The Slaves of Solitude

  The Slaves of Solitude

  Also by Patrick Hamilton

  NOVELS

  Monday Morning

  Craven House

  Twopence Coloured

  Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky

  Hangover Square

  The West Pier

  Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse

  Unknown Assailant

  PLAYS

  Rope

  Gaslight

  The Duke in Darkness

  RADIO PLAYS

  Money with Menaces

  To the Public Danger

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55-56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published by Constable and Company Ltd 1947

  This edition first published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2006

  Copyright © Patrick Hamilton 1947

  Introduction © Doris Lessing 2006

  Introduction to the 1999 edition © Michael Holroyd 1999

  The right of Patrick Hamilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84529-415-1

  ISBN-10: 1-84529-415-7

  eISBN: 978-1-47210-358-1

  In The Slaves of Solitude, whose characters are entirely fictitious, Thames Lockdon bears a rough geographical and external resemblance to Henley-on-Thames. The Rosamund Tea Rooms, however, resembles no boarding-house in this town or any other, though it is hoped that it resembles in some features every small establishment of this sort all over the country.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY DORIS LESSING

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 1999 EDITION BY MICHAEL HOLROYD

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  INTRODUCTION

  BY DORIS LESSING

  How wildly an author’s reputation may fluctuate can be shown no more dramatically than by the story of Patrick Hamilton. We know that an author’s repute sometimes falls to zero after their death, usually often to recover, but he remained ignored and even unknown for longer than usual. You would say, ‘Patrick Hamilton,’ and hear ‘Who?’ even from Literary Departments, but then his admirers and a natural uplift in the invisible cycle that determines renown caused some of his books to be reprinted, and so he is remembered again.

  He was in his lifetime well known as a novelist and as a playwright, spoken of as the heir to Dickens, George Gissing, Defoe. He was not a major writer, but that is not why he was temporarily forgotten. Major writers may suffer the same fate – George Meredith, for instance, that most civilised and witty writer, is fathoms deep in a sea of oblivion. What Patrick Hamilton has is an immediacy of empathy that makes some of his characters, his scenes, as unforgettable as Dickens’s, as painful as Gissing’s.

  He was being read by the young in the forties, because when I was in Southern Rhodesia, kept there unwillingly first by the Second World War, and then by the aftermath of war – no ships, and air travel for the common traveller still in the future – I longed for my origins (I had heard England referred to as Home all my life) and I wrote to a friend who had been in the RAF in what was then Salisbury (now Harare) for training, and asked him what London was like these days. ‘We can’t go on using Dickens as a guide for ever.’ He sent me the novels of Patrick Hamilton, which certainly did not depict a promise of plenty and good times, but chimed with the reports of England bombed, rationed, beleaguered. And when in 1949 I did at last come to London I found Hamilton’s pages coming to life in pubs, streets, cheap hotels. He was a much-spoken-of writer, popular and approved of by the then literary arbiters. His plays were running in the West End, Rope, for one, which was made into a film by Hitchcock, radio plays and later, television. Hangover Square was well known. Everyone read him who read at all, and people waited for his next book as they do now for our popular writers. He was known in left-wing circles because he was a communist, or reported to be. ‘The Party’ – which was how the Communist Party was referred to then – was proud of him in its contradictory way. They were pleased to boast of such a well-known writer, but were wary of writers and artists who so seldom were prepared to toe the Party Line. The gossip about him was far from malicious, though with the rumours about him, it could have been. He was drinking himself to death, and although attempts had been made to stop him, these had failed. He was known to fall unfortunately in love, even absurdly, once at least with a prostitute. On the other hand he was generous with his money, considerable for those days, helping young writers and people fallen on hard times.

  He had been poor himself and his descriptions of poverty were far from academic. When he began writing he was not immediately successful, and in those days young writers did not expect to be instantly well off. He was kind, and approachable and lovable, and so said everyone, while also saying, ‘What a tragedy, how very sad’. And he did die of drink and that was a tragedy. Three bottles of whisky a day? Is it possible?

  The main reason it took so long for Hamilton to come back into view was that his London had gone in that transformation which took place in the second half of the fifties. The dirty, war-damaged, unpainted, grubby streets that greeted me on my arrival had given way to something new, and lively. Colour had returned, the bombed sites had gone. And the people had changed too. Now, when you walked into a pub Hamilton’s characters were not there. The young were everywhere, particularly in the new coffee bars – courtesy of the Italians. The pubs themselves were being done up, not always to everyone’s taste.

  Hamilton’s characters came out of an unhappy history. It is forgotten now that before the First World War there was talk of imminent revolution – the condition of the working people was so poor – though now people talk as if the Empire benefited everyone. The fear of Revolution made King George refuse to give asylum to his relatives Nicky and Alex, the Czar and Czarina of Russia. They begged for help, did not get it, and were then murdered. Then came the First World War and its depredations, and the difficulties of post-war times. Then the Wall Street collapse and the Depression. It is forgotten often that again the condition of the working people was such that whole swathes of them lived on bread and dripping, bread and margarine, and sugar and tea. When the young men reached the call-up centres, the Other Ranks were a good foot shorter in height than the middle-class boys, an
d in bad physical condition. The Second World War and its aftermath impoverished Britain. The moneyed classes were amply chronicled by Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Antony Powell, but there were other witnesses, of whom Patrick Hamilton was the most reliable.

