17. Nostalgia, Misogyny, and the Future in Coming Up for Air

Audio version

[edition used is George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011). Coming Up for Air appears at pp. 471-666, and is hereafter referred to as CUFA.]

Six months after Orwell returned from Spain, in December 1937, he’d finished a rough draft of Homage to Catalonia. He was looking ahead to his next work of narrative fiction. This was to be Coming Up for Air (1939), which he described in a letter to his agent as ‘a novel’ that would be ‘about a man who is having a holiday and trying to make a temporary escape from his responsibilities, public and private.’[1] There was, perhaps, a certain amount of self-imaging in this remark. Having been wounded in Spain, and having witnessed a great deal of worrying political upheaval there, Orwell deserved a bit of time off, or at least time away from the usual run of things. And he got it later in 1938 when he was advised on health grounds to spend the winter in a warm climate. With his wife, Eileen, Orwell travelled in September to French Morocco via Gibraltar. The warmer weather was needed to help with Orwell’s tuberculosis, which eventually killed him.[2] Eileen remarked in a letter of 4 October that Orwell had begun Coming Up for Air alongside a spot of carpentry—making a box for goats to eat out of, and a hutch for chickens to go in.[3] Five months later, Orwell stated that although he was happy with ‘about 100 pages’ of the novel, he considered the rest of it ‘a failure.’[4] By this point Orwell had made a career out of being unhappy with his own work. Not even the Moroccan sun could change that. But from a certain point of view the judgement was oddly appropriate. Coming Up for Air may or may not be a failure as a novel, but it’s concerned with failure as an idea throughout. Failure is what makes Coming Up for Air such a success.

All of Orwell’s novels are about failure, in some measure. We can describe each one of them in terms of some disappointment or malfunction. Consider John Flory’s inability to live either with the empire he serves or with the nature of his own body and mind, in Burmese Days (1934); Dorothy Hare’s powerlessness against the limitations of home-life and domesticity, in A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935); Gordon Comstock’s unavoidable need for the capitalism he despises, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936); the shift from animalism to despotism, in Animal Farm (1945); and Winston Smith’s obliteration at the hands of the Party, in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). These are all novels about things going wrong. A winning formula, for Orwell, and a losing destiny, for his characters. These novels, as I’ve said before, appropriately enough, are circular stories whose protagonists end up, literally or figuratively, back in the places where they started out from. A Clergyman’s Daughter is exactly this: the novel ends where it begins, in the Rectory. Dorothy, Orwell’s only woman protagonist, is stuck back into the domestic interior where she spends so much time gluing together costumes for children. If Animal Farm is about the victory of animal over man, it’s also about the eventual substitution of animal for man. There is no decision between man or farm, at Manor Farm—they end up being the same thing, with animal despots in charge at the end just as Jones was in charge at the beginning. Orwell’s novels succeed, circularly, in evidencing failure.

Coming Up for Air is another novel about things not being right, or not working as they should. Its focus is the failure of the imagination—or, rather, its concern lies with the operations of an imagination that fails all too well; that fails precisely because it succeeds in doing what the imagination does: imagining. The novel’s protagonist, George Bowling, is a fantasist of the first order. A stand-in for the limitations of the idea of Great Britain, perhaps (given his initials), Bowling imagines his way into an English past that turns out, predictably, no longer to exist.[5] The main thrust of the book is nostalgia: the sentimental remembering of yesterday; rose-tinted spectacles; wish-fulfilment, those kinds of things. Bowling’s failure lies in his inability, or reluctance, to identify the limits of nostalgia until it’s too late—until he meets the incompatibility between what he remembers about where he grew up, Lower Binfield, and what the people who lived there were like, and what it and they are like now. Although Bowling is aware of the constructed nature of his fantasies, and admits his sentimentality and romanticism, he’s also unaware of how much his mental life is structured by cliché, and by paranoid fantasies of persecution. Afraid of the future, Bowling takes solace in the pre-war past, which he opposes to his own degraded present. His imagination works, and works well. Yet it also fails him. Bowling’s ‘haze of nostalgia’, in Martha Carpentier’s formulation, gives him ‘entirely imaginary’ (CUFA, p. 619) impressions of his childhood haunts and companions.[6] At worst, it allows him to have the most violently misogynistic daydreams about his wife, Hilda, who is one of the many enemies Bowling imagines for himself in a novel set on the cusp of worldwide war.

