Lorenheim
The second-floor lodger at Willowbed Road, dark and lizard-like, who makes about thirty-five shillings a week touting vacuum-cleaners and has not a single friend in the world. Gordon goes past his door very quickly.
Somebody to talk to. He will physically pull a neighbour into his room to get it.
The book
At a glance
- The second-floor lodger at Gordon's boarding house
- 31 Willowbed Road, north-west London
- Selling vacuum cleaners door to door
- About thirty-five shillings a week
- Both left uncertain; Orwell says only that he is dark and lizard-like
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLorenheim rents the second-floor room at 31 Willowbed Road, a lodging house in north-west London, in George Orwell's novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936. Gordon Comstock, the poet the book follows, has the room at the top of the same house and passes Lorenheim's door several times a day.
He sells vacuum cleaners door to door and makes about thirty-five shillings a week doing it. Gordon, working in a bookshop, earns two pounds, which is forty shillings, so Lorenheim is the poorest man in the building. Orwell describes him as dark, meagre and lizard-like, and says his age and his nationality are both impossible to guess.
What Orwell does with him is short and unsparing. Lorenheim has not a single friend in the world and is eaten up by the wish for company, and the effect on everyone else in the house is that they walk faster on the stairs. Gordon does knock at his door once, but only to borrow a needle so he can darn his socks before going to a party.
How the book draws them
- The jobTouting vacuum cleaners, which means selling them door to door on commission. It brings him about thirty-five shillings a week, five shillings less than Gordon earns in the bookshop.
- The ambush on the stairsIf you so much as slow down outside his door he is liable to pounce out and half drag, half wheedle you inside. Gordon's method is to go past very hurriedly and not look at the door.
- What he talks about once he has youOrwell calls them interminable paranoiac tales, and gives the two subjects: girls he has seduced and employers he has scored off. Nobody in the book ever reports believing any of it.
- The roomColder and more squalid, Orwell writes, than even a lodging-house bedroom has any right to be, with half-eaten bits of bread and margarine lying about everywhere.
- The needleBefore Gordon goes to a literary tea-party he borrows a needle from Lorenheim and darns his socks with it, which he thinks is better than inking the skin where his ankle shows through. It is the only time in the book anyone goes to Lorenheim for anything.
- Who else is in the houseFlaxman, a travelling salesman on the first floor whose wife has left him; an engineer on night work who wears a bowler hat indoors and out; Gordon in the top floor back; and Mrs Wisbeach, the landlady, downstairs. Lorenheim is the one none of them stops for.