Backlisted - The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

Episode Date: April 3, 2017

Novelists Lissa Evans and Stuart Evers join Andy & John to discuss Patrick Hamilton's 1947 tale of boarding-house life in wartime. Also, this week Andy has been reading Keith Waterhouse, while John talks about Padgett Powell's 'The Interrogative Mood'. If you like this episode, the 'Hamilton Extra' edition continues the discussion, with even more gin & it...Timings: (may differ due to adverts)4'40 - The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? by Padgett Powell10'45 - Palace Pier by Keith Waterhouse17'38 - The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. It was indeed the London Book Fair last week, Andy. The whole of the publishing world converged on Olympia and much talking was done.

Many fewer deals were done. I was there for two days, but in and out, as they say. Liz, have you ever been to the book fair? No, no, I'm too busy writing, Andy. Ouch! have you ever been to the book fair? no, no, I'm too busy writing and the ouch by far the best way I think any writer who goes to the book fair at Olympia would probably go back to their hotel room

and sit with their head in their hands demotivated it's like an aircraft hangar full of miserable people well I couldn't I would hate to comment and agree with you entirely on that issue it's good for it's great if you're if you're if you're selling rights and you're doing the deal and you're into doing the deal and you're seeing people from all over europe and from

the states then it's good but if you're slightly feckless editor like i used to be sort of you rather wonder from stand to stand thinking, oh, what is this? Too many books, there are too many books. It didn't bring any poetry with it. I think there is that sense of overload, just the sheer, it's not quite on the same scale as Frankfurt where you think this is absolute madness.

How can all these books exist simultaneously? We have absolutely no chance. Let's just give up and go home or as Stuart says, go out and get drunk with people we know and like. Which is always... Speaking of which. Steady. Maybe we should start, do you think? Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which does what it says on the tin.

If that is what's written on the tin says giving new life to old books and this tin is sponsored by unbound nice my name's john mitchinson i publish books at unbound the website which brings authors and readers together to create beautiful books and i'm andy miller i'm the author of we need to talk about kevin and you join us here gathered together in the dining room of the slightly down at hill boarding house owned by unbound in a small dormitory town in the Thames Valley where today we'll be discussing the Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. Now, Patrick Hamilton, when John and I first discussed what Backlisted might be and which authors we might feature on Backlisted,

I think it is accurate to say that the very first author we ever mentioned was Patrick Hamilton. Is that right? Do you remember that? In truth, it was. Verily, the book we've... The reason that we've held off doing Patrick Hamilton until now, there's a couple of reasons, but we've arrived at that now, and we were sort of saying earlier, this is like ultimate Backlisted TM, isn't it, this episode? Like ultimate cage fight.

This is act, act Backlisted. So we're going to be episode? Like Ultimate Cage Fight. This is Echt Backlisted. So we're going to be talking about the novelist, playwright, man of letters, intellectual, actor, chronicler of low life, alcoholic, stalker, communist, communist apostate and inventor of gaslighting, Patrick Hamilton. But we were worried that there wouldn't be enough to say about him. So we're joined by not one but two guests. First of all, we're joined by the writer Stuart Evers to talk about all things seedy, drunken and shabby. Is it on my script? Hello Stuart.

Hello. And your book Ten Stories About Smoking was published to great acclaim in 2011. And we're also joined by returning guest to Backlisted, hence Ultimate Backlisted, our guest on our very first episode. So long ago. The novelist, it was about 50 years ago, wasn't it? Lisa Evans, who has written four acclaimed novels for adults, two novels for children, the second of which, Wedwabbit.

Three, the third of which, Wedwabbit. The third of which, Wedwabbit, eyes matte, furiously. The third of which, Wedwabbitbit was published earlier this year how's that doing all right in a moment in a moment we're going to get into the meat of the show but before we do a bit of naked pleading that's the sound of andy slipping into something much less comfortable if you're listening to this podcast before midnight on the 17th of April 2017, we'd be most grateful if you could vote for us in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category. It's at britishpodcastawards.com forward slash vote.

You then search for Backlisted. Thank you for doing that. I've already done it. Have you? Thank you. Oh, thanks, Lisa. That's all right. And if you're listening to this podcast

after the 17th of April 2017 then you can ignore the previous two minutes and we'll just crack on with the show John Mitchinson what have you been reading this week?

oh I've been reading something small and delicious this week Andy a book I've long wanted to talk about and completely forgotten about until you said

to me just last week what are you going to be reading next week and I thought what am i going to be reading that i can talk about and because i obviously as you know work as a publisher you read a lot of stuff that you wouldn't want to talk about some of which you would but this is a small brilliant high concept novel or is it question mark by paget powell and the reason I chose this will come well maybe come clear later on in the in the show or towards the end of the show when we we talk about things even even forsooth beyond Patrick Hamilton Padgett Powell is a an American novelist I think he was

born in Florida he's the author I think novels. But this is the one that I absolutely loved. It comes... And it's called... The Interrogative Mood. And the trick is, it is written entirely in questions. Entirely in questions. And you would think this is the most tedious thing... I just want to put...

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Lisa pulling an excellent face, listeners. Have either of us... Stuart, have you read this book? No. It's a very sad no. Lisa, have you read this book? No. No.

I haven't read this book, but I have ordered a copy of it because I looked it up after John said he was going to be reading it and I did think, exactly, the look on... Listeners, you can't say, oh, my goodness, this looks like it might be quite annoying. Not another piece of experimental crap. Yeah, but equally, I sort of, and then I saw there's all sorts of, it's very,

and I read some of it, and it seems to be very much in the highly, at the highly enjoyable end of the kind of Nicholson-Baker side of things. Much more enjoyable than a lot of... So it's very much at the higher end of it. Yeah, yeah, but funny, but funny, right? Okay. I don't know why it works.

