In truth, the enemy was not the pub. In those days it was the nearest gateway to alcohol, and – prefiguring Shaw – an aristocratic lady of the nineteenth century purged her Welsh estate of all its pubs, thinking thereby to chase drink from the land, and believing quite sincerely that her tenants would be grateful in the end. But the real enemy was lack of moderation, which does not only affect the poor, and does not apply only to drink. And the pub, when it was doing its job, sought to curb and ease immoderation. My great-grandfather’s pub stood bang next door to a church, and each temple comfortably accomodated its neighbour. Nevertheless, he was inclined to eject the Salvation Army when it came trooping into his bars. Not just on account of the saintly hypocrisy with which the clear of eye and conscience rattled their tins in the haunt of the devil, but because he believed that he himself made a greater contribution to the public good.
It is precisely that atmosphere of acceptance, not always apparent in the church, that makes the pub so important to the person who has little else. The belief in the perfectibility of life, cleansing the body to cleanse the soul, is with us still, albeit purveyed by lovely millenials wielding a courgette and a spiraliser rather than preachers with eyes full of unworldly sincerity. The pure in heart shall see God; the pure in blood shall be venerated on Instagram and float in a perfect cryogenic eternity. Today’s temperance movement includes a religious component, mainly Muslim, but this new secular fanaticism – which seeks to expiate the original sin of physical fallibility – is also helping to condemn the pub to its slow death. In my grandmother’s pub, every sip and puff was a shrugging geste insolente towards inevitable decline. In moderation, this had its adult dignity. There is very little moderation in the martyrdom of the triathlon and the green juice, nor in the obverse of temperance, the reaction against its insistent call, the wheel-size pizzas and goldfish bowls of wine that torment the body with excess.
And what of the other quest for purification, the one that seeks a society scoured of moral transgression? This too is still with us, although the old sins have been replaced with new orthodoxies. These may have right on the side but, again, they have come to represent a kind of extremism: like the temperance movement, they wish the realities of human nature away, and such immoderation is liable to have immoderate consequences.
There was less of all this in the heyday of the pub. This is not to say that the pub was perfect, but its very imperfection was the point. Louis MacNeice was born (in 1907) into what he called a ‘temperance family’ and wrote that his father objected to alcohol – and presumably pubs – on the grounds that the drunkard ‘loses his self-respect’. To MacNeice, who did not follow the family creed, this ‘was all to the drunkard’s credit, self-respect being one of the roots of evil’. Even when drinking was not enjoyable, it was ‘in a good cause; one was laming and debilitating one’s private Satan, one’s Tempter, one’s self-respect.’ By turning the notion of what constitutes ‘temptation’ on its head, MacNeice exquisitely expresses the point: that there is something humanising, humbling, even righteous in the willingness to shift one’s sense of self, and find ‘a communion among those whom sobriety divided’.
Thus, in a phrase, the pub is defended. I now realise that what MacNeice describes is what I saw as a child, walking through my grandmother’s pub at its ugly-beautiful evening peak. Still, of course, there were those who would not have been persuaded. For the self-respect brigade extended way beyond those who were impelled by religious conviction, into a less elevated and far more common type of puritan: those who opposed pubs on the grounds that they were ‘not quite nice’. Or, as the monstrous Mr Thwaites, petty tyrant of the boarding house in Patrick Hamilton’s wartime novel The Slaves of Solitude, puts it to himself: ‘Public houses were not really things which were supposed to take place at all.’
Patrick Hamilton, most of whose books are set in the interwar period, was the great poet of the pub (alongside Kingsley Amis). He was also a great writer about drink: again like Amis. Both men knew of what they wrote, and their characters put it away in quantities to make the head reel, although of the two Hamilton was the heavier drinker. His obsessional style notated the rhythms of drunkenness – every surge and retreat within an evening’s session – and the terrible dogged logic that takes possession of the swooning mind. As for pubs, he was alert to every variation on the theme. He knew the provincial businessman’s pub with its self-important saloon bar, decorated with coats of arms and creating ‘a “baronial” effect of the most painfully false character’. He knew the unpretentious Earl’s Court pub, with a canary in its cage and tables covered in green linoleum. He knew the old dive of a Chiswick pub, with oilcloth on the floor and ‘a decayed fountain not in use set in a despondent nook’. He knew the workaday Euston Road pub, and indeed made the fictional Midnight Bell the setting for his interwar trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which my grandmother read as if it were non-fiction, verifying and delighting in every detail of clocks kept fast, horse-brasses polished, early evening bores and so on.
