Although Patrick Hamilton died as recently as 1962 – the year of That Was The Week That Was and Love Me Do – his fiction belongs to a world whose outlines had begun to disappear twenty or even thirty years before. Craven House (1926), his second novel, glances back to the era of his Edwardian childhood, and in The Slaves of Solitude (1947) he produced a definitive account of the privations of the Second World War Home Front, but the locus classicus of his work is the period between about 1920 and the summer of 1939 – the world, to borrow one or two classic Hamiltonian symbols, of the Lyons Corner House, the gangster film, and flaring headlines about the Prince of Wales. If Hamilton’s chronological focus sometimes feels uncomfortably narrow, for a man who lived into the age of Suez and Buddy Holly, then his spatial window is more restricted still. With the exception of Twopence Coloured (1927), his “theatre” novel, all his books are set within a geographical triangle that extends from Central London westward along the Thames Valley into Berkshire and southwards to the Sussex Coast. Their action, on the other hand, colonizes an even smaller territory. Whether fetched up in South Kensington, Maidenhead, or Hove, nearly all Hamilton’s characters head, by a kind of infallible homing instinct, for the nearest pub.
Hangover Square (1941), Hamilton’s great novel of 1930s Earls Court, features an interesting minor character, a solitary young man called Halliwell who spends his evenings in the local watering holes drinking glasses of port and eavesdropping on the chatter of the other barflies. It is tempting to identify Halliwell, a “fair-haired, clean-shaven young man with a fresh skin and a rather prominent nose”, with Hamilton himself, for the feeling in his novels of someone who has observed a public house not merely as a sociological construct but as an exercise in group psychology is very strong. More so even than Julian Maclaren-Ross, who admired his work, Hamilton is the laureate of the saloon bar, the private lounge and the snuggery. Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953), in particular, contains several revealing passages about pub routine (“This is the way of public houses during the first half hour or so of opening time. They will remain in a state of desultory, almost deadly quiet for a long while, and then, all of a sudden, burst into life”) that would not look out of place in a contemporary Mass Observation survey.
Or perhaps this is to narrow down the range of Hamilton’s interests to the point of absurdity. As one of the great fictional chroniclers of drinking he takes himself to anywhere drink is likely to be found: to the public bars of upmarket hotels (always a good venue for impressing women) to secret gin and brandy orgies in pebble-dashed front parlours. Two of his books are set almost entirely in pubs; in at least another three, practically every significant event takes place against a background of clinked tumblers, last orders and the barmaid’s saccharine smile. Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, perhaps the most alcoholically charged of all his novels, has more than twenty separate scenes in which characters either buy drinks, have drinks bought for them, or are discovered in some out-of-the-way corner of the bar with the first of the evening at their elbow.
All this – drink, drinkers, the log fire sending rays of paralysing heat into the damp streets beyond – might be thought to imply a certain sense of conviviality. In fact the vistas opened up by the scraping of the door-bolts and the landlord’s welcoming nod are full of bitter, anguished brooding. For as well as the saloon bars of the English Home Counties, Hamilton’s other great subject is loneliness. Nearly all his major characters are distinguished by their complete lack of connection, their detachment from any fixed point of human contact. The surviving family of George Harvey Bone in Hangover Square amounts to a single aunt living at Hunstanton in Norfolk, whom he visits at Christmas. Miss Roach, the spinster heroine of The Slaves of Solitude, has a brother living in Brazil and an aunt who has migrated to Guildford. Bob, the barman in The Midnight Bell (1929), is an orphan whose return to his old career as a merchant seaman at the novel’s close is noticed by perhaps three people. Whether virtuous, hopeful and well-meaning or scheming, snobbish and self-interested – the two principal “types” in which Hamilton deals – each of his characters is horribly adrift, left to fend for themselves in an increasingly hostile world. At the heart of this atmosphere of refilled glasses, swift halves and ones for the road, lies only a desperate sense of isolation and failure to cohere.