I can't tell you why it works. I picked it up with the same level of, I have to say, with dread that I can see coming from around the table. And yet, and yet, I found myself sitting down and reading it and reading it very quickly and enjoying it and thinking about it a lot. Largely, I i think because the individual questions the sort of the appersue that uh pal gets into it are are it just interesting interesting

enough to to there's a brilliant sequence towards the end about jimmy hendrix which i'd read the whole thing because it kind of is the best probably the best sequence in the whole book but just to give you a bit of flavor i thought i'd just read this because this gives you flavour and you can dislike it or like it but anyone who wants to read something that is very very unlike most of the naturalistic fiction that is around

that is not I would say experimental in any kind of difficult way but is actually it is a weird work of philosophy. I really, I noticed, I hadn't even noticed before, it comes with a Richard Ford quote, and I thought this was the last thing he would have liked.

But Richard Ford says, if Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel, and maybe they did, did they? It might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell's, immensely readable, ingenious, witty, and ultimately important feeling in a way you can't quite describe but don't need to. Anyway, here's a paragraph from this, I think, fine book. Do you have any experience with boils?

When people are weeping and fretting about you, do you console or attempt to move away as politely as possible? Do you find Mary Martin and Peter Pan sexually stimulating? Have you ever had cockles? Does Ireland sound like your kind of place or like someone else's kind of place? Have you ever been exposed to rigorous mathematical proofs and if so do you like them? Do you know the term for the kind of trowel used in applying certain adhesives that has teeth on its edge so that glue is laid down in fine rows instead of as a film? Does any confusion arise if you see or hear pinecone and corn pone together? Do you have any impulse to wish that everything you could own somehow without overmuch trauma may be made to disappear?

If you had to threaten someone with either, I'm going to slap that taste out of your mouth, or I'm going to knock you into next week, which colourful expression would you prefer? If someone threatened you with either of these utterances, would you reply, well, pack your lunch, or you and whose army, and so on, and so on. I'll tell you what this reminds me of.

What I do when I want to annoy my son, which is talk like this, repeatedly. A little bit like that. Yeah. Rising inflections absolutely well i think that sounds very good and i've ordered a copy so i have to agree i was weirdly it shouldn't work but it kind of does and it obviously there's no there is no what you begin to get through it is you begin to get there are patterns and you think you do annoyingly think

about a lot of the a lot of the little insights through the book. It's a book that invites you to try and see patterns, but doesn't really... I mean, you don't need to, as Richard Ford says. It sort of is what it is. It's a brilliant... As a sort of... You know, if you like that kind of Perekian, Rema Kano... Yeah, I was going to say, it feels very Perek.

It's not quite as pleased with itself in any sense. The thing that slightly makes me not love Nicholson Baker is that smugness. I do love Nicholson Baker. I love good Nicholson. I like the mezzanine. Anyway, that's Paget Pal. Andy, what have you been reading? I want to add at this point that our guest, Stuart Evers, I want to add at this point that our guest, Stuart Evers,

has very kindly mixed us delicious drinks to enjoy during the course of this Patrick Hamilton. But we can't drink ours yet. What are we drinking, Stuart? We're drinking a gin and French. Gin and French is the drink enjoyed to oblivion by many characters in Patrick Hamilton. It's the rod in Patrick Hamilton's pencil. If this was a Hollywood movie

you would definitely think that Gin and French was a product placement by the Coca-Cola So what I read this week in keeping with the theme that I knew was coming for Ultimate Backlisted TM was a novel by Keith Waterhouse, the late Keith Waterhouse, the late Keith Waterhouse.

The late, great Keith. Set in Brighton, called Palace Pier. And I have to thank listener and Unbound author E.O. Higgins for actually sending me a copy of this book when he knew that we were thinking about doing a show about Patrick Hamilton. He said, you must read this book if you like Brighton. I used to live in Brighton for several years, and if you like Patrick Hamilton. So I read this book in one go.

It's only about 200 pages. I read it in one go, which I reckon is approximately the same number of goes it took Keith Waterhouse to write it. Put it with the others. Will this do? There's little evidence of a strenuous rework. But you know what?

It was really, really enjoyable. So this is his 15th novel. It was published in 2003. Amazing. It's a sort of Brighton romp. And as I said,

I lived in Brighton for five years. And he name checks numerous pubs that me and my friends used to go in all the time, such as the Great Eastern and the Heart and Hand

and the Cricketers and various streets in the North Lanes and various bookshops that we used to go in all the time such as the great eastern and the heart and hand and the cricketers and various streets in the north lanes and various bookshops that we used to go in and hotels like the metropole the mcguffin of the book is based around a lost patrick hamilton novel a sequel to the west pier called the palace pier and supposedly this is the book that patrick hamilton was working on at the end of his life, and it contains a couple of passages of pastiche Hamilton, which I'm just going to read now, and the jury gathered round the table of experts

and passed their judgement on it. A lot of sucking of cheeks. There is no title page, just the title itself at the top of the first sheet, Palace Pier. His heart jumps as he reads the opening sentences. There are those women who lack morals as bald men lack hair. They are not in themselves immoral, they are not even amoral, any more than one would call a cat amoral. They are simply deficient in moral values, as other women, though none of their own doing may be lacking in vitamins

such a one was Dorothy Ruth Ferris the only daughter of a pharmacist Stuart is laughing and his wife living appropriately enough as it was to turn out in the shadow of Lewis prison while at the small private school to which her parents could just afford to send her Ruth as she wished to be known contemptuously consigning the Dorothy, her mother's maiden name, to the ash heap of history, began for no discernible reason whether psychological, pathological or traumatic, and after two blemishless terms during which the only black mark against her was a charge of shoving at netball, to get into the habit of helping herself to small sums of money or other items she came across while compulsively rifling the pockets of garments hanging in the cloakroom

oh i'd read that you know what i think that is bloody good it's good apart from the fact there is no way that patrick hamilton would ever use the word netball. That's true. That's very good. Everything else just about spots on. Okay, so... Does it work? Okay, so the book is really good fun. It name-checks Patrick Hamilton, but it also name-checks, quite knowingly,

Julian McLaren-Ross, Norman Collins, Gerald Kirsch, and all these writers of the kind of London Soho demimonde of whom presumably Waterhouse was personally familiar with he was that transition I mean he was

Waterhouse and Jeff Bernard well I was just about to say reading this book really reminded me of two things and I have to indulge me still further. So I said I lived in Brighton, and this was a very nostalgic read for me, Palace Pier by Keith Waterhouse.

