Patrick Hamilton (dramatist)

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 study of his novels has been revived recently because of their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture. They display a strong sympathy for the disadvantaged, as well as an acerbic black humour. Doris Lessing wrote in "The Times" in 1968: "Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected".

Life and works

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 brief 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 disfigured badly 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 some 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 wealthy and were also successful as films: the British-made "Gaslight" (1940) and the 1944 American remake, and Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" (1948).

"Hangover Square" (1941) is often judged his most accomplished work and still sells well in paperback, and is regarded by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as an important part of the tradition of London novels. Set in Earls Court where Hamilton himself lived, it deals with both alcohol-drinking practices 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. During the 1930s, like many other authors, Hamilton grew increasingly angry with capitalism and, again like others, felt that the violence and fascism of Europe during the period indicated that capitalism was reaching its end: this encouraged his Marxism and his novel "Impromptu in Moribundia" (1939) was a satirical attack of capitalist culture.

During his 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 - 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 regarded increasingly as a comic masterpiece. The hostility and negativity of the novels is also attributed to Hamilton's disenchantment with the utopianism of Marxism and depression. The trilogy is comprised of "The West Pier" (1952), "Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse" (1953), dramatized as "The Charmer" in 1987, and in 1955 Hamilton's last work published, "Unknown Assailant", which is short and was partly dictated as Hamilton was drunk. "The Gorse Trilogy" was first published in a single volume during 1992.

Hamilton had begun to consume alcohol excessively while still a relatively young man. After a declining career and melancholia, 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 Chetwynd-Talbot in 1954.

Recent revival

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 BBC Two screened an adaptation of "20,000 Streets Under the Sky" in September 2005, reshown on BBC Four in January 2006, alongside a documentary account of his life. The adaptation was released on DVD in 2007.

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

External links

* [http://www.blackspringpress.co.uk Black Spring Press] New publishers of The Gorse Trilogy and Craven House
* [http://www.tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25338-2644199,00.html The lost worlds of Patrick Hamilton] : a review in the [http://the-tls.co.uk TLS] , May 16, 2007
* -- Review of "The Slaves of Solitude"
* A biography can be found at [http://www.allmovie.com/ www.allmovie.com]
*
* [http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=8015 Patrick Hamilton] at the Internet Broadway Database
* -- Review of "The Midnight Bell"
* -- Article on Hamilton's screen adaptations
* [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/04/welcome_back_patrick_hamilton.html Article on Hamilton revival]
* [http://www.yourfleshmag.com/artman/publish/article_727.shtml Essay on Hamilton's treatment of London pub culture]
* [http://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00367.xml&query=patrick%20hamilton&query-join=and Patrick Hamilton Collection] at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
* [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/commentary/article2305998.ece "The lost worlds of Patrick Hamilton"] : D. J. Taylor's introduction to the Gorse Trilogy from [http://www.the-tls.co.uk TLS] , May 16 2007.