Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2 page)

The Siege of Pleasure
(1932) is the story of Jenny Maple’s first step down from respectable servant girl towards prostitution. ‘Jever hear of Bernard Shaw? . . . He wrote a book called
Mrs Warren’s Profession
– an’ showed it was all economics,’ Bob, the waiter of ‘The Midnight Bell’, tells her – to which she replies: ‘I guess he was just about
right.’
The economic point is well made in
The Siege of Pleasure
, which portrays the meagre and pleasureless conditions of her servant life as a form of socially acceptable, class-regimented prostitution. By describing as the place of her employment his own suburban home in Chiswick, and giving portraits of his nerveless mother and eccentric aunt as her employers, together with a fearful silhouette of his father (pathetically fallen away after a stroke and the unwelcome double success of
Rope
and
The Midnight Bell)
, he aligns his own escape with Jenny’s to make it all the more comprehensible.

Jenny is a shallow character – her shallowness makes all the more remarkable the power of her beauty which so profoundly impresses Bob. ‘He decided he would really die for such beauty.’ This sexual-aesthetic longing, and a longing for the freedom of financial security, are the two motivating forces in all these novels. Jenny herself has no eye for beauty and is even blind to her own looks, believing Bob is ‘a bit mad’ to be so ‘crazily in love’ with her. It is one of the ironies of the trilogy that the prostitute is sexless and the barmaid, Ella, does not drink. Both have little understanding of their clients, though a good deal of professonal expertise. As a servant, Jenny has been ‘arduously trained in the practice of pleasing strangers’ and it is this skill she has taken on to the streets. Her own pleasure comes through drink which gives her access to wonderful sensations and the feeling of being in harmony with her environment. ‘She never believed it was possible to be so happy.’ For Jenny, drink is the replacement for everything that her existence itself has prevented her from enjoying naturally. ‘Love, of which some spoke, was a closed book to her, and she honestly believed it would remain a closed book all her life. It was a closed book which she had no desire to open.’

But love seems an open book to Bob and as real as his literary aspirations. When, intoxicated by her murderous beauty, he puts his arms round Jenny and wills himself to believe that she loves him, happiness feels very close. Led into a hell by this alluring and irresistible pilot, he comes to use drink as a way of forgetting a ‘vile and disappointing planet’, where such promised happiness is only a mirage.

Between the writing of
The Midnight Bell
and
The Siege of Pleasure
, Patrick Hamilton managed to free himself from his debilitating passion for Lily. He was helped in bringing his life under control by a sensible, if passionless, marriage in 1930 to a woman who was also in retreat from an unsatisfactory romance. Having reduced his drinking, he was in good spirits when, in January 1932, walking along Earl’s Court Road with his wife and sister, he was knocked down and critically injured by a car. For a time his life was in danger, but after some months he made the best recovery possible, though he was left with a withered arm and, despite plastic surgery, marks and scars on his face, particularly his nose, which had been almost torn off. He added the accident to his final draft of
The Siege of Pleasure
, equating those who had done him emotional damage with those who had damaged him physically.

For almost two years following the completion of
The Siege of Pleasure
, he was unable to write anything new. Then, in a sudden concentration of creative energy, he completed the trilogy with a wonderfully balanced and accomplished novel developing a subsidiary plot from
The Midnight Bell
. Also centred in the pub,
The Plains of Cement
(1934) is Ella the barmaid’s story, which complements Bob’s story and brings a deeper perspective to the themes of
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
. Although apparently disinherited from the privileges of romance by her plain looks and financially disadvantaged by her background of lower-class poverty, this sensible girl is not without her dreams of a better emotional and economic life. But, unlike Bob and Jenny, she struggles to keep these tempting fantasies under control. She is secretly in love with Bob but endeavours to keep this a secret even from herself. She has it in her to feel for him what he feels for Jenny, for although ‘a placid and efficient girl, she also worshipped at the shrine of pure beauty and romance’. Knowing nothing of Jenny, she believes that ‘any girl with eyes in her head would be after’ Bob, but schools herself to accept that she can never hope to attract his attention. ‘She was, she found, incapable of inspiring his tenderness.’

