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You don't get to choose your literary heroes
Orwell's Gordon Comstock is an arrogant, delusional cynic. And for a time I wanted to be just like him
Richard E Grant as Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Photograph: Kobal
Leisurely unpacking books after moving house is one of my most indulgent, and dusty, pleasures. As the books have a tendency to distract me from finishing the job, it can take any amount of time to complete the task.
At the bottom of a box that contained a novel, never finished, with a train ticket bookmark telling its own story and a bunch of foxed paperbacks, I found something I'd assumed I'd lost long ago: a battered copy of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I sat down on the floor and began to read, transported back to 1930s London and 1990s Congleton.
I must have read Orwell's third novel at least a dozen times between 1990 and 1992, and it changed me. Or more specifically, the central character, Gordon Comstock, changed me. Despite Comstock being arrogant, self-delusional, bitter and cynical, there was something about him that made sense – even when Orwell's novel does not.
Comstock is a prematurely aged twenty-something, who has quit his job in advertising to work part time in a bookstore while he writes his magnum opus, London's Pleasures. There he rails against the Money God, shaking his fist at the capitalist west. Despite family, friends and a woman who loves him, he seems determined to throw his life away in an egotistical show of his own rejection of middle-class values.
Reading it now, it's no real surprise that Orwell rejected the book during his lifetime. It's crass, overwritten (for Orwell at least) and unbearably grim. Reading the scene where Comstock manages to blow his £10 advance from a poetry magazine on extravagance rather than getting his overcoat from the pawnshop is about as depressing as Don Birnam selling his typewriter for a pint of sour mash at the conclusion of The Lost Weekend.
Yet at the time, I saw Comstock as the perfect ideal of the struggling artist. He was against everything: the literary establishment (his rants in the opening section echo the frustrations of unpublished authors now, while also putting the boot into Eliot, Auden and a host of other sacred cows), marriage, class, and money – especially money. It was enervating, and nasty and that was good. I saw nothing of Comstock's borderline monomania, but instead saw a rage and a bitterness that I wanted to share.
I started smoking because I wanted to feel the way he felt when playing around with his Players Weights and wondering whether he could afford to smoke one now. I began to get interested in left-wing politics, blow the wages I earned from my part-time job unnecessarily, and affect a wholly foolish cynicism that, like several of my shirts from the period, simply didn't suit.
Rereading it on the spare room floor, I was surprised at just what a profound effect such a nasty character could have. I suspect that, as with any character that really gets to you, he has traits that are similar to my own, but amplified and stretched. If a character is too similar to you, it's hard to fully engage with them, which is why it's easier for an English teenager to take to Holden Caulfield than someone like William "Billy Liar" Fisher. Characters who have a profound effect are the ones who challenge your own nature of self, the person, perhaps, that you could be if pushed to extremes. Their proximity to you, and their distance, I think, make them irresistible.
Talking to others about this, the same kind of names crop up. Arturo Bandini, John Fante's alter ego got a couple of mentions, as did Des Esseintes from Huysmans's A Rebours. There was even a worrying nomination for Money's John Self. Desperate and unhinged all of them, yet all deeply influential for the people I spoke to. The consensus was that you don't get to choose – they just come along and whip you up in their world and their mind. It could have been anyone, but I got a poet manqué with a hatred of pot plants and 1930s social mores. Thank you, Gordon Comstock, thank you so bloody much.
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