Moreover, he had to do all this in a setting the grimness of which contrasted markedly with the bourgeois comforts that he was attacking as essentially worthless in the novel. He was upset partly because he objected to such in-house censorship, and at so late a stage, and partly because he had to make the changes, using the same number of letters in order that his text would not overrun. Orwell was required to make drastic changes at proof stage and this he strongly resented. It was only as the proofs started to come through in February that fears were aroused at Gollancz, who then referred the book to their solicitor. Orwell completed writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying by the beginning of 1936, and by the time he left London on 31 January 1936 for his journey north to gather material for The Road to Wigan Pier, he was under the impression that his text had been accepted. Despite the fact that there is only one relevant edition, and that Orwell corrected the proofs, preparing a text in line with what Orwell originally wrote presents difficulties, some insoluble. It was not published again in Orwell’s lifetime, only appearing in Secker & Warburg’s Uniform Edition in 1954 and in America in December 1955, published by Harcourt, Brace. Three thousand copies were run off, of which 2,194 were sold most of the remainder were lost as the result of an air-raid. His only comfort is that many of the books in the store, even the classics, are neglected and decaying.Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published by Gollancz on 20 April 1936.
They remind him not only of his failed book, but also that he has been working on a new poetry book, London Pleasures, for years and still has not finished: “For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer,’ and he couldn’t even write!” (8-9).
He feels only contempt for all the novels in the book collection. Gordon surveys the novels in the store’s lending library and bitterly thinks about his own book, a poetry collection titled Mice, which sold poorly.
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