As an English novelist, Hamilton also knew all about class, and wrote about pubs through the prism of his characters’ agonised class awareness. Many of them are at home in pubs: like their creator they have that instinct, not just to have a drink, but to step off the street and be instantly absorbed into that other world, that beam-slanted dusk. ‘As soon as he got inside a pub tonight, it would be all right,’ is what the unhappy, love-tortured George Harvey Bone tells himself in Hangover Square. Bone has a quarter-bottle of gin in his own room, and naturally he has a go at that, but it isn’t quite the same thing.
Set against the pub, however, is Hamilton’s other milieu: the boarding house. Like the pub, it is a home that is not quite a home. At the same time it is the pub’s spiritual opposite. Its métier is not to forgive but to judge, everything from the timbre of a voice to the loudness of a check suit. Boarding houses were often occupied by MacNeice’s ‘self-respecting’ types – Mr Thwaites being the supreme example – and to such people pubs were faintly shocking, like bookmakers. Accordingly, they had an allure quite disproportionate to their reality. In Craven House, also set in a boarding house, one of the residents – a middle-aged husband – regularly dodges the congealing Sunday roast on the pretext of needing a good long ‘tramp’; this takes him to several pubs, where he behaves with a wildly inappropriate loucheness that stops him from going off his head. Back among the aspidistras, however, the anti-pub façade must be maintained.
As for women, their response is still more complex, filtered as it is through sex as well as class. Mild, sweet-natured, middle-class Miss Roach, in The Slaves of Solitude, willingly sheds the boarding-house sensibility at her local pub not far from London, although she is only emboldened to go there because it is the war, and normal behaviour is suspended. ‘She had no longer any fear of entering public houses …’ But the Rising Sun is a ‘nice’ pub, so that is all right. Along with its rather surprising pinball machine, it has the heavily decorated saloon that symbolises decency (it goes without saying that a woman would drink in the saloon). So too does the Friar, the baronial-themed pub in Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse. This, the foremost ‘hostelry’ in Reading, is where Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce – whose late husband was a colonel, no less – is more than happy to drink gin while being flirted at by affluent businessmen. ‘She “detested snobbery” and thought public houses “great fun”.’ Nevertheless, she is not comfortable with waiting for her man friend while seated alone at the bar. That is not merely losing face, but caste.
The Midnight Bell in Twenty Thousand Streets is not a dive. Its clientele contains a very pub-like mix of the educated oddball, the waggish motor trader, the unsuccessful actor, the struck-off doctor and so on; but there are prostitutes in the saloon – obvious ones – and it is implied that the landlord’s wife, who isn’t in fact his wife, has dabbled in the same profession. The barmaid, Ella, meanwhile, is entirely virtuous. She is well treated at the pub, but her mother wishes that she
didn’t work there, and a possible job as a governess is presented as a step up. Another escape route appears when she is courted by an older man, Mr Eccles, whose claim to eligibility is that he has ‘a little something put by’. This money holds all the numinous gleam of the mirrored counter behind Ella’s not-quite-pretty-enough head: she can scarcely bear the man, but knows she ought to marry him. Awful though he is, he is her ‘chance’.
Ella is created with sad fondness, as a good, kind, sensible, unremarkable girl. She is Mr Eccles’ superior in every salient way. Yet she is his supplicant: not just because she is poor, but because she is a barmaid. She does her work gamely – ‘giving chaff for chaff’ with the customers – but despite her innate dignity she feels a lurking social shame. She fears that she inhabits a world that is not respectable.
