“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? Having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may age rather better than Lessing’s own.
I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though before that I was a fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I read, in quick succession, Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and loved them: the writing, the humanity, the originality. And, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be fans, or, if they read the books for the first time, were as enthusiastic as I was. (Except my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a close second. I also particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.
I don’t know much more about Hamilton’s background than can be found in his Wikipedia entry here. He had communist sympathies (like the early Lessing), a strong identification with outsiders and the downtrodden (something that does not come over so strongly in the work of the self-consciously ‘major’ Doris Lessing), and he was an alcoholic – which is probably why you almost get a hangover reading these novels, just from the sheer number of drinks you have to imaginatively knock back. He was also apparently disfigured when he was run over by a car, though I don’t know exactly in what way. Both Hangover Square and the first book of the trilogy deal with a doomed and unrequited sexual obsession which is apparently based on Hamilton’s own life.
Apart from being a novelist, Patrick Hamilton was a successful playwright. I’ve already mentioned Rope which became a film. His play Gas Light was adapted for the cinema twice, and is the origin of the concept of ‘gaslighting’ – something, of course, which is done to the downtrodden to keep them down. (Hangover Square was also made into a film, though from what I gather the film is very different from the novel.)
All these novels are set in or near London before or, in the case of Slaves, during the second world war. This seems to lead some commentators on Hamilton to speak of his work as though it was some kind of historical artifact, a record of a certain kind of life in a certain milieu, at a certain time in history. As I’ve remarked before, this idea of fiction as ‘documenting’ some particular period of history, or place, or area of life, strikes me as rather reductive. The specificity of place and time certainly give these books their distinctive colour, their three dimensionality, but they speak to the experience of us all. Or to mine at any rate.
Hamilton is very good at evoking place and atmosphere – see for example the account of a commuter train arriving in the station of a commuter town that begins Slaves, or those endless drinking bouts in pubs in which you can almost feel the drinks going down. He is also good at evoking interior states, and especially about obsession and addiction, to which of course he was not a stranger. He writes beautiful, functional, unfussy prose. There is absolutely no showing off (a quality, incidentally, that reminds me of my friend Eric).
All writers have their own distinctive sets of characters. Hamilton’s fall into three groups. The first group are hard, narcissistic, self-obsessed people, who are cruel to those they see as weaker than themselves, use people without ever really seeing them, and typically nurture fascistic fantasies. Examples are the truly ghastly Mr Thwaite in Slaves, and the cold, empty, beautiful Netta in Hangover Square. He explains these characters in a couple of places as being nothing more really than spiteful, status-obsessed school children who have never grown up, and therefore persist in being mean, as many school children are, to those below them in the pecking order while sucking up to those they perceive as above them.
Secondly there are quiet, mild, rather lost characters who don’t know how to assert themselves in the world. Miss Roach, the main character in Slaves, is one such, a 39-year-old single woman, appallingly lonely, very unassertive but not without convictions or principles, we don’t even learn her first name until late in the book. Bombed out in London during the Blitz and now living in a genteel lodging house with a bunch of much older people in a town outside London, into which she commutes every day to a job in a publishing house. George Bone in Hangover Square is another (or at any rate George Bone when in his right mind: he has sudden strange mental fogs in which he becomes oddly detached from the world, and is driven by primitive, infantile fantasies about killing the woman who torments him, and going to live happily ever after in Maidenhead). Bone is lumpish and clueless. He has no idea what to do with his life, but hopelessly pursues a beautiful but empty woman who cares nothing for him, but is happy to use him. He knows he is being used, and hates the seedy world of lazy, fascistic, snobbish drunks into which he has been drawn, but lacks the strength of mind to free himself.
Finally, there are a number of characters who manage to be competent at life without being egotistical. These people are not concerned about where others are in the pecking order, or where they themselves are, but deal with those around them as fellow human beings. George’s friend John Littlejohn is one of these people in Hangover Square. He sees George has made a mess of his life, and tries to help. Having been at certain points in my younger days, one of those lost, unassertive outsiders myself (I’m afraid there were also occasions when I behaved like one of the first kind of character), I can vouch for the extraordinary power of even very small acts of kindness or friendliness from people who treat you simply as another human, and not as the hopeless failure you imagine yourself to be – and which is how you are indeed seen by those other, colder, more status-conscious people.
[George Bone] walked up Earl’s Court Road northwards feeling lighter, more resilient in spirit. This was because of the kindness and cordiality of the bank clerk, who had called him Mr Bone (as though Mr Bone was somebody), and treated him him as an equal. The bank clerk, of course, knew nothing about Netta, his disgrace, the fact that he was not treated as an equal by her, or by any of her friends, or by people generally. And yet he did not believe that it was because he did not know these things that the bank clerk acted thus. He believed that this bank clerk was one of those few, warm-hearted, indiscriminate, easy-going people, who were naturally unaware of any superiority of inferiority in individuals, or who, even if they were aware of such things, were not impressed by, or at all interested in them.
Hangover Square
I still gratefully remember tiny acts of friendliness of that sort from fifty years ago!
Slaves and Hangover Square are both beautifully structured and paced, which is impressive when you consider how little actually happens. In Slaves, for instance, the story is this: Miss Roach is simultaneously bullied and bored silly by Mr Thwaites over the dinner table in her boarding house (his ghastliness is quite funny, if you can get past just how ghastly it is), she is taken out for drinks by an apparently benign but ‘inconsequent’ American officer who never makes his intentions clear, she is let down by her manipulative German friend Vicki who Miss Roach befriends partly as an act of kindness, in view of the hostility inevitably faced by a German woman in England during the war. Vicki forms a kind of alliance with Thwaites, and finally, in spite of her diffidence, Miss Roach is goaded beyond endurance, loses her temper, and has a row with the two of them, which brings her boarding house life to an end. And then, with the help of two of those nice people, she experiences a very small but very touching moment of redemption, though certainly not a happy ever after, when she’s finally made up her mind to risk the Blitz and go back to live in London. And that’s it!
In Hangover Square, George Bone hangs out in Earl’s Court and Brighton, mostly with either the same group of nasty people who treat him like rubbish, but occasionally with nice people who, to his surprise and bewilderment, find him likeable and want to help him. Throughout the book, he zigzags between self-destruction and redemption -at one point, for instance, he gives up drinking briefly and remembers that he is really good at golf, and it looks for a moment as if he has turned a corner – but in the end he drifts back towards Netta and drinking, until (spoiler alert) his mental fogs finally lead him to his own, and Netta’s, and Netta’s friend Peter’s, destruction.
But however narrow and local and specific the canvas in these books, however lowly the protagonists, what is being depicted is a struggle between good and evil – between life and a kind of living death. And what makes them special is the way that Hamilton inhabits his lonely outsider protagonists. They are alive. (For characters really can be alive, if a writer inhabits them, as alive as the personas we adopt in our day to day lives.)
Is it permissible to wonder what awful persecutions he suffered himself to enable him to write so well about these victims, Miss Roach, George Harvey Bone, others struggling to survive when so much is stacked against them?
Doris Lessing, Introduction to The Slaves of Solitude.
Hamilton was a successful man, who became wealthy on the back of this plays and their film adaptations, but he clearly knew at first hand what it is to be an outsider: the loneliness, the shame, but also the wells of anger and resentment that build up, if only unconsciously, inside even the mildest and most downtrodden of people. I guess because I also have first hand experience of that kind, I like writers like this and the characters they create, and tend to be bored by confident, assertive, competent characters. (In fact I am often a little bored by them in life!) It’s a very long time since I have encountered a writer whose work moved me as much as these books.