It would be strange if the peculiar air that invests nearly everything he wrote – a kind of dogged seedy tension in which misanthropy and sentiment are permanently at war – were not somehow related to the circumstances of his own life. Hamilton, all the biographical evidence insists, was a supremely odd fish – secretive, self-deluding, shoulders permanently buckled beneath the weight of family baggage. Hamilton père was a vainglorious, non-practising barrister who inherited £100,000 from his father, little of which survived to support his children, and who later wrote historical novels that are smothered under a blanket of Wardour Street English. There was a hero-worshipping brother, Bruce, and an actress sister, Lalla, whose later life proved quite as tragic as anything in Patrick Hamilton’s fiction. Precocious early success – his first novel was accepted for publication three days after his twenty-first birthday; Rope (1929), his money-spinning dramatization of the Loeb–Leopold case, was written when he was twenty-four – was balanced by serial personal misfortune. His first marriage, to Lois Martin, may not even have been consummated. In January 1932, two novels into his London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, he was knocked down by a car and spent a year in hospitals and nursing homes. All this exacerbated an underlying frailty. In the index to Sean French’s Patrick Hamilton: A life (1993), “drinking” gets fifteen mentions. By the end of the war, Bruce Hamilton calculated, with black market whisky at twenty-five shillings a bottle, his brother was spending nearly £2,000 a year feeding his habit.
The Gorse Trilogy (1951–5) – neurotic, restless, its comedy always pulled down by an awareness of the destinies that lie ahead – is late-period Hamilton: crack-up lay just around the corner. Though harassed by the Attlee era’s punitive tax regime, he was a wealthy man: Alfred Hitchcock had filmed Rope, while Gaslight, his second big dramatic smash from 1939, had also been bought by Hollywood. Other aspects of his life, though, were in sharp decline. By the late 1940s he had begun a relationship with Lady Ursula Talbot (known as “La” and, as “Laura Talbot”, the author of several novels, including The Gentlewomen, 1952), while never quite being able to detach himself from Lois. Before divorce proceedings were finally instituted in 1953, he divided his time between a converted stables near Pangbourne with his first wife, and a tiny rented house in Hove with her replacement. Lalla, meanwhile, was dying of cancer. In these understandably fraught circumstances he began work on the series of novels whose composition and reception, Sean French has plausibly suggested, hastened the end of his life.
The publishing history of the Gorse novels is a melancholy affair. Hamilton’s publisher and long-term friend, Michael Sadleir, affected to admire the manuscript of The West Pier “beyond measure” only to backtrack on receipt of a disparaging letter from J. B. Priestley, who had been asked for a puff (“Nobody enjoys this writer’s odd mannerisms and close observation more than I do, but with the best will in the world I find this particular story very slight”). Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, Sadleir thought, “gives an impression of petulance and personal prejudice so peevishly over-stated as to make the characters mere cock-shies”. By the time of Unknown Assailant, Sadleir could not even bring himself to write the jacket copy. He delegated this task to the author on the grounds that “there may well be some point you would like to stress about the new story”. Approving notices – L. P. Hartley thought The West Pier’s entertainment value “could not be higher”, while Graham Greene considered it the best novel about Brighton ever written – were no consolation. Apart from the few desultory pages of a further novel, entitled “The Happy Hunting Ground” (“in every way, utterly impossible” – Bruce) and the beginnings of a memoir of his alcoholism, Hamilton wrote no more. Retiring to a bolt-hole on the North Norfolk coast with La, he drank himself to a painful death at the age of fifty-eight.
If nothing else, The Gorse Trilogy is an example of the futility of thinking that you can go against the grain of your literary nature – in this case, to imagine that your forte is epic villainy, when what you really excel at is small-scale deceit. After a sinister vignette or two from prep school days, we first meet Ernest Ralph Gorse as an eighteen-year-old stalking girls on Brighton seafront, then again as a twenty-five-year-old deviously at large among the Reading mock-Tudor set, finally half a decade later in the drab backstreets of West London. Like his predecessors, Gorse is a loner, his only relative a stepmother who has indulged him as a child in response to the guilt she feels for disliking him. A swindler, with faint sadistic and – it is implied – masochistic tendencies, Gorse specializes in women. In The West Pier his victim is the teenaged sweetshop assistant Esther Downes. By the time of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, he has moved determinedly upmarket to a colonel’s widow named Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce. Unknown Assailant has him paying mock-assiduous court to a good-natured barmaid, Ivy Barton.
