Orwell (16 page)

His uneasy recantation on television, reinforced by his guilt-ridden pleas when I interviewed him, seemed inspired by bad conscience. Was he a victim,
manipulated and humiliated by the Communists he still believed in, or a Communist agent, planted in POUM to discredit the militia? My interviews with Frankford and Lesser reveal that the political battle-lines of the 1930s have endured into the 1990s. Hard-liners still believe it's ethical to lie in the service of Communism—even when the system has withered and supporters like Frankford have begun to crack. They continue to repeat what Orwell in 1940 called “the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

Coming Up for Air

 

This essay, the first devoted entirely to
Coming Up for Air,
appeared in the special Orwell issue of
Modern Fiction Studies
when I was guest editor. I argued that this synthetic and seminal novel recapitulates the themes of the 1930s and foreshadows the political satires of the 1940s. It also portrays an apocalyptic vision that destroys the possibility of recapturing one's childhood. I concluded with an extended comparison of Joyce's Leopold Bloom and Orwell's George Bowling.

 

“They were born after 1914 and are therefore incapable of happiness.”

—Bertrand Russell

Coming Up for Air
(1939), Orwell's central transitional work, is both a synthetic and seminal book, gathering the themes that had been explored in the poverty books of the thirties and anticipating the cultural essays and political satires of the next decade. The location and central symbol of the novel appear as early as
Down and Out
when Orwell describes tramping in Lower Binfield and fishing in the Seine; but the novel has much closer affinities to
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, for Gordon Comstock's belief that our civilization is dying and the whole world will soon be blown up is very like Bowling's. Similarly, Comstock's fulmination against marriage and his dreadful vision of a million fearful slaves groveling before the throne of money are repeated in the later novel. Comstock's fellow lodger and sometime friend, the traveling salesman Flaxman, has the same good humor, stout physique and mild vanity of Bowling; and he, too, uses some extra money to escape from his wife.

The dull, shabby, dead-alive Comstock family, who depressingly dwell in an atmosphere of semi-genteel failure, resemble the decayed middle-class family of Hilda Bowling, whose vitality has been sapped by poverty. Like the Oxford don Porteous, whose name suggests old wine and Latin, they live “inside the whale,” entirely in the dead world of the past. When everything else has changed for the worse, only Hilda's fossilized Anglo-Indian family and the eternally classical Porteous have stayed the same, and their political vacuum has been filled by the hateful Left Book Club lecturer. “All the decent people are paralysed. Dead men and live gorillas”:
¹
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

The Road to Wigan Pier
satirizes many of the same targets as this novel: drab and soulless estate housing; mild and mindless Socialists; the crankish fruit-juice drinker, nudist and sandal-wearer of Pixy Glen; and the difficulty of finding unpolluted streams with live fish in them. And one of the most striking images of working-class life in
Wigan Pier
is repeated in
Coming Up.
The decrepit woman who had “the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery”
²
becomes Bowling's boyhood nursemaid: “A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair coming down and a smokey face, looking at least fifty years old…. It was Katie, who must have been twenty-seven” (41). As in
Wigan Pier
, the deterioration and decay of the natural landscape is paralleled by a similar decline that Bowling observes in people. In the early twenties, Hilda Bowling was a “pretty, delicate girl … and within only about three years she's settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump” (136). When he returns to Binfield in the thirties, Elsie, his first love, “with her milkywhite skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels” (204).

Finally, Orwell's idealization of domestic life in
Wigan Pier
is repeated in the novel when Bowling's parents read the Sunday newspaper: “A Sunday afternoon—summer, of course, always summer—a smell of roast pork and greens still floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to read the latest murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through yards of smudgy print … and myself under the table with the B.O.P. [Boys' Own Paper], making believe that the tablecloth is a tent” (46). This Dickensian description of sentimental and soporific, cozy and mindless domestic dullness would be used satirically by most modern writers, but Orwell portrays the scene from the point of view of a secure and protected child.

Bowling's prophetic fears about the destruction of his childhood England by bombs follow inevitably from Orwell's ambivalent thoughts in the final paragraph of
Homage to Catalonia
as he returns to England: “Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens … all sleeping the deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.” Orwell says that “the phrase that Hilter coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people,' would have been better applied to the English,” and the somnolence of this pleasant pastoral nostalgia is clearly related to the drowsy numbness of mother and father at the fireplace.
³

Coming Up for Air
is about an apocalyptic vision that destroys a nostalgic dream of childhood. Bowling is in a prophetic mood in which he foresees the end of the world and can feel things cracking and collapsing under his feet. The war that will decide the destiny of Europe is due in 1941, and it seems to Bowling (as it did to Orwell at the end of
Homage)
that he “could see the whole of England, and all the people in it, and all the things that will happen to all of them” (224). Bowling, caught in a brief intense moment between the destructive future and the nostalgic past, seeks, like Winston Smith, to escape the painful modern realities by recapturing his idealized childhood memories. Orwell's metaphor of escape in both works (people trapped in a sinking ship is the symbol of man's fate in
Nineteen Eighty-Four)
is “coming up for air,” “like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and octopuses” (168). But escape is impossible for Bowling, who has the archetypal experience of returning home to discover that the lost Eden of childhood is irrecoverable: “What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin we're in reaches up to the stratosphere” (216).