Because of the social divisions between men and women and the incompatibilities of male and female sexuality, there is truth in Ella’s sober assessment. To Bob’s mind, Jenny, with her ingenuous expression and clear blue eyes, is a heavenly creature who ‘with the child’s weight of her body’ seems magically uncontaminated by the world; while the humming buoyant figure of Ella, his frank and admirable companion in toil, who really
is
uncontaminated, appears no more than ‘a jolly good sort’. Jenny is the child who must be owned, and Ella the mother who is taken for granted and eventually will be left. His intelligence tells him that this is false; but we do not act through intelligence, reserving it for commentary on our actions:

Particularly did he feel he was betraying Ella. She so deserved his respect, but all his homage went to another. Poor Ella. He watched her as she moved about merrily (in the cap which became her so), and gave back chaff for chaff in the crowded Christmassy bar. She had only one sin: she was without beauty. But she had all the heartbreaking desires, and you could see them there, in her charming face, as she laughingly and maternally answered – a creature eternally maternal, eternally fruitless – the insincere compliments of the men.

Ella uses her intelligence more than most, but she is ‘for ever seeking little reassurances and excuses for optimism’. As a means of overcoming her sorrowful intuitions she is determined to see the best in everyone – even her horrifying suitor, Mr. Ernest Eccles. It is her fate to have one of the most dreadful admirers in English literature. As a besieging lover with all the propaganda of youth, the fifty-two-year-old Mr. Eccles is a sinister as well as an idiotic man. He presents himself as a romantic figure but appears in Ella’s eyes merely as an old man with ‘something put by’ which could buy her comfort and stability in life.

Money seems more likely than love to change Ella’s life, and she is pressured by her circumstances to think of men as Jenny has regarded them – ‘appendages, curiously willing providers, attendants, flatterers of an indolent mood, footers of bills and payers of “bus fares”’. She is horrified to find herself calculating that if she inherits money from the death of her stepfather – a bully who carries overtones of Bernard Hamilton – she will evade marriage to Mr. Eccles, which would be a living death. ‘I can’t stand cruelty,’ says Jenny. But everyone is destined to be cruel to someone in these novels: Jenny irresponsibly torments Bob; Bob unwittingly wounds Ella; Ella hurts Mr. Eccles, who in turn ill-treats her whenever he gets the chance.

The fact that all this should not depress the reader is a tribute to the power of Patrick Hamilton’s storytelling and the exhilaration of his humour. In the earlier pages there are signs of immaturity – some passages of overdeliberation, moments of facetiousness, and an anxious reliance on what J. B. Priestley called Komic Kapitals. But as the book progresses, wonderfully comic scenes proliferate. Mr. Eccles, in particular, is a character of Dickensian proportions – Mr. Eccles who lives so intensely through his new hat that ‘it cost him sharp torture even to put it on his head, where he could not see it’, who when looking for his visiting card is ‘not unlike a parrot diving into its feathers’, who creates a ‘private cloakroom for his innumerable accessories whenever he sits down’, who polishes his dignity on a lurching bus ‘by peering and looking back in a critical way out of the window, rather as though London was being partially managed by him, and he had to see that the buildings were in their right places’. But though Mr. Eccles hardly ever fails to utter the most subtle drivel, he is no one-dimensional character. Touchy, crippled by shyness, desperately lonely and absurd, he too has his dreams of redemption. We feel compassion for anyone who meets him, but are also made to feel compassion for the man himself. He is used to give retrospective detachment to
The Midnight Bell
, for his wooing of Ella is another version of Bob’s pursuit of Jenny, and it provokes a similar reaction: ‘We all have to take these risks.’

Patrick Hamilton treats the pub as a theatre, describing its exits and entrances, laying down its décor and stage directions (‘On your right was the bar itself, in all its bottly glitter, and on your left was a row of tables . . .’), taking us ‘behind-scenes just before the show’ and up to the attic rooms where Bob and Ella pass their ‘endless procession of solitary nights after senseless working days’. Performing against the lurid illumination of the saloon bar, his cast of ordinary habitués is magnified into a troupe of crazed misfits, and the conventions of English life reveal themselves as dramatically foolish.

