The Slaves of Solitude, Page 2

  His first play, Rope, was staged in London in 1929, when he was twenty-five. ‘I have done exactly what Nöel Coward did with The Vortex. I am known, established, pursued,’ he wrote. ‘The world is truly at my feet.’ His gratuitous murder story scandalized and delighted audiences even more than Coward’s family drama of adultery and drug-addiction. It was to be played in theatres round the world for the rest of his life, was adapted for radio and television, and made into a famous experimental film by Alfred Hitchcock. The title had been taken from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (‘Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss’), and the event-plot was derived from a cause célèbre in the United States involving two brilliant young students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who become obsessed with Nietzsche’s theory of the Superman and attempt an immaculate, motiveless murder. Patrick Hamilton himself rather unconvincingly denied that he had founded his play on this case. ‘I am not interested in crime,’ he said. Though he was pleased by the play’s success, he wanted somehow to distance himself from it. ‘It bears no relation to the rest of my writing,’ he wrote. He called it ‘a sheer thriller’, and technically this is true. As Sean French writes in his biography of Patrick Hamilton, Rope is a ‘supremely effective dramatic machine’. By placing a wooden chest containing the murdered boy centre stage and inviting his father to eat supper off it, Hamilton ‘found an authentic addition to the repertoire of horror’. But by denying all knowledge of the Leopold-Loeb trial, he conceals the fascination he shared with them for Nietzsche, whose superior thought, he believed, was strong enough to free him from the force field of his father’s megalomania. There is a mention of Carlyle, but none of Nietzsche in the play, and Patrick Hamilton represents its savage homo-erotic theme as being merely a piece of the stage business. ‘I have gone all-out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep,’ he wrote. ‘. . . If I have succeeded you will leave the theatre braced and re-created, which is what you go to the theatre for.’ But it was ‘not intended to be a highbrow play’, and so he added ‘delving into morbid psychologies and so forth’ was quite beside the point.

  There is a similar exploitation of villainy, a piling on of agony, in his equally successful and much-filmed melodrama, Gaslight. Here the psychopathic husband brings his wife to the house where he has murdered her predecessor and tries by a variety of devilish stage tricks to push her into madness. Almost all his plays, from the ingenious revenge thriller for radio, Money with Menaces, to the gothic stage tragedy of imprisonment and murder, The Duke in Darkness, show a sadistic relish for applied cruelty which seems at odds with the embracing sympathy and humour of the novels – though terror and the prospect of revenge are never far below the surface of his multi-layered fiction.

  These two faces of Patrick Hamilton are subtly brought together in his celebrated novel Hangover Square (1941), a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story originally subtitled The Man with Two Minds, in which the ungainly, weak-willed George Harvey Bone, lovelorn and innocuous, is intermittently transformed by a snapping sensation in his head, a schizophrenic click!, into a predestined killer. The parallel world that this heavy-drinking man enters is colourless, submerged, semi-silent, the world of an automaton, remote from other people except his intended victim, the tantalizing Netta Longdon, whom he loves.

  As he grew older, Patrick Hamilton’s novels became darker. The Slaves of Solitude is the most sombre of all. Though there is no sound of gunfire in the book, no sight of blood or spectacle of killing, it is, he tells us, a war novel. The only bombshells are verbal bombshells, but the grey deprivation of life is seen as much a part of the war as soldiering. ‘The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other. This was war late in 1943.’ The dim black-out, ‘like moonlight gone bad’, in which these people live mirrors the blackness of the author’s spirit.

  This blackness seems to have been largely caused by his inability to escape from the acute anxieties of childhood. They had been extraordinarily stimulated by the extravagant unpredictability of his father: his sudden violent tempers, alternating with moods of embarrassing affection, his bouts of drunkenness, his extreme social snobbery and ancestral mythmaking, all contributing to the dread of his presence in their comfortable home. Whatever Patrick did in later life seemed like a distorted echo of Bernard. When he idiosyncratically took up Marxism to purge his parents’ social pretensions and obtain a secure, predictable scientific faith, was he not parodying Bernard’s eccentric fascism? When he found a father-figure in Stalin was he not reproducing his father’s discovery of Mussolini?

  His sexual life too seems to have faltered under the imposing, impotent shadow of his parents. He believed himself to be unattractive to women and may have suspected that he was a repressed homosexual. In any event, he had difficulty in achieving sexual fulfilment with women (scholars have diagnosed premature ejaculation). He idealized glamorous actresses and played sado-masochistic games of bondage with a series of prostitutes (his early infatuation for a London prostitute was almost a carbon copy of his father’s first marriage). Nevertheless, he married twice, tried to keep both wives content by drifting back and forth between them, and made all three of them unhappy.

