Coming Up For Air

COMING UP FOR AIR By GEORGE ORWELL ‘He’s dead, but he won’t lie down’ Popular song  2021 © Real ePublisher/ Real Publishing & Giancarlo Rossini www.realpublishing.eu info@realpublishing.eu Cover design: Giancarlo Rossini Preface by Giancarlo Rossini“ Coming up for air " is a novel that cannot be seductive due to the setting, and the characterization of the characters: a dark British industrial suburb, polluted by the winds of war (the novel was written in 1938) corresponds, for mediocrity and rebelliousness to charm, to the main character, the first person narrator of the story; gray George Bowling is a middle-aged insurer, weighed down in body and spirit by a disappointing existence. It is as if Orwell had insisted on sculpting the deterioration and decay of the culture and conditions of his people by concentrating on the creation of a specter of paper that goes, negligent and aware, adrift. It is the book of the slovenliness and meanness of ambitions and Weltanschauung of the English (Western) petty bourgeoisie: he has the frankness to deny any positive connotation, and to soften, with satire, a perception of reality that I do not find it difficult to judge as decidedly honest and consistent with the future production of the author. Exceptionally interesting, in this regard, as we shall see, what Orwell writes about communism, fascism and National Socialism: considering his particular bitterness towards the tyranny and aberrations of totalitarian regimes, and the exceptional lucidity of his - I am about to adopt an annoying term, but immediately accessible and understandable - "direct contact", it is difficult to overlook its existence, and its particular "inconvenience", especially if one considers the time of writing and its peculiar political-social climate (it is a reporting to historians: it is a literary source, therefore minor; The novel is structured in four parts, asymmetrically divided into 4 + 10 + 3 + 7 chapters. In the first part, the narrator introduces himself: George “Fatty” Bowling, brick red face, blue eyes; butter-colored hair. So overweight that he can only see the front half of his feet; he has a wife, Hilda, whom he stopped loving immediately after marrying her, and two children: Billy and Loria. The young are described as leeches; the wife, like a hare, however withered by boredom and by her intellectual mediocrity: she has an anxious and brooding look, but seems to meditate only on the troubles to cause for her husband, and on the new complaints to propose. The Bowling family lives in a house identical to many others, in the industrial suburbs: in a dormitory area, made up of long rows of semi-detached houses, with the façade decorated with stucco, privet hedges as borders, the door colored green. So, we accompany George in his childhood among the first, confused memories of the opposition between the British and the Boers, hints of anti-militarism, inexplicable "contingency" patriotism), the narration of the peaceful existence of his family, shopkeepers, and of its integration into the fabric social status of the country (two thousand inhabitants, a little more), an element emerges that explains much of the regretted culture: George was a passionate fisherman. He was an intelligent fisherman, who went fishing in any pond: in the New England he is living in, he can no longer fish anywhere. The fish are dead, the industry has won an infamous battle: men are denied the consolation of life in contact with nature (back then: they killed, and they kill, more sewage than fishermen: let's memorize it). Fishing was an intense joy, the greatest of his life: he has no regrets for childhood, nor for cricket, nor for sweets: only for fishing. Civilization exhales its last breath: its symbol is the disappearance of the fish. Then follows the memory of the first teenage love, Elsie, and of the First World War, spent more among the books than on the front line, due to an incomprehensible duty as guardian of the "west coast" (oh British men, beware Irish!). The symbolism adopted is quite understandable: in those years, both parents of the protagonist died of illness; dragging with it the root of the old world it knew, and the old balance. Bowling focuses on the narrative of post-war misery; of the first, hateful "commission" or "piecework" hires, announcement of today's "dogma of flexibility", of the tragic state of mind of each individual, victim of a relentless struggle, of the feeling of robbing one's neighbor, of the awareness of being able to lose your job at any moment. Finally, he was fortunately hired as an insurer; he finds a wife, a fallen bourgeois, and realizes that after the wedding she becomes depressed and sloppy; in her eyes, she is a middle-class, which implicitly confirms her "class leap"; but in the new England, the small and middle bourgeoisie seem united by a depressing existence, orphaned of values ​​and points of reference other than economic well-being. A series of descriptions of bourgeois misery are excellent. The former fisherman and former officer changes physical appearance just when he realizes that he is living to spit blood and guts, in exchange for a new pair of shoes for his brats: he feels old, and betrayed by life. He no longer believes in anything: he finds support and consolation by mythologizing the past. It is 1938. In the third part, the novel assumes, to the gaze of the non-English contemporary, and therefore not necessarily interested in the epic of the early twentieth century petty bourgeois, another value; the narrator tells about the propaganda of his time, all centered on the opposition between democracy and fascism: the occasion is a conference in which he participates with his wife, as a spectator (obviously). Bowling is keen to point out that both Labor, Conservatives, Communists and Trotskyists speak of