There is a sex complication here. A girl can’t be too careful, and all that. Alongside Ella’s story is that of Jenny – one of the prostitutes drinking in the Midnight Bell – who started life as a neat and exemplary servant and who, after one night of heavy drinking in a Hammersmith saloon, is set inexorably on the road to debasement. It is a morality tale, but it carries the weight of realism. To Jenny, pubs are ‘haunts of destruction’. Given her story, she is quite right to see them this way, although the real agent of her downfall is her own extreme prettiness, which encourages her to dream in a way that her class does not permit. In a pub, however, she is exposed: spotlit as prey, and – after numerous large ports – entirely without her usual defences.
Ella, who does not have Jenny’s allure, is less vulnerable but also more out of place in the pub. And she is right to be anxious. A barmaid did have a tricky status, defended by her bar yet wholly exposed, negotiating a world of men with whom she is required to engage and pray to God every night that they behave. She has none of the power of the landlady; only the age-old female power, based upon biology and self-protection, to attract and deflect and – with luck – control the attentions of men.
But this is not only about femaleness. Ella’s colleague, Bob, is a waiter in the saloon – some pubs enhanced the status of this bar with a smartly deferential table service – and he too finds himself struggling with the low status of his work, playing servant to prostitutes and to mean gits who toss him a derisive ha’penny as a tip. Neither Bob nor Ella is a snob. Both have a sense of tremulous self-worth. Yet both are vulnerable to the snobbery of others, to whom despite themselves they feel inferior, because of their association with a pub.
Patrick Hamilton is one of my favourite novelists, but when I first read him – by which time my grandmother had left her pub – I was pulled up somewhat by this viewpoint. Slightly troubled, if I am honest. Had I myself been judged because I was descended in the female line from publicans? It seemed both impossible and quite likely. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that pubs, or my grandmother, might be seen as declassée. But then I didn’t think much about class, in that personal sense, until university (where people seemed fairly obsessed with it). Before that, my engagement with the subject was merely abstract, something that I read about.
I read about the upper classes in Nancy Mitford, for instance, although it was only much later that I encountered this throwaway, in a letter to Evelyn Waugh, about the characters in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair: ‘All that public house life, like poor people.’ Nancy, bless her, wouldn’t have known the first thing about pubs (for all her areas of worldliness, her idea of an everyday drinking establishment was probably White’s). More interesting is Greene himself, who sort of did know. And I do remember, reading Brighton Rock when I was about thirteen, sensing a wrong note. When I reread the novel recently I sensed it again. Greene presents – quite brilliantly – a figure who could be seen as the very spirit of the pub, the landlady, the earthy magic that does not elevate but that miraculously lifts … Ida Arnold, with her friendly breasts and the taste of Guinness in her mouth, who spends afternoons in Brighton hotel rooms with weary, smiling, defeated men, who cocks her hat to an affirmative angle in the saloon mirror, who is defiantly non-respectable but believes in right and wrong: a fine figure of a woman, with no interest in saving souls and a determination to save Rose, a teenage waitress in love with the deadly boy gangster Pinkie. Ida takes life ‘with a deadly seriousness’. Life is all. ‘Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, Ruby port, the leap of her heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post and the colours go bobbing up.’ The pub creed? Yes, one might say so. ‘Be human,’ says Ida, and to her it is as simple as that. That reality, for her, is enough; it is something worth having; it has to be, because for sure there is nothing else.
But Rose has a different creed, beyond the sunlit here and now. Like Pinkie she is a ‘Roman’, and believes in sin and damnation rather than wrongdoing and a hangman’s rope. So she resists Ida’s irreligious salvation with all the power that is in her, putting her faith in something inchoate yet profound.
I find Greene’s highly charged Catholicism essentially silly; incredible, in both a literal and literary sense. I certainly don’t believe it when Sarah renounces Bendrix for God in The End of the Affair (nor, incidentally, did Nancy Mitford, who said that the God she believed in liked people to be happy). I believe in Rose more, because she is so young. And Brighton Rock translates metaphor into action so dynamically that the struggle between Rose/Pinkie and Ida works, whether one believes in it or not. In the end it is a superb novel, therefore it carries its own power of conviction, which carries one along.