Whether or not Hamilton meant to produce this effect, each novel is a minor variation on the existing theme. To each of the women Gorse at one time or another proposes marriage. In each case the lure is snobbery. Impressionable Esther is dazzled by Gorse’s Westminster tie, his talk of “my people” and the “Colonel Ralph Gorse” from whom he has expectations. Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, and a large part of her wherewithal, are inveigled by an imaginary Military Cross and an equally bogus military ancestor, “Gorse of Assandrava”. To hook Ivy there is even a nom de plume, “The Honourable Gerald Claridge”, in which guise Gorse masquerades as a theatrical impresario, again with a distinguished and moneyed relative lurking in the background. In each case, too, the finale is more or less the same: Gorse, having diddled his victim, drives off into the distance, leaving a frightened or outraged woman to clear up the mess.
Hamilton takes immense pains with Gorse, or at least with Gorse’s sleek exterior. He is forever reminding us about his toothbrush moustache, his ginger hair, his slightly mannered voice and his smart blue suits. The preamble to The West Pier has the eleven-year-old monster in embryo engineering a scene in which a Jewish boy is suspected of stealing a torch, sticking pins in car tyres and – a wonderfully creepy touch – making his pet mice swim lengths of the bathtub. There is also the case of the small girl tied to a roller at the local cricket ground, for whose plight Gorse may or not be responsible. All this raises the question of the kind of anti-hero Hamilton intended Gorse to be, and the kind of impression he is supposed to make upon the reader.
Unquestionably, Hamilton originally conceived Gorse as a villain of the deepest dye, a walking encapsulation of the great criminal names of English folklore. This impression is reinforced by the eagerness with which Hamilton constantly mythologizes him, compares him to other criminals (he apparently has a touch of Burke and Hare, not to mention resemblances to Palmer the poisoner and Neville Heath, who mutilated a series of young women), offers scornful summaries of what journalists have said about him and, in Unknown Assailant, even manufactures a couple of biographers, “G. Hadlow Browne” and “Miss Elizabeth Boote”, who have written full-length books about him.
The problem about these exalted standards is that Gorse can never live up to them. While it is perfectly possible that Hamilton intended to develop him into a figure of Heath-like depravity in later books, his early career is trivial in the extreme. Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, with her snaffled £500, rests at the top of a very small range: Esther’s savings amount to a paltry £68.15s, while the fleecing of Ivy Barton realizes a bare £50 (although to do Gorse justice he does manage to relieve her father of an additional £200). A really competent performer, you feel, would already be helping himself to thousands, hoodwinking Lloyds syndicates with insurance scams, issuing false prospectuses and retiring to the Riviera on the proceeds. But Gorse, as confidence tricksters go, is ominously second-rate, betraying his social origins from one phrase to the next – speaking French to Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce at one point he pronounces et as “eight” – bragging about his prospects and trusting to the extreme stupidity of his victims to see him through. Such is the number of people who have their doubts about him – these range from his prep-school headmaster to a theatre director met for a few moments in the pub – that the reader wonders why the procession of female dupes can’t see through him as well. But while this may undermine Gorse as a character – commonplace when he should be exceptional, conceited when he should be discreet – from the point of view of the trilogy as a whole it works to Hamilton’s advantage. What starts off as the analysis of a particular “type” ends up as a series of psychological case studies and, more important still, an exposure of the milieu that gives them life.
Rereading Balzac’s La Comédie humaine in extreme old age, Anthony Powell wondered whether the constant scheming of certain of its characters wasn’t rather exaggerated: “one feels the average person does not take so much trouble, as Balzac represents them doing, to swindle someone else”. In Hamilton’s world as in Balzac’s, the true object in defrauding someone of their savings is not so much to amass money that would otherwise have to be honestly earned as to exercise power. Hence the infinitely drawn-out process of manipulation and intrigue to which Esther, Ivy and Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce are subject, and the high degree of psychological acuteness that Gorse brings to his assault. We see this at the very beginning of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse when Gorse, sitting at the pub bar eyeing up his prey, asks Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce whether it would be “taboo” to give her dog a biscuit. It is exactly the right word to use to an Indian Colonel’s relict, and, as Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce has not so far “quite taken to him”, instantly raises him several notches in her estimation. It is the same with Gorse’s management of his victims, a series of inches given and received, of Gorse buying his way into the women’s regard with small displays of apparent honesty and trustworthiness (Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce thinks she has won money on a horse, Esther has a small loan faithfully restored), accumulating the reserves of moral capital that will enable him finally to clean up.