All of this puts things squarely in the negative. But this is not to say that Coming Up for Air is a ‘negative’ text, in the sense that it’s downbeat, or pessimistic. Although the novel is often read, as Annette Federico points out, ‘as prefiguring the nightmare world of Nineteen Eighty-Four; as an extended meditation on the common man’s passivity and helplessness in a period of impending political crisis; or as a sentimental, even reactionary, compromise of Orwell’s leftist politics’, there is also a good deal of uplift in its humour and, indeed, in what Federico calls its ‘liberatory potential’, which as she reads things ‘is derived less from a position of overt rebellion against the existing order than from a position of faith in the existence of the ordinary as a repository of meaning in a technocratic, politically unstable, and almost entirely secular society.’[7] The ordinary, that’s to say, does a lot of the heavy lifting in this text: it evokes and invokes, puts up barriers of resistance, and leads the mind away into nostalgic reassurance. At Charing Cross, having given his new teeth a baptism of beer (CUFA, p. 492), Bowling sees a poster that starts off the memories in him: ‘some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually in the past’ (CUFA, p. 494). This takes us up to the end of Part I of the novel. What follows, across Parts II and III, is a long account of Bowling’s life before, during, and after the First World War. We learn about his youth, against the background of an idealized Lower Binfield, before the times of ‘unpleasantness’ (CUFA, p. 546) begin, with the start of the First World War. Part IV looks ahead to the onrush of the Second, and to the idea of worldwide devastation. Nostalgia is attractive to Bowling precisely because the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart.

Like many Orwell novels, the main theme of Coming Up for Air is aired in its first sentences. No messing around—this is a book about memory:

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

I remember the morning well. (CUFA, p. 475, emphasis added)

 And what follows is, for the most part, an extended series of memories dealing with different stages in Bowling’s life, from his youth in Lower Binfield, to his time as a soldier in the First World War, to the ‘queer time’ (CUFA, p. 573) after it. Particularly important, for Bowling, is the pre-First World War age. Drawing on the time-honoured idea of a long Edwardian ‘golden period’, Bowling remembers the pre-war epoch as a pastoral idyll, an eternity of summer days and green landscapes. He knows that this is delusional (CUFA, pp. 503, 555), but he can’t help himself. The delusion is too comforting to give up. As Bowling emphasizes, to himself as much as to the reader: ‘It always seems to be summer when I look back. I can feel the grass round me as tall as myself, and the heat coming out of the earth. And the dust in the lane, and the warm greeny light coming through the hazel boughs’ (CUFA, p. 504). A vision of rural bliss; a taste of the ‘golden country’ to come in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is memory as consolation—memory, knowingly rose-tinted and idealized, held on to for the sake of comfort. ‘I dare say it was a dull, sluggish, vegetable kind of life’, Bowling later admits. ‘You can say we were like turnips, if you like. But turnips don’t live in terror of the boss, they don’t lie awake at night thinking about the next slump and the next war. We had peace inside us’ (CUFA, p. 610).

The sort of ‘peace’ Bowling has in mind here is perfectly exemplified, for him, in the sport of fishing:

As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler. There’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp. (CUFA, pp. 532-3)

Fishing is, for Bowling, ‘the opposite of war’ (CUFA, pp. 539-40). What he doesn’t seem to notice, however, is that the ‘peacefulness’ of fishing went hand in hand, in his youth, with casual violence. Fishing before the First World War was ‘the real thing’ (CUFA, p. 528), but so was killing rats, squirrels, birds, and toads—and often in the vilest and cruellest of ways. The peace that was inside Bowling and the boys he used to hang around with is noticeably bound up with viciousness and death. An eternal summer, maybe, but also a time during which a young boy, Wally Lovegrove, is drowned in Burford Weir (CUFA, p. 528). Fishing is everything that Hitler isn’t, except that it isn’t, and Bowling knows it even as he can’t quite recognize the contradiction.