  People ask now, ‘But how could so many people become communists? Why did they?’.

  It is this history, particularly the desperations of slump-time, that made so many communists.

  Decades of hard and turbulent times had created Hamilton’s world of crooks and spivs, blackmailers and bounders, murderers and thieves, and some of the nastiest women in literature. It is forgotten that then girls had to look for husbands to keep them from the fate of spinsterhood, and a miserable old age; they had to find men to exploit. Now girls get jobs. If they did have jobs then they certainly did not earn anything like what the men did. But Hamilton records penniless girls’ attempts to be decent and honest, just as George Gissing had done before him. But I think one has to remember Hamilton’s scheming greedy bitches with a horror reserved for no other writer.

  He was a good hater. He loathed a certain stratum of British life, just as George Orwell did. Pretentiousness and snobbishness, ignorance about the outside world, coupled with a complacency that came from knowing they were members of the greatest empire in the world. And there were the real crooks, like Gorse: the trilogy about him made a TV series and put a word into the language. ‘He’s a real Gorse, that one,’ you would hear.

  The Slaves of Solitude is set in wartime but not in London, where life was easier, if more dangerous than outside. There were restaurants for the well off, people danced in the big hotels. An old woman told me, ‘It was so glamorous, don’t you see? The wonderful uniforms, and so many men from everywhere. Any girls with any kind of good looks had the time of their lives.’ An American, who had flown many sorties over Germany, said that in between dropping bombs he and his fellow officers had danced in the London hotels every night. He had a wonderful time. A new slant, surely, on ‘The best time of my life’.

  But these amenities were not known in the little towns outside London where people were living as they could through a war that seemed endless. ‘They once had a Thirty Years War, didn’t they? A Hundred Years War? Why shouldn’t we?’

  Their war was dark, oppressive, cold – and endless. Some landladies found the wartime restrictions to their taste. In the Rosamund Tea Rooms – once real tea rooms (a name enough to revive memories of bad boarding houses and penny-pinching hotels) – the landlady took the light bulbs out of the sockets, so that the inhabitants had to use their torches inside as well as outside in the dim streets. Miss Roach, the patient long-suffering heroine, does not think much about the fortunes of war, the smashed empires, the ruined cities, the cold seas full of the dead. The war for her was all attrition and doing without. ‘The war . . . was slowly, cleverly, month by month, week by week, day by day, emptying the shelves of the shops – sneaking cigarettes from the tobacconists, sweets from the confectioners, paper, pens and envelopes from the stationers, fittings from the hardware stores . . . beer from the public houses, and so on endlessly – while at the same time gradually removing crockery from the refreshment bars, railings from familiar places, means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room from the trains.’

  I am reminded of a woman who re-read her war-time diaries years later and found she had never mentioned great events like Stalingrad or the Siege of Leningrad. She had written about the black-out, about queuing for a bit of off-ration meat, or a few sweets.

  The general gloom is livened by an American soldier, Lieutenant Pike, born to illustrate the old gibe, ‘Over-paid, over-sexed, and over here.’ Among these English people wearied by the war, he is large, florid, generous, careless, good humoured and always out for a good time. His emotional excesses include a compulsion to ask every girl he meets to marry him, one of them Miss Roach, who though thirty-eight had ‘given up hope’ – to use the old phrase – years ago. Oddly enough, though ‘hopeless’ she had recently received an offer of marriage from ‘An impossible man who had somehow perceived her possibilities.’ The pensive resigned sadness while rejecting him, was because she was contemplating ‘the joy which would have been hers had she now been receiving, or had ever in her life received, an offer which she could reasonably accept.’

  Is it surprising that ‘hopeless’ Miss Roach warmed to the careless attentions of the Lootenant whose slap-happy liberality in everything enlivened the spirits of this whole community of tired people?

  Two of Patrick Hamilton’s nastiest characters are in this novel. One is Mr. Thwaites, a bully whose favourite victim was Miss Roach, and a German girl, Vicki, who secretly loves the Nazis, scheming, greedy, and spiteful. There is no possible defence to be made for either, unless it is that they are too stupid to know how vile they are. Between them their persecutions drive the mild Miss Roach into violence, and at the end of the story she is in bed in a good London hotel, driven from the Rosamumd Tea Rooms, and tomorrow she will start the search for a place to live in this overcrowded city. She knows nothing about the ‘February blitz shortly to descend on London’, flying bombs, rockets, the atom bombs that will at last end the war. ‘After long fearful musings, she at last composed her mind to sleep.’

  ‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us,’ ends this sorrowful novel. It could do as an epitaph for all of Patrick Hamilton’s novels.

  Is it permissible to wonder what awful persecutions he suffered himself to enable him to write so well about these victims, Miss Roach, George Harvey Bone, others struggling to survive when so much is stacked against them?

  His London has gone, but never decent honourable sensitive people being driven crazy by cold cupidity, by the crooks, the bullies, the stupid.

