Craven House

by Patrick Hamilton, Will Self

Genres: Classics; Friendship; Literary Fiction; Sagas; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English boarding house, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way down - and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on - the young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped out the territory that he would make, uniquely, his own.

Although many of Hamilton's lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work. The inmates of Craven House have their foibles, but most are indulgently treated by an author whose world view has yet to harden from scepticism into cynicism.

The generational conflicts of Hamilton's own youth thread throughout the narrative, with hair bobbing and dancing as the battle lines. That perennial of the 1920s bourgeoisie, the 'servant problem', is never far from the surface, and tensions crescendo gradually to a resolution one climactic dinnertime.

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 416

Sample

By the time I reached class consciousness, in the mid-sixties, my grandparents had stopped dressing for dinner. They were down to one servant, as well – Doris the cook, who was famous in the family for her legendary chocolate cakes; comestibles of such heaviness and density that my father claimed, were you to not masticate them effectively, the sharp end of a slice might give you an ulcer. Doris wasn’t even a proper servant – she certainly didn’t live in, and when my father and his parents were a little sozzled, they’d often fall to reminiscing about their former servants: my father’s much-loved nurse, Annie, and their onetime housemaid, Louie, who’d married a gas fitter and moved to Shoreham shortly before the Second War. The increasing shabbiness of my grandparents’ gentility wasn’t a function of declining wealth, but rather of a wholesale social and technological transformation: the replacement of domestic labour by labour-saving devices in the middle years of the twentieth century, combined with the final substitution of stock dividends for rental incomes.

If I dwell on the subject now it’s for two reasons: Firstly, because this is the sort of world portrayed in Patrick Hamilton’s novel, Craven House, written when he was only twenty-one; and secondly, because reading it I realise that the era when I knew my grandparents’ house – with its obsolete dumb waiter and disused electric bells (once used to summon servants from the lower depths) – is more distant from the present than the period when the novel is set is from it. In other words: I feel I have a closer and more intuitive understanding of the mores of Miss Hatt and her ‘sort of paying guests’ than many contemporary readers probably have of the sixties. I can remember maiden aunts in black taffeta and blacker bombazine; I can recall people who said ‘jolly japes’ without a smidgeon of irony, before asking if I’d like a smidgeon more of Doris’s chocolate cake – cake which my grandfather did indeed masticate (a word he used without any suspicion we’d hear it as a double-entendre) the forty times he religiously dedicated to every other mortifying mouthful of the four meals they took per day, without fail.

But it was my own parents who were perhaps more evocative of the craven attitudes of Mr and Mrs Spicer, Mrs Nixon, Major Wildman and Miss Hoare. In common with other epigones, my father and mother could never get used to having to ‘do’ for themselves: cooking, cleaning and all other domestic chores were always a terrible – and more importantly unjust – imposition; while any larger or odder jobs would require a ‘little man’ to be summoned. In the interminable Craven House lunches, teas and suppers so excruciatingly limned by Hamilton, I see the cold collations and coronation chicken of my own childhood – and recall also the hideous sense of circumscription there was in all one might do and say and think: a culture condensed out of the milk of human unkindness. Set, then, in a genteel boarding house, and recounted in three distinct sections: pre-First World War, wartime and post-war, what is Craven House besides a portrait of the former rentier class driven to the expediency of renting their own accommodation? Well, it’s also a rather chilling portrayal of the strange psychosexual fog that wreathed the late Victorians – a fog that becomes tangible (not that anyone would want to touch it) in the form of Cornelius Spicer’s nightshirt, which he dons as sort of male burqa to protect his modesty and most likely his wife’s near-virginity.

The sexlessness of the Spicers is only compounded by his prurience and her prudery – together with Miss Hatt, the spinster chatelaine of this West London suburban villa, they form a peculiarly loveless triangle. Hamilton – at this stage still a tyro when it came to writing in the vernacular – allocates earthier desires only to Aud (Audrey) and Eed (Edith), the servants still being summoned from the lower depths; although, as the years pass, they answer the bell with less and less deference. The Künstlerroman lying at core of the novel’s plotting, and its predictable intersection with the trajectory of Hamilton’s own young life, shouldn’t detract from the reader’s enjoyment any more than does his empurpled prose – writing is seldom a very young person’s metier, for an obvious reason: lack of experience – since to write of the world one must, perforce, know it. Hamilton flies past the first net this deficiency presents by writing emphatically about what he knows, his entire young life having been engaged in a slalom down the slippery slopes of the English class system, from home to rented house to a succession of craven boarding houses.