Nevertheless, Bowling learns his lesson in the end. ‘Fat men of forty-five can’t go fishing’ (CUFA, p. 657), he states, after going back to Lower Binfield and discovering that his favourite fishing pool has been drained and half-filled with tin cans (CUFA, p. 651). The idea that Bowling has on the day he gets his new false teeth is the idea to go back to Lower Binfield, after a ‘middling’ (CUFA, p. 576) life, to experience his past again, to see and touch and taste and smell and hear his youth. What he finds is that modernity has overtaken Lower Binfield, burying it in a sea of brand-new houses and ‘enormous factories of glass and concrete’ (CUFA, p. 621). The past he remembers, along with the past life it implies, has disappeared. Just like Bowling, with his worn herringbone suit, bowler hat, wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs ‘written all over [him]’ (CUFA, p. 607), Lower Binfield has been written over, or ‘swallowed’ (CUFA, p. 620), by modern architectural expansion. Nostalgia reaches back into an imagined past and places its hooks in the imaginary, not in the real. What Bowling finds in Lower Binfield is a new town of the sort exemplified by the likes of Hayes, Slough, and Dagenham—places defined, as he sees it, by ‘chilliness’, with ‘bright red brick everywhere, the temporary-looking shop-windows full of cut-price chocolates and radio parts’ (CUFA, p. 623). Modernity has arrived, and Bowling finds himself bowled over by its gleaming strangeness. The past has been rubbished (or, as the American slang has it, canned). Nostalgia offers comfort, but its comforts are short-lived, and they don’t stand up to the real world’s scrutiny: ‘there’ll be no more fishing this side of the grave’ (CUFA, p. 657). Was fishing ever really what he thought it was?

Bowling’s nostalgia hooks up with another theme in the novel: the theme of fakeness. There are a lot of fake and false things in Bowling’s world, from his false teeth, to the fishy frankfurter he eats in the London milk-bar, to the sham-Tudor and fake-picturesque housing in modern Lower Binfield. Nostalgia is a kind of fakeness in that it constructs the past as the nostalgist, the one doing the nostalgic remembering, would prefer it to be, rather than as it actually was. Bowling’s nostalgia creates fakeness in this sense. Although he recalls certain parts of Lower Binfield correctly, what makes his visit there so disorientating is the distance between his nostalgic memories and the physical reality of the environment through which he disbelievingly walks. He doesn’t find the Binfield he expects to find. What he finds, instead, is a substitute Binfield—a place that seems as if it’s ‘got a new population’ (CUFA, p. 629). ‘There is not much in [Bowling’s] experience that is not synthetic’, writes David Trotter, and we can find evidence of this not only in the synthetic-substitute population of Lower Binfield, but also in things like cakes made with ‘egg-substitute’ (CUFA, p. 628) and the possibly endless replications of Georges in the Confectioner and Tobacconist in which his old girlfriend, Elsie Waters, is employed (CUFA, pp. 644-6).[8] Not even the bombers that continually fly in the sky throughout the novel are immune from the unreal and imitative. When the planes launched from the Walton military aerodrome accidentally drop a bomb on Lower Binfield’s market-place, a real explosion is followed by the slow realization that this is not the beginning of another world war. No: only the simulation of a beginning. Even so, its effects are real. A severed leg in the rubble evidences the costly misjudgement of a lever pulled by mistake. The violence, like Winston Smith after him, has little effect on Bowling.[9]

Bowling’s deadpan response to the severed leg is telling. Although the sight of it disgusts him, it also doesn’t really make much of an impression on him, as he insists (CUFA, p. 658). And perhaps this shouldn’t be all that surprising for someone who is accustomed to the disgusting, and to being disgusted. He’s particularly sickened by the milk-bar frankfurter, with its ‘horrible soft stuff’ (CUFA, p. 491) inside, and by the sticky feeling of having a soapy neck, which makes him feel that his clothes don’t fit and that he’s ‘sticky all over’ (CUFA, p. 479). Coming Up for Air catalogues an impressive variety of repellent sensations, as so many of Orwell’s novels do. Here its focus falls in many instances on revolting smells: the whiff and pong of dust, mud, trenches, cemeteries, beer, and even of old mackintosh coats.[10] Bowling holds back his full reserves of disgust, however, for Elsie. Remembering her as having been ‘pretty’ (CUFA, p. 555) back in the pre-war moment, when he sees her in modern Lower Binfield he can scarcely believe his eyes: ‘Only twenty-four years, and the girl I’d known, with her milky-white skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling along on twisted heels’ (CUFA, pp. 642-3). Bowling has already used the offensive word ‘hag’ to describe the twenty-seven-year-old Katie Simmons, his informal babysitter (see CUFA, p. 506), and here it’s used to even more offensive effect. One explanation for this is that Orwell is showing up Bowling for the chauvinistic pig that he is. What this explanation can’t quite account for, in my view, is the sheer delight in offensive description (across CUFA, pp. 642-4) that characterizes Bowling’s disgust. Orwell wanted to have his cake and eat it. There was something of the misogynist about him, too.

