The Slaves of Solitude

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It was difficult to ascertain whether the force motivating the old man was actually desire or vanity. There was probably something of both. The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute, and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky (1935). Gorse has reddish hair and a gingery moustache that distracts the unwary from his permanent look of smelling something nasty on his upper lip. On the West End streets, he exercises a Dracula-like authority over the darker symbols of Hamilton’s world. He plies his victims with drink but has no taste for alcohol and is ‘always repelled by drunkenness’. Prostitutes – with whom he mixes ‘only socially’– like and defer to him, and he’s good with cars, able to fix an engine and knowledgable about the motor trade, which usually plays an important part in his scams. At the same time, he gets his clubland mannerisms wrong, fails to keep his stories straight, and generally makes ‘absurd, seemingly totally inconsequent, blunders’. He’s practised in flippant ye olde-speak, as favoured by ‘very unwholesome minds’, and sometimes wears a monocle that makes him resemble ‘a curious, undistinguished mixture between Bertie Wooster and Satan’. Some of the props he uses to establish his bona fides are taken directly from Bernard Hamilton, who liked having things engraved with crests in line with his claimed ducal pedigree. While his snobbery is ‘deep and bitter’, however, Gorse takes little pleasure in the fantasies he spins or even the lifestyle perks they’re designed to attract. impressions were conveyed to him in partially ghostly and mysterious ways – in the uncanny gurgling and throbbing of unlocated water-pipes, which seemed softly and eerily to answer each other all over the house: in the sound of unidentified windows shrieking open or being slammed shut: in sudden furious rushes of water from taps into basins: in the sound of bumps, and of thuds: of tooth-glasses being rattled with tooth-brushes, and of expectorations: of coughs and stupendous throat-clearings: of noses being blown: even of actual groans…’

Mr Thwaites’ weapons are words, and he declaims, referring to himself in the third person and adopting an extraordinary mix of the arachaic, the anachronistic, and what he believes to be dialect, to glorious, glorious effect. She must pull herself together. This was pure lunacy. Any sane person, knowing what was going on in her head and regarding her objectively, would see that she was out of her mind. Well, if she was a lunatic, there was one lunatic thing she could do. She could do it now, if she had enough courage. She decided she had.” There was a pause. Then Miss Roach, having thought it out, took up her cup of tea, put it down on the table, and walked towards the door. Came into use, yes, but also misuse. Gaslighting is not bullying, and it's not lying, and it's not (just) mere manipulation even with malicious intent -- it's something more complex than that, which involves all three of: a) a power differential, b) deliberate manipulation, and c) an intent to undermine the gaslightee's grasp of reality and sanity by the gaslighter for the purpose of control or abuse or both. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-02-02 18:01:46 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40053906 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

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The Coalman, no doubt, will see fit to give commands to the King,’ he said, ‘and the Navvy lord it gaily o’er the man of wealth. The banker will bow the knee to the crossing sweeper, I expect, and the millionaire take his wages from the passing tramp.’

You know', said Mrs Barratt, I don't think you really like the Russians, Mr Thwaites. I don't think you realise what they're doing for us.' ....The Slaves of Solitude is set in the winter of 1943. We are in the Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, in Henley-on-Thames. Miss Roach, an educated middle-class “worthy spinster dame” who works in publishing, has fled London during the Blitz and has taken up residence here. She is lonely, and has little in common with the other residents: odious Mr Thwaites, a pompous, prejudiced and pretentiously phrase-making old man, Mr Prest, a retired actor who misses the bright lights of St Martin’s Lane, two guests Miss Steele and Mrs Barratt, and Mrs Payne, the owner. The poet John Betjeman said in a contemporary Daily Herald review, that "I think Mr Hamilton is one of the best living novelists, and that this is the best book he has yet written." [1]

She was, she saw, always having thoughts for which she rebuked herself. It then flashed across her mind that the thoughts for which she rebuked herself seldom turned out to be other than shrewd and fruitful thoughts: and then she rebuked herself for this as well. It’s just as well that Woolgar is so magnificent, and that there is well-judged support from Francis as the little Englander Thwaites, because some of the other performances are way too crude, swamping the delicacy of the material. That’s partly because the roles are under-written. But it doesn’t help that Jonathan Kent’s uncharacteristically uncertain production sometimes piles on the melodrama and also frequently mistakes dullness for meaningful emotional restraint. They didn’t talk, they didn’t laugh, they didn’t seem to enjoy their food, they didn’t seem to go out, they didn’t seem to have any interests, they didn’t seem to like each other much, they didn’t even seem to hate each other, they didn’t seem to do anything. The time is the dead of winter and the dead of war and the characters are the captives of a boarding house – “this apparent mortuary of desire and passion”.The only thing NOT present here in TSoS is spiritual crisis (not a priest to be found anywhere) - although as David Lodge points out in his introduction, the book does end with an uncharacteristic, but entirely fitting, prayer. North London's Hampstead Theatre is fighting for its relevance in a changing London theatre scene, and the programme for the show aggressively touts its achievements including growth in box office and fundraising while its Arts Council grant was slashed by 14% in the last round of funding cuts. This safe, cosy choice will likely maintain that trajectory, but not challenge its audiences unduly. Hamilton is taking a risk with this hyperbolic metaphor, which is repeated more than once. It invites the reflection that in 1943 there was a real hell elsewhere, in Auschwitz, in Stalingrad, in a thousand places - so why bother with these trivial boarding-house conflicts? But Hamilton is making the valid point that all suffering is relative. We feel most keenly what most immediately affects us, and although we may be cognitively aware of much greater and more terrible suffering than our own (as Miss Roach shows herself to be on several occasions), it can never engage our thoughts and emotions with the same intensity. Furthermore, there is a kind of equivalence between the struggles in the great theatre of war and in the boarding house; in both, good is pitted against evil, decency against devilry, and the fact that this opening exchange in the Rosamund Tea Rooms actually refers to the real war underlines the connection between microcosm and macrocosm. It is a connection which is maintained throughout the novel as it follows Miss Roach's fortunes. Miss Roach worked for a publisher in the heart of London, but she had been bombed out of her room in Kensington a year earlier. She found lodgings in a run down boarding house. An upstairs room with a feeble ceiling light, a slippery synthetic bedspread, curtains that wouldn’t quite meet, and no bedside light. One of Hamilton’s finest novels… The Slaves of Solitude is a pitch-perfect comedy, in which all the passions and tensions of war are enacted in a seedy boarding house in Henley-on-Thames.”