I really loved it. And yes, Geoffrey Bernard. One of the things I remember going to in Brighton in about 1989 or 1990 was the opening touring night, before its London transfer, of Geoffrey Bernard is Unwell by Keith Waterhouse at the Theatre Royal Brighton

starring Peter O'Toole. A show that normally runs two and a quarter hours. On the night we went, it ran four and a half hours. Because they had bussed in Keith Waterhouse and all his mates

from the Cochran Horses and all the hacks that Geoffrey Bernard knew and Geoffrey Bernard. And so every joke got a round of applause and a raucous laugh. And also, after the interval, during which drinks were taken by all concerned,

the energy coming off O'Toole was so incredible. He got one standing ovation after another and I don't know if you've seen Geoffrey Bernard is unwell but there's an amazing bit where he does a trick with an egg. I've never known an atmosphere in a theatre before, during and specifically after that trick had been successfully

pulled off by Peter O'Toole. The look on Peter O'Toole's face, the disbelief that he'd done it. So it reminded me of that. Wonderful, really wonderful. The other thing it reminded me of thinking about peter o'toole and i was talking about this on twitter this week i took my mum for her birthday last weekend to the grand hotel in eastbourne we had tea at the grand and i remember that the last time i've been at the grand in eastbourne was for the ba conference the Booksellers Association conference 20 years ago and I had gone to a promotional breakfast at the BA conference they tend to wheel in authors and assemble booksellers breakfast

lunch and dinner yeah well surprisingly lunch and dinner were not on the agenda for the appearance of Peter O'Toole in Eastbourne at the Booksellers Association conference. So I went to this breakfast to celebrate the publication of... The first book in his autobiography, when he never did another one after that. Precisely. So Peter's there.

He's very elegant, smoking, I seem to remember. And he speaks about his book. He reads a little bit of his book. It's absolutely wonderful. And then they say, would anybody like to ask a question? And a brave woman puts up her hand and says, yes, I'd like to ask Peter,

how did you write your book? And he looks at her and he said, I used a pen and a piece of bloody paper. And that was the end of the Q&A. I love OA. So, so, so I love, so I love,

so to go back to Palace Pier by Keith Watershouse, I just, I thank you E.O. Higgins. This was like a proper trip down memory lane for things I had both lived and had not lived.

Nostalgia. Nostalgia for things that I'd never actually done, you know. So wonderful, wonderful book. Now, it's commercials.

Which brings us really more seamlessly than usual. More seamlessly than ever. To the subject of our... The Slaves of Solitude. So we're going to have... So John and I are going to inaugurate the discussion of Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamlet. Let's clink glasses, everyone. Here we go.

Can I say it's the most alcoholic-smelling drink I've ever had in my life. I've never tasted gin in French before, everybody. Here we go. Can I say it's the most alcoholic-smelling drink I've ever had in my life? I've never tasted gin in French before, everybody. Here we go. Well, it's like cherry with added alcohol. It's like a crap martini. That's what it is. God, that doesn't muck about. I must say, though, it's quite Moorish.

I say after the first sip. Hello. You had me at hello, Andrew. So, Stuart, as we traditionally ask on here, we're going to talk a bit about what Patrick Hamilton means to readers and publishers and booksellers, I think, in a minute, and writers, indeed. But when did you first encounter Slaves of Solitude or Patrick Hamilton?

Well, I know specifically when I encountered Patrick Hamilton for the first time Penguin Books were doing a promotion when I was working in a bookshop in Birmingham they were trying to promote a bunch of classics or 20th century classics as you would a beach read and so it it was a good classic publisher wheeze. So it was Bonjour Tristesse was the romance title. The heady days. And the other one was, there was four. I can't remember what the other two were,

but the other one was Hangover Square. And I'd never come across Patrick Hamilton before. And I was very taken with the title and I started reading it and suddenly I was swept up in this world which was very much like the world in which I lived but very different and there was just something about the absolute baseness of the characters

there was something about the absolute baseness of the characters. There was something about the kind of refracted, boozy lens that he cast over people who were just lost and not really belonging in any form of society, and that appealed to me in a very, very visceral way. So I tried to seek out everything that Hamilton had written, which was difficult because most of it was out of print at that point. So when are you talking about? 1997 this would have been.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So pretty much everything was out of print, but I managed to get an old copy of the Gorse trilogy, but I was put off of that because of the Nigel Havers adaptation The Charmer and so I just sort of kept that because it was about a rich

person and I wasn't interested in that and I still struggle with reading books about rich people and Literature not ready for you I have to read carefully and then I came across Slaves of Solitude

because Constable reissued it whenever it was and I saw it in a bookshop and I thought oh my goodness me I've got to get this book because it's another Hamilton that I've not got and I read it in just before my birthday in 2008.

