Living with Strangers

Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film

Chiara Briganti, Kathy Mezei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000182026
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

Living with Strangers examines the history and cultural representation of bed-sitting rooms and boarding houses in England from the early twentieth century to the present. Providing a historical overview, the authors explore how these alternative domestic spaces came to provide shelter for a diverse demographic of working women and men, retired army officers, gay people, students, bohemians, writers, artists, performers, migrants and asylum seekers, as well as shady figures and criminals. Drawing on historical records, case studies, and examples from literature, art, and film, the book examines how the prevalence and significance of bedsits and boarding houses in novels, plays, detective stories, Ealing comedies, and contemporary fiction and film produced its own genre of narrative. The nine chapters are written by an international range of established and emerging scholars in the fields of literary studies, art and film history, political theory, queer studies and cultural studies. A lively, highly original study, Living with Strangers makes a significant contribution to the cross-disciplinary field of home studies and provides insight into a crucial aspect of British cultural history. It is essential reading for students and researchers in anthropology, history, literary studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, film studies and cultural studies.

CHAPTER 1
ASPIDISTRAS AND DIVANS: TRANSIENT SPACES IN THE LONDON NOVEL, 1920s TO 1940s

Kathy Mezei and Chiara Briganti

The typist home at tea time, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland, 1922 (1963: 71)

Eliot’s image of the lives of young working women, who earn a pittance and often live in cramped, shared accommodation, evokes the ubiquitous presence of bedsits and boarding houses in interwar London. These transitory spaces frequently formed the narrative frame for writers probing ways to express the inner self and investigating the ordinary lives and homes of an increasing mobile working and middle-class population.

Dwelling and narrative

‘A book could be written on the boarding-house mind …’ Patricia Brent, Spinster (Jenkins 1918: 277)

While novels offer effective vehicles for conveying the experience and effects of dwelling spaces upon the psyche and the body, houses and rooms reciprocate by contributing to the architecture of the novel. In the novels that we examine in this chapter (George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Margaret Storm Jameson’s A Day Off, Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark, Patrick Hamilton’s Craven House and The Slaves of Solitude and Norah Hoult’s House Under Mars), Wells’s wilderness of ‘streets of dingy grey houses’ (see ‘Introduction’, this volume: p.1) is foregrounded, and the characters appear unhoused.¹

Bedsitter literary works (notably Jameson’s and Rhys’s)² explore an individual’s inner consciousness and his or her struggle with agency. In contrast, the boarding-house genre (which includes guest houses, private hotels, hostels for women), as exemplified by Patrick Hamilton’s Craven House and The Slaves of Solitude and Norah Hoult’s House Under Mars, usually investigates a community framed by the restrictive traditions, social practices and spaces of this communal dwelling.³ Although playful with language and speech patterns, these boarding-house novels adopt the conventions of realism; in fact, in Hamilton’s case one could speak of a form of hyperrealism comparable to that of Edward Hopper, who was active at the same time and whose interiors reflected a similar malaise.

While we agree with Virginia Woolf that ‘novels are in the first place about people, and only in the second about the houses they live in’ (1924: 19), we also concur with Andrew Thacker’s argument that locations ‘can and should be examined historically and with an awareness of how diverse spaces can reflect, produce or resist forms of power’ (2005–06: 60). The inhabited space of the bedsit/boarding house novel reflects specific social and personal dilemmas unlike, for example, those reflected by the detective novel, the country-house novel, the rural novel, the domestic novel and the metropolitan novel, which are saturated with memories and with personal and social histories that inflect their narratives. In contrast, the bedsit/boarding house is merely the indifferent repository of lives that leave behind few traces other than marks on the wall, a dusty aspidistra, Eliot’s mixed-use divan or the odd cast-offbit of furniture. When a character in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927) remarks that people often live ‘under the compulsion of their furniture’ (108), he expresses the power of olfactory, haptic and visual depictions of objects in lodgings – bed, chair, carpet, curtains, aspidistra – to reveal identities under construction. J. B. Priestley and Jean Rhys, for example, are adept at capturing the coerciveness and indifference of these transient spaces to their inhabitants by anthropomorphizing bedsits – thus, a peevish tone opens Good Morning, Midnight: ‘“Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes, No?”’ (Rhys 1986: 9), while in Priestley’s Angel Pavement, ‘The [very small] bed-sitting-room … did not like being sat in, resented the sight of a cup of tea and a biscuit’ (1930: 137). Such hostile rooms and furnishings invoke the defamiliarization engendered by the fusion of ‘strangeness and familiarity’ common to rented accommodations and the ‘entanglement of strangers in temporary intimacy’ (Newton 2010: 179, 176). All that remains in these dwellings that mock any effort of their inhabitants to be remembered is ‘the lotus odour’ of the ‘indolence and unhappiness’ of ‘unemployed servant girls, and the spoiled beauties of the slums’ (Hamilton 1929: 231). Furthermore, in the case of rented rooms, the lodger enters an already furnished space normalized and policed and with little choice as to décor, which at best would allow for ‘signs that the personality of the tenants had struggled with that of the landlady’ (Agatha Christie 1934: 8).⁴ For, as A. E. Coppard put it in a 1929 short story, more often the unspoken rule would be ‘my [the landlady’s] mantelpiece is the altar of my majolica and my ormolu; thou shall have none other gods but mine’ (1920: 16). While Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton have noted that ‘household objects constitute an ecology of signs that reflects as well as shapes the pattern of the owner’s self’ (1981: 17, authors’ italics),⁵ we would argue that in the case of the lodger, household objects constitute an ecology of signs that shape rather than reflect the pattern of the owner’s self.

