Writing during the period of the Harlem renaissance in 1940, Langston Hughes reflects the times:
Landlord, landlord
My roof has sprung a leak.
Don’t you ’member I told you about it
Way last week?
Hughes’ thrillingly lyrical reportage in one of my favourite poems, The Ballad of the Landlord, is a familiar gripe about, among other things, the disrepair that plagues thousands of tenants.
He reminds us of what we already know: the rent is too damn high. In Britain, the leaks have been sprung, the rents are the highest on record, and there seems to be no ready fixes. Housing, and the way we live, is in crisis. This week, as interest rates reached record highs, with tenants running out of solutions, people took to Twitter to share stories. And there was an inevitable focus on landlords, potential rent hikes and the Renters Reform Bill, which potentially gives landlords new powers to police “antisocial behaviour” which could lead to eviction.
There is are a long literary history of writing about landlords. They appear in not only for comic relief, or to serve a moral purpose, but to tell us something about society at any given time. For Dickens, the landlord provided a perfect motif of inequality when the acquisition of housing made the man. He condemned slum landlords in Oliver Twist and Bleak House.
These stories tell us something about housing conditions and power, by placing us between the walls where history happens – people’s homes. Landlords appear in the pages of poems and novels, where the pendulums swing between the benevolent to the macabre.
Take Doyle’s landlady to Sherlock Holmes, Mrs Hudson, introduced in 1887, who acts as a maternal stand-in housekeeper, nanny and personal assistant who provides food and a blind eye to dangerous behaviour. Watson suggests in The Adventures of the Dying Detective, that Mrs Hudson was able to overlook Holmes being “the very worst tenant in London” thanks to his “princely payments”. The message is clear: the great Holmes is brilliant enough, or at least rich enough, to be able to manipulate any structural power around him to avoid punishment – even a landlady.
Not all landladies are destined to serve. The other side of the swing presents Mrs Wisbeach, in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a strict landlady devastatingly described as “one of those malignant respectable women who keep lodging-houses. Age about 45, stout but active, with a pink … horribly observant face, beautifully grey hair, and a permanent grievance”. Permanent grievance? Sounds familiar.
In his 1959 short story The Landlady, Roald Dahl shatters the motif of the maternal landlady beyond recognition. The nameless protagonist illustrates how the fallout of loss after the war had played havoc with traditional roles. In longing for her son, this landlady is a long way from Mrs Hudson, changed by the times, into something else – a serial killer. Despite the offer of a cheap room, we’re reminded that once the door is closed we’re at her mercy. Dahl’s landlady, not unlike many of my own, still disrupts a good night’s sleep.
Not all are beyond reproach. In Andrea Levy’s 2004’s novel Small Island, set in Britain in 1948, landlady Queenie pushes the social dial forward by performing a radical act out of desperation – renting her house on Connaught Street to Black lodgers. She catches the ire of local people when an enraged neighbour stops her: “Those kinds of people do not belong here!” she bellows at her. Later in the novel, her husband Gilbert, returns home from the second world war and is livid to find out how she has been financially supporting herself, asking, “Did they have to be coloured?” These exchanges remind us that racist policies have long infected housing acquisition – but amid the racist handwritten landlady notices, there has been the odd Queenie. New frictions tell new stories: Liv Little’s novel Rosewater, published this year, opens with an eviction served not by a locatable individual but the faceless apparition of J&P Housing association, a very modern aggressor in the most modern of crises.
The enduring relationship of landlords and ladies in writing tells us much about power and changing society through the ages. They appear in literature, sometimes at the centre, sometimes in the shadows, reminding us of lives lived at the behest of other people.
Hughes’ ballad of course, is not limited to disrepair. He focuses on the sharp edge of the crisis that Black tenants face – a particularity where discrimination means that a complaint might lead to a police call. So then, Hughes is under no illusion about where power lives. He tells us something precise about housing conditions in 1940s America, but his push back could be a rallying cry for tenants across the UK today:
Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that’s Ten Bucks more’n I’ll pay you
Till you fix this house up new
• All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In by Kieran Yates is out now (Simon & Schuster £14.99) To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