And I know this because I've got a train ticket inside the book, which tells me when I read it. And going back, it just reminded me of just the sheer... Pleasure's the wrong word, but the feeling that I had of a close kinship with both writer and character and place and time, and it did something kind of unusual towards me. I read that, and then I read

The 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, and on the back there's a quote from The Observer, I think it is. And it says that Patrick Hamilton minds loneliness and self-delusion better than any other writer. And I realised that that's basically all the stuff that I write is exactly the same as what Hamilton had been doing. And that label was entirely the kind of characters. And I realised that if I hadn't read Hamilton,

I wouldn't have been able to lovingly rip him off. I was disappointed when they announced the musical Hamilton to discover it wasn't about Patrick Hamilton. Wouldn't that be amazing? Listen, when did you... Same question to you, about Patrick Hamilton. Wouldn't that be amazing? Listen, when did you... Same question to you, but Patrick Hamilton rather than Slaves of Solitude? I don't know.

Yes, no, I think I read Hangover Square first. I think slightly dully. I think it was recommended by my sister. But I read several of them and his observation is so acute. I don't know that there's a there's a better reporter of dialogue in terms of dull dialogue the way that people talk to each other when they're drunk i don't think anyone has ever written it better he he he's vision is like a laser and it's a laser cutting through this sort of blancmange of drunkness.

It is absolutely extraordinary. And he has such tremendous insight into the lives of seemingly drab, unhappy people in a way that puts you inside them rather than just observing them. I'm going to answer my own question for once. Andy, when did you first encounter Patrick Hamilton? I've got a theory about Patrick Hamilton. So one of the books that I wrote about in the year of reading Dangerously

was 20,000 Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton. It always struck me, I was a bookseller for many years, and it always struck me that booksellers really love Patrick Hamilton, right? Partly because, you know, they spend a lot of the time in pubs feeling sorry for themselves, right? After work. I think that's a misrepresentation of every bookseller in this country.

I don't want to have that said. It might be true, but I don't want to say it. But I never actually read anything by Patrick Hamilton. So I talk about, I'm just going to read a little bit from the Year of Reading Dynasty about why I decided I needed to read Patrick Hamilton, having said that I read him for years.

These were all books, to a greater or lesser extent, that defined the sort of person I would like to be. They conveyed the innate good taste someone like me would possess effortlessly. If you asked me if I liked Patrick Hamilton's work, for example, I would almost certainly reply in the affirmative. Moreoverover I thought of myself as a Patrick Hamilton fan despite never having read anything by Patrick Hamilton it was easy to maintain these two apparently contradictory positions one did not necessarily cancel out the other it seemed inevitable that I would become a Patrick Hamilton fan once I found the time to read him so why refrain from assuming that identity in

advance it need not even alter if I were to discover that, on settling down with a book by Patrick Hamilton, I didn't much care for it. There would always be another book I might read at some hazy point in the future, and like more, confirming the high opinion I had of Patrick Hamilton, though to date I had read nothing which matched up to the esteem in which he was held by me.

And with this certain prospect fixed on the horizon, so the likelihood of ever reading Patrick Hamilton receded still further. I was the victim of a self-confidence trick. So I knew in my sick and corrupt heart that you were supposed to like Patrick Hamilton if you were the sort of person that I aspired to be. Fortunately, when I did read Patrick Hamilton, of course, I absolutely loved it. John, when did you first? It's similar.

I was trying to remember, but I think this was a particular Waterstones thing. I think Patrick Hamilton somehow in the 80s, early 90s, became a cult writer. Hangover Square became the book

that all booksellers sort of weird, I don't know, some strange osmotic process. That when you, you know, it was exactly what you say. You'd say, Patrick Hamilton, you go, oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean. And then, of course, we also had this strange thing that the headquarters of some bit of W.H. Smith was called Craven House.

Oh, dear. So actually my first not particularly i have to say typical patrick hamilton was i read craven house and then i thought which i quite liked and then i read hangover square which i absolutely loved and then i weirdly until a few weeks ago stopped because i just always thought oh there'll be time for me to get back on top of all the Patrick Hamilton novels I haven't read. But actually, I have to say, this last week, I re-read Hang of a Square, which I loved, but I don't think I love it as much as I love...

I think Slaves of Solitude is my favourite book that we've ever done on the podcast. Wow! Really? I really do. There's so much in this book. It's sort of distilled. You know, sometimes you get a book when you think somebody should have written this novel about England during the war.

I've never read it. Not even Nigel Bolchin, who we liked. Nobody's ever quite got the boredom. Because the war is a character in the book, right? The pilferer. He writes, I think, as well as Muriel Spark and as brassily as Muriel Spark and as brasserly as muriel spark but he he's writing about characters who are there's so many bits you could read but they're

sitting in that they're sitting in that front room and not talking to one another i'm just going to read the blurb on the back of this uh cardinal edition uh of the slave and soldier and then i'm going to ask what's on the front yeah Yeah, there's a fantastic Bill Brandt photograph of a woman who may have taken drinks before the drinks she's currently taking. And then I might ask you, have you got something to read? It's trying to... So much.

I'll read the blurb and then, you know... So, for those of you who haven't read The Slaves of Solitude... Read it now. Read it now. But here's the blurb on the back of this Cardinal edition. It is late 1943. Many blitzed Londoners have fled to the soulless boarding houses of melancholy riverside towns.

One such refugee is the circumspect Miss Roach, 39. Still commuting into London by day, she pecks at Spam and mashed potato by night under the conversational direction of loquacious braggart and resident old goat, Mr Thwaites. Mr Thwaites torments Miss Roach. It gives his life purpose until the arrival of a brash German vamp called Vicky Kugelmann

who winds up even Miss Roach into modest notions of revenge. Enter a good-time American lieutenant who is something in laundry across the pond and the blackout battle is on. As Patrick Hamilton toys fiendishly with his character's vulnerabilities, the loneliness, austerity and bleakness of little lives in a big war, a very particular kind of home-front world is vividly recreated where only imagination, artistry

and the blackest of humour are not rationed. And then there's a wonderful quote by Anthony Pole. Dickens with a touch of E.F. Benson. I mean Dickens, he gets compared to Dickens a lot doesn't he? Patrick Hamilton?