  Patrick Hamilton’s triumph was to turn these disasters of his life into marvellous opportunities for his novels. Even here fate malignantly intervened. Early in 1932, when on the verge of a literary breakthrough, a near-fatal road accident in the wasteland of Earls Court (where he was to set Hangover Square) prevented him from writing for two years. It also left him with a damaged arm and scarred face. But though this exacerbated his morbid self-consciousness, he turned it to advantage on the page, adding to Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky a dramatic road accident which he later adapted as a play for radio called To the Public Danger.

  He was already a heavy drinker before his accident. By the time he began writing The Slaves of Solitude he had become an alcoholic, drinking three bottles of whisky a day. Drink slowed his work and he made most progress on this book during periods of relative abstemiousness, writing in bed all day before going out to drink in the evenings. He was living partly in London, where he had an apartment at the Albany near Piccadilly Circus, and in Henley, where he set his novel, ‘a mere village right off the map’ which he named Thames Lockdon.

  He offers us an ironic self-portrait in The Slaves of Solitude as the mysterious Mr. Prest, ‘the black sheep of the boarding-house’, who with his beery voice and face of an ex-pugilist, floats through each day with ‘an air of having been battered silly by life, of submissiveness to events, of gentleness, of willingness to please, of dog-like gloom and absent-mindedness’. Though looked down on by the other members of the boarding-house as being almost an alien (‘funny’, ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘queer’), he regards all of them with ‘the supreme, leisured, and assured contempt of a cultivated man for Philistines . . . indeed, as a sort of zoo, containing easily recognized types of freak animals, into which an ironical fate had brought him.’

  The exception is Miss Roach, the shy, modest, decent, over-sensitive, thirty-nine-year-old spinster and daughter of a dentist from whose viewpoint the story is mostly told. She, who had been nicknamed ‘Old Cockroach’, has an affinity with the man whose name is so nearly ‘pest’. But, within the stupefying atmosphere of the boarding-house, she does not recognize this and ‘often wondered what exact motive Mr. Prest had in being alive – if, and by what means, this seemingly empty, utterly idle and silent man justified his existence.’

  But Mr. Prest, like Patrick Hamilton himself, divides his life between Thames Lockdon and London, where he can be found at various bars, ‘sipping at his beer and hoping for the best’. On unfortunate days he stands alone, embarrassed, self-conscious, obsessed by the fear of being ‘out of it’ and ‘not wanted’. But then come lucky days when he joins the crowd and, ‘in his old element, now completely elated rather than
dejected by his own yesterdays’, talks on an equal footing with famous men of the theatre. For Mr. Prest has a secret. As ‘Archie Prest’, he has once topped the bills in pantomimes. Near the end of the novel, when, due to the wartime shortage of actors, he is starring in a production at Wimbledon of Babes in the Wood, he is miraculously transformed from ‘a forlorn, silent man in the corner . . . that idler and hanger-about in bars’ into ‘a wicked but absurd uncle . . . preposterously dressed in green’. In this wonderfully comic and surreal scene, partly a fantastical rewriting of a sad late performance he had witnessed by the great old musical comedian George Robey, Patrick Hamilton gives us the opposite of that deadly transformation experienced by George Harvey Bone in Hangover Square. This is the ecstatic transformation his characters search for in pubs; which Patrick Hamilton, changing his name to Henderson, had looked for when he briefly went on the stage himself in what he called his ‘nerve-wracking, ill-adjusted, wretched early youth’; and which, in muted form, he finally achieved in his best novels. Seeing Mr. Prest’s elderly pugilistic face, so madly painted, as he stands bombarded by the frantic yells of delight from the children, Miss Roach observes ‘an extraordinary look of purification about the man – a suggestion of reciprocal purification – as if he had just at that moment with his humour purified the excited children, and they, all as one, had purified him.’

  Somehow his triumph seemed to be Miss Roach’s triumph as well, and her heart was lifted up with pleasure . . . Looking at him, she had a strong desire to cry . . . the elderly comedian . . . was pulling it off tremendously in spite of his age and long retirement, astonishing everyone, even himself . . . And, observing the purification of Mr. Prest, Miss Roach herself felt purified.

  This too, in its fashion, is the achievement of Patrick Hamilton in The Slaves of Solitude. Mr. Prest and Miss Roach are the only characters in the novel to escape from the horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms at Thames Lockdon and find the possibilities of a fuller life in London. To do this, like characters in Wagner’s Ring, they must go through the circle of fire laid down by the blitz, the flying bombs and enemy rockets. They must confront the ‘crouching monster’ that is London, with its polluted breath that exudes across the first page of the novel. For Thames Lockdon, its name blacked out ‘for reasons of security’, where the cemetery ‘spoke greenly and gracefully of death and antiquity, the Park spoke leaflessly and hideously of life-in-death, or death-in-life, amidst immature municipal surroundings’, was Patrick Hamilton’s purgatory: ‘a place to pass through’ with its ‘semi-tottering parade of death in life’.

