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What emergency could possibly justify omnipresent bureaucratic hectoring?
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.”
Continue reading the piece here at The American Conservative
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.