The world in which The Gorse Trilogy takes place, though quasi-genteel and abetted by all manner of middle-class politeness, is essentially cut-throat. Its inhabitants, by and large, are out for what they can get. Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce is enticed by Gorse’s suppositious affluence and good family. Mr Stimpson and Major Parry, the gentleman friends whom Gorse cuts out, are after her sexual favours and, in the case of the widowed Mr Stimpson, her money. Even Esther Downes and Ivy Barton, represented as virtuous but credulously dim-witted, are captivated by the idea of marrying a “gentleman”. The novels’ comedy, consequently, is the comedy of social aspiration, false ambition, unwitting self-exposure. By far the funniest sections of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, for example, are given over to Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s absurdly self-aggrandizing diary (a document which, as Hamilton shrewdly notes, is really “a letter to an imaginary woman friend – a friend who was, occasionally, so disagreeable as to be almost an enemy”) but they are run a close second by the versifying Major Parry’s attempts to write an Armistice Day poem for the local paper.
As a doctrinaire Marxist, who esteemed Nikita Khrushchev (“I particularly like the way in which he is incessantly rebuking those who go too far in their denigration of Stalin”), Hamilton might have been expected to disapprove of Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce and her satellites. But his hatred of Mr Stimpson, Major Parry and the confraternities of the pub lounge is more than simply theoretical. There is a sense of personal enmity, of all kinds of scores being settled from far back in the pre-war ooze. The other terrifying thing about the Gorse books is their determinism, the sense of unappeasable destiny lurking beyond the curtain of each novel’s close. Even the minor characters – especially the minor characters, one might say – have their fates drearily unwound before them. Rosen, the bullied Jewish boy, bucks the trend by becoming “a successful municipal and BBC musical conductor”, but Gertrude Perks, the beautiful Esther’s plain accomplice, marries the son of a fishmonger and is not “effectually consoled”, while Stan Bullitt, the heroic teenager who rescues Ivy from the sash cord with which Gorse has trussed her, dies in the early days of the Second World War.
If Hamilton is cagey about Gorse’s ultimate fate – although he remarks at one point that he will die “painlessly and quickly” (on the gallows) – he is oddly prophetic about the Home Counties landscapes through which he wanders. Appropriately enough, for a man nearly killed by a careless driver, bad hats in Hamilton tend to be connected with motorized transport. Andy, in The Siege of Pleasure (1932), who puts the servant girl Jenny Maple on the streets, is “in motors”. Gorse’s dissolute chum Ronald Shooter, whose house he borrows for the duration of his Reading stay, is “if in any business, in the car-business”. Gorse’s swindles, too, invariably have something to do with cars. The money Esther lends him funds the purchase of one; Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce is presented with a machine, which Gorse does not in fact own, as “security”. As he drives off in the direction of Nottingham at the close of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, all the imaginative energy expended on these “sweetest little semi-racing things”, those faithful “buses” that confounded the “Bolshies” in the General Strike, realizes a vision of an English countryside carpeted by “beetles”, Hamilton’s word for the “multitude upon multitude of other cars which he met or which overtook him on his way”. Gorse’s character, Hamilton quickly glosses, fearing that we may not have made the connection, is “of a very beetly kind”. The real interest of the Gorse books, though, lies not in their withering exposure of the Mrs Plumleigh-Bruces of this world, in their savage humour, or even in eco-prophecy, but in the mind that is quietly uncoiling behind them.
The routine complaint levelled at a writer of Hamilton’s type at this stage in his career is that he has travelled too far from the things that are worth writing about. The Gorse Trilogy, on the other hand, often looks like the work of a writer who has journeyed too far into himself, to whom external stimuli have ceased to matter, and who is, consequently, feeding entirely off his own imagination. Gorse is not at all a self-portrait – although there are uncanny points of similarity between his and Hamilton’s lives – and yet the reader feels constantly that in the delight he takes in portraying Gorse in action Hamilton is working off some of his own resentments and obsessions. The detachment of his narrative voice is, in the end, a false detachment, something cooked up to deceive the reader, and it is this that gives the books their dreadful fascination – an end- of-the-tether quality not often found in the English novel of Patrick Hamilton’s day, let alone the half-century that has followed it.
This is the introduction to a single-volume reprint of the Gorse trilogy to be published by Black Spring next month.
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D. J. Taylor's recent books include On the Corinthian Spirit: The decline of amateurism in sport, published last year.
