The Slaves of Solitude (2 page)

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 awkwardness 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.

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.