Elsie is only one target of Bowling’s prejudice. He’s unhappily married, as his constant put-downs about his wife, Hilda, bear out, and he resents his role as a father. A house like his, Bowling emphasizes, is ‘more or less infested by women and kids’ (CUFA, p. 600, my emphasis). He’s more than happy to generalize about women in the plural, about all women’s supposed expertise in matters of deception. Hilda is little more than a ‘nagging and sulking’ (CUFA, p. 665) inconvenience to him, but he emphasizes this view of his wife precisely when he is himself caught out in being deceptive. When, at the very end of the novel, Bowling is snared in a trap of his own making, and Hilda suspects him of having had an affair with another woman, the best he can muster is an indignant faith in his own correctness, despite the fact that he’s responsible for Hilda’s entirely justifiable misgivings about his behaviour. The episode further entrenches his essentialist view of ‘women in general’ (CUFA, p. 556), a view reiterated in his asides about women being unable to have youthful feelings of ‘knowing everything and fearing nothing’ (CUFA, p. 525). Making matters much, much worse, though, are Bowling’s fantasies of murder and exploitation, which attach to Elsie and to Hilda. He remembers Elsie as ‘the first person who taught [him] to care about a woman’, and as a ‘very submissive’ plaything, the kind of woman who ‘always [does] what a man [tells] her’ (CUFA, p. 556). His description of losing his virginity is conveyed in similar language—a matter of taking advantage of a ‘malleable’ (CUFA, p. 557) object, rather than respectfully sharing an intimate moment with another person. He remembers the early years of being married to Hilda as a time when he ‘had serious thoughts of killing’ her (CUFA, p. 582). His attempts to convince the reader that he’s somehow typical in having such thoughts—that they give ‘a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage’ (CUFA, p. 582)—ring hollow.

Bowling takes comfort in misogyny because he’s convinced that his view of things is correct. We are, as readers, denied any proof that Hilda lacks ‘any kind of joy in life, any kind of interest in things for their own sake’ (CUFA, p. 582). We just don’t know if this is right. Bowling asserts the claim as truth, and we’re meant to accept it. Coming Up for Air gives us no reliable insight into Hilda’s point of view; she is like one of the women, as seen by Orwell in his essay ‘Inside the Whale’, in the poems of A. E. Housman, where in his opinion ‘the woman’s point of view is not considered’.[11] And this is the novel’s point. Coming Up for Air is a study in character, with the character, Bowling, responsible for everything we know about everything and everyone else. It’s possible to construct a psychoanalytical reading of the text in which Bowling’s chauvinism can be revealed as a neurosis, or as the projection onto others of internal fixations.[12] His bigotries might also be linked to his anxieties about the radical transformation of life taking place everywhere in modern civilization, from frankfurters to market-town streets. The speed and extent of change in modernity has turned the future into ‘something to be terrified of’ (CUFA, p. 558). Whereas in the pre-First World War period people enjoyed what Bowling calls ‘a feeling of continuity’, the knowledge that their ‘way of life would continue’ (CUFA, p. 559) after death, the post-First World War period is a time of ‘things cracking and collapsing under [people’s] feet’ (CUFA, p. 603), an extending moment of ‘ghastly flux’ (CUFA, p. 560). Bowling’s disaffected intolerances may in part be linked to a sense that people like him no longer have a place in the world.

