From London's The Morning Star (Wednesday 3rd November 2004); reproduced by kind permission of the author, John Branston
Love and Death in Publand
IN FOCUS: Patrick Hamilton
JOHN BRANSTON gets to grips with the darkly prophetic novels of Patrick Hamilton, whose troubled life was mirrored by his writing.
See also the photographs
2004 marks the centenary of the birth of Britain's best-known literary chronicler of London's underclass between the wars, the best-selling Marxist novelist and playwright, Patrick Hamilton. He was creator of English fiction's most sinister confidence trickster and his works attract a cult-following of distinguished fans.
Long time admirers include Doris Lessing, Antonia Fraser, Michael Holroyd, Keith Waterhouse, Sean French, Corin Redgrave, D.J. Taylor and Lynn Truss who pay homage to Hamilton's dark, alcohol-fuelled vision which finds an eerie pictorial counterpart in the London nightlife imagery of social realist photographer, Bill Brandt, whose centennial is also celebrated this year.
Curiously, Brandt's eerie, night photographs could almost be the pages come to life of Hamilton's magnificent London trilogy, 'Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky' (Vintage) and they similarly capture the bleak anonymity of the modern city which hides, in Holroyd's acute phrase '...those dim places where life seems to have leaked away.'
Hamilton's fictional world, according to Holroyd, describes 'life on the margins' at a time when the English social system was breaking apart to abandon a generation of class-dislocated casualties in the wreckage.
Brandt's images of an oppressed underclass share Hamilton's own literary vision, and both men were ideologically responsive to contemporary movements in continental European Socialism, bearing witness to the deprivations of workers' lives endured across the class divide.
Hamilton, the Marxist maverick, crossed that class divide often, as his lowlife novels reveal. The humiliations of Hamilton's disastrous affair with a pretty, flighty, Soho prostitute provided the raw data for his 'Siege of Pleasure', the most poignant segment of his London trilogy. Her intimate experiences on London's streets in the book's confessional passages (Hamilton is acclaimed for his 'bat's wing ear' attuned to idiomatic speech) are unmatched as a social document depicting without sentiment the realities of interwars' London prostitution.
Recently, Corin Redgrave acted on radio in an episode from Hamilton's 'Gorse Trilogy' which concerns the sinister adventures of a ruthless young small-time con-man. (On television, Nigel Havers was the eponymous seducer in 'The Charmer'.) Redgrave thinks Hamilton has a great grasp on villainy. 'It's ... motiveless malignancy. The villain has no other motive than the sheer enjoyment of doing harm.'
Graham Greene described 'The West Pier' (part one of the 'Gorse Trilogy') as 'the best book written about Brighton', and the character of Gorse, in his sociopathic cold-blooded amorality, prefigures 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'. So it's a 'must read' for fans of both Greene and Highsmith.
In fact, another devoted fan, Keith Waterhouse, in his novel 'Palace Pier' (Sceptre), has conceived a novel-within-a novel in that his plot revolves around a supposedly undiscovered novel of Hamilton's from which Waterhouse quotes a number of pastiches.
The career of Hamilton's dashing hero, Gorse, is derived in part from the life of multiple-deception led by the notorious double-slayer, Neville Heath, hanged in 1946. (Heath's famous last words, before his execution, when offered a drink, were: 'You might make that a double,' a Hamiltonian quip, if ever there was one.)
The prophetic quality of Hamilton's psychological insights can be seen in his portrayal of Gorse as a potential killer whose childhood behaviour foretells the cruelty of his adult sadomasochism.
A sadistic loner, Gorse, as a Hove schoolboy, takes his pet mice with him to the bathroom. 'Then he took his five white mice ... and made them swim in the bath... their heads held painfully high...'. Hamilton seems to be looking far into future by anticipating the psychological imprinting of a psychotic sadist which has been now identified as originating in childhood. Serial killers like Ian Brady and Jeffrey Dahmer both began by torturing animals for amusement, as preparation for tormenting human prey.
The adult Gorse, the conniving chancer, shares Neville Heath's bravado by masquerading as an officer of elevated rank, and exhibits a fascistic obsession with military uniforms.
Hamilton's professed Marxism was a heartfelt belief and not idly faddish. His political prescience and early abhorrence of Fascism is expressed also in his masterpiece, 'Hangover Square'. As novelist and critic D.J. Taylor makes clear: 'Hamilton saw the psychological roots of Fascism.'