But far more skilled an evasion consists in this young writer having the native wit and perspicacity to sense that his own milieu was both a sort of botched world-entire in its own right, and that its queered social relations were a microcosm of the entire world without. Add to this an acute ear for the inanities of human intercourse and an acuminate eye for the bedevilling details of human appearance, and you have the necessary equipment for building a fictional cosmos of your own. That there’s no ‘Hamiltonia’ to march with the borders of Greeneland, or be encroached on by Orwellian suburbia, is perhaps a function of how he expanded the territory. The seedy world of the downwardly mobile upper middle classes should’ve led, fairly logically, to his colonisation of the deathly dull realms of the genteel English lower middle class, since the two moieties have always had more in common than they do with the rather more cosmopolitan and intellectually inclined group they flank. It was Hamilton’s fascination with the mechanics of obsession – which, as the thirties wore on he was able to experience in his own alcohol – and sexually fuelled abrasion – that, quite as much as his characteristically interwar middle class self-hatred, led him into the servants’ quarters just as they, in turn, were opening out to a wider world.

The books that ensued embellished all of the figures he first found in the worn-down carpets of Craven House – embellished and expanded them, until their vicious curlicues and useless geometries were inscribed right across the battered face of raddled old London. And it is this status – as a great London writer – that Craven House first tentatively proclaims.

 

Will Self, London, 2016

I think that this new edition of Craven House, in which some alterations have been made from the original version, requires one or two remarks as preface.

In February, 1941, I had a letter from Michael Sadleir (whose firm first published the book in 1926), in which he said:

 

I have been re-reading Craven House. It is much more congested in its earlier chapters than I had remembered. Your technique was, I suppose, a new experiment in those days, and you were tempted to overdo it. As it gets on it settles down to a more controlled method.

Of the high spots which I remembered Mr Spicer’s Tramp did not get me as it used to, but the two maids in the kitchen impressed me much more. The little boys were still superb, the tube-journey ditto, and I laughed myself quite silly over the Russian Lady. The book is grand entertainment. If only it was simpler at the beginning! I suppose it’s hopeless to ask you to go over it for a new edition. It ought to be a standard thing of its kind, but many readers must have been baffled by the involutions and parentheses of those early chapters.

With this encouragement I re-read the book, which I had not looked into for ten years. I found that less could be done about these faults of style than I had hoped. The book certainly gets better as it goes along, but throughout intermittently it shows traces of the bias I had at that time – the delight in the odd, longer word instead of the direct, simpler one – the long (and at times purely facetious) construction instead of the natural one – the ‘that lady’ instead of ‘she’, the ‘that gentleman’ instead of ‘he’, the ‘whereupon’ instead of ‘then’.

Nevertheless it seemed to me that any attempt to remedy this in a really thoroughgoing manner would destroy the very things which give the book its quality, its gusto, its freshness and its high spirits, which, perhaps, were only able to express themselves in this rather uncouth way. So apart from certain really outrageous passages and certain places where the congestion of style actually clouds the meaning, I have not, purely as regards style, made very many alterations for this edition.

A fault in the book which Michael Sadleir did not mention is its occasional sentimentality. I do not know that that matters much: in a book of this sort a little sentimentality is probably all to the good. What, however, is terrible is a mixture of sentimentality and archness. I imagine there are few authors who do not find things of this sort in their early work – few authors who do not, when reading such passages, slowly redden with shame to the roots of their hair. Needless to say I have tried ruthlessly to delete all such passages, though some may remain without my being aware of it.

Lastly there is the question of a book seriously ‘dating’ after sixteen years – a thing which it might easily not do after six years or sixty. As the first part deals with a period before the last war, it is dated intentionally, and so the question does not arise; and I do not think the latter part reads too awkwardly in this respect. Slightly excited references to ‘bobbed hair’ struck me as being the outstanding example of something about which nothing really effectual can be done in a new edition.

I have spoken of authors slowly reddening to the roots of their hair over passages in their early books. Sometimes they do this over their early books from start to finish. Although it was written when I was only twenty-one, I can definitely say that Craven House does not come into this class; and that if it can still find readers, I should still like it to be read.

 

P.H.

A momentous evening dinner in nineteen hundred and eleven: a little girl and a little boy go to bed.

