A friend of mine co-edits a rather good online literary journal entitled '
middlebrow'. Essentially I think the idea is to reclaim the term and turn it from one of derision (see Virginia Woolf) to one of praise. It celebrates intelligent but unpretentious art and literature...or something.
For the first edition I wrote an article on one of my favourite authors; Patrick Hamilton. The aim was to (re) introduce people to this marvellous and sadly forgotten author and persuade them that there is more on offer than just
Hangover Square. You can either click this
link (and maybe explore some of the other stuff on there) or read my piece in its entirety below.
The reason I'm posting this now is because I've just found out to my delight that Hamilton finally has a blue plaque in London. Unfortunately it's in Chiswick where he briefly lived rather than the far more apt Earls Court.
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| Patrick Hamilton |
Patrick Hamilton
If you’ve ever felt out of touch with modernity, if you’ve ever felt aware of the meagreness of human existence, if you’ve ever been to the pub for one drink and stayed until you fell off your chair, or if you’ve ever been so deluded to believe that everything will be fine if you could just live a sober life with a cat in Maidenhead, then you really should probably read some Patrick Hamilton. Even if you’ve never been so low or mad for any of the above to apply (which is unlikely) then read him anyway. Despite enjoying popularity in his own inter-war era he is now tragically forgotten, even amongst literary circles. Perhaps it is because his work lacks the explicit philosophical themes of his contemporaries (Graham Greene, for example) and has therefore avoided entering the highbrow canon. Similarly it is sufficiently brilliant, complex and intelligent to avoid the abyss of popular easy reading. In fact it falls somewhere in between, one might say mid….well, you know. However, as one of my favourite novelists, I want to persuade you that there is more to Hamilton than his well known Hangover Square.
If you read only one other thing, make it Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Possibly Hamilton’s magnum opus, it is actually a trilogy of novels (The Midnight Bell, The Siege of Pleasure, and The Plains of Cement) which follow the fortunes and, more frequently, futile loves and humiliations of three characters connected to the ‘Midnight Bell’ pub near Tottenham Court Road in London. Each book in the trilogy follows one of the principal characters and consequently is told from a limited, vaguely subjective perspective (though still third person). The effect of this is that each novel adds, once completed, an extra layer of emotional, historical and contextual depth to the story. You fall so hopelessly for the characters that each betrayal or deceit, of which there are many, feels as if it were perpetrated against you, personally. Hamilton’s brilliant characterisation should not come as too much of a surprise though, as much of the trilogy is touchingly autobiographical.
In 1927, whilst still a young man, Hamilton fell madly in love with a prostitute named Lilly. Perversely such behaviour seems to have run in the family, his father having had a similar affair years before. His father’s folly ended in tragedy (suicide) – Hamilton’s with a strong sense of empathy for the downtrodden and destitute. However, as convincing and personal as Hamilton’s evocation of character inevitably is, what for me is even greater is his evocation of the time and place that these people inhabit. Twenty Thousand Streets is a book about London, but it is even more a book about pubs – the sort of floridly decorated Victoriana swathed pubs that are still to be found partially preserved as branches of Sam Smiths or not so well preserved and to be discovered decaying in the backwaters of the East End. Within this atmosphere Hamilton brings to life the routine, smells, sights and, most wonderfully of all, the sounds of 30s England. He captures what J.B. Priestley described as ‘the complacent platitudes, the banalities, the sheer idiocy of pub talk’. The Midnight Bell, like any pub, has its habitués – from the pretentious Mr Sounder, who is forever in the throes of composing some ‘Little Thing’ to send to the papers or a sonnet to evensong at Westminster Abbey (‘music wave on wave’ his ‘soul did lave’) to the ubiquitous letches after the barmaid. Though public houses no longer have saloon and public bars or serve Black and White or halves of Burton, Hamilton captures the universals which link his time and ours.
From London pubs to provincial boarding houses, a very different novel is The Slaves of Solitude. Whilst Twenty Thousand Streets effortlessly succeeds in blending pathos with a powerful vein of dark, cynical humour this later novel, published towards the end of Hamilton’s writing career, is pure cynicism. ‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us’ ends this bleak work; and these are clearly the author’s own sentiments, rather than the protagonist’s. Having established that this book is not for people seeking, say, an alternative to PG Wodehouse, I want to make clear that it is not ‘depressing’. It is involved and deeply moving. It follows one Miss Roach, a middle aged spinster who has given up hope of marriage long ago and is living in the Rosamund Tea Rooms as a refugee from London. Poor, pathetic Miss Roach is courted by American officers and bullied endlessly by Hamilton’s two best (and really only) villains – the suspiciously German Vicki Kugelman and the truly despicable Mr Thwaites; a man with a mental age of twelve who delights in bullying our unlikely heroine. Hamilton in turn seems to delight in mocking Mr Thwaites and the result is a cacophony of schadenfreude calculated to appal and delight in equal measures and actually, on occasions, induce laughter. Though set in wartime there is almost no reference to battles or victories, except those between the inhabitants of Thames Lockden. What the book is about is the language of war, the peculiar language of those involved in war, and the endless irritation and isolation of those people unlucky enough not to be using the war as an excuse to have a jolly good time. It’s hard to know how to ‘sell’ The Slaves of Solitude except as the natural progression for those who have read Twenty Thousand Streets and Hangover Square. With each successive novel the plot becomes less important and we start to share, almost conspiratorially, Hamilton’s like, dislikes, and twisted sense of humour.
As might be apparent, the two novels described above are not to be dipped in and out of at will. To appreciate them you need to fully engross yourself – and not to do so is a challenge in itself. In fact to read Twenty Thousand Streets and, to a lesser extent, The Slaves of Solitude feels, in a sense, like a challenge. You don’t ‘finish’ them but ‘overcome’ them. And with that comes an immense amount of satisfaction. No other author I can think of so perfectly captures an entire era with its linguistic and cultural idiosyncrasies. It is a genuine tragedy that Hamilton is recognized only by his, frankly, most two dimensional novel. If you thought Hangover Square was even vaguely readable then please, go to your local library or book shop now and ask for Patrick Hamilton. You will not be disappointed