Patrick Hamilton is an expert guide to English social distinctions, with all their snobbish mimicry and fortified non-communication. He describes wonderfully well how the hyphenated upper classes, yelling at their dogs, splashing in their baths like captured seals, and writing their aloof letters in the third person (like broadcasters recounting an athletic event), remain so mysterious to the lesser breeds. Taking us out of the pub into the swarming streets of London, he gives us a social map of this malignant city as it was in the harsh commercial era of the 1920s and the early 1930s. His Marxism became a method of distinguishing between the avoidable and the unavoidable suffering of people, and, in so far as literature can change social conditions, such a vivid facsimile in fiction may have helped to do so. Since it has been out of print for thirty years, this is a good opportunity to recommend it to a new generation of readers. While the narrative drives you forward, you will absorb the authentic atmosphere of what it was like to live in England between the two world wars.

Michael Holroyd, London 1986

B
OB

S
LEEPING, JUST BEFORE
five, on a dark October’s afternoon, he had a singularly vivid and audible dream. He dreamed that he was on a ship, which was bound upon some far, lovely, and momentous voyage, but which had left the coast less than an hour ago. The coast, implicitly and strangely, was that of Spain. He was leaning over the side and peacefully savouring the phase of the journey – a phase which he knew well. It was that curiously dreamlike and uninspiring phase in which the familiarity and proximity of the coast yet steals all venturesomeness from the undertaking, and in which the climax of departure is dying down, to the level tune of winds and waves and motion, into the throbbing humdrum of voyage. That throbbing would continue for weeks and weeks. . . . A strong wind was blowing, buffeting his ears, roaring over the green waves, and rendering utterly silent and unreal the land he had just left. He was extraordinarily cold, and a trifle sick. But he did not want to move – indeed he could not move. He was lulled by the mighty swish of the water beneath him, as it went seething out into the wake, and he could not, under any circumstances, move. . . .

He awoke, with jarring abruptness, into the obliterating darkness of his own room. The swishing was his own breath, and the disinclination to move traceable to his snuggled, though cold and stiff position, on the bed. His dream sickness was a waking sickness. The thundering of the wind in his dream was the passing of a lorry in the Euston Road outside.

The burden of cold and ever-recurring existence weighed down his spirit. Here he was again.

He took stock of his miserable predicament. He was in his little hovel of a room – on his bed. He was not in bed, though. Save for his coat and shoes he was fully dressed, and he was protected from the cold by his rough quilt alone. He apprehended that his clothes were wrinkled and frowsy from his heavy recumbence. . . .

It was pitch dark – but it was not yet five o’clock. His alarm would have gone, if it had been. He need not yet stir. There were no sounds of life in the house below.

Why had he slept? He remembered coming up here, a happy man, at half-past three. It had been bright daylight then. Now the dark was uncanny.

He turned over with a sigh and a fresh spasm of sickness swept over him. He waited motionlessly and submissively until it passed. Then he cursed himself softly and vindictively. He faced facts. He had got drunk at lunch again.

At last he sprang from bed and lit the gas.

He poured out all the water from his jug into his basin, and plunged in his head, holding his breath and keeping down. He gasped into his towel and rubbed madly.

Braced by the friction he returned to normal and all but unrepentant humanity again. Horror fled. For a moment he had been a racked soul contemplating itself in a pitch-dark and irrevocable Universe. Now he was reinstated as the waiter of ‘The Midnight Bell’ dressing in his room a quarter of an hour before opening time.

Nevertheless, the gas-lit walls and objects around him were heavy with his own depression – the depression of one who awakes from the excess in the late afternoon. Only at dawn should a man awake from excess – at dawn agleam with red and sorrowful resolve. The late, dark afternoon, with an evening’s toil ahead, affords no such palliation.

In the house below – ‘The Midnight Bell’ – the silence was creepy. Creepy in a perfectly literal sense – the silence of things creeping. It was the silence of malignant things lurking
in passages, and softly creeping up a little, and lurking again. . . .