One might think that a severely alcoholic Stalinist could never be a good writer, let alone a fine novelist, but the case of Patrick Hamilton refutes this commonsensical opinion. His novel of an English boarding house during the war, The Slaves of Solitude, published in 1947, is a beautifully observed and completely non-ideological study of the character of the residents of just such an establishment. If one had to guess the political opinions of its author on the basis of the book alone, one might even suspect him of having been a libertarian.
There is a passage that I found particularly resonant, nearly 80 years after it was written. In it, one of the main characters, Enid Roach, reflects on the wartime atmosphere, having seen a notice in the window of a shop that there were “no cigarettes—sorry”:
Such was Miss Roach’s mood nowadays that she regarded this less as a sorrowful admission than a sly piece of spite…. It was a sarcastic, nasty, rude “sorry.”
This is followed by a disquisition on the hectoring to which citizens were subjected during the war:
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 use the telephone other than briefly, she was 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 [she was on her way to work] where she could spend it, but to put it into savings, and to keep putting it into savings. She was not even to talk carelessly, lest she endangered the lives of others.
It was perhaps ironic that a man who remained a devotee of Stalin right up to his own death in 1962 should have written the last sentence quoted above, for in Stalin’s regime, careless talk endangered not only the lives of others, but the life of the speaker himself. But consistency is not to be looked for in human beings.
In Britain, at least, the hectoring of the war years has returned. A person entering the country is immediately warned that aggressive behaviour to the immigration or customs officials will not be tolerated, but he is also enjoined to report any suspicions of people-smuggling that he thinks he has witnessed.
On the first train he takes, he will be told to report “something that doesn’t look right” to the transport police, who will “sort it.” What this “something that doesn’t look right” may be is unspecified; and, as I look around myself in such circumstances, nothing looks right to me. The other passengers dress badly, are too fat or too thin, use too much or too little makeup, are tattooed and have ironmongery in their faces, are watching idiotic videos on their telephones, or are eating junk food, sometimes several of the above at once; as, for the buildings past which we go, they are appallingly ugly. Should I call the transport police? How will they “sort it,” other than by mass demolition and the reformation of human nature?
The hectoring continues. On the escalators in the underground station, one is enjoined to hold on to the handrail; one must under no circumstances run. One should not put one’s hands in the mechanism of the escalator (a religious revelation, that one). Arriving on a platform, a message from the mayor of London tells us to be nice to one another. Stand well back, mind the gap, let the other passengers off first, beware of pickpockets. How full of danger is the modern world!
Hectoring is, of course, an employment opportunity for bureaucrats. One can well imagine how much good they think they are doing by reminding people to beware of slippery floors when it rains and to bring an umbrella, to keep hydrated in hot weather, to wrap up warm in cold, to arrive in good time to catch their train without having to hurry, not to be abusive or use racist language.
Let us take the injunction in stations, seaports and airports not to be abusive to immigration officials. Is there anyone who would have been abusive to them were it not for the warning that such abuse would not be tolerated (the punishment or penalty unspecified, and perhaps best left to the imagination)?
During the war, at least, there was some kind of ostensible reason for this constant hectoring. It really was important that people should waste nothing, though waste will tend to reduce spontaneously during periods of penury and declining disposable incomes.
But what is the national emergency that justifies so much hectoring nowadays, the revival of an atmosphere of which Miss Roach complains in The Slaves of Solitude? There is nothing comparable to the war; the hectoring must signify something else.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
Doctor Johnson said that we need more often be reminded than informed, and perhaps this has become the mission statement of bureaucracies: constantly to remind. Of course, this implies a belief that that the default setting of most or many people is, for example, to be abusive to all and sundry, or to put their fingers into the mechanism of escalators (which, by the way is not easy to do, and requires some determination or even skill), or not to drink when they are thirsty.
The fact is that the bureaucracy (I treat it as a class) finds the population as unsatisfactory as I find the people on the train when I look around and am told to report anything “that doesn’t look right.” Moreover, it stands, or believes itself to stand, in loco parentis to the whole population. As an anxious father or mother watches over a crawling child that is inclined to put exploratory fingers into electric sockets, so bureaucrats warn us (on the labels of bottles of whisky or gin) that drinking can make you drunk, and it can damage your liver if persisted in.
There is, perhaps, no war going on, at least not in the sense of the Second World War, but there is, as ever, conflict—increasingly, that between the governors and the governed. The former have no confidence in the latter, and so they must be hectored into decency, goodness, and obedience, the kind of Sisyphean task that guarantees perpetual employment.