It's the exclamation marks. But it's the kindlamation marks. Is it? Yeah. But it's the kind of grotesquery, I think, as well. The bit that I've picked out is perhaps atypical because it's perhaps a little bit more subtle than some of the other bits, but I think this was the bit that, among many bits in this book,

utterly broke my heart. This is is one and this is a scene with the with the aforementioned vicky kugelman and uh she is she is out with what a piece of work what a piece of work we'll talk we'll talk more about her later um but this is they're out miss roach is out with vicky kugelman and the person that miss roach considered to be her American, who is the lieutenant, and the lieutenant is out drinking. And the lieutenant is a really fascinating character. I'd like to talk about him more if that's at all possible,

but this is a quick scene that broke my heart. I'm not going to do any accents. So she's got kind of vaguely Germanic accent, Vicky, and the lieutenant has got an American accent. I'm not going to do any accents. So she's got kind of vaguely Germanic accent, Vicky, and the lieutenant has got an American accent. I'm not going to do that. Now I buy you a drink, said Vicky at last. And the lieutenant protested. No, I send you around.

I send you all around. And she went away to the bar to get it. Miss Roach felt certain that the lieutenant must be experiencing something of the same feeling as herself and thought that now was the moment to say something about it. But she didn't quite know how to put it. Oh, I'm sorry about all this, was what she wanted to say, but something stopped her.

Instead she said, I'm afraid Vicky's getting a bit tight. You mustn't let her have so much. The lieutenant who was playing the machine paused a moment before replying, tight, he said. She's not tight. I'm glad you brought her along. She kind of lightens things up. I mark the same page. It's unbearable, isn't it? Unbearable. I mean, no one, I think, has written better about those tiny nuances,

the feeling of being bullied, the sense of people ganging up on you. For me, that's what this book is. It's the precision, every little nuance, the way that Vicky Kugelman starts to, the definite article starts to say, well, that's a very good thing. I just wanted to read, because we're talking about drink, but there's a brilliant passage about drink,

which there are many brilliant passages about drink, but Miss Roach, who is the sort of the heroine of the book, and this is about drinking, really. Without any taste for drink, and originally half scandalised by the notion of drinking in public, or of drinking at all, these women would at first imagine that the pleasure they obtained from the new habit

lay in the company, the lights, the conversation, the novelty or the humour of the experience. Then, gradually, they would perceive that there was something further than this, that the longer they stayed and the more they drank, the more their pleasure in this pastime was augmented, reaching, at moments, a point almost of ecstasy. Finally would come the realisation that the drink itself

was not only intimately associated with, but was almost certainly the immediate cause of their sensations. And the bolder spirits among them would come to profess this openly, going so far as to make jokes about it, urging their friends with naive abandonment to have another, speaking of having had too much, finally of being drunk, or of the danger of getting drunk. Actually, very few of these women were constitutionally capable of getting

drunk but only of getting swimming sensations in their heads and wanting to go home and eat or go to bed that's so good it's you know it i mean that's kind of every and i think that's one of the things that he is the best writer about pubs yeah i made a list of the things at which i think i mean in some senses i think we can talk about this hamilton is a limited writer who excels at certain things and i will give you the list of the things at which i think he excels first and then you can agree or disagree right no no i was just going to say you know that thing that i was going to say that you said yeah is that it well we're not far off almost exactly but i was going to say that he's um he's not an amazing totally beyond brilliant writer

but he's an exceptional novelist yeah interesting yes i agree i think the prose the prose is sometimes a bit flat and a bit ordinary but the things that he does within his novels with for instance character are exceptional yes his focus is narrow but extraordinary so he so I made this little list which was these are the things at which he excels booze boozers specifically those two things right he's brilliant as John just said at conveying the experience of different types of drinking and different states of mind while drunk

but he's also fantastic at the kind of weird bonhomie or terror of the pub environment he's fantastic at bores, he at bores. He writes bores brilliantly.

There's one in this novel called Mr. Thwaites. We'll talk about it in a minute. The greatest bore in literature. Mr. Eccles in 20,000 Streets Under the Sky as well. He is very good on both Brighton and London. Graham Greene said he was the pre-eminent Brighton novelist, novelist of Brighton and London. Graham Greene said he was the pre-eminent Brighton novelist, novelist of Brighton, but he's also one of the great novelists of London, right?

Well, certainly, I mean, when I got to London, the first thing I did was I went to go and have a look around Earls Court. Yeah, yeah. You know, to see the Hangover Square. Hangover Square, yeah. And I got to Earls Court and There was nothing of the book there. And he creates a landscape. He creates a landscape, a mental landscape,

and also a physical landscape, which is indescribably his own. You know that you are in Hamilton territory. Sometimes you can even go into a pub, as you did today, John. Go into a pub and you know that it's a hamilton pub you know that he could have easily be sat sitting at the bar there but the other story to return to i was saying the other things that about which hamilton writes brilliantly and

we'll come on to the reason for this is in addition to you know drink and pub balls a a lot of pub life. He is brilliant on obsession and cruelty. Yeah. Who writes cruelty better? Human cruelty to other human beings. I'm going to go out on a limb here because I think that without Hamilton, I don't know whether Pinter ever actually read... I totally agree.

He must have done. Because the power dynamics between the characters... In this novel in particular, the triangle between the left-hand Miss Roach and Vicky Kugelman is... It's amazing. Even when you get towards the end and it feels like it's going to denouement, you don't even realise, really,

is this going to end? Is this how it's going to end? What is going to happen? And the compression of it, in that when you become so obsessed with someone, so obsessed with a power triangle, that the mere syllable can completely swing the power. He's got exactly that. And that is exactly the way that that works.