The childhood passages of
Coming Up
have the same affectionate and nostalgic tone as Orwell's “As I Please” column and his major essays on English popular culture, like “Boys' Weeklies.” These essays, which develop and illuminate the themes of the novel, were written against the background of the Second World War. In one of these cultural essays, “The Art of Donald McGill” (1941), Orwell lists the conventions of the comic postcard jokes—all women plot marriage, which only benefits women; all husbands are
henpecked; middle-aged men are drunkards; nudism is comical; Air Raid precautions are ludicrous; illegitimate babies and old maids are always funny—and nearly every one of them appears in
Coming Up.
Actually, Bowling's colloquial humor is far superior to these conventional jokes. He “baptizes” his new false teeth in a pub, compares Hilda's constriction to that of an “average zenana,” says that one old lady thought the Left Book Club had to do with books left in railway carriages, and observes that he got fat “so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and got stuck inside.” Orwell's description of Bowling guarding the tins of bully-beef in Cornwall, and especially his satire on Hilda's (and his own) Anglo-Indian family and on Porteous, both mummified relics of the past, is well done.
Coming Up
, like
Gem, Magnet
and the Raffles stories (all three are mentioned in the novel), comic postcards,
Helen's Babies
, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, and “Good Bad Books,” recreates a decent, stable, familiar but nonexistent world.

In each of his essays on popular culture, Orwell favorably compares the static old-fashioned view expressed in these works with that of their harsher and crueler successors: the schoolboy atmosphere of the Raffles stories and “Boys' Weeklies” with the torture and corruption of
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
and the “Yank mags,” the classic perfect poison murder with the modern bloody “Cleft Chin Murder.” (The closing paragraphs of Orwell's “Raffles” and “Decline” are nearly identical.) All these popular works are Orwell's boyhood favorites, have a strictly prewar outlook, and never mention contemporary politics. Popular books like
Helen's Babies
and
Little Women
“have something that is perhaps best described as integrity, or good morale.” Their world, like that of Lower Binfield at the turn of the century, was more class-ridden and more impoverished than the modern world, but did not have an oppressive sense of helplessness. As Orwell says in an unpublished BBC talk, “What you are not likely to find in the mind of anyone in the year 1900, is a doubt about the continuity of civilisation. If the world as people saw it then was rather harsh, simple and slow-moving, it was also secure. Things would continue in a more or less recognisable pattern; life might not get appreciably more pleasant, but at any rate barbarism wouldn't return.”
⁴

This opposition between past and present is symbolized by the house in Binfield that is cleaved by the accidental bomb: “What was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched … but the lower rooms had caught the force of the explosion. There was a frightful smashedup mess” (221). Both the prewar past and the warlike present have rather obvious contrasting characteristics. In old Lower Binfield there was no rush and no fear, in West Bletchley everyone is “scared stiff”; in the past the airplane was “a flimsy, rickety-looking thing,” in the present
threatening bombers constantly fly overhead; in the prewar world fish swim in the pond, in the modern world, writes John Wain, “fish is the stuff they put into sausages instead of meat”:
⁵
“Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that
they
were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of…. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your [false] teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth” (27).

The explosive and perverse phallic image emphasizes the corruption and sterility of Lower Binfield. Orwell frequently protests against “the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanization of life”; and in one of his rare poems, “On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory,” he grieves that “The acid smoke has soured the fields, / And browned the few and windworn flowers.” These lines echo the tradition that goes back to Blake and that has been voiced most powerfully in the modern age by Lawrence (in
Lady Chatterley's Lover)
and by Forster, whose views in
Abinger Pageant
(1934) are similar to Orwell's: “Houses and bungalows, hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, bypasses, petrol pumps and pylons—are these going to be England? Are these man's final triumph? Or is there another England, green and eternal, which will outlast them?”
⁶

Orwell's symbol of England's green and pleasant land is fishing, “the opposite of war,” and so much of the novel is concerned with fishing that Orwell might have subtitled his book, which takes place near Walton,
The Compleat Angler.
Yet it remains an effective symbol: “The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to the time before the war. There's a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish…. They're solid kinds of names” (74). The ideal fishing pool is the secret one behind Binfield House where enormous carp, perhaps a hundred years old, sun themselves near the tranquil surface of the water. When Bowling finally returns there, he finds the Thames crowded and polluted and the sacred pool a drained cavern half full of tin cans.