35 pages • 1 hour read
George OrwellKeep the Aspidistra Flying
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
We meet Gordon Comstock as he works his shift as a clerk at a bookstore. He reflects angrily on how he accepted a threepenny in change when buying cigarettes from a shop girl. Gordon finds just having a threepenny embarrassing: “Because how can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit? It isn’t a coin, it’s the answer to a riddle” (4).
Gordon surveys the novels in the store’s lending library and bitterly thinks about his own book, a poetry collection titled Mice, which sold poorly. He feels only contempt for all the novels in the book collection. They remind him not only of his failed book, but also that he has been working on a new poetry book, London Pleasures, for years and still has not finished: “For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer,’ and he couldn’t even write!” (8-9). His only comfort is that many of the books in the store, even the classics, are neglected and decaying.
Gordon also turns his cynical and cruel eye to his customers, who include:
- A middle-class man Gordon suspects is looking for “smut” (7)
- A couple of working-class women praising “essentially English” writers (12)
- A young man Gordon thinks is wealthy and whom he identifies as gay or, to use his own slur, a “Nancy” (13)
- A visibly impoverished woman who tries and fails to sell Gordon a bag full of books in bad states
- Two “upper-middle-class ladies” who are regulars that look at books about dogs and cats but never buy anything (17)
- A shy young man who is also a regular
- A young woman looking for “hot-stuff modern love-stories” (18)
Throughout the day, Gordon contemplates modern life and his situation as a struggling writer. He blames his failure to write on lack of money, which he needs for education, trips that would provide him with inspiration, and “leisure and peace of mind” (9). He sees the “graceless street” outside the shop as proof that the modern world has a “great death-wish” (16).
Chapter 2 Summary
After his shift is over, Gordon returns home. His neighborhood is “not definitely slummy, only dingy and depressing” (22). He lives in an apartment building for single men run by Mrs. Wisbeach. At the entrance, Gordon runs into one of his neighbors, Flaxman, who invites Gordon to join him at the bar. However, Gordon is out of money and snaps at Flaxman even though he does want to go: “Of course it was money that was at the bottom of it, always money. You can’t be friendly, you can’t even be civil, when you have no money in your pocket” (26). Besides Flaxman, Gordon’s other neighbors are Lorenheim, a lonely but overly friendly man, and an engineer who works at night. Gordon shares his own apartment with a “sickly aspidistra” that he has unsuccessfully tried to kill through neglect or putting salt in the soil (27).
Gordon wrestles with finding the motivation to work on London Pleasures rather than re-read Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes. After Mrs. Wisbeach gives him dinner, he makes tea, although it is against Mrs. Wisbeach’s rules to make tea in the apartments. Mrs. Wisbeach’s strict rules and constant attempts to catch her tenants breaking them always make Gordon nervous. She also forbids her tenants from having women over, watches their comings and goings closely and even examining their mail. Gordon notes, “You had the feeling that she was always watching you” (29).
Determined to spend the evening working on London Pleasures, Gordon tries to finish a passage he worked on yesterday and crosses out two lines. He wonders if the idea for the poem is too ambitious for him but realizes “[i]t was something to cling to. It was a way of hitting back at his poverty and his loneliness” (31). When the time comes for Mrs. Wisbeach to deliver her tenants’ mail, Gordon hopes to receive either an acceptance letter from one of two publishers he sent his poems to or a letter from his girlfriend Rosemary. However, he receives neither. The disappointment spoils Gordon’s mood to write. He reads Sherlock Holmes even though “he [knows] it by heart” and then goes to sleep (34), reflecting on the one stanza he recently finished.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The opening chapters introduce readers to Gordon Comstock’s work and home life as well as his views on society and his place in it. His main concern and the source of his troubles is his lack of money. Not only is he poor, but he is convinced that poverty is the reason that he is unable to finish his epic poem, London Pleasures, and that he has very few friends. Gordon believes that “All human relationships must be purchased with money” (14).
Disdainful as Gordon is towards money, wealth and class nevertheless shape his perceptions of other people. From the “throw-outs of the money-god” (as Gordon describes the impoverished woman who tries to sell him books) to the young man with the “golden aura of money” (16, 13), money or the lack of it is his basis for judging people. Further, it is how Gordon judges his own work. Although his poetry collection Mice did win him a glowing review, he still considers the book a failure because it did not sell well. However, it is not just Gordon who judges art and other people through money; society does so as well.
These chapters also detail Gordon’s attitude toward the middle class. Viewing a potential customer who appears to be a middle-class man, Gordon assumes he is a hypocrite: “At home, president of the local Purity League or Seaside Vigilance Committee […] [b]ut doubtless, to-night, when darkness hid his blushes, he’d slink into one of the rubber-shops and buy High Jinks in a Parisian Convent, by Sadie Blackeyes” (7). Gordon also identifies his landlady, Mrs. Wisbeach, as “one of those malignant respectable women” for monitoring the behavior of her single male tenants and forbidding them from having women over (23). Being middle class is not just a matter of wealth, but also maintaining (or pretending to maintain) a culture of strict morality when it comes to sex.
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By George Orwell