  Heaven appears to lie in the country beyond, where Miss Roach sometimes walks at weekends. It is a place that dominates and submerges ‘all things appertaining to men and towns’ and brings her spirit moments of consolation and refreshment. But in the paradox of war these fields and hills have become a mirage, irrelevant to life, while Thames Lockdon itself, which people believed had been ‘heaven’ before the war, was now the very pit of hell.

  Patrick Hamilton makes the Rosamund Tea Rooms a palace in this hell (‘this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town’). I myself lived not far away from Henley during the war and afterwards, and I recognize the authenticity of this guest house, its torpor and apathy. But Patrick Hamilton makes it hideously and hilariously surreal. Like London, it is a monster, giving out its repertoire of ‘silent noises’, its uncanny gurgling and throbbing sounds from unlocated water-pipes, its shrieks, and bumps and expectorations. It is full of the rage and prejudice and unhappiness that existed in himself. It contains everything he had acquired from his parents. We see aspects of his father in the loquacious and malevolent Mr. Thwaites, that archaic ‘trampler through the emotions of others’, who carries a mental age of twelve into ‘the bloom of his carefree and powerful dotage’; and also in Lieutenant Pike, the Lucifer who brings a light that blinds rather than illuminates, and whose inconsequence and unpredictability heighten Miss Roach’s anxieties. And we see the influence of his mother in the false friend, Vicki Kugelmann, so sinister and ambiguous, who promises to ‘lighten things up’ but adds to the awfulness of the place.

  From these Furies Miss Roach finally escapes to her publishing life in London, as Patrick Hamilton himself escaped into his writing. The Slaves of Solitude is a powerfully redemptive novel. We are spared nothing: and nothing is sentimentalized. The condition of England is subtly blended with the author’s own condition, and we are led from this black hole of boredom, with its thunderous atmosphere of recrimination and insecurity, by a humour that is not merely defensive, not merely a sudden glory at the ridiculousness of our enemies, life’s enemies, but which in its magical fusion of fact and fantasy becomes an illumination of reality.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  LONDON, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

  The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

  The area affected by this filthy inhalation actually extends beyond what we ordinarily think of as the suburbs – to towns, villages, and districts as far as, or further than, twenty-five miles from the capital. Amongst these was Thames Lockdon, which lay on the river some miles beyond Maidenhead on the Maidenhead line.

  The conditions were those of intense war, intense winter, and intensest black-out in the month of December. The engine carrying the 6.3 from Paddington steamed into Thames Lockdon station at about a quarter past seven. It arrived up against buffers, for Thames Lockdon was a terminus, and it hissed furiously. That hiss, in the blackness of the station, might have been the sound of the crouching monster’s last, exhausted, people-expelling breath in this riverside outpost of its daily influence and domain. Or it might, tonight, merely have been the engine hissing through its teeth against the cold.

  One waiting at the barrier to meet a friend could see compartment doors being flung open rapidly everywhere (as though some sort of panic had occurred within the train), and the next moment a small army of home-seekers, in full attack, came rushing towards the dim black-out light – like moonlight gone bad – above the ticket-collector. Those who were early enough got through at once, but soon the rush of the crowd was caught in the bottle-neck, and there was formed a slow, shuffling queue of people, having green tickets snatched from them in the bad moonlight.

  Once through the barrier the wayfarer thundered over the bare wooden floor past the booking-office out into the three-times-night. Here, waiting for the rich, or the overloaded with luggage, a few cars and taxis could just be discerned, lurking silently, or with their self-starters throbbing, or moving cautiously away. Torches came flashing on and going out like fireflies. These fireflies went away in all directions in an atmosphere which was one blended of release, of caution in the blackness, and of renewed painful awareness of the cold.

  In order to reach the Rosamund Tea Rooms (which were not Tea Rooms any more, but a boarding-house) Miss Roach, who was thirty-nine and worked as secretary and in other capacities with a publishing firm in London, could either turn to the left and walk through the shopping streets, or turn to the right and go by the houses along the river-front. There was nothing in it – it was five to six minutes either way. She usually chose the way by the river, however, for the river, being open and flowing and made of water, without her knowing it gave her a sense of briefly escaping, of getting a ‘breather’, as one would when walking along a front on a seaside holiday – and this in spite of the fact that she could not see the river, or anything at all in the universe save t
he other fireflies and the patches of pavement coming within the radius of her torch-light.

  She heard a couple of frozen people muttering and blundering behind her, and another couple muttering and blundering ahead of her. A solitary firefly-holder came blundering by her. The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other. This was war late in 1943.