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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 wealthy barrister, and a family tyrant, who spent his 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. 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. 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. "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 accidentally run over by a car, sustaining multiple fractures and requiring plastic surgery. The accident left him permanently disfigured and 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, who marries a woman for her money and tries to drive her mad in order to get his hands on it. 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) 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. 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 forces him to revenge. Along with Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947)
the book 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 was made a composer and concert pianist instead of an
alcoholic outcast. In the grand finale Bone plays his piano concerto.
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). 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." 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 (1947). Most of the action of the story takes place in a boarding house. The book was reissued by Oxford University Press in 1982 as a "Twentieth Century Classic." Hamilton was married twice – first to Lois Martin in 1930 and then to Ursula Stewart in 1953. During his last years Hamilton's wives looked after him without becoming friends. According to his older brother Bruce, his whisky intake rarely fell below the equivalent of three bottles a day. 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: 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); World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The Reader's Companion to Twentieth Century Writers, ed. by Peter Parker (1995); Patrick Hamilton by Sean French (1993); Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton by Nigel Jones (1992); 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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