An Indecent Place

KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING (248 pp.)-George Orwell-Harcourf, Brace ($3.75).

"The conscience of his generation," British Critic V. S. Pritchett called Brit ish Novelist George Orwell (who died in 1950). Orwell was a maverick radical who attacked his old friends of the left with as much ferocity as new, would-be friends of the right. In the U.S., he is best known for Animal Farm, the best anti-Communist satire yet written, and that nightmare about Big Brother, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Keep the Aspidistra Flying-which appeared in England in 1936 but has never before been published in the U.S., is a sharply satirical attack on the left-wing intellectuals and fake-proletarian martyrs of the '305. Thus, in a sense, it is about yesterday's battle; yet it is also more timely than ever, for only lately has the world begun to understand that it is the little comrades who pave the way for Big Brother.

Above all, Aspidistra makes grimly amusing reading.

The Cigarette Problem. The poverty with which the book deals is more comic than tragic. Hero Gordon Comstock is bone-poor, not because he is genuinely down-and-out, but because a pinkish bee in his bonnet tells him that it is nobler to half-starve than surrender to what he calls "the money-code." A poet of sorts (he has published a slim volume entitled Mice), Gordon has not got much farther because he is usually too cold and hungry even to hold a pencil. Gordon's conscience allows him to earn about ten dollars a week as salesman in a bookshop-which doesn't leave much for even cheap cigarettes. Gordon's big question is not: How can I write better poetry, or how can I make a better world? It is simply: How can I make four cigarettes last two days?

All Gordon's problems are reduced to this ludicrous level. Unlike other men who always have a bed but don't always have a girl, conscientious Gordon has a girl but not a bed he can take her to. He is also too poor to marry his Rosemary, and this means that his love life consists of pressing her against the "rough damp bricks" of viaducts and alleys.

Gordon has another admiring friend, a rich Socialist named Ravelston, who edits a magazine named Antichrist. Ravelston tries his best to help Gordon, but it is against Gordon's principles to accept money from the rich. He prefers to "borrow" from his impoverished sister, who has to go without food in consequence. When Ravelston bleats: "You might as well have a decent place to live in," the man-of-principle only retorts: "But I don't want a decent place. I want an indecent place."

Prophet of P.P. Fired from his bookstore job. Gordon at last gets a bellyful of real poverty. He spends most of his time lying on a foul mattress and staring at the ceiling. He watches the bugs march in stately procession round his garret-but not very often, because the room is so ice-cold that the bugs feel cozier in the woodwork. At this point of the story, Novelist Orwell has more than driven home his point: "To abjure money is to abjure life." Man's first duty is to get himself "bound up in the bundle of life," to fit himself for the struggles of "being married, begetting, working, dying." And so, at the eleventh hour, Orwell yanks Gordon out of his sanctimonious gutter, marries him to Rosemary, and gives him a good job writing ad copy. "[The firm] had decided that B.O. and halitosis were worked out [as a] way of scaring the public. Then some bright spark had suggested, 'What about smelling feet?' " And it is as the prophet against "P.P." (Pedic Perspiration) that Gordon at last savors the simple pleasures of "a house of our own and a pram and an aspidistra."

In this early novel, Maverick Orwell was gritty, growling, commonsensical and touching. He grew more bitter later on, for he never wrote a basically kinder or more human novel.

* The aspidistra is a hardy house plant with stiff, glossy leaves, long a homely windowsill badge of respectability in lower-middle-class British homes, and celebrated in song by Music Hall Diva Gracie Fields (The Biggest Aspidistra in the World).

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