Domestic rooms and their objects therefore play significant performative roles.⁶ In Mavis Doriel Hay’s golden age detective novel, Murder Underground (1934), which centres on the residents of a boarding house in Hampstead, the key to the mystery literally lies in the murder victim’s armchair. Together with the performance of everyday life, the navigation of the inner, confined space of the room and the outer, sometimes treacherous, spaces of hallway, stairs, lounge, dining room and city streets inevitably produces its own genre of narrative. In these ‘narratives of merging’ (Newton 2010: 178) and transience, bound by the conventions of shared lodging, the living quarters thus became a narratological device for introducing and shaping characters – lodgers, visitors invited and uninvited, landlords and landladies, their children and relatives and household servants. For instance, House Under Mars introduces us to the inhabitants by the device of Mrs Bayliss entering and (albeit cursorily) cleaning each room. Through this process, the reader is conducted on a tour of the house and its tenants, of social interactions and conventions (de Certeau 1984: 119).⁷

Bedsits, women and bachelors

Eight o’clock in the morning. Miss Ada Moss lay in a black iron bedstead, staring up at the ceiling. Her room, a Bloomsbury top-floor back, smelled of soot and face powder and the paper of fried potatoes she brought in for supper the night before. (Katherine Mansfield 1962: 127)

During the early twentieth century, the bedsit in fiction became known as a place ‘fit and proper for the woman who is neither an Angel in the House nor a mistress of the streets’ (Harvey 2008: 169). At the same time, its material existence gave rise to representations strongly inflected by gender-determined desires and terrors. Following the removal of the Sexual Disqualification Act of 1919 and as more women like Eliot’s typist moved to the city and entered the work force, the bedsit came to symbolize ‘female creativity and freedom’ (169). However, while for ‘the modern woman’ in search of economic and sexual independence the bedsit might indeed signal freedom from tiresome domestic obligations and the anticipation of adventure, for single men, unemployed and older women, it could connote the terror of downward mobility and rootlessness, ‘a locus of economic hardship and social deprivation … the family home slashed to meanness’ (169).⁸ For instance, to an impoverished widow and her daughter, bedsits in London meant ‘[F]rowsy landladies, dirty children on the stairs, fellow-lodgers who always seem to be half-castes, haddocks for breakfast that aren’t quite – quite and so on’ (Christie 1934: 9).

