Coming Up For Air Revisited: Orwell, England and the idea of escape

There’s no escaping ‘escape’ in Orwell’s writing, either the word or the deed. It haunts the life-
changing action of A Clergyman’s Daughter (‘Loss of memory is only a device, unconsciously used,
to escape from an impossible situation’). It tolls like a bell through the self-inflicted trials of Gordon
Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (‘You do not escape from money merely by being
moneyless’). And look, there it is - in the second sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Winston
Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through
the glass doors of Victory Mansions…’ A slight detail, perhaps, but it demonstrates a typical, ready
reflex in Orwell’s protagonists to position themselves in flight from, as well as in battle with, forces
that threaten to overwhelm them.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, clearly, is about a world in which individual freedom is curtailed to an

absolute degree - ‘Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed
- no escape.’ It pursues fleeting acts of resistance to their grim conclusion in a place of no-return
and no-escape: Room 101, with its terrorising image of rats scrabbling to be freed from a cage, and
into Winston’s face.

This lecture will take that grim culmination to Orwell’s oeuvre as its starting-point, and then rewind
across his life and work, asking why he revisited this impulse so often, while pointing up the
ambiguities it held for him. Escape for Orwell is not straightforwardly a benign proposition,
however much it is associated with rebellion, self-realisation, sensuality and a reconnection with the
natural world.

Orwell himself was something of an escape-artist - he altered his accent, tried on different social
‘types’ for size, changed his name, embedded himself in a wide range of experiences, often of a
punishing and imprisoning character. He was famously down and out, frequently off and about. He
started life in India, grew up in Oxfordshire, spent formative years in Burma and ended up on a
Hebridean island, a fugitive from the demands of the capital. Yet Jura wasn’t a place of retreat so
much as a space for great perils to be confronted; Orwell, with his noted disdain for ‘escape
literature’, underwrote his adventures with a sense of mission, duty, and political obligation.
Attendant to that, though, ran a current of self-suspicion: what was he running away from, and what
was he running towards? Reality or a dream?

The complexity and contradictions of ‘escape’ as a preoccupation in his work come to the fore in
Coming Up For Air, analysis of which will form the main part of the talk. With the threat of world
war hanging in the air, George Bowling first escapes into the past in a moment of involuntary
reverie, and then resolves to make that idle dream a ‘reality’, by seeking out the rural England of his
boyhood. He is, in his own mind, a prisoner - confined by economic necessity - on the run: ‘I could
almost hear them shouting: 'There's a chap who thinks he's going to escape! There’s a chap who
says he won’t be streamlined! He’s going back to Lower Binfield! After him! Stop him!’

And yet for all that Orwell invites our sympathies for this beleaguered everyman, he also
emphasises the character’s furtiveness and tragicomic futility. As with Keep the Aspidistra Flying,
escape is a form of social suicide and possibly a route towards actual self-destruction. It is also
spurred on by ideas of malaise and decline that are inherently politicised in nature and, in their sheer
scale, exert a particular thrill. Bowling would almost prefer Armageddon to life in an armchair.

This lecture will move into a consideration of the emblematic nature of Orwell’s fiction, the way
that, encoded in personal narratives of flight there lies England itself.The talk will thread together
the personal contradictions with political ones that go to the heart of Orwell’s personality as a
writer: England of the 1930s could not afford to shirk harsh truths by taking refuge in nostalgia, yet
at the same time no country, in Orwell’s view, can survive if it doesn’t hold onto established ideas
of itself in the face of the modern age’s erosions and erasures. About this apparently irresolvable
tension, there is much to be said; and some of it will be said here.