Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, a True Hall-of-Famer of an Alcoholic Writer

Everything I’ve read about Patrick Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude singles it out for praise as a spot-on depiction of ordinary life in England during the Blitz, and for all I know it is. I don’t know much about the Blitz except what I got from watching Green for Danger, and that’s not much. But withdrawn and prickly female solitude is a subject I know a little better, and I can attest to the accuracy of Slaves of Solitude’s depiction of that.

Its insight into the female mind would be remarkable coming from any male author, but it’s all the more astonishing given that Patrick Hamilton inherited from his father a lifelong obsession with prostitutes, not just patronizing them but falling in love with them and trying to play their savior. The elder Hamilton’s first marriage was the result of such a rescue attempt — the poor woman eventually threw herself in front of a train — and Patrick had a long, mooning infatuation with a whore named Lily Connolly (which he described in the semi-autobiographical Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky). One does not expect the same mind that would transform an ignorant prostitute into a redeeming angel to also create a believable female protagonist, much less write a first-person novel from her perspective.

Also, Hamilton was drinking three bottles of whiskey a day by the time he started writing this book in the mid-1940s — no easy task under any circumstances, and certainly not under rationing. His brother estimated that with the money Patrick spent on black-market whiskey, he could have bought a house, and not a shabby one. (Please restrain your shock as I inform you that Patrick Hamilton died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1962, at the age of 58.) So Slaves of Solitude was a real accomplishment in more ways than one.

The book begins:

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 might 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. 

There are a few more paragraphs of this wonderful stuff before we meet Miss Roach, whose first name we don’t learn until page 119, when it is revealed that “Miss Roach bore the unfortunate Christian name of Enid.” She is a 39-year-old spinster whose life outside of her job (reading manuscripts for a publisher in London) is dominated by a bullying resident of the boarding house where she stays, which bears the misleading name of the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a holdover from the building’s prior occupant. The proprietress “would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been too far blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea.”

I say Mrs. Roach life is dominated by this fellow resident, Mr. Thwaites (“a big, tall man, anything between sixty and seventy . . . steady, self-absorbed, dreamy, almost somnambulistic . . . a trampler through the emotions of others”), but in truth she only ever encounters him at supper, the only time the boarding-house tenants are forced into each other’s company. But a few hours a day, even a few minutes, can grow to absurd proportions in the lives of the lonely. For them, a short exchange over rubbery chicken kiev might be the only human interaction they have all day. Mr. Thwaites’s torments are small-scale — referring to the Russians, whom he hates, as “your friends” when chatting with Miss Roach about the latest war developments, simply because she once made a mildly positive remark about the Soviets. But however petty its provocations, hatred of Mr. Thwaites is the only emotional reaction that the solitude-deadened Miss Roach feels.

And that is the real subject of the novel: how the reactions of lonely people differ from those of the relatively normal. A tendency to blow annoyance out of proportion is one way. A reliance on alcohol, especially when the threat of human intimacy comes in prospect, is another. Miss Roach’s romance with an American serviceman who offers to take her back to Pennsylvania and make her the “laundry queen of Wilkes Barre” depends on alcohol from start to finish — and what a finish! It was inevitable, obviously, but Hamilton pulls off a small miracle by depicting how even the most stalwart commitment to emotional detachment can’t keep Miss Roach from seeming, and being, rather pathetic.

The last thing I want to say about this book (other than that you should read it) is what I learned from it that I didn’t know before. (Hypersensitivity to irritation? The abuse of alcohol as a crutch? Already read it!) Halfway through the book — about the same time we learn our protagonist’s first name — Miss Roach’s German-born friend Vicki Kugelmann moves into the Rosamund Tea Rooms and, lo and behold, proceeds to befriend, disarm, and finally defeat the unbearable Mr. Thwaites. The remarkable thing is how easily this victory is accomplished — which of course makes Miss Roach wonder whether Mr. Thwaites was this vulnerable all along.

One possibility is that Miss Roach could have overthrown this tea-room tyrant any time she wanted, if only she could have mustered up the will. Another interpretation is that when an insular community gets in a rut, introducing a new character is the only way to get out of it — and that’s no testament to the new character’s positive qualities; she doesn’t have to be strong or singular, all she has to be is new.

Expect a post about the Gorse Trilogy sometime next week, when it arrives from Amazon; this is Hamilton’s treatment of a sociopath. In the meantime, this post by a band-member of St. Etienne (!) is the most interesting discussion of Patrick Hamilton I’ve read.