Nevertheless, there is this wrong note. Subjective, of course, but I hear contempt in Greene’s description of Ida, and a rarefied snootiness in his portrayal of Rose and Pinkie. As George Orwell put it, Greene ‘appears to share the idea … that there is something rather distingué about being damned’. Whereas Ida could not be less distinguished with her pieces of wisdom, arranged in her mind like cheap ornaments on a dresser, her hackneyed belief in law and order, her refusal to engage with anything more spiritual than a Ouija board. ‘At one with the One – it didn’t mean a thing beside a glass of Guinness on a sunny day.’ How Greene judges her, beneath the veneer of understanding! ‘She bore the same relation to passion as a peepshow.’ Her hotel trysts are impure in a way that Pinkie’s coupling with Rose is not; her easy willingness to have a drink with an old flame at eleven in the morning is set against Pinkie’s fervid abstinence. Greene knows about Ida, he knows the world of the saloon, the casual pick-up, the sentimental songs, the tip for the 4.00 at Sandown, the good nature and the areas of indomitability. He knows it all, just as Patrick Hamilton does, but he holds it at arm’s length.
If Ida Arnold embodies something like the spirit of the pub, the landlady, the chin up creed, then here, in Brighton Rock, is the intelligent case for the prosecution. ‘Be human’ is all very well. But it is not enough. It will not quite do as an everyday philosophy. There is a whole dimension beyond. And that may be so, but for all its subtlety, Brighton Rock does not convince me: I still sense the spectre of class, of a middle-class sensibility dazzled by the elitist rigours of Catholicism, and by its own ability to conjure the worldly bravura of an Ida.
As it happens she has a male counterpart, of sorts, in Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. He is a man in late middle age named Mr Prest, who lives at the Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house but is not a boarding house type; he instead drinks every day in the local pubs and is ‘regarded as being somehow beyond the pale’. Although the other residents do not know this, and think him a mere unplaceable nobody, Mr Prest is in fact a former music hall performer of some distinction. Distingué, even. This would not have enhanced his reputation in their eyes (Mr Thwaites would have considered Max Miller to be ‘unnecessary’), but what they also do not know is that Mr Prest is politely uninterested in their opinion of him, and indeed regards the boarding house as ‘a sort of zoo’.
The revelation whereby Mr Prest becomes the hero of The Slaves of Solitude is, to my mind, one of the most beautiful passages in twentiet
h-century literature. Like Ida Arnold, he can be seen as an embodiment of the spirit of the pub, of the ‘be human’ philosophy, but what is extraordinary is that in Patrick Hamilton’s hands this in itself acquires another dimension: Mr Prest’s very ordinariness and vulgarity has exactly that power. At the end of the novel he is 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 who wants so much more from life than respectability can give her. Miss Roach watches from her stalls seat in a theatre in Wimbledon. There she sees, in a moment of simple blinding perception, that Mr Prest is ‘going to be the hit of the show’:
The ‘common’ Mr Prest … Yes, indeed ‘common’ – very much ‘commoner’ here than at the Rosamund Tea Rooms – at moments vulgar perhaps – and yet, with these children, how very much the reverse of ‘common’, how shining, transfigured, and ennobled! … Looking at him, she had a strong desire to cry …
And now, thinking of this passage, it mystifies me anew that Hamilton is often described as a cruel or cold novelist. There is such an intensity of compassion – such a touching authorial urgency – in the rendering of Mr Prest, who throughout much of the book remains shrouded within his beer-drinker persona, and whose values are so gloriously unveiled as the very obverse of those of the boarding house. Also of those of Rose and Pinkie, even though Mr Prest, apparently similar to Ida Arnold, is drawn from a very different standpoint. The self-regarding ‘Romans’ seem merely childish, wasteful of joy, with their pallid obsession with sin, in the face of Mr Prest, who deals in reality yet has ‘the gift of public purification’. He imprints his giant personality upon the theatre and, in return, what earthy magic ensues and elevates!
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