Keep The Aspidistra Flying - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

Cyril Connolly wrote two reviews at the time of the novel's publication. In the Daily Telegraph he described it as a "savage and bitter book" and said "the truths which the author propounds are so disagreeable that one ends by dreading their mention". In the New Statesman he wrote "a harrowing and stark account of poverty" and referred to "clear and violent language, at times making the reader feel he is in a dentist's chair with the drill whirring".

For an edition of Omnibus, (The Road to the Left, broadcast 10 January 1971), Melvyn Bragg interviewed Norman Mailer. Bragg said he "just assumed Mailer had read Orwell. In fact he's mad on him." Of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Mailer said : "It is perfect from the first page to the last."

In a letter to George Woodcock on 28 September 1946 referring to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell noted that it was one of the two or three books of which he was ashamed. He dittoed his comment on A Clergyman's Daughter that it "was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so." Orwell biographer Jeffrey Meyers found the novel flawed by weaknesses in plot, style and characterization but praised "a poignant and moving quality that comes from Orwell's perceptive portrayal of the alienation and loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary's tender response to Gordon's mean misery." In spite of negative judgments the novel has won its admirers, notably Lionel Trilling, who called it "a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made."

Tosco Fyvel, literary editor of Tribune from 1945-49, and a friend and colleague of Orwell during the last decade of the writer's life found it interesting that "through Gordon Comstock Orwell expressed violent dislike of London's crowded life and mass advertising- a foretaste here of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He has Gordon reacting to a poster saying Corner Table Enjoys His Meal With Bovex in a manner already suggesting that of the later novel:

"Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred...Corner Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. - For can you not see Behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there's nothing but a frightful emptiness, a sceret despair? And the reverberations of future wars."