Patrick Hamilton (dramatist)

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Patrick Hamilton (March 17, 1904 - September 23, 1962) was an English playwright and novelist. He was well-regarded by Graham Greene and J. B. Priestley and his novels have undergone a revival recently through their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture. They display a strong sympathy to the dispossessed, as well as an acerbic black humour.

He was born Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to writer parents. Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School.

After a short career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America).

The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute, and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy 20,000 Streets Under the Sky (1935).

Hamilton disliked many aspects of modern life. He was badly disfigured when he was run over by a car in the late 1920s - the end of his novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953), with its vision of England smothered in metal beetles, reflects his loathing of the motor car. However, despite a streak of distaste for the culture in which he operated, he was a popular contributor to it. His two most successful plays, Rope and Gas Light (1938, known as Angel Street in America), made Hamilton a wealthy man and also found success as films: the British-made Gaslight (1940) and the 1944 American remake, and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948).

Hangover Square (1941) is judged his most accomplished work and still sells well in paperback, now regarded by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as an important plank in the tradition of the London novel. It deals with both the alcohol culture of the time and the underlying political context, such as the rise of fascism and responses to it. Hamilton became an avowed Marxist, though not a publicly declared member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the 1930s, like many other writers, Hamilton grew increasingly angry with capitalism and, again like others, felt that the violence and fascism of Europe in the period was a sign that capitalism was reaching the end of its course; this propelled him towards Marxism and his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) was a satirical attack on capitalist culture.

In later life Hamilton developed in his writing a misanthropic authorial voice which became more disillusioned, cynical and bleak as time passed. The Slaves of Solitude (1947), was his only work to deal directly with the Second World War, and he preferred to look back to the pre-war years. His Gorse Trilogy - three novels about a devious sexual predator and conman, the character of whom owes something to the psychopath Neville Heath - are not generally well thought of critically, although Graham Greene said that the first was 'the best book written about Brighton' and the second (Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse) is increasingly regarded as a comic masterpiece. The hostile and negative tone of the novels is also attributed to Hamilton's disenchantment with the utopianism of Marxism, although as in all his work the trilogy also displays a (sometimes savage) sense of humour. The trilogy comprises The West Pier (1952), Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), dramatized as The Charmer in 1987, and in 1955 Hamilton's last published work, Unknown Assailant, which is short and was partly dictated as Hamilton was drunk.

Hamilton had begun to drink heavily while still a relatively young man. After a declining career and depression, he died in 1962 of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure, in Sheringham, Norfolk. He was married twice, firstly to Lois Marie Martin in 1930, and a year after divorcing Lois, to Lady Ursula Stewart in 1954.

Hamilton was recently the subject of a special season of films at the National Film Theatre in London, and continuing the strong recent revival of interest in his work the British TV channel BBC2 screened an adaptation of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky in September 2005, reshown on BBC4 in January 2006, alongside a documentary account of his life.

[edit] Further reading

Jones, Nigel. (1991) Through a glass darkly : the life of Patrick Hamilton, Scribners
French, Sean. (1993) Patrick Hamilton: A Life, Faber and Faber