  So thoroughly has it gone that we may wonder if his novels could be called historical. But there are people who remember well the grimy war-depleted, grim meanness of the Tottenham Court Road area, of the Ten Thousand Streets Under the Sky, now so smart and full of commerce, of the shabby awfulness of Netting Hill Gate, now the last word in fashion, the meagreness of certain boarding houses and cheap hotels.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 1999 EDITION

  BY MICHAEL HOLROYD

  Patrick Hamilton wrote The Slaves of Solitude between 1943 and 1946. He was then in his early forties and already had behind him a brilliant career as novelist and playwright, with plenty of money earned from films of his work, but a dramatically shattered life.

  His apparently conventional, upper-middle-class family background in the south of England seethed with tragicomic extravagance. Bernard Hamilton, his untrustworthy and vainglorious father, was himself a novelist, a truly awful novelist, who pursued an astonishing variety of additional roles: as an occasional soldier, part-time theosophist and bewigged though non-practising barrister; also an impressionable traveller, amateur actor, fascist (he was an ardent admirer of Mussolini), and dogged religious controversialist (‘What a low comedian you would have made!’ exclaimed Henry Irving after one of his monologues on religion). At the age of twenty-one he had inherited a fortune and then married a prostitute who threw herself in front of a train at Wimbledon Station. His second wife, the sexually frigid daughter of a fashionable London dentist, filled her time copying oil paintings, singing music-hall songs and writing romantic fiction. She found compensation for a loveless marriage in the possessive love of her three children, of whom Patrick was the youngest.

  Patrick Hamilton’s first novel, Monday Morning, described by his brother Bruce as ‘a joyous miscellany of scraps of autobiography shaped to the needs of a novel’, was published when he was twenty-one. It was followed a year later, in 1926, by Craven House, which made his reputation as a realistic novelist. He was seen as being in a line of descent from Dickens, and compared in Britain to George Gissing and in the United States to Sinclair Lewis. Both books were largely autobiographical. Monday Morning chronicles the awkwa
rdness of an early unconsummated love affair and provides it with a charmingly unconvincing fairytale ending. The novel presents, his biographer Nigel Jones suggests, ‘a self-portrait of a young author newly liberated from the smothering possessiveness of his mother and the tyranny of his father’.

  Craven House, which was written in a guest house at Kew where his mother had protectively taken him, is a precursor to The Slaves of Solitude. Both novels chart with meticulous, almost plodding, care the banality of lodging-house life in England during wartime, the dullness and horror of which Patrick Hamilton’s macabre imagination converts into something between an asylum and a torture chamber. In Craven House we glimpse the beginnings of a break-up in English social life that took place after the First World War. This change was to be bewilderingly accelerated in the Second World War by the ‘twanging, banging invasion’ of United States soldiers – embodied in The Slaves of Solitude by the broad uniformed figure of ‘Lootenant’ Pike, whose wide American grin, gorgeous American teeth and insurmountable American talk dazzle and bemuse the other characters. But whereas Craven House is endearingly sentimental in its optimism, The Slaves of Solitude is a black comedy of manners that reaches its climax with a great cry from the soul echoing through the empty universe: ‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us.’

  Patrick Hamilton’s lodging houses, with their meagre gas-fires, their dim light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and the oppressive silences of their exhausted tenants, have something of the same nightmare atmosphere as Dickens’s boarding schools. As an escape from their imprisonment in these sullen institutions, he ushers his characters into the lighted world of the public house, where they can lose their private inhibitions, and lose themselves, by entering for some time a parallel world of fantasy and illusion. Pubs feature in almost all Patrick Hamilton’s novels, most particularly his marvellous London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), which makes brilliant and poignant use of his own disastrous infatuation with a young prostitute during the late 1920s. The reading public loved the compulsive story-telling of this ambitious novel; while critics and other writers increasingly valued his powers of sociological observation. ‘He wrote more sense about England and what was going on in England in the 1930s than anybody else,’ commented Doris Lessing. ‘. . . You can go into any pub and see it going on.’ Here were the defeated classes of the Depression: the homeless, the ostracized, the needy, re-created with loving detail. His characters are ordinary and uneducated people, tormented by their fantasies and tormenting others: ‘real people made plain for us,’ as J. B. Priestley called them. It is not a faultless novel: sometimes the narrative is too wordy, sometimes too mannered. But these are living faults that shadow living characters and are produced by Patrick Hamilton’s desire to convey simple people in situations that are beyond them. In the malignant atmosphere of London, these companions in toil came together in the local pub. There is the sailor-turned-waiter with ambitions to be a writer, the fly-by-night young girl trapped into prostitution, the plain barmaid courted by one of Patrick Hamilton’s specialities, the monster bore – a relationship developed in The Slaves of Solitude between the thirty-nine-year-old Miss Roach and the malevolent Mr. Thwaites. They are all observed with humour and tenderness, below which runs a disturbing subtext of fear and revenge. ‘There was not even any hope for Miss Roach that Mr. Thwaites would ever die.’ It is this menacing subtext that rises to the surface and drives the plots of Patrick Hamilton’s stage plays.