I went today to one of the three events that the Brighton Festival have included to mark the centenary of his birth (in Hove). I missed the one with Doris Lessing and had to choose between one of two today, so I picked one with his two biographers, Nigel Jones and Sean French, which was fascinating. Both Jones and French were good talkers and the chair, whose name I’m sorry to say I missed, but was from the University of Sussex’s creative writing course, didn’t have to do much to keep discussion going
The only criticism of the event I can suggest is that a celebration of Patrick Hamilton should properly involve a lot of self-destructive whisky-drinking and falling in doomed love with shallow and unfeeling coquettes, barmaids and prostitutes for the men and caddish con men à la Gorse for the women.
Nigel Jones and Sean French started by discussing Hamilton’s’ early life and the influence Hamilton’s father, a vain, pompous and fascistic barrister, had over him and his brother Bruce. I refer you to their books for details, alas these biographies are out of print, but second-hand copies may be had and public libraries will be able to supply them through the interlending networks.
French,Sean
Patrick Hamilton :a life/(by) Sean French
London:Faber,1993
0571143539
Jones, Nigel
Through a glass darkly : the life of Patrick Hamilton / Nigel Jones
London : Scribners, 1991
0356197018
The matter of the availability of Hamilton’s works came up several times, as it has before recently and as I have commented in this blog the trade database BookFind suggests that more titles are available than is actually the case. There were no real answers to this question. Someone suggest that Hamilton was really only a "writer's writer" (and a comparison with Henry Green was made here, as someone who fascinates writers through his technique but who non-writing readers find difficult if not impossible to read) and therefore without wide appeal. But in his lifetime the plays were extraordinarily successful One of the speakers, I think Sean French, suggested that the reason might simply be that Hamilton was, “the poet of failure” and that failure is not an attractive subject for publishers or for the common reader.
Apart from the theatre and radio, Hamilton’s relationship with other media was not happy. He was unhappy with Hitchcock’s film of Rope and there was a ludicrous film made of Hangover Square which turned the hero, Bone, into a composer. But there is apparently to be an attempt to televise Slaves of Solitude and I think ITV made a version of the Gorse trilogy in the nineteen eighties. See also Nick Robinson's helpful comment on an earlier post. Nigel Jones suggested that Hamilton was now unknown “except in academia”. But there were many people in the room and not all of them from the universities
The Bruce Hamilton archives contain the letters between Patrick and Bruce, which both French and Jones used in their biographies. They were left to Nigel Jones by Hamilton’s sister-in-law, Aileen and are now kept at the University of Austin, Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre.
