Gordon Comstock

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• How he looks at the startChapters 1 and 2 give a small frail figure: five feet seven, delicate bones, quick fretful movements. He is never quite unconscious of his height, and when he knows he is being watched he carries himself very upright and throws a chest, which occasionally deceives simple people. His hair is usually too long, so that his head looks a little too big for his body, and he smooths it without noticing. The one feature he does not mind is what people call a good forehead, meaning a high one; walking home into the wind he gets more of it than ever.
• No overcoatIt is up the spout for fifteen shillings, and he goes about without one, hoping passers-by will read the lack as caprice. The rest is in the same state: ready-made flannel trousers stained and shapeless, shoes that need resoling, a discoloured Woolworth's tie. Dressing for the literary party in Chapter 4 he turns his collar inside out and knots the tie so the torn place does not show.
• The threepenny-bitHe has fivepence halfpenny, and threepence of it is a coin he refuses to spend because producing it alone would show the shop-girl it was his last. His verdict on it: "It isn't a coin, it's the answer to a riddle." Outside a pub, hours later, he takes it out and throws it away into the darkness rather than use it.
• Tobacco arithmeticFour Player's Weights on a Wednesday with no money until Friday, and smoking one of them costs half an hour of that night's writing time. Going to a literary tea-party he puts a single cigarette into an empty Gold Flake packet, because a packet with one in it looks like a packet that was full an hour ago.
• The secret cup of teaMaking tea in your bedroom is the second-worst offence in his lodging house. He keeps a sixpenny Woolworth's kettle, a packet of Lyons' tea and a tin of condensed milk in a suitcase under the bed, all wrapped in newspaper so they cannot chink, and he smuggles the used leaves down two flights to the W.C. He compares the difficulty to a murderer's, disposing of the body.
• The feud with the plantThere is an aspidistra on his window-sill with seven leaves that never puts out an eighth. He has tried starving it of water, grinding hot cigarette ends against its stem and mixing salt into its earth. He wipes his kerosene-stained fingers on the leaves. "I'll beat you yet, you b——," he tells it.
• The poem that goes backwardsA night's work on London Pleasures produces two lines crossed out, and he registers a sense of achievement in the destruction. He carries the manuscript in his pocket long after he has stopped believing in it, because it is a thing made outside the money-world and the weight of it against his ribs holds him up.
• A scarecrow, she tells himIn Chapter 6 Rosemary looks properly at him for the first time in a while and itemises what she sees: the pale wasted face, the uncut hair, a coat button broken in half, and no buttons at all on the shirt under the tie. She calls him a perfect scarecrow and asks whether there is any need to go about looking like a rag-bag. He has not shaved, and she rubs her cheek against the day-old beard anyway.
• Eightpence in a wet fieldThe scene the book builds its whole Sunday towards fails on money, twice. He cannot go through with it partly because he never thought about contraception and partly because he is thinking about the coins in his pocket. "I can't make love to you when I've only eightpence in my pocket," he tells her afterwards. "At least when you know I've only eightpence."
• The night he goes too farDrunk on the fifty-dollar cheque, he pulls Rosemary into a dark side street, shoves her against a wall and thrusts his hand into the front of her dress. She notes that the movement is brutal, as though she were a stranger to him, and that she has stopped being Rosemary and become a girl's body. She smacks his face and goes home. He does not follow, because his legs are too heavy and it does not seem worth it.
• The thing he is good atCopywriting. He took to it almost from the first day at the New Albion: the vivid phrase that sticks and rankles, the neat little paragraph that packs a world of lies into a hundred words. He watched his own talent develop with surprise, then amusement, then horror, and gave a month's notice.
• The letters he writes when he is hurtTwo of them, both posted at once so that they cannot be reconsidered in the morning. To Rosemary, one line in the middle of an otherwise blank sheet, no address and no signature. To Paul Doring, who had invited him again and explained the mix-up, a single obscene sentence over his full name.
• Down, not outAfter the night in the cells he stops wanting to escape money and starts wanting to escape decency. He takes the worst job and the worst room he can find, shaves three times a week, washes only the parts that show, and lies on the bed watching bugs cross the ceiling two by two. He calls it going under ground.
• Bread and margarineBy Chapter 10 he is a small slouching figure, shabby almost to raggedness, waiting in an archway with his hair blown about by the wind, haggard and despondent. Rosemary finds grey in his hair. Chapter 11 puts it plainest: shabby to the point of raggedness, the face much thinner, and carrying the dingy greyish pallor of people who live on bread and margarine.