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(Anthony Walter) Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) |
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English novelist and playwright, whose best-known works include Rope (1929) and Gas Light (1938); both have been filmed many times for the cinema and for television. Patrick Hamilton died of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure. "London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respitory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels. (from The Slaves of Solitude, 1947) Born in Hassocks, Patrick Hamilton was the youngest of three children born to parents, Bernard and Ellen Hamilton, who were both divorced. Bernard was a failed barrister, and a family tyrant, who spent his £ 100,000 inheritance on drink and women. His first wife had been a prostitute who threw herself under a train. Ellen, the daughter of a London dentist, was briefly married to an incorrigible womanizer. Both Ellen and Bernard were published authors – Bernhard had written historical books, including The Giant (1926), a fictionalized life of Danton which he sent to Mussolini. Ellen published two romantic novels. Hamilton's older brother was the detective novelist Bruce Hamilton. Hamilton grew up in a big house in Hove, which was sold during the postwar slump when the family began to run out of money. He was educated at Holland House School in Hove, Sussex, Colet Court in London, and Westminster School (1918-19), from where he was taken away. Hamilton continued his education at a commercial college in Holbron. At the age of seventeen he began to work as an actor and assistant stage manager for Andrew Melville. He performed small roles in A Case of Diamonds and The Squaw Man, toured in The Count of Monte Cristo, The Monster, and On His Majesty's Service, and learned the elements of Melodrama genre. However, he then changed his career and worked as a stenographer, having learned the typing and shorthand via correspondence course. As a novelist Hamilton made his debut with the Dickensian Monday Morning (1925). It was followed by Craven House (1926), a story of the inmates of a boarding-house, which established his reputation on both sides of Atlantic. In 1927 Hamilton fell in love with Lily Connolly, a prostitute. Later he portrayed her in The Midnight Bell (1929), the first part of the semi-autobiographical trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. The bleak love triangle revolved around the Midnight Bell pub – "a small, but bright and cleanly establishment, lying in the vicinity of the Euston Road and Warren Street." Hamilton himself had frequented pubs there. The second volume was The Siege of Pleasure (1932), in which Jenny, the prostitute, was the central character. In the third volume, The Plains of Cement (1934), the barmaid Ella is offered an opportunity to change the course of her life. Together the novels were published in 1935. A celebrated "bright young" novelist of the Twenties and
Thirties,
Hamilton's work was in tune with the times, but he never glorified the
life of the upper class like Evelyn Waugh. Despite his success and
royalties from his plays, Hamilton was frequently broke. In London
Hamilton lived in the fashionable Albany bachelor apartments off
Piccadilly Circus, the fictional home of E.W. Hornung's gentleman thief
Arthur J. Raffles. Hamilton had another home in Henley, which he named Thames Lockdon in The Slaves of Solitude (1947). "The good Americans usually die young on the battlefield, don't they? Well, the Davids of the world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect crime." (Brandon in Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, 1948) Hamilton's first theatrical success was Rope (1929),
produced in the United States as Rope's End.
