Re-reading 'Coming Up for Air'

I was thirty-six when I first read George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, around the age that Orwell was when he wrote it, much later than many of Orwell’s other books which I’d largely read in my mid-twenties, having not encountered the author’s work while at school. The central metaphor of the title enters the text perhaps two-thirds to three-quarters through the novel (“Coming up for air! Like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again…”): the contemporary narrative in the book is permeated with the uneasy anticipation of the war to come. Orwell had returned from the Spanish Civil War, and was in no doubt that a general war in Europe was coming, and that it would bring a form of authoritarianism with it. The novel was written while convalescing in North Africa, and possibly this physical distance also added to Orwell’s creation of a lost world before the First World War. Orwell makes his first-person narrator, George Bowling, a decade older than he was in order to explore that world more fully, as well as adding to Bowling’s sense of middle-aged routine and disappointment. The central drive of the novel is Bowling articulating the desire, and then acting on this desire, to revisit the town where he grew up, and, specifically, to revisit spots where he fished as a boy before the First World War, this as a means to prepare, temperamentally, for the bleak future, like the big sea-turtles ‘coming up for air’: “…it wasn’t that I wanted to watch my navel. I only wanted to get back my nerve before the bad times begin.” Living in contemporary England, in 2022, and being aware of my own fortunate circumstances of having a job (although part-time, not well-paid enough and insufficiently secure for this not to be a concern) and a house, rationally, personally, the future is much less bleak than the winter of 1938-39 when Orwell was writing (this becomes the beat of a drum through the narrative: “War is coming. 1941, they say.”), but, with war in Europe once again, the highest inflation for forty years, the anticipation of unaffordable energy bills, the political instability, the ongoing pandemic, in the summer of 2022, the immediate future of the next few months was not without a sense of foreboding.

The novel begins with the line “The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.” This ‘idea’ is the return to Bowling’s childhood home, Lower Binfield, to fish, and in particular, to fish in an isolated and forgotten pool. Although announced in the first line, this idea is then gradually revealed over many pages, prompted by a newspaper headline which reminds him of Sunday mornings in church as a child, and the possibility of such a trip being facilitated by having won money betting on horses, money which Bowling hasn’t mentioned to his wife. As the plan begins to take shape, the novel moves into its central section, a long, detailed evocation of his childhood in late Victorian and Edwardian England, before the narrative catches up with itself once more, to George Bowling’s journey to Lower Binfield, and his projection of the possibility that this experience will provide him with some form of necessary mental armour, “before the bad times begin.”

I had a coincidental juxtaposition of two adjacent dates in the summer: there was a dentist’s appointment on a Saturday in June; then, the next day, I decided to return to the cathedral city of Winchester where I’d studied art in the 1990s, not strictly unplanned, but I was free that Sunday, which happened to be the last day that the 2022 degree show was open to the public. It felt a little impulsive, or so I imagined, crossing London to take the train from Waterloo, on what had once been a very familiar journey, now just an echo. I walked from the station to the art school in a something like a fugue, past all the places that I lived over three years of my degree. It was twenty-five years since I had graduated, and twenty years after I had last visited to see the degree show: after leaving art school, I had a few years of going back to Winchester, relatively regularly, knowing people who were still studying there, still living there, but this faded. Arriving at the art school, the fine art degree course seemed to be much smaller than when I had studied printmaking as part of it. Other courses were as prominent, if not more so. However, much of what I thought of as ‘the old block’, especially on the ground floor, where I had been based, was not greatly changed. The studio where I had installed my degree show work was still a studio; the students now seemed to have more space each, in comparison to when I had been there. I noted that the graduating student occupying the space I’d shown in was working with ideas around trompe l’oeil, an odd, specific affinity. The vast sculpture studio was much the same. Along one of its encircling corridors, I came across a glass case on the wall. This contained various materials relating to previous fine art degree shows, among which I could see the degree show catalogue from 1997, my year, like a relic in a vitrine. Prominently wedged against the glass was the 1997 sculpture department showreel, on a VHS tape, against a stack of numerous 35mm slide boxes. 

The particular texture of the everyday, once past, is hard to truly recall, to really capture, something Orwell attempts in Coming Up for Air and at the same time, through George Bowling, acknowledges the impossibility of: “I’ve tried to tell you something about the world before the war, the world I got a sniff of when I saw King Zog’s name on the poster [which causes the reminiscence of church and a psalm with “Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan”], and the chances are I’ve told you nothing. Either you remember before the war and don’t need to be told about it, or you don’t remember and it’s no use telling you.” Although the art school had a row of computers in the library connected to the internet by 1996, digital connectivity had so little impact on life as I experienced it then: I didn’t know anyone in my year in fine art having a mobile phone, and two out of the three places that I lived in those years had landlines which accepted incoming calls only. This would mean going out to a phone box in the street, with the right change or a phonecard, to telephone someone, and, for anything but the most cursory conversational transaction, one would return and wait by the telephone, and just hope that it would not be engaged by the time one got back inside. For a lot of my communications with friends elsewhere, I relied on letters and postcards. Newspapers were more important (I avidly read papers at weekends during the long prorogation of parliament in the run up to the general election in 1997, the first in which I was able to vote) and news was on broadcast television at a few defined times during the day: one might not hear of ‘world events’ until some time later (I remember this being the case with the sinking of a passenger ferry), especially if one only watched the evening news, missing bulletins earlier in the day. Haunting the corridors of the art school, which for three years had been such a part of my daily experience for three formative years, echoed George Bowling’s disjunctive return to Lower Binfield: “I was a ghost, and if I wasn't exactly invisible, I felt like it. Did you ever read a story of H. G. Wells about a chap who was in two places at once–that's to say, he was really in his own home, but he had a kind of hallucination that he was at the bottom of the sea?” The vitrine of archive material on largely obsolete media brought this home.