 

The hour after lunch found Keymer Gardens in a state of grey and windless somnolescence. A pause, almost devout, and so unanimous as to have an air of being prearranged, overtook the whole neighbourhood, though there remained an abundance of petty noises. From one or two of the houses there might yet be heard the remote clatter of the washing-up, and from others, where the servants had not already had their meal, the hiss and spit of frying. A sweep was crying in a strained and inconsolable manner from some street far away; little boys and girls were making their way, less unwillingly than with vagrant buoyancy, to school; a maid dashed out to post a letter, and remained talking to a lady at the top of her basement steps. In addition to which the sound of the Southam Green High Road, a quarter of a mile distant, and the sound of all London behind it, beat faintly yet incessantly, like the roar of a waveless sea, upon the inured ears of the inhabitants. Such noises, nevertheless, were unable to disturb the lazy peace manifest in Keymer Gardens. They served, rather, to emphasise the hush.

In this state Keymer Gardens remained for two hours, under a lowering sky; so that towards the end of that time the stillness had amounted to little less than enchantment. But the postman came at last, with no nonsense about him, and he put an end to it. Little front gates shrieked open at his advance: he strode fearlessly up to front doors, played his own curt personality upon them with the knocker expressly supplied for him, and crossed the road briskly to do the same again. By the time his final ‘Ta-tat-at’ was muttering at the end of the road, Keymer Gardens was wide awake and ready for tea. And while tea was yet in preparation, the lamp-lighter, a being as noiseless and insinuating as the darkening firmament itself, brought the evening.

Almost at once the atmosphere was charged with life. A motor car, like a flying particle from the mass of noise in the High Road, whirred down the main avenue that passed Keymer Gardens on its way to Kew; and above the noise of the High Road rose the agonised call of the newspaper sellers. Front doors were slammed, kindly footsteps rang through the streets, dogs were summoned by shrill voices, pink lights appeared in cosy dining-room windows, somebody beat a mat maliciously in a garden; factory hooters bewailed urgently, answering each other in vague, wakeful distances; and the District Trains, moaning home to Southam Green Station with greater frequency, brought the first silent batches of men and women from the City, hastening as it were conspiratorially to their homes.

At six o’clock, from Craven House, which was the large house at the corner of Keymer Gardens, a middle-aged woman came out, with a leather shopping bag.

 

Six o’clock was by no means the customary hour for Miss Hatt’s shopping, but she had undergone an excessively arduous and dusty day within, preparing for her new guest – the Major (she was calling him the Major already!) and she had told herself that a little breath of fresh air could do her no harm. The notion of a walk for the mere sake of walking, however, though not an unthinkable notion, was a notion simply absent in Miss Hatt’s bland mentality. There were such things as Sunday Walks, of course, or strictly Appetising or Digestive Walks, and there were even Lovers’ Walks, but all of these could be said to have their own goal, and no other sort of irregular and unlocalised Walk was allowed.

It was, therefore, in some sort of propitiation to these axioms that Miss Hatt had remarked to her cook, Edith, that she would herself go and bring back the Fish. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘you can never trust these people, and I want to get a little fruit, too.’

To which Edith had rejoined ‘Yes’m,’ under her breath, and without chancing an encounter with Miss Hatt’s eyes; for Edith had been for several days cherishing a belief that her mistress had thought twice and better about the fish.

Fish, indeed, as a first course, was an entirely new departure, and as Miss Hatt made towards the High Road, there yet lingered some doubts as to the advisability – nay, safety – of its introduction. She was nevertheless convinced that she was a little too far compromised to withdraw now. When, two days ago, the retired Major Wildman stood taking his leave at the door of Craven House – a captured, though still verbally uncommitted and airy-gestured, paying guest – he remarked, with his winning smile, ‘I must warn you in time that you would find me a very hearty eater, Miss Ah – Hatt’; and Miss Hatt, already a little intoxicated by her own timid but glib reiterations of the beautiful luck and blessings falling in the course of nature upon a Major taking up residence in such a house, capped the ecstasies of hot water at all times of the day, fires in the bedrooms, hot-water bottles, and three towels changed twice in the week, with the rash and thoughtless promise, ‘Oh, yes? Well, we have a five-course dinner, you know. That’d be starting with fish, you know… and dessert…’

To say that the Major’s eyes lit on the utterance of this falsehood would be to put the case in a wrong light, but he murmured ‘Really?’ in a style altogether readable as fervour, and it was only after he had left that Miss Hatt realised to the full the trying implications of her little falling-away. In the first place there were Mrs Nixon and her young daughter – her only other guests (as guests) – to be considered. Mrs Nixon had hitherto learnt to expect nothing before the joint in the evening fare, and to regard the dessert, as it lay chilly upon the table, more in its traditional and ornamental aspects than otherwise. It would most certainly not do now to let Mrs Nixon associate the inauguration of a new first course with the appearance of Major Wildman.