And because he's created this prim character who is constantly doubting herself constantly you know he flits into her mind and the she constantly doubting herself you know oh is she evil is she not is she a nazi is she not and all of these kind of things and it's it's brilliant a psycho psychological exploration of of how one feels particularly after a big night or or anything like that where you know like are you you know maybe she isn't as bad as as i thought on all the rest of it um but he he he teases that out and and then you realize that it's on the like you say the turn of one phrase yeah one thing one thing taken just slightly the wrong way and it just unravels in the worst kind of well we should we

should also say one of the other things that Hamilton is so brilliant at writing about, because it's where he spent much of his life, Slaves of Solitude is set in a shabby boarding house, as is his early novel, Craven House, the Rosamund Teary. He's so good on the... Oh, it's amazing. He enforces socialisation. Terrible.

The atmosphere of that dining room, the pain of it, and the exactitude of it. I made notes, a lot of notes, when I was reading the book about the Second World War because I write books set during the war. Yeah, but I was going to ask you, so as a novel about the Second World War, how does this compare with other things from the same period

or just after the war in fact when this well for me it was perfection because it's a book about the war written during the war so i could be by a very good writer so i could be absolutely certain that what he was seeing and what he was observing actually existed it was there and so i mean you know i i actually wrote notes on it um you know my research file things things like Miss Roach, Vaguely Lefty reads the News Chronicle, Mr Thwaites reads the Daily Mail, Miss Steele, Refined reads the Times and Mr Prest

Common, the Daily Mirror he's got the exactitude of it but also beautiful details like the fact that for instance in the blackout in the morning sometimes the lights would go on in the morning because there was no blackout and actually seeing lights in the dark

was magical and in the evening just before the blackout time one or two shop lights would go on and you were saying weren't you that you we mentioned the character of Vicky Kugelmans I have slightly you slightly borrowed her

I slightly borrowed her in one of my books, Crooked Heart, it's set in provincial... It's set in St Albans during the war, and I created two Austrian refugees, Vicky's German, one of whom, the main woman, is not Vicky, but her friend Birgit,

who's rather jolly in a painful way and always shouts about defending British beer and British cakes. I'm afraid I slightly stole Vicky because Vicky is so marvellous and painful and horrible and her use of slang, which agonises. Can I just read a tiny bit of Vicky causing Miss Roach pain by her use? Why, said the lieutenant, can you make a cocktail? Can I make a cocktail, said Vicky?

Oh, boy, can I make a cocktail? From which I take it, said the lieutenant, apparently delighted rather than nauseated by this excursion into his own idiom that you can make a cocktail. Can I make a cocktail, said Vicky, conscious of having made a success and so enlarging upon it or can i make a cocktail uh-huh oh boy wizard and miss went agonized by that interestingly though oh this is the third time that i've read this book and i began to see things differently this time, slowly,

about two characters in particular, Vicky being one, and Mr. Thwaites as well, slowly. And the reason why... Wait a minute, I'm going to hold that. Can one of you explain who Mr. Thwaites is? Can I read a classic bit of Thwaites? He's a big older bloke. He's all spanked.

He's a bully. He's a bully. He's resident at the Rosamund Tea Room's guest house. Where not much conversation goes on unless he is kind of leading. It is implied that he is a Nazi sympathiser and he is described more than once by Patrick Hamilton as the president in hell

so John they have been out Vicky Kugelman and Miss Roach and the lieutenant have been out the lieutenant have been out and this is then the next morning in the Rosamund tea rooms and there's light conversation

about the evening. Yes, it was very nice, said Miss Roach. And Vicky said, yes, we enjoyed ourselves very much. I wish I'd been with you, said Miss Steele, as usually advertising a trifle absurdly her anti-foggy attitude to life. I'd have enjoyed it myself. Yes, I wish you had, said Miss Roach, and wondered how much Miss Steele actually would have enjoyed it myself. Yes, I wish you had, said Miss Roach, and wondered how much Miss Steele actually

would have enjoyed it. There was a short silence, and Mr Thwaites began. And didst thou dance and dally and trip the lightsome toe, he asked, e'en unto the small hours of the morn? Oh no, said Vicky, we were in before twelve. Like Cinderella, said Miss Steele from her table, and Vicky, not answering Miss Roach, said, Yes, that's right, like Cinderella. It was characteristic of Vicky to have let Miss Roach to answer Miss Steele. Now that Vicky was established in the boarding house, it was becoming more and more clear that she took hardly any notice of,

had hardly a word for anyone but Mr Thwaites. And didst thou imbibe mighty potions from the fruit of the grape? Mr. Thwaites went on, pursuing God Bacchus in his unholy revels. Oh, yes, said Miss Roach, we have a certain amount to drink. As Mr. Thwaites was trothing, it looked as though, on the whole, he was going to be fairly lenient. And hast thou one ache this morning? asked Mr. Thwaites, appertaining unto head,

and much repentance in thy soul forsooth? Oh, not so bad, said Vicky, it might be worse. And what did you dance? asked Mr. Thwaites, detrothing in a sudden axis of bitterness. Jazz, I suppose. There was a pause. Oh, it's not jazz now, said Miss Steele. You're old-fashioned,

Mr. Thwaites. It's boogie-woogie now, isn't it? And so on. That's Mr. Thwaites. That's the monstrousness of Thwaites. But that's Thwaites in a good way. I think that one of Hamilton's truly great moments as a writer,

I think probably his greatest achievement is to, when the time comes to feel sorry for Mr. Thwaites, we feel sorry for him. Yeah. And he is a truly odious human being. And the way that he creates that character there is there is i mean obviously he hamilton hates him i mean there's no doubt about it but there is a smidge just a just a soups on there of humanity within it which keeps him you know as hateful as he is we still kind of

interested in him because he's because he is an embodiment of a man that still exists now. You can go to any pub up and down the country and you will hear someone truthing. The brilliant thing about him, he's a fantastic character because he's so well written. His lines, he has some of the best lines in the book. He really does. And then he has those moments where suddenly... The viciousness. The viciousness when he has that particular moment when he really just sticks the knife in.

