Hangover Square
Authors: Patrick Hamilton
PENGUIN BOOKS
Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. Born in Hassocks, Sussex, in 1904, he and his parents moved a short while later to Hove, where he spent his early years. He published his first novel,
Monday Morning
, in 1925 and within a few years had established a wide readership for himself. Despite personal setbacks and an increasing problem with drink, he was able to write some of his best work. His plays include the thrillers
Rope
(1929), on which Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Rope
was based, and
Gas Light
(1939), also successfully adapted for the screen (1939), and a historical drama,
The Duke in Darkness
(1943). Among his novels are
Craven House
(1926);
The Midnight Bell
(1929),
The Siege of Pleasure
(1932) and
ThePlains of Cement
(1934) which form a trilogy entitled
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
(1935);
Hangover Square
(1941); and
The Slaves of Solitude
(1947).
The Gorse Trilogy
is made up of
The West Pier, MrSampson and Mr Gorse
and
Unknown Assailant
, which were first published during the 1950s. J. B. Priestley described Patrick Hamilton as ‘uniquely individual… He is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil.’ Patrick Hamilton died in 1962.
PATRICK HAMILTON
Hangover Square
A story of darkest Earl’s Court
with an Introduction by J. B. Priestley
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Constable 1941
Published in Penguin Books 1956
Reprinted with an Introduction 1974
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2001
15
Copyright 1941 by Patrick Hamilton
Introduction copyright© J. B. Priestley, 1972
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195640-4
Contents
The First Part –
CHRISTMAS TRAVEL
The Fourth Part –
JOHN LITTLEJOHN
The Seventh Part –
END OF SUMMER
NOTE
The quotations from
Roget’s Thesaurus
are made by permission of Messrs Longmans, Green & Co., to whom the author and publishers make grateful acknowledgement.
SCHIZOPHRENIA
: …a cleavage of the mental functions, associated with assumption by the affected person of a second personality.
Black’s Medical Dictionary
Introduction
It is now half a lifetime ago that I wrote an Introduction to Patrick Hamilton’s
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky
. (This was a genuine trilogy of London novels, which had been published separately but were then brought out in one volume.) And now here I am, back again. But everything is different. Then, in 1935, Patrick Hamilton (b. 1904) was still a young novelist of immense promise. Now I have to remember that he died ten years ago, and that there must be a whole generation of readers who know nothing about him and his fiction, who have never opened his
Hangover Square
and
The Slaves of Solitude
. It is just possible that some of them may have heard of his two successful plays,
Rope
and
Gaslight
, but while these are not without theatrical merit – on any level Hamilton was a good craftsman – they are not in the same original and memorable class as novels like
Hangover Square
and
The Slaves of Solitude
, which indeed are among the minor masterpieces of English fiction.
The first was written in his later thirties; the second in his earlier forties, being published in 1947. Three more novels were to come, between 1951 and 1955:
The West Tier, Mr Stimpsonand Mr Gorse
, and
Unknown Assailant
, three independent stories but linked together because they all describe the mean villainies of one Ernest Ralph Gorse. This was a bad idea anyhow, and Hamilton no longer had the creative energy to bamboozle us into believing it was a good idea. There was a reason for this rapid decline from his best work to his worst. He spent too many of his later years in an alcoholic haze, no longer a social drinker but an unhappy man who needed whisky as a car needs petrol. There may have been some inherited tendency here, but I feel strongly that an increasing desire to blur reality
arose from the depths of a profoundly disturbed unconscious. We have to accept this, I believe, fully to understand the man and his work, both the wonderful best of it and the forgivable worst of it. Otherwise I would never have referred to his later alcoholism, for I prefer to remember him as the delightful young writer I first knew well over forty years ago.
Even in 1935, six years before he gave us
Hangover Square
, I could write in my Introduction: ‘Here is a drama, The London Pub, presented by a tragic comedian, for that, I think, is no bad description of this author. The comedian cannot be missed; and now and again he returns to an early fault and is too determinedly facetious, too lavish with what we might refer to as his Komic Kapitals. But his humour is real, and has a fine Dickensian thrust and flourish. Behind the run is a deepening sense of tragedy…’ Here we can find the clue, the pattern, the secret. Patrick Hamilton began as a very young novelist, barely in his twenties. And there is a sense in which he stayed very young, even though he reached maturity as an artist. The essential self behind the novelist, expressed by him, never came out of that youth, never really matured at all. Patrick Hamilton became one of the most widely admired novelists of his generation; he earned and spent a great deal of money; and in ordinary terms he left his youth behind for many years of middle-age. But while knowing all this – and indeed a lot more than this – I cannot help seeing him from first to last as a gifted youth, living in some boarding-house and breaking out of his solitude every night to sit in a pub, keeping very sharp eyes and ears hard to work. Even the absurd little snobberies of his later life, noted without malice by his brother Bruce, seem to me those of a rather ingenuous youth. Again, though he tried living in many different places (always in England), he never appears to have really settled down anywhere, never became a member of a community, but was always, so to speak, the restless and sceptical outsider, still the gifted but lonely youth.
