'Bloody, sneaking meanness...'

By Vinod Mehta, Editor-in-Chief of Outlook, an Indian newsmagazine:

After a gap of 40 years, I have just finished re-reading George Orwell’s novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Set in Britain in the late ’40s, it is a harrowing tale of a struggling poet, Gordon Comstock, struggling to live up to his socialist beliefs. A bleak story told in brutal prose. Perhaps it is semi-autobiographical, reflecting Orwell’s early down-and-out life.
Comstock is eventually broken by a system which worships money. He resigns a job in an advertising company, preferring to work on much lower wages in a book shop. Frequently, he does not have enough money for a meal and goes to bed hungry. Yet, he keeps writing poetry and keeps getting rejection slips from upmarket publications. In the end, he is crushed. He knocks up his girlfriend, does the honourable thing, becomes middle class and embraces the world of money: he goes back to the advertising company he had grandly quit. He complains to a rich upper-class friend, “You don’t know what it means to live on two quid a week. It is not a question of hardship—it’s nothing as decent as hardship. It’s the bloody, sneaking meanness.”