Miss Hatt thought she had two weeks’ grace, however, and seeing that she must prepare the way for the change at once, had a vague idea that she might cunningly break the news to Mrs Nixon with, perhaps, a little thin soup one evening; and leading her gracefully on to small portions of, say, Cauliflower au Gratin on the next, bring her up through a deft Welsh Rarebit, or soft roes on toast, to Fish. This projected finesse was ruined at the outset, however, by a letter from the Major, saying that he would like to come to Craven House in two days’ time. Miss Hatt was thus compelled to choose between the finer shades of her catering honour with Mrs Nixon, and her promise to the Major; and she plumped for the Major, as that gentleman, who was bringing his little boy with him to go to school, bid fair to be a Permanent. And though such an expression as Permanent is a very coarse and bitter expression to employ in such a connection, a Permanent was what Miss Hatt desired more than anything else in the world.

Emerging from the dark, aloof silence of the Green that gave its name to the neighbourhood, Miss Hatt came into the Southam Green High Road.

This was as bright and noisy as a fair. The trams thundered down a littered thoroughfare, and the shops glittered and hummed with humanity – humanity bustled at the grocers; deafened at the butchers; brusquely rattled at, with brown paper bags, at the fruiterers; bewildered at the post office; deferred to at the drapers; confidentially advised at the jewellers; curious and handling at the bazaars; limply appealed to from the edge of the pavement; a little sad and tense at the chemists; newly respiring and bravely conversational at the public houses, and everywhere crowded.

Miss Hatt was all at once taken with a mood of contentment verging on exultation. This was partly due to the thick sights and sounds around her, partly to a flowing, nervous relief after a hard day indoors, and partly to the two cups full of tea that she had consumed before coming out.

She felt very contented and very mellow altogether. She was contented in her life – her position – her clean and sturdy house – her new maid, Audrey (a treasure, she believed) – her glittering new pince-nez, which considerably clarified the whole quality of life itself – Major Wildman – Mrs Nixon – and last, and perhaps least, her two Old Best Friends, Mr and Mrs Spicer.

For Mr and Mrs Spicer were, and always had been, prominent and inescapable figures in Miss Hatt’s life. Indeed, even at school she had been the oldest, best friend of Mrs Spicer, who was then merely Letty Craik; and she had known Mr Spicer when he was merely Clifford Spicer, a very humorous young man, and they had all been immense companions and intriguers together. More, she had participated in certain sunny, rare, faded, laughing, Bicycling days, ten years later, when they had all three sped about the country on the most beautiful and lunching-out, if not picnicking, expeditions; and when Mr Spicer had first commenced certain vague leerings, double meanings, recondite reticences, and similar astonishing mysteries culminating in the selection of a Mrs Clifford Spicer. In fact, such a very close and intimate friend with Mr and Mrs Spicer was Miss Hatt, at this period, that it was almost a matter of inward doubts, from time to time, as to the exact lady in whose favour were the vague leerings, double meanings, recondite reticences, and similar astonishing mysteries.

Time, of course, cleared these doubts in its own way, and the winter following that bicycling summer witnessed the engagement of Clifford Spicer to Letty Craik; and some years later they were married. The connection with Miss Hatt was by no means dropped on this score, however, and in the seven years since that fluttering and pious day, they had happily maintained the trio. It was, indeed, the project of Mr and Mrs Spicer staying with her, and so helping with the expenses, that had first induced Miss Hatt to take over Craven House, which would otherwise have been a little too large both for her intentions and her personal funds. It nevertheless remained all her own, and she had furnished it entirely herself.

They had been settled here together for some five months, and it had proved still to be a house rather too large for their needs, when Mr Spicer had been visited modestly by the idea of Miss Hatt taking paying guests. Even so delicate shirking of the issue as was conveyed in the expression Paying Guest, was distasteful to Mr and Mrs Spicer, and Miss Hatt, and was most tremulously dodged. Miss Hatt once went so far as to utter, ‘Sort of paying guests, you know,’ but it was tacitly regarded as an ill-considered utterance, and Mr Spicer was content to allude very distantly to an Agreement, an Arrangement, or an Understanding. ‘Three guineas, or something like that…’ murmured Miss Hatt, with shuddering timidity…