The story depicts two Oxford undergraduates who attempt the "perfect
murder" to prove that they are above ordinary people. The story
had similarities with the notorious Richard Leopold and Nathan Loeb
"Killing for Kicks" murder case – they killed 14-year-old Bobbie
Franks in 1924 purely for academic interest. Hamilton denied any
connections. Alfred Hitchcock had been toying with Hamilton's play since the mid-1930s, and finally adapted it into screen in 1948. The result did not satisfy the author. Hitchcock shot the film in a series of eight-minute continuous takes and this technical experiment dominated too much the whole result. James Steward, playing the boys' former headmaster Rupert Cadell, guesses the boys' secret, and realizes that if he gives the two enough rope they will hang themselves. Farley Granger's performance as Philip Morgan, the other college student, was considered a disappointment. Although the homosexual aspect was not prominent, the film was banned in Chicago and well as in other towns like Seattle and Memphis. At the peak of his career in 1932, Hamilton was struck by a drunk
driver, and sustained multiple fractures, which required plastic
surgery. The accident left him permanently disfigured and with a withered arm, and there were scars
on his face. This blow of fate perhaps
contributed to his succumb to alcoholism. Gas Light (1938),
presented on Broadway as Angel Street,
gained a huge success and ran in the United States for almost
three years (1942-44). It was a story of a Victorian villain, Jack
Manningham who tries to drive his wife Bella insane. Manningham's
actions are linked to a jewel robbery that occured 20 years earlier in
the same house. Rough, a retired police inspector, rescues Mrs
Manningham and helps her to regaing confidence in herself. In the British screen version from 1940 Anton Walbrook played the villain, outwardly suave but eyes shining with cruelty. At the end, utterly defeated, he cradles his rubies with childish passion and the ex-detective, who has caught him, lets him be for the moment. George Cukor's film adaptation (1944), entitled with a single word Gaslight, was a study of psychological dominance and abuse through manipulative words and actions. In the play the woman was a long-time spinster, but in the film Ingrid Bergman is much younger; Charles Boyer played the role of her husband. Bergman won the Best Actress Award for her performance as a victimized woman. "Bergman wasn't normally a timid woman; she was healthy," Cukor said later. "To reduce someone like that to a scared, jittering creature in interesting and dramatic." An earlier film adaptation of the story was made in England in 1939-40, but MGM kept it out of circulation to benefit its own production. More than Hamilton's play, it was the 1944 film that inspired
to coin in the United States the term "gaslighting," which refers to "a
manipulative psychological tactic employed to make someone doubt their
sanity. A manipulator tries to get someone to question their reality
and perceptions." (Gaslighting: The Narcissist's favorite tool of Manipulation by Theresa J. Covert, 2019, p. 5) According to Miami News
(Sept. 16, 1948), reporting on divorce petitons, in one suit the
complainant claimed that the husband "gave her the Gaslight treatment." Hamilton's Hangover Square from 1941 was a grim
study of a
schizophrenic named George Harvey Bone, who lives in the lower depths
of Earl's Court, London. His mental detorioration is worsened by his
love for a freckless whore, Netta Longdon, who is unfaithful to him
with his best friends. Bone's agony drives him to a desperate
act, but the narrative makes it clear that his desire for revenge is
justified. The novel was written during the Battle of Britain and to
illustrate Netta's wicked nature, Hamilton portrays her as a Nazi
fetishist: "She liked the uniforms, the guns, the breeches, the boots,
the swastikas, the shirts." After finishing the book, Hamilton said
that it is perhaps the best thing he has ever written. Along with Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947)
Hangover Square is among the most penetrating studies of
drinking. Behind the
story was Hamilton's unrequited passion for the actress Geraldine
Fitzgerald in the mid-1930s. Lowry and Hamilton never met. The film adaptation by the director John Brahm was shot between late August and mid-November 1944. Darryl F. Zanuck insisted that substantial changes were made in adapting the novel for the screen. Thus Bone, played by Laird Gregar who died before the release of the film, was made a composer and concert pianist instead of an alcoholic outcast. Hamilton himself was aghast at the changes made in the novel by the studio. George Sanders, who was cast in the role of Dr. Allan Middleton, a criminal psychologist, refused to learn his lines. "I can't possibly say this crap!" he complained. In the grand finale Bone pounds the piano, with the house in flames around him. Bernard Herrmann wrote the 'Concerto macabre' mainly in the mode of one of the most famous works by Franz Liszt, Dance of the Dead (Totentanz). On the soundtrack, Ignace Hilsberg plays the piano. As a playwright, Hamilton never repeated the success of Rope and Gas Light. The Duke of Darkness