The fury of Hamilton's indictment of Fascism drives the pace of this classic noirish thriller. ('Hangover Square' is published by Penguin.) Set in the grimy publands of Earls Court, the novel charts alcoholic George Harvey Bone's helpless infatuation with wannabe starlet Netta Longdon who is cool, contemptuous and desirable beyond his reach. Hamilton describes not only the brooding, frigid, self-absorption of his fictional love-hate-object, the 'unholy beauty' Netta, but also beckons us inside the troubled schizophrenic mind of her killer, Bone. For, tragically, whether murderer or murderee, both suffer in a vacuum a moral void symbolic of Hamilton's own dark, booze-suffused, private hell.
Perhaps, above all, Netta, the treacherous 'unsuccessful and impecunious film actress' whom Hamilton's alter ego, Bone, kills during one of his 'black-outs' (when reality trips, closing like a camera-shutter 'Snap... Click! ...') best expresses the social decay which so fascinated him, and which he morbidly analyses as the canker undiagnosed beneath the deceptive surface glare of the glittering beer-engines inside the taproom of Bone's regular pub, the 'Black Hart'.
The 'parallel world of fantasy and illusion' encountered in London pubs, writes Holroyd, is a dimension where Hamilton's characters lose their private inhibitions and where their creator's divided self that of a repressed libertine equally sought release from his own demons. 'Hangover Square' is a tragi-comic study of boozed-up sexual obsession a thinly-disguised, cathartic reworking of Hamilton's painful, unrequited passion for the film actress, Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Yet, for all that, Hamilton's own hellish London of urban alienation is analysed with unrivalled mordant wit and relish, providing us with arguably the most penetrating study of drinking mania ever.
As Sean French wryly observes, Hamilton was 'a connoisseur of alcoholic behaviour', and he could describe his own pathography with the precision of a clinician (he eventually, unsuccessfully, underwent Electro Convulsive Treatment for depressive alcoholism).
'I like his dark humour,' says Holroyd. 'You need characters to cast a shadow as they walk.' Hamilton, the self-confessed 'heavy drinking man', to escape his own darkness of the soul, in emulation of his creations, sought also the 'mock good cheer' of the public-house 'where the fantasy-life of his characters could come alight only in some brightly-lit bar' among '...the coming together of so many lonelinesses.'
This interpretation is echoed by Hamilton's 'Times' obituarist, celebrating the laureate of London's rootless masses '... a genuine minor poet ... of the loneliness, purposelessness, and frustrations of urban contemporary life ...'
Hamilton's London was '...a kind of No-Man's-Land,' wrote J.B. Priestley, a milieu 'of cheap lodgings in Pimlico, and the less expensive picture theatres, a world of barmaids and waiters and prostitutes ... of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet.'
Tragically, Hamilton's meteoric trajectory as a popular writer ended in decline into alcoholism, and death from cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure. Yet, although that astonishingly precocious talent was to ultimately burn out, Hamilton was to leave four literary masterpieces, 'Hangover Square'; the London Trilogy 'Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky; 'The Ralph Gorse Trilogy'; and the powerful redemptive novel, 'The Slaves of Solitude'. (Laments another cult follower, Antonia Fraser, 'The "Slaves of Solitude" is one of my favourite novels and why isn't it in print?')
As Doris Lessing observes, Hamilton is a social historian virtually without equal in his punctilious reckoning up of the minutiae of desperate lives in the interwar years.
'Now people have forgotten the kind of smell that came out of England in the Thirties,' she says, 'the cheese-paring and the obsession with money. Then, people were always calculating... could they afford to have this drink here, or a cheaper meal there.' It is in this kind of raffish world of rent arrears and post-dated cheques that Hamilton's feckless goodtime Netta meets her end. 'Never has anyone written about crooks as well as Hamilton. And it's the details that are so absorbing,' in Lessing's view.
Agreed. It's the details that are most telling in Hamilton's work. And the dark humour of the drunken double-killer who, hell bent on revenge (in 'Hangover Square), is 'not too drunk to be too clever' for the man and woman he plans to annihilate, Netta and her lover, a black-polo-necked bullyboy Fascist snob.