It was nevertheless an exceedingly happy inspiration, judged apart from the ecstasy of fertile planning that took place in the drawing-room one night; for it bid fair to solve the Long Evening Problem, which was becoming a very acute and painful problem to Mr and Mrs Spicer, and Miss Hatt. For it had taken only three months’ residence at Craven House to exhaust the little fund of external entertainment remaining in each other’s personality. And though there was the Piano, upon which Mrs Spicer could deliver an unimpeachable performance to her placid and respectfully alert man; and though there was the Southam Green Empire, to which they paid a weekly visit; and though they sometimes turned the lights down in the drawing-room, and sat about the glowing fire wilfully to exude middle-aged comfort and romance (with an occasional rather ghastly and aghast interlocking of hands from the mated pair), the evenings on the whole were reaching a pitch of ennui and amiability almost intolerable – if not positively approaching the danger mark. For one evening the Spicers took their courage into both hands and read a newspaper and a novel for an hour and a half by the clock, like perfect limpets against the bright conversational wrenches of a knitting Miss Hatt; until at last that lady, after poking the fire with an efficiency and rapidity that carried an unquestionable Hint, was driven to say, ‘Well, then, I’d better be going up to bed, then,’ to which Mrs Spicer replied, ‘Very well, my dear,’ without raising her eyes. The first cross word between them.

The installation of Mrs Nixon and her daughter had served to lighten this burden already, though Mrs Nixon did not allow her little daughter to stay up to dinner, and retired herself soon afterwards. And Major Wildman came this evening, and there were two more rooms to be filled.

Miss Hatt made her way to the fishmongers, where she was treated with curt deference, and where, amidst the bright, glittering dead bodies of the fish, whose morose and blood-streaked heads were even past mute criticism of the outrage done upon them, she watched her own prey, as it was sliced open, with a fascinating virtuosity, for her easier consumption. Emerging without a tremor, she went on further to buy apples and bananas; arranged the goods in her leather shopping bag, lifted her head a little to express finality, and made for home.

She crossed the Green again and passed the large Town Hall on her left. Outside this a bill was displayed, advising the Southam Green public that a free lecture on Theosophy would be delivered next Tuesday in the Houghton Room.

‘This really is the most wonderful place,’ thought Miss Hatt. ‘Really it is. Seven minutes’ walk from the High Road. Eight minutes’ from the station. The Empire. Buses and trams to anywhere you want. Free Library… and now a free lecture. We must go to that. Theosophy…’

She pondered, a few moments, in a friendly and detached way, upon the adventures awaiting her eternal soul. ‘Theosophy. That’s reincarnation, isn’t it?’ she told herself. Then she wondered whether there would be a silver collection, in which case it would be necessary to fortify oneself with a sixpence.

 

The Major and his little son have arrived. A capacious winter overcoat in the hall, a silk scarf, and a small boy’s bowler hat – these the foreboding centre of a little world of silence.

Faintly from the basement come sounds of the oven door slamming, and the servants calling to each other. Then Audrey, the young maid of sixteen, comes up the stairs, and softly as any conspirator, proceeds to set the scene.

She lights the gas in the drawing-room, and stirs the fire. From the little room next door, known as the Study, the parrot mutters ‘Ladysmith,’ in a feverish undertone. ‘What, Polly?’ Audrey answers. ‘Ladysmith, eh?’ But there is a hollow ring in her quiet voice, and no reply from the bird.

Audrey then enters the dining-room, lights the gas, and starts to lay the table. When she has finished this, she hears light footsteps running down the stairs and confronts Miss Hatt at the door.

‘Oh, Audrey. You managing all right?’

‘Yes. Quite all right, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.’ She gazes at Miss Hatt, at once dreamy and alert.

‘Have you done the table and everything in here?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I think you’ll find that everything is quite Shipshape,’ says Audrey, gravely nautical.

‘Oh, very well,’ says Miss Hatt. ‘Yes. That seems all right. Yes.’ And then, responding, possibly, to the sailor’s atmosphere introduced, she adds, ‘You’d best be getting down below.’

Swift as her mistress’s thought, for this is in nineteen hundred and eleven, Audrey runs down to the kitchen.

Miss Hatt remains for a moment to scan the table with her practised eyes, appears to be content, and goes into the drawing-room. Here she stirs the fire, lifts the cover of the piano, opens a large volume of Chopin’s works, and lays it upon the stool; brings forth a calf-bound volume of Kipling’s Poetry from a little book cabinet, and lays it on the little centre table; removes a dusty calendar, shifts the chairs and the sofa, and performs other homely and artistic details upon a scene guaranteed to charm the retired and widowed military gentleman now upstairs. At this moment she is joined by Mrs Spicer. Mrs Spicer differs as much from her old school companion in outward parts as she resembles her in all matters of inward personality. For whereas Miss Hatt is stoutish, with chubby pink cheeks, and the general bearing of a merry sparrow taking the sun, the other lady is skinny and ashen in every particular. They are both short, however, and both wear glittering pince-nez, and both do their hair the same way, and wear the same kind of beads and brooches. And they both have the same merry voice, and they share together an infinite zest and capability for brightly rem. . .