There's this brilliant quote. Stuart, I hoped you were going to defend Thwaites, right? There's this brilliant quote from Doris Lessing where she's talking about Thwaites and Vicky Coogleman, and she says, there is no possible defence to be made for either unless it is that they are too stupid to know how vile they are.

No, I disagree with that. I do disagree with that because I think Vicky Kugelman is actually defensible. Is she as evil? Because not even Miss Roach really understands how bad she is and how much of an evil... Because she spends a lot of time

vacillating between these two things is she an evil dirty Nazi or is she just like you know a normal woman trying to eke out her time and in the sense that all of the characters are put on time you know that they are

trying to make the best out of a terrible thing and is there with her is she as guilty as Miss Roach eventually puts her as you know, because we see it very much from her perspective

There's a lovely moment at the end where she sees her sitting, you know, she sees her sitting and she realises, and she's going off without, you know spoiler alert, she's going off without, you know, spoiler alert, she's going off back to London, Miss Roach, and she sees Vicky Kugelman sitting there. And she has this, it's not exactly a moment of pity, but she sees the sad, empty squalor of Vicky Kugelman's life and is able, what does he say, it's a lovely, she probably wasn't really the concentration camp,

stadium yelling, rich, fruity, German Nazii which miss roach had at times thought her and yet she also very possibly was and miss roach now found it easy to forgive her but that's perfect hamilton it's like yeah it's like he doesn't he never this could be a really sentimental, soppy novel. But it's totally not. You see, I think both Waits and Vicky are taking advantage of a peculiarly vulnerable person, the sort of person who gets bullied in the playground. Miss Roach is plain, she's earnest, she's honest, and she doesn't have the viciousness that they have

and can't defend herself against them. And they are classic bullies in a pincer move. And I think he, for all Patrick Hamilton's weird attitude to women, which I'm sure we'll get on to, I think his portrait of Enid Roach is extraordinary. Brilliant, I agree. It's so sensitive, it's so painful, it's so brilliant. She's a small person in a small life who knows her smallness,

and it's agonising to her. She knows she's not attractive, she knows that people aren't really interested in her, and yet she has a small amount of self-worth. And Vicky Coogerman sees that and squashes it. So I'm going to say boo-boo to Vicki Kugelman. I don't know. I just think that because of the way that the novel is structured,

then we are encouraged to feel that way. But actually, if you analyse what she does at those particular times, you know, I'm not so sure that that you know unlike thwaites where you know his actions are very very clear you know that you know because he's given center stage by hamilton i think if you actually look at exactly what vicky does how much of that is actual bullying how much of that is actually in inid's mind. And I do wonder whether Hamilton is playing a very interesting game with that, where you actually...

The adventure of gaslights, everybody. But I do wonder whether with her particularly, we're kind of blinded by Hamilton's obvious sympathies for Enid. He was also... And he went mad. I mean, he became very angry. As this gin and French really kicks in, it seems appropriate to do the biography of Hamilton.

Mine's getting a little low. So Patrick Hamilton, born 17th March 1904 in Hassex, near Brighton. Hamilton died September 1962, aged 58, in Sheringham, Norfolk. That's a miracle he made it to that age. I was going to say, fell down a lot in between. He was one of three children, a brother called Bruce, who was also a playwright and novelist, and a sister called Lala, an actress.

And I'm just going to read Michael Holroyd's brilliant description of the circumstances in which Patrick Hamilton grew up. His apparently conventional upper- 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 a theosophist and bewigged though non-practicing barrister also an impressionable traveler amateur actor fascist he was an ardent admirer of Mussolini and dogged religious controversialist at the age of 21 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, what a phrase, built 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. So it's in that kind of fevered

hothouse environment. If you know anything about Hamilton, you can see that There's a lot of thwaites in his dad. Yeah, absolutely. I read that in church as well. First of all, I thought, someone's got to write a novel about Hamilton's dad because, I mean, who was it who called him

he would have done well as a bad low comedian or something like that. That's right, yeah. But you can also see the things in his father's life, the marrying a prostitute, the becoming a fascist, that Hamilton himself sort of lived... And he's an alcoholic. All these things are either Hamilton does or he creates a mirror of.

I'll just say a bit more about him. So the family was kind of downwardly mobile. They'd been very wealthy. They'd inherited a lot of wealth. But gradually, basically, the father had drunk it and gambled it away. They had their own house in Hove, and then they moved to various guest houses. Patrick Hamilton was sent to Westminster School

because he was a bright lad, but then they couldn't afford to keep him there, so he was taken away from there at the age of 15. And as Stuart was saying, he has this incredible run of success when he's very young. He publishes his first novel Monday morning in 1925 when he's 21,

and by the age of 30 he's written six novels, including the three novels in 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure, which is my favourite, and The Planes of Cement. About three different characters, three or four characters, main

characters, seeing the same story from different points of view, which is an incredibly precocious thing for a writer in their twenties to do, let alone do so successfully. And he also has a hit play called Rope. Rope, huge hit, which is subsequently made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock, of course. And he got tons of money from it.

So he becomes very rich. He's also, as you say, knocked down by a car in the late 20s or early 30s. And disfigured, or so he felt. So that kicks his alcoholism really into overdrive at that point. And by World War II, he's also written a very peculiar novel called Impromptu in Moribundia. Have any of you read that? No.

