Appreciation: The Slaves of Solitude

I read Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square a couple of years back on its reputation as a cult classic. I found it a bit of a disappointment: well crafted and convincing in its way—but so much booze, and such unlikeable characters!--hard to stay on board. Still, it was good enough so it (along with an appreciative introduction from David Lodge) impelled me to have a go at The Slaves of Solitude, newly reminted from NYRB. I’m glad I did; SOS has all of the virtues of its predecessor, plus a few more of its own. And the down-market alcoholism, though still a factor, is less burdensome or oppressive.

Lodge calls it a World War II novel, which is a bit misleading. It’s a home-front novel, so a war novel only in the sense that Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen trilogy counts as a war novel, or Elizabeth Bowen stories like “Mysterious Kor.”

Taken as such it is indeed a remarkable evocation of the bleak stiff-upper-lip near-desperation of the Britain in the early part of the war, before anyone was sure we would win—when a lot of us thought we would lose. But you can broaden the theme: this kind of gritty stoicism more or less defines British life from (say) the collapse of the bond market after World War I, until the explosive birth of Carnaby Street in the early 60s (some people lived out their entire conscious lives under the same grey shadow).

It’s also tightly plotted, around a stagy conceit that works: life in a shabby-genteel boarding house away from whatever glamour might be on offer in the city, not yet into whatever peace and quiet might be available in the country. Here Hamilton places “Miss Roach” (she has a first name, but that’s a detail) and a cast of supporting characters, particularly her demoniac adversary, Mr. Thwaites. Miss Roach and Mr. Thwaites have it out in a manner that is funny only to an outsider; Hamilton tells their story with comic detachment, yet without losing his sympathy.

The plot is enough, but it is the setting that gives it all dignity and texture. In the following excerpt, Miss Roach has just confronted a sign at her local tobacconist saying

NO CIGARETTES

SORRY

And such was Miss Roach’s mood nowadays that she regarded this less as a sorrowful admission than as a sly piece of spite. The “sorry”, she felt certain, had not been thrown in for the sake of politeness or pity. It was a sarcastic, nasty, rude “sorry”. It sneered, as a common woman might, as if to say “Sorry, I’m sure”, or “Sorry, but there you are”, or “Sorry, but what do you expect nowadays?”

There were other instances of this sort of thing on the way to the station, where, on boardings, the lecturing and nagging began in earnest. She was not to waste bread, she was not to use unnecessary fuel, she was not to leave litter about, she was not to telephone otherwise than briefly, she ws not to take the journey she was taking unless it was really necessary, she was not to keep the money she earned through taking such journeys where she could spend it, but to put it into savings, and to keep on putting it into savings. She was not even to talk carelessly, lest she endangered the lives of others.

Depressing, also, to Miss Roach, were the unadvertised enforcements of these prohibitions—the way that the war, while packing the public places tighter and tighter, was slowly, cleverly, month by month, week by week, day by day, emptying the shelves of the shops—sneaking cigarettes from the tobacconists, sweets form the confectioners, paper, pens, and envelopes from the stationers, fittings from the hardware stores, wool from the drapers, glycerine from the chemists, spirits and 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. It was, actually, the gradualness and unobtrusiveness of this process which served to make it so hateful. The war, which had begun by making dramatic demands, which had held up the public in style like a highwayman, had now developed into a petty pilferer, incessantly pilfering. You never knew where you were with it, and you could not look round without finding something else gone or going.

—Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude 100-101

(NYRB Classics 2007)