I left the art school, and with much of the Sunday afternoon still before me, I went for a walk, through town, past the cathedral, the boys’ school, to the water meadows. This more or less recreated a walk I’d made the last time I had visited for the degree show, in 2002, although then I did so before visiting the art school rather than after. Coming Up for Air was in my mind, a connection when recalling being at the dentist the day before, the decision to spend money on a train ticket that day for what could have seem a frivolous excuse to get away from London, thinking about the uncertain future coming and being unable to understand how bad it might be, and then suddenly I was crossing a bridge on the way to St. Catherine’s Hill, looking down at the transparent waters of a chalk stream. This glass-like clarity of the Itchen and the Test was something which had made an impression when I was first in Winchester, an unfamiliar quality which struck me as being very different in character from the opaque silt of the Thames and the Roding, the rivers that I grew up with. Unlike George Bowling in the novel, I’ve never fished (my older brother had a rod at some point when we growing up, and I remember once accompanying him to the park, getting the line tangled, and never thinking of it as a pastime since then). Watching the clear, flowing waters also made me think about the memorial to Isaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, in Winchester Cathedral: entry to the cathedral had been free when I was a student, and, particularly when I was first in Winchester, I used to visit the cathedral not infrequently. I only knew about Walton going to Winchester thanks to a somewhat humorously archaic wood engraving in a book on the art. 

It was here I decided to make something. Unprepared, I had my mobile phone. Despite–or perhaps appropriate to–the feeling of technological obsolescence when seeing the catalogues, slides and the VHS tape in a glass case, at the time of writing, I don’t use a smartphone. For years I had the most basic mobile phone possible, but had recently bought a new phone which represented a very slight upgrade, technologically speaking, in that it could take crude digital photographs and record video–at a resolution of 350x263 pixels, at less than 10 frames per second. This was very close to work I had made at art college twenty-five years ago, making 'treated' videos, copying and pasting frames back and forth between Apple Movieplayer and Photoshop at 320x240 pixels and a very similar frame rate. I recorded my walk up and around St Catherine’s Hill, and the poor images would have to function as a stand in for this experience. I used a rather more sophisticated editing program to put together these clips than the work I’d made when at college, which felt a little absurd as an exercise. There was a longer version, but for what it was, there was a logic to reduce it to just four shots of the chalk streams themselves, contained, hemmed in, crossed by a waste pipe in the first three, running free in the final shot, carrying a leaf away downstream. Using a high-definition resolution and a 16:9 aspect, and not scaling up the video, had the effect of pushing the images away from the viewer, framed in a large expanse, which felt right.

Looking at the work on the walls in the art school, I tried to recall the sense of excitement that went alongside graduating twenty-five years ago, the experience of three years of study culminating in that moment, and the anticipation of the then still-unformed future and all its possibilities. I am now two years older than George Bowling in Orwell’s novel, older than Orwell was when he died, the same age my father was in the year that I graduated. In retrospective how would the version of me at that point then see myself now, at the time of writing? Disappointed? Glad to have somehow kept making art all through those last twenty-five years? It’s too difficult to be objective about one’s own success or otherwise. I could have given up. I could have been more successful of course. But there's never been a year when I haven't exhibited something, somewhere, even if this was just a single painting in a small group exhibition, indeed, there's never been a year I haven't sold work, although I've had a couple of years in which I've made a loss, and others in which I've earned so little that trying to be an artist does just feel like an expensive hobby.

The new filling fell out four days later. I began writing this in the summer, but it was put to one side. Like an artwork still in the process of being created, the notes I’d made then had the potential to become a satisfying piece of writing which would somehow combine and connect all the things I was thinking then, in a way which could properly communicate them, leaving open all its possibilities until the moment that it was done. The filling had been superficial: contacting the dentist, there would be a long six weeks wait until I could be seen again. I didn’t book it at the time, being told that I could be seen sooner in the event of a cancellation. This didn’t happen. I then caught Covid for a second time, and ill-health followed me back to work in the autumn term. Eventually I had the filling replaced, the day after it snowed in London. As I walked home through the snow last week, I had the thought that this was then–at that moment–all six months ago. I returned to the text.

Nicholas Middleton