During the writing of 'Hangover Square', Hamilton boasts of his gift of not only documenting the transience of London's humdrum daily grind during the Phoney War, but also his facility to trace faithfully in his fiction the arc of history on the wing. To Hamilton were attributed uncanny powers of rapport; of being '...in touch, if unconsciously, with the prevailing social currents.'
Lynn Truss, another dedicated fan, affirms Hamilton, '... does write very well from a woman's point of view ... he does understand what it's like to be them.' However, Truss recognises a misogynistic vengeful streak running through a number of Hamilton's fictions, stemming from an unfulfilled lovelife.
This misogynistic 'revenge motif' is evident, too, in Hamilton's phenomenally successful play, 'Gaslight', the story of an opportunist who marries a woman for her inheritance and schemes to drive her mad. George Cukor's film based on the play was a study of psychological dominance and abuse of a woman through manipulation. Charles Boyer played the role of the evil husband. (Netta in 'Hangover Square' describes Boyer as her ideal lover; maybe they were made for each other.)
Ingrid Bergman won Best Actress Award for her performance as the victimised wife. 'Bergman wasn't normally a timid woman.' Cukor said later. 'To reduce someone like that to a scared, jittery creature was interesting and dramatic.'
'Gaslight' followed Hamilton's first runaway theatrical success, 'Rope', which centres on two university undergraduates who attempt the 'perfect murder'. They kill a third boy, to prove that they are above 'ordinary' people. The story had similarities with the notorious Leopold and Loeb 'Killing for Kicks' murder case they killed 14-year-old Bobbie Franks in 1924 solely for academic interest, in perverted discipleship of Nietzschean nihilism. Hamilton denied that 'Rope' had any connections with the case.
Hitchcock adapted it for the screen but the result failed to satisfy Hamilton who did not care for a Hitch in his Rope.
'I have gone all out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep,' Hamilton wrote of 'Rope', but Sean French, thinks differently. French believes Hamilton has an affinity with Hitchcock. For Hamilton, like Hitch, he asserts, 'Sex and violence are absolutely entwined...' and twisted into a guilty secret (yet, clearly, a different class of guilt uncoloured by Hitch's vestigial Catholicism). Whatever Hamilton may have claimed, says French unequivocally, 'Rope' is '...one of the gayest plays written in the twentieth century.'
New readers coming fresh to Hamilton's novels will swiftly recognise the humanistic views reflected in his works insofar as he championed, like Dickens, the working millions by recognising and celebrating individual voices from the oppressed majority. But, again like Dickens, no political propagandising is ever so overtly evident as to impede the suspense and narrative drive of a thoroughly 'good read' from the pen of a master storyteller.
And there is a spiritual connection with Dickens of some significance concerning Hamilton's death (in 1962).
Hamilton, the Dickens devotee, died aged fifty-eight, and geranium petals from a wreath ('Patrick's favourite flower') were scattered on his coffin.
Charles Dickens also died in his fifty-eighth year, entombed in Westminster Abbey, with his coffin covered with his favourite flower, scarlet geraniums.
Now that Patrick Hamilton's hometown, Brighton, has achieved millennial recognition of status as the City of Brighton & Hove, in the year of his centennial there can be no more proper time to celebrate the embracing breadth of this great novelist and playwright's compassion and humanity.
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This is the unedited text of "Morning Star' article 03/11/04
Brighton-educated screenwriter John Branston has been the principal mover-and-shaker in championing the Patrick Hamilton Centenary and setting the agenda for a number of literary events for the centennial. Branston is currently working on a dramatisation of 'The Victim', the celebrated novel by playwright George Tabori (screenwriter of Hitchcock's 'I Confess' and world authority on Bertolt Brecht).
Recommended further reading:
By Dr Brian McKenna: "Confessions of a Heavy-Drinking Marxist: Addiction in
the Work of Patrick Hamilton." In "Beyond the Pleasure-Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics" (ed. S. Vice, M. Campbell & T. Armstrong).
Sheffield Academic Press, 1994.
By Bruce Hamilton (Patrick Hamilton's older brother and fellow Marxist
sympathiser): "The Brighton Murder Trial. Rex versus Rhodes." 1937. A fascinating fictional account set in a very different Britain to the one we know. The world order of the interwar years has collapsed and dictatorships proliferate. In Brighton communist James Rhodes is sent to trial for the
murder of local fascist National Youth leader, Bertram Hayward. This is a chilling tale of a dystopia that might have been had not WW2 intervened