(1942), directed by Michael Redgrave and staged at the St. James's
Theatre, London, lasted seventy-six performances. The play was set in a
jail in the sixteenth-century France. "Patrick Hamilton, like every
other playwright," said the critic Lewis Nichols, "can stub his toe,
and this he had done most throughly in The Duke of Darkness." Hamilton's final series of novels remained unfinished. In The
West Pier, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse and Unknown
Assailant,
he traced the career of another psychopath, Ralph Ernest Gorse. The
character was an early example in thrillers of the cold-blooded and
amoral charmer, a forefather of Psycho and Hannibal Lecter. Graham Greene described The West Pier as "the best book written about Brighton." (Greene was generous in his praise, but later he thought that his own first major novel, Brighton Rock from 1938, was "one of the best I ever wrote." ) Later the series was made into a television drama, The Charmer (1987), starring Nigel Havers, Bernard Hepton, Rosemary Leach, and Fiona Fullerton. Hamilton's novel was set along the seafront and pier in Brighton in the early 1920s. There are no murders and no violence, but Hamilton creates a dark, malevolent atmosphere, which perhaps is also a social statement in itself. Hamilton's Marxist views and private admiration of Stalin reflected only marginally from his works – he never joined the Communist Party. He did not depict the heroic working class, but rootless people, petty criminals, prostitutes, and barmaids, whose illusions are broken. In 1938 Hamilton left London and settled in
Henley-on-Thames, a small town which inspired The Slaves of
Solitude.
Most of the action of the story takes place in a boarding-house,
Rosamund Tea Rooms at Thames Lockdon.
The story is told mostly from the viewpoint of Enid Roach, a
thirty-nine-year-old spinster. After being bombed out of her London
flat, she moves into Rosamund Tea Rooms, where she encounters a gallery
of characters. Mr. Prest, "the black sheep of the
boarding-house", who observes alone in his corner, is Hamilton's ironic
alter ego. Enid Roach and Prest are the only residents, who escape
the purgatory of Thames Lockdon. At the time of writing the book,
Hamilton drank three bottles of whisky a day. The Slaves of
Solitude was
reissued by Oxford University Press in 1982 as a
"Twentieth Century Classic." Richard Kane adapted the novel to the stage in 1988 under the title Miss Roach's War. During the war, Hamilton held for a short time the "unofficial post
of play-reader to the Soviet embassy, advising the Russians on what
British works would be ideologically suitable for translation and
distribution in the USSR." (Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain by Paula Derdiger, 2020, p. 69) He was married twice –
first to Lois Martin, a cultured older woman, in 1930, and then in 1953 to Ursula Stewart, born
Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot; he began an extramarital affair with her
about 1947-1948. Hamilton's wives looked after him without becoming
friends. He
lived with Ursula during the week and then returned to his wife. Ursula
Stewart was an author who published under the name Laura Talbot. According to Hamilton's older brother Bruce, his whisky intake rarely fell below the equivalent of three bottles a day. He was interested in cricket. With his friends he spent time in the pubs of Fitzrovia. Patrick Hamilton died on September 23, 1962. The writer J.B. Priestley praised his gift in describing "a kind of No-Man's-Land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet." For further reading: 'The Slaves of Solitude and Narratives of Inconsequence,' in Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain by Paula Derdiger (2020); Dark Psychology and Gaslighting Manipulation by Ryan Pace (2020); Gaslighting: The Narcissist's Favorite Tool of Manipulation by Theresa J. Covert (2019); Patrick Hamilton: His Life and Work: A Critical Study by John Harding (2007): 'On Patrick Hamilton's Impromptu in Moribundia' by N. Maycroft, in Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Vol. 10, Issu 4 (2002); 'Hamilton, (Anthony Walter) Patrick,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 2, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); '(Anthony Walter) Patrick Hamilton,' in The Reader's Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, edited by Peter Parker (1995); Patrick Hamilton by Sean French (1993); Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton by Nigel Jones (1992);'Hamilton, Patrick,' by Charles Shibuk, in Twentieth Century Mystery and Crime Writers, ed. by J.M. Reilly (1985); The Light Went Out by B. Hamilton (1972) Selected works:
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