critic like Anna Funder, in her take-down of Orwell called Wifedom, might call out Bowling’s misogyny, in that he often makes casual comments about how useless women are or how much he wants to seduce them while he’s on his rambles – although Funder would strike out on that one given that, in Wifedom itself, Funder notes that Orwell’s wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy liked Coming Up for Air. Besides, the way George Bowling thinks and speaks is really an accurate way men of his temperament did speak in the English 1930s. Finally there is the fact that Coming Up for Air is really specific commentary on an earlier age – an age now passed – and therefore belongs to historical studies.

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            And at this point, dear reader, I am going to right royally annoy you. After having given detailed accounts of the four novels which Orwell wrote in the 1930s - Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air – I am NOT going to write critiques of the two works of fiction Orwell wrote in the 1940s, the novella Animal Farm and the novel 1984, which are surely Orwell’s best known works. “Why not?” you ask. Because these works and their contents are so well known that you do not need me to puzzle them out for you. Is there really anybody reading this blog who has not heard “Four legs good. Two legs bad”, “All Animals are Equal but Some Animals are More Equal the Others”? Or “Thoughtcrime”, “Newspeak”, “Five Minute Hate”, “Two Plus Two Makes Five”, “Room 101”, “Long Live Big Brother”? The fact is that these two works, and what they have to say, are now part of mainstream culture and are very direct in their message. When it was published in 1945, as the Second World War was ending, some critics gamely pretended that the novella Animal Farm was a satire on Hitler and all totalitarianism – but it was most clearly a satire on Communism and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The novella’s clash of the dominant pigs Snowball and Napoleon was clearly the clash of Trotsky and Stalin, and other events in the fable were directly based on Soviet practices and historical events. Published in 1949, 1984 was also based on the Soviet Union and again referenced Trotsky (called Goldstein in 1984), the man the masses are trained to hate by “Big Brother” (Stalin). 1984 was published the year before Orwell died, in 1950. Those who wished to carp about the man - especially left-wingers annoyed that he had criticised the Soviet Union -  said that Orwell was a very sick man when he wrote 1984 and they very defensively claimed that he had a very diseased view of things. But his savage satire and polemic have weathered the test of time.

One little glitch. During the Cold War, Animal Farm and 1984 were eagerly promoted by the U.S.A. and films were made of both of them in the 1950s for purposes of propaganda. Perhaps Orwell would have been annoyed or bemused by this. After all, his views continued to be more socialist than conservative. But his fear and contempt for Communism was based on his experience in the Spanish Civil War.

In an earlier stage of my life, when I taught high-school, I sometimes gave Animal Farm to junior classes –  then called Form 3 or 4. You may have noticed that junior high-school classes are often fed shorter texts to read, which is why so often they get shorties like John Steinbeck’s novelle The Red Pony, or The Pearl or [for the brighter kids] Of Mice and Men. So Animal Farm was taught in that context. When it came to senior classes (Forms 5, 6 and 7) I taught the likes of Sons and Lovers or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Wuthering Heights or The Mayor of Casterbridge. But I do remember a couple of times getting seniors to read and compare both Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. They soon got the picture that Orwell’s dystopia was built on coercion, torture and brutality, while Huxley’s dystopia was built on drugging people with hedonism. As one wit put it, Orwell feared a world in which books were forbidden and people weren’t allowed to read; whereas Huxley feared a world in which people couldn’t be bothered to read because they were constantly distracted by trivia and drugs. Pretty much our world.