THE NOVEL - Short Story 5 (Short Stories for Artists, Poets and those who Wander)

 

Many years ago I read George Orwell’s novel “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”. Orwell did not like the novel saying - it was one of two or three books he was ashamed of, and he only wrote it because he wanted 100 pounds quickly. But I found the book riveting. Set in the 1930’s , It's the bitter story about Gordon Comstock a man who has declared “war” on the worship of money by leaving a promising job as a copy writer and instead taking a low paying job as a book shop assistant, so that he can write poetry. Unfortunately neither the “war” nor the poetry is going well and he finds himself alone, miserable and in abject poverty.

Living in a different country, at a different time, I had nothing in common with the protagonist but for some reason I could not get the story out of my head. I decided to write a novel like that myself. It would be a story about a struggling writer and it would include poems and short stories I earlier wrote as part of the writers output. It would not be written from beginning to end but would be written in fragments. Later on the fragments would be combined together using narrative techniques to form the whole story. The novel would be written in third person but it would be written in such a way as to give the impression that it was really a first person narrative. Sadly it didn't work out.

I found myself with a lot of fragments that could be not fitted together. My third person – first person method was so complicating that even I did not fully understand it. I tried various methods to move ahead but couldn’t. It was too much of a muddle. In the end the novel disintegrated in my mind. I wondered how much time had been wasted in this desperate attempt to write a novel. Then I realized the true value of the novel. 

The novel had kept me happy during an otherwise sad time when my life had taken a downward spiral. If not for it I would have become inactive and drifted down. For me the value of the novel was not whether it could be published, but how it made me feel. And who knows maybe one day I could turn these “fragments” into a novel publish it.