Give a man enough Rope
Julie Burchill
PATRICK HAMILTON: A LIFE by Sean French Faber, £20, pp. 327 They say distance lends enchantment and what do you know, they're right again! Imagine, for a moment, that Patrick Hamil- ton was around today, drunk, depressed, really weird about women and overly keen on golf; you'd really go out of your way to avoid him at the Groucho. You'd tug your husband's sleeve when he lurched into the brasserie and stood there peering through his specs for someone new to humiliate; Look, darling, it's that horrible Patrick Hamilton! Quick, get the check and let's blow this scene like now!' But your unmar- ried girlfriends, they wouldn't be so quick off the blocks. They'd sit there scowling at him through their highball glasses and pret- ty soon they'd fall for him. They'd call you at four in the morning: 'Oh, you won't believe what Patrick's done this time! With lovely of all people! After I bought him that lovely set of irons for his birthday!' Tell me about it,' you rasp, settling back in the knowledge that there's no sleep till sunrise. But luckily he's dead (at 58 in '62 of our old mate 'alcohol-related illnesses'), so no such unpleasantness tempts us to give him a wide berth and write him off as yet another dullard apostle of Amis Minor, obsessed with the inner-city jetsam set to a degree that does not flatter a grown man. No, instead I can enjoy him, as did J. B. Priestley, Graham Greene and John Betje- man, in the knowledge that he's not going to come round, tie me up and touch me for a fiver to get to Wentworth. Hamilton has often been called 'a writer's writer', which I think is a bit on the rude side. It may be true that his great novels — Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the Gorse books — did not set the publishing world on fire, but he had enormous success with his West End plays, the first, Rope, when he was only 24. He effectively had two careers, and was brilliant at both of them . and I don't really think that if Hitchcock filmed your play, which he did, you can be called a writer's writer at all. It's a bit like calling Sharon Stone the thespian's thes- Plan (careful how you say that after a few.) I believe that the lives of writers are interesting; I know mine is, especially on a Thursday. For some reason they don't look
good on film, with Jane Fonda wearing sensible shoes and chucking her typewriter out of the window in a right old lather. But a writer's biography will beat a film star's any day for the amount of booze con- sumed, liberties (and drugs) taken and sheer downright squalidness; come on, who's the most fun to read about, Bogart and Bacall or Scott and Zelda? But I already had an excellent book about Patrick Hamilton — Through a Glass Dark- ly by Nigel Jones, an Abacus paperback and so I looked languidly on this one by the last socialist sex bomb, Mr Sean French of the New Statesman.
I thought it might be a bit wet — but my spirits lifted considerably during the intro- duction when Mr French sets about him in no time. 'Experimental' writers get it first, then John Betjeman for being a show-off, then Fitzrovians and Sohoites for hanging around in bunches in bars instead of taking a modest repast at Lyons Corner House and then, shock horror, Mr French lays into Hamilton's brother Bruce! In the past, Bruce has always been portrayed as a sort of literary Theo to Patrick's Vincent, keep- er of the eternal flame of his brother's cre- ativity. But Mr French doesn't like all Bruce's talk of his brother as a tragic failure: This is the Hamilton to be found in his brother's memoir, a work of piety that is also an act of belated revenge. Patrick might have been grimly amused to be accused of being a failure by his brother, who didn't produce a single novel of the quality even of Craven House, his second novel, written at the age of 21, Hamilton received no honours or awards; he sat on no committees; he was never inter- viewed on television or radio. When he died he left half a dozen first-rate novels and two of the most commercially successful plays of his time. That is the success that matters.
Whoah! — well held, that man! But if this is really true, then what interest can there be in Hamilton's drinking, depression and 'amours', as he so coyly calls them? If the play's (and book's) the thing, Mr French could have simply given us a bibliography, and be damned with all the 'What a night! First the Sandman, then the Tooth Fairy, next the Ghost of Christmas Past, followed by ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night.' personal details. Luckily, his thinking is a bit muddled on this score, and he has given us an excellent, scurrilous book instead.
It is an unusual writer who cannot identi- fy with the later part of Patrick Hamilton's life. At the high point of his drinking, in 1946, he was consuming no less than three bottles of whisky a day. He thought that the best way to write a great novel was to sleep all day and then write while drinking all night long — and he actually did write Hangover Square this way. Idiotically, while insisting that he must get down to his novel, he took a job as the theatre critic of Time and Tide,
a position for which he was singularly ill- suited. He regretted the acceptance, almost as soon as he had made it, describing the activity to Bruce as 'peculiarly degrading in a subtle way'.
Being a critic is degrading -- but it is not degrading because we are parasites sucking the blood of genius. It is literally degrading because most first-rate critics are far more intelligent than the soft parade of film directors, actors, pop singers and novelists whose cards we are ceaselessly asked to mark — and having to dip a toe into their muck time after time, for money, is very degrading indeed. Happily, Hamilton wrote only three columns before he gave up and was succeeded by George Orwell — an exceedingly bad novelist, and thus far more suited to the post.
But very few of us — I trust — had a childhood which for sheer weirdness can compare with Hamilton's. Comprehending his father, it is blindingly obvious who the model for all those bemused, bourgeois old bullies like the hideous Mr Thwaites was, with their delusions not just of grandeur but of adequacy, even. Bernard Hamilton
had a 'Hamilton' mania [writes Patrick] and like so many Stewarts, he was, really, when everything was worked out, the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland. As such, he once explained to me, in complete sobriety, that the Hamiltons were the peremptory foes of the Douglases, and that it was really my busi- ness, if I ever met a Douglas, to 'run my sword through him'. He also once ended a dramatic disquisition to me in the 1920s with: 'And if it ever comes to war between England and Scotland — you and I go over the border!'
I find that the childhood part of any biography is by far the most dreary, as a rule; like watching the home movies of someone you have never met. But because of the epic ghastliness of Bernard Hamil- ton, this childhood is actually the best part of a very fine book. And here's a little something to horrify your friends with: in Hangover Square, the loathsome, beloved Netta Longdon's flat is situated at exactly the point in Earl's Court where Hamilton suffered the car accident which was to paralyse his arm, permanently damage his leg and rip off his nose. A better metaphor for the car-crash damage of love was never found.
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