The ageing protagonist of Winifred Holtby’s Poor Caroline is one of an army of ‘pious maiden ladies in seaside boarding houses’ (1985: 51). At dinner she may have sat next to Aunt Ellen, a character in Lettice Cooper’s The New House (1936). Elderly, single, alone, Aunt Ellen reflects: ‘this was not a real house, but a place of hire and bargain, [where] people were supplied with the minimum of everything they would put up with’ (1987: 282). By contrast, a bedsit in London provides her niece Rhoda with an escape from a tyrannical and manipulative mother. To H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, the ‘little bed-sitting-room was like a lair, and she went from it into this vast, dun world, with its smoke-grey houses, its glaring streets of shops, its dark streets … much as an animal goes out to seek food’ (1980: 105). For the lonely, elderly protagonist of Katherine Mansfield’s poignant story, ‘Miss Brill’, who retreats into her ‘little dark room – her room like a cupboard’, the room is a synecdoche of the spinster’s crushed spirit (1964: 191).⁹ On the other hand, Mary Datchet’s room in Woolf’s 1919 Night and Day strikes the beautiful and upper-class Katharine Hilbery, ‘as enviably free; in such a room one could work – one could have a life of one’s own’ (1976: 252).¹⁰ Katharine would not have felt so envious of the painter, Nina Hamnett. Moving to London at twenty-one, Hamnett couldn’t have found a better address for the future Queen of Bohemia than Graft on Street, Fitzroy Square. However, ‘[t]here were bugs in it. I chased them with a can of petrol. I slept there sometimes but generally went home as I could not afford much to eat during the day-time and there was always food at home’ (1932: 34).

In Voyage in the Dark, Anna Morgan, a chorus girl from the West Indies who can never warm herself in London’s poorly heated bedsits, has no family relations or useful employment to which to resort.¹¹ As she feels the walls of her shabby room closing in on her, she laments: ‘this damned room’s getting smaller and smaller’ (1982: 26). A Day Off chronicles a harrowing day in the life of a middle-aged woman who faces destitution after having been abandoned by her lover and who establishes a strange symbiosis with her room, the faded wallpaper, the cracks in the ceiling. Jameson’s character and situation have much in common with the protagonist of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Pictures’, a story which, like Jameson’s, takes place in one day. Ada Moss is an ageing singer out of work who also lives in depressing surroundings, endures the discomfort of a body that has become heavy and unsightly, and experiences a fearful negotiation with the city and the spectre of destitution. If the woman in Jameson’s story has a symbiotic relationship with her room, the invisibility of Mansfield’s character is anticipated in her ‘Bloomsbury topfloor back’. In both cases their fates depend on their being able to attract a man and keep him. Jameson’s character faces starvation after being deserted by her lover; Mansfield’s story ends showing Ada Moss only able to postpone it by going off with a stranger, a stout man who ‘like[s] ‘em firm and well covered’ (1962: 136). Their precarious situation is a foreshadowing of the dark fate that awaits the younger Anna in Voyage in the Dark.

Gordon Comstock, the embittered aspiring poet in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, moves from dingy neighbourhoods that contrive to keep up ‘a mingy, lower-middle-class decency’ (1954: 30) into increasingly filthy kips, conducting his rejection of ‘a civilisation of stockbrokers and their lipsticked wives’ in a slum attic, the squalor of which parallels the deterioration of his habits (129): ‘His bed-sitting-room was eight shillings a week and was just under the roof … it was the kind of life he wanted … There was a film of dust on everything. In the fender there was always a greasy frying-pan and a couple of plates coated with the remnants of fried eggs. … and a poor weedy aspidistra’ (253–255).

In the meanwhile, Gordon’s sister Julia clings to a form of dignity in her bedsitting, ‘with an accent on sitting’, (152) which represents the ‘typical submerged life of the penniless unmarried woman’ (73). This space has literally fed on her body: ‘every one of her scraps of furniture, collected over intervals of years, represented a period of semi-starvation’ (152).

While for many female characters the bedsit is either happily embraced as an escape from domesticity and family obligations, or bravely accepted out of economic necessity, for Gordon Comstock it represents the dreary alienation of urban life, the ills of capitalism and the interchangeability of the commodified interior and the commodified body. To him, both bedsits and boarding houses are symbolic of urban decay and invoke entrapment. Echoing the ni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Series Preface: Why Home?
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Living with Strangers
• 1 Aspidistras and Divans: Transient Spaces in the London Novel, 1920s to 1940s
• 2 Immortal Apples and Eternal Eggs: Life and Still Life in the Bedsits of Bloomsbury
• 3 Writing in a Bedsitter: Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing
• 4 In a Queer Room, 1900–70 Mark Armstrong
• 5 Thieves in the House: Ealing Comedy and the Criminal Lodger
• 6 Cold Rooms in the Post-War London Novel
• 7 London’s Post-War Housing and the Classic Detective Novel: Allingham, Christie, Marsh
• 8 Precarious Living in the Films of Ken Loach
• 9 Leave to Remain: Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum
• Index