Coming Up for Air depicts Bowling’s fears about his place in modern life as a form of pathological abjection. Yet it also takes anxiety seriously, and nowhere more so than in the case of Bowling’s fears about what the future has in store for humanity at large. Coming Up for Air is a novel about Bowling’s inadequacies. This is not to say, however, that everything he’s terrified of is somehow a misjudgement. There’s a lot of dread in this book, and a lot of dread of things that Orwell feared would soon become real—of ‘the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think’ (CUFA, p. 603). Coming Up for Air describes, in the words of one critic, ‘the development from a simpler, less industrialized society in which people felt a certain secure continuity with tradition and history to a highly industrialized society in which individual liberties are being replaced by a totalitarian technocracy.’[13] And in this precise sense the novel does prefigure the nightmare world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its vision of the average suburban street as ‘a prison with the cells all in a row’ (CUFA, p. 481); its image of ‘huge Ministries with hordes of clerks and typists all drawing two pounds a week and upwards for piling up mounds of paper’ (CUFA, p. 572); its anxieties about the ‘enormous factories of glass and concrete’ (CUFA, p. 621) that have edged out the remnants of Lower Binfield; and its depiction of the lecturer ranting on about hate, hate, and hate: ‘Let’s all get together and have a good hate’ (CUFA, p. 595). Bowling defines the ‘realities of modern life’ as ‘an everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things’ (CUFA, p. 575), but he also clearly sees them as a struggle against looming powers bent on putting souls into slavery.

Perhaps the most terrifying prospect, for Bowling, is the idea of a streamlined future, a time in which ‘nothing matters except slickness and shininess’ (CUFA, p. 490)—a time of ‘coloured shirts’ and ‘streamlined men from eastern Europe who are going to knock old England cock-eyed’ (CUFA, p. 599); the kind of men ‘who think in slogans and talk in bullets’ (CUFA, p. 604). As Bowling remarks at an earlier point in the text: ‘Fear! We swim in it. It’s our element. Everyone that isn’t scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism, or Communism, or something’ (CUFA, p. 484). Bowling notes, in remembering his time in the First World War, that being part of a huge conflict ‘was like an enormous machine’ (CUFA, p. 563) grabbing hold of you. The fear he has for the streamlined future is much the same fear of being captured by mechanism, by streamlined sameness. There is something of this dread in the irritation he feels at the ‘streamlined leather armchairs and glass-topped tables’ (CUFA, p. 627) in the hotel in Lower Binfield. Yet really the dread is less about material, and more about the immaterial onrush of time, of the future. Bowling’s dread is a dread of saying goodbye to a feeling in the guts that’ll be ‘gone for ever if the rubber-truncheon boys get hold of [him]’ (CUFA, p. 609). Orwell’s final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, puts that eventuality front and centre.  


[1] George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 11: Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2000), p. 100.

[2] For more detail about Orwell’s illness, see John J. Ross, ‘Tuberculosis, Bronchiectasis, and Infertility: What Ailed George Orwell?’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 41.11 (2005), pp. 1599-603.

[3] Eileen to Geoffrey Gorer (4 October 1938), Facing Unpleasant Facts, p. 218.

[4] Orwell to Jack Common (5 March 1939), ibid., p. 338.

[5] There is much about George Bowling that is like George Orwell, too, of course.

[6] Martha C. Carpentier, ‘Orwell’s Joyce and Coming Up for Air’, Joyce Studies Annual (2012), pp. 131-53, at p. 145.

[7] Annette Federico, ‘Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air’, Studies in the Novel, 37.1 (Spring 2005), pp. 50-63, at p. 51.

[8] David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, p. 113. See also the replications of Hilda, too (CUFA, p. 662).

[9] I’m referring here to the scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston sees a severed hand in the street, disconnected from its owner’s body in a bomb explosion, and—seemingly unmoved—kicks it into the gutter (see Part I, Chapter VIII).

[10] Cf. Trotter: ‘In 1825, Charles Macintosh discovered that naphtha drawn from coal tar stabilized raw latex into a liquid that when spread between two layers of fabric made for an excellent waterproof material. Macintosh gave his name to a whole range of rubberized silk or cotton garments— or almost gave his name, since mackintosh with a “k,” the variant spelling, is now standard. There was a problem, however. Rubberized cotton stank’ (Literature in the First Media Age, p. 111).

[11] See The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 12: A Patriot After All, 1940-1941, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), p. 95.

[12] For one such reading, see Carpentier, ‘Orwell’s Joyce’.

[13] Robert J. Van Dellen, ‘George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air: The Politics of Powerlessness’, Modern Fiction Studies, 21.1 (Spring 1975), pp. 57-68, at p. 58.