hatred; it seems to suggest that hatred is the only common denominator to parties and world views otherwise not at all analogous or similar. However, he internalizes the message: he does not deny the Hitlerian danger (but: he seems to have the same horror of the Stalinist regime: both are "executioners different from the past", and he goes to talk about it with an old scholar, Porteous. The latter considers the Nazi an adventurer, and evaluates him as an "ephemeral phenomenon": he tends to minimize, showing George how many tyrants history has already expressed, from classicism onwards. Culture has drugged the old master of ataraxia: who lives in a world where eternal truths never set, and is not interested in the affairs of men. George finds no peace, and makes no sense. He physically sinks (while reiterating that he feels himself a “ghost” in various circumstances) in his past: returning to his childhood country (fourth part), alien to everyone: and now everything is alien to him. The journey seems to be able to be interpreted as an escape, but the grotesque outcome of the experience, as you will see, and the bitter and paradoxical epilogue affect our reading of the story. Which seems to seal the most bleak, irremediable, gloomy and apocalyptic that had been expressed up to this moment: the future has come true, and it is image, death, desolation, misery; and they do not deceive buildings, or industries; nature has folded, and the soul of men suffers: it is afraid to exist. And therefore, it attacks. Another war will remind men of what baseness they are capable of, and what horrors; new misery will create new fear, and only time and memory can correct these abominations. Maybe. *** Orwell began writing this novel in 1938, when he discovered he was ill with tuberculosis: he resumed working on it as soon as his health conditions allowed him, during a stay in Marrakech prescribed by doctors. It is a book that can constitute a clear and terrible document of Orwell's lucidity as an observer of reality: although weak in the analysis and criticism of the pre-war system, Edenized without ever convincing the reader, it is nevertheless satisfying as a satire and critique of the bourgeoisie, and appreciable in the courageous denunciation of the danger of authoritarian regimes, for different causes and reasons. Not a masterpiece, but an excellent viaticum for reading the works of the great English writer. Part I 1The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. I remember the morning well. At about a quarter to eight I’d nipped out of bed and got into the bathroom just in time to shut the kids out. It was a beastly January morning, with a dirty yellowish-grey sky. Down below, out of the little square of bathroom window, I could see the ten yards by five of grass, with a privet hedge round it and a bare patch in the middle, that we call the back garden. There’s the same back garden, some privets, and same grass, behind every house in Ellesmere Road. Only difference, where there are no kids there’s no bare patch in the middle. I was trying to shave with a bluntish razor-blade while the water ran into the bath. My face looked back at me out of the mirror, and underneath, in a tumbler of water on the little shelf over the washbasin, the teeth that belonged in the face. It was the temporary set that Warner, my dentist, had given me to wear while the new ones were being made. I haven’t such a bad face, really. It’s one of those bricky-red faces that go with butter-coloured hair and pale-blue eyes. I’ve never gone grey or bald, thank God, and when I’ve got my teeth in I probably don’t look my age, which is forty-five. Making a mental note to buy razor-blades, I got into the bath and started soaping. I soaped my arms (I’ve got those kind of pudgy arms that are freckled up to the elbow) and then took the back-brush and soaped my shoulder-blades, which in the ordinary way I can’t reach. It’s a nuisance, but there are several parts of my body that I can’t reach nowadays. The truth is that I’m inclined to be a little bit on the fat side. I don’t mean that I’m like something in a sideshow at a fair. My weight isn’t much over fourteen stone, and last time I measured round my waist it was either forty-eight or forty-nine, I forget which. And I’m not what they call ‘disgustingly’ fat, I haven’t got one of those bellies that sag half-way down to the knees. It’s merely that I’m a little bit broad in the beam, with a tendency to be barrel-shaped. Do you know the active, hearty kind of fat man, the athletic bouncing type that’s nicknamed Fatty or Tubby and is always the life and soul of the party? I’m that type. ‘Fatty’ they mostly call me. Fatty Bowling. George Bowling is my real name. But at that moment I didn’t feel like the life and soul of the party. And it struck me that nowadays I nearly always do have a morose kind of feeling in the early mornings, although I sleep well and my digestion’s good. I knew what it was, of course, it was those bloody false teeth. The things were magnified by the water in the tumbler, and they were grinning at me like the teeth in a skull. It gives you a rotten feeling to have your gums meet, a sort of pinched-up, withered feeling like when you’ve bitten into a sour apple. Besides, say what you will, false teeth are a landmark. When your last natural tooth goes, the time when you can kid yourself that you’re a Hollywood sheik, is definitely at an end. And I was fat as well as forty-five. As I stood up to soap my crutch I had a look at my figure. It’s all rot about fat men being unable to see their feet, but it’s a fact that when I stand upright I can only see the front halves of mine. No woman, I thought as I worked the soap round my belly, will ever look twice at me again, unless she’s paid to. Not that at that moment I particularly wanted any woman to look twice at me.