Yet this reading strikes me as too much against the grain of what Orwell’s novel has been gearing us up for throughout. But I think we can alternatively see this ending as Comstock’s reluctant decision to grow up and take responsibility, perhaps (perish the thought) even finally finding happiness and proper love with Rosemary. Certainly, Orwell’s narration appears to gesture towards such a conclusion. It’s easy to view Comstock’s decision to marry Rosemary and go to work for the advertising company as an act of tragic resignation (he’s resigned to the cult of the aspidistra and to the money-god).
One of the things we discussed in seminars was the ending. I’ve read Keep the Aspidistra Flying twice, and even taught it one year to my students at Loughborough. A long-suffering ‘girlfriend’ of Gordon’s, Rosemary, and his friend, the upper-class Ravelston (a sort of champagne socialist), are the other chief characters in the novel, as we follow Gordon’s journey through rejection, writer’s block, inspiration, selling a poem, celebrating by splashing out and spending all the money he’s earned, and ending up … well, it would be churlish to offer spoilers now, wouldn’t it? However, he finds it difficult to get inspired and writes virtually no poetry while working at the bookshop. Gordon had had a well-paid job as an advertising copywriter, but he’d thrown it up in favour of a more modest job so he would be free to write poetry. Certainly, he spends his days surrounded by books, quite literally: he works in a small bookshop in London. Keep the Aspidistra Flying focuses on Gordon Comstock, a struggling poet, who has dreams of making it big in the literary world. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell captures the struggles of the aspiring writer with almost pitch-perfect attention to psychological detail, exploring the gulf between art and life, and art and money, for that matter.
And he did all of these in his 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which may not be a great novel like Nineteen Eighty-Four, but is firmly – at least for my money – in the ‘good’ category. Although principally known for his last two novels about totalitarianism, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and for his political essays about big questions surrounding nationalism, fascism, and Communism, George Orwell also wrote well about petty poverty, the writer’s life (see his ‘ Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, also from 1946), and the English obsession with money, usually with having too little of it.
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