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Eight Orwell’s Apocalypse 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. 84 part ii. the art 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...

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