It sounds totally nuts. It's sort of a Swiftian satire set on an alien planet. Hamilton sci-fi satire. Yeah, yeah, that's right. But he's also written you heard it here first but he's written another

massive hit play called Gaslight and in fact the term gaslighting which I've been making jokes about but that's entered general parlance

in the last three or four years wouldn't he be delighted he would love that and it's been made into two films and then

1940s he writes he other plays, which are successful. He writes the novel Hangover Square in 1941, Slaves of Solitude in 1947. And he was also a communist. He was a didactic communist. And you can read these novels, as he would on one level wish you to, read these novels as he would on one level wish you to as lessons in communism, in the effect on

society of the sort of the ragged trouser philanthropist by Robert Trestle he's of course a much better writer than Robert Trestle is so he can't cleave too closely to that ideological template. But the ideology seems to be odd because his

first commitment is to the work. It doesn't appear to be political. I don't think there's anything particularly political in this, particularly where Miss Roach is constantly harangued by Thwaites. Your friends, the Russians. It reminds me of a line from Fawlty Towers when the guy dies, the kipper and the corpse, and he comes downstairs and, you know,

he's just given the breakfast to this dead person and Basil says to Sybil, you know, your friend, you know, the one in eight, and this kind of your friend becomes this kind of, it's such an attack, isn't it? It's like, your friend, you know, this is what you were like. That's totally, that is Mr. Throat's voice.

It is, yeah. And Miss Roach tries to counter him in a logical way. They're not actually friends of mine. His point is speaking to a Mr Thwaites like that. We should also say, we were talking about earlier, that by the time he writes The Slaves of Solitude in 1947, he's putting away, he's reputed to be putting away, three bottles of whiskey a day.

So you'll read it, what you'll're reading, we were talking about this earlier, it takes him three years to write, which normally his novels didn't take him that long to write, because he's kind of hanging on with his fingernails, concentrating to get this book out. And then after that, he writes the Gorse trilogy, The West Pier in 1952, Mr Stimson, Mr Gorse in 1953,

and the final part, Unknown Assailant in 1955, which is basically dictated while drunk. And then that's his last real work, and he dies of cirrhosis of the liver in 1962. The thing I find fascinating about Patrick Hamilton, and I do think we have to say this, and I know, John, you had read some of, and I've read, Nigel Jones's biography of Hamilton, through a glass darkly it is quite unsettling to realize that the reason why hamilton is able to write so meaningfully about things like drunkenness cruelty and obsession he lived it is because he really did live it i mean the drunkenness sure but also there's all these stories about for instance instance, the actress

Geraldine Fitzgerald. He was a terrible, terrible stalker of women. I mean, really. And she felt that he was actually dangerous, didn't she? She moved to America to get away from him because he was stalking her. He would walk home and she felt, it wasn't just that she felt he was, she felt if

he caught me, he would murder me. And the character of netter in hangover square is based on her who is murdered at the end no spoilers um but netter is like an uber bitch like a beyond even vicky kugelman kind of level of of absolute nastiness and i think that um one of the things which made me, which gave me pause about Hangover Square particularly is the depiction of this woman is

you know the devil incarnate you know she is absolutely the worst human beings who have ever lived and in a way that Vicky Kugelman isn't quite. I think he writes women's inner lives quite brilliantly, unexpectedly and beautifully.

It's amazing. One thing I wanted to say, because we haven't mentioned it, and I think it's really easy with this book to focus on Thwaites and Kugelman, but the hero of the book, and Laura Thompson, who is a massive fan of this book and also has written a book about her grandmother who was a landlady during this exact period and there's nobody are you writing about pubs in the 1940s and 50s you've got to talk about Hamilton but she said in the book she said

the revelation whereby Mr. Prest became the hero becomes the hero of Slaves of Solitude is one of the most beautiful passages in 20th century literature. He can be seen as the embodiment of the spirit of the pub, of the be-human philosophy. But what's extraordinary is that in Patrick Hamilton's hands, this in itself acquires another dimension. Mr. Prest's very ordinariness and vulgarity has that power. At the end of the novel, he's given a part in a pantomime,

a last-chance part owing to the widespread wartime call-up of actors, and offers a ticket to his fellow resident Miss Roach, whom he likes and he wants so much more from life than respectability can give her. And then she goes and he's the hit of the show. It's just... It's an beautiful... He doesn't exist in the book before then.

And then he suddenly becomes this incredible... And there is a thing, obviously, Hamilton himself has a sort of slightly sentimental... Because he was a failed actor. But the transformation when she goes and sits in this and watches Mr Prest on stage with the children and his energy, and he's suddenly transformed from this man in a bad tweed suit

reading the Daily Mirror and his Common into this incredible purifying agent in the book. She talks about purification. This is what David Lodge says about Slaves of Solitude. He says you can see that act of Prest's as analogous to Hamilton's, you know, final bow of potency in the book. And because everything is more or less over.

I mean, the Gorse trilogy isn't... It's interesting, but it's more or less over after the Gorse trilogy isn't it's interesting but it's not it's the obsession that he has with that sort of weird con man it's brilliant I'm just going to read the very very last bit of the last line and it is as endings go

one of the great endings but this is the last bit of the last line God help us God help all of God help all of us. Everyone. All of us. Oh my goodness. And that's the note on which we should probably draw things to a close.

Thanks to our guests, Stuart Evers and Lyssa Evans, and our producer Matt Hall. Our extensive archive of old shows is available on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com forward slash backlisted pod. And we're available and active on Twitter and Facebook. So come and join in the conversation. But you know what? Because this is Ultimate Backlisted TM and because the drinks are really kicking in now, we're going to keep going.

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