It is this that gives his fiction its unusual setting, its peculiar characters, its unique style, tone, flavour. He is above all the novelist of the
homeless
. Instead of a specific society, which most novelists require, he takes us into a kind of No-Man’s-Land
of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet. (And no English novelist of my time has had a better ear for the complacent platitudes, the banalities, the sheer idiocy of pub talk, than Hamilton.) But his characteristic humour, always at its height retaining a certain zest that is itself youthful, still leaves us aware of what is lurking in the shadowy background. This is a suspicion of the society from which his chief characters are exiled. It is a deep feeling that there are no real homes for his homeless people to discover. It is a growing despair that dreads the way our world is going. (To ease this, during the Second War and for some time afterwards, he turned to Marxism and Soviet Russia, but not with any great conviction and passion – ingenuously youthful again – as any of us who heard him on these subjects can testify.) What was intensely felt here was not the result of political-economic opinion. It was an instinctive abhorrence of our modem urban life that may have disturbed him quite early, perhaps from boyhood. Though he used a wartime background for his
Slaves of Solitude
, it is significant that in the three Gorse novels that followed he had to return to the nineteen-twenties and thirties: he could no longer cope with the post-war world. It is also significant that the most forceful piece of writing in
Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse
is the last thing in it, a sardonic vision of an England covered with cars, as if it had been successfully invaded by a host of giant beetles, receiving every attention.
While he matured as a novelist – and both
Hangover Square
and
The Slaves of Solitude
reveal formidable skill – that inner Patrick Hamilton, the lonely youth of the boarding-houses and pubs, remained to brood over the scene. So he is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil. His George Harvey Bone, condemned to live in Hangover Square, is a triumph of compassionate creation. His is an idle and stupid existence, always threatened by schizophrenia, and he is a double murderer before finally committing suicide. Yet it seems to me impossible to deny him our sympathy. His adored Netta, on whom he wastes so much time, attention, deeply-felt longing, is not only a selfish and callous little bitch, but, along with her closer
friend, Peter, seems to represent some principle of evil. And all this group, forever aimlessly drifting and pub-crawling, somehow suggest the London of 1939, and far better than most novels of the period, though they may be more broadly-based. We live so closely with the hopelessly infatuated Bone that we can never forget him.
Much the same can be said of a very different character, Miss Roach, with whom we live so closely in
The Slaves of Solitude
. She is another of Hamilton’s memorable innocents, and the kind of rather vague spinster who would never attract our attention. But by the time she leaves the boarding-house at Thames Lockdon and returns to London, then we have shared with her so many little adventures, as strange to her as episodes in the Arabian Nights, we are among her closest friends. (It is the lack of this growing point of sympathy in so many recent clever novels that makes us shrug them away.) And we have also become acquainted, in typical Hamilton fashion, with Mr Thwaites, at once a comic character and a menacing monster, the sinister Vicki Kugelmann, and the American who is as generous but as unpredictable as an Oriental despot. It is all happening in wartime, with the war itself never forced into the scene but kept growling in the distance; the whole thing being presented with wonderful skill.
It is possible that this new generation of readers, who do not know their Patrick Hamilton, may at first be bewildered or rather bored by his very individual humour, depending as much of it does on emphasizing – by a free use of quotation marks and capital letters – the catch-phrases and banalities of an older and vanishing generation. But I feel sure that a great many younger readers will be caught and held by Patrick Hamilton’s intensely personal vision of life, his enduring sense of homelessness, of the loneliness and solitude so many young men have known, his feeling for the innocence always menaced by stupidity and wickedness, the compassion behind his apparently sardonic detachment The world that he secretly regarded with horror, in the dark outside the lighted saloon bars, is not better than it was when he was writing these novels, it is if anything – worse. So I feel there must be thousands of youngish readers who will not
only appreciate his unique talent but will also welcome him as a friend and a brother. And on my part I must add that, returning to these novels after many years, I find his stature has increased. He is no great major novelist, taking all society in his grasp, and he never pretended to be. But among the uniquely individual minor novelists of our age, he is a master.