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| Genius declared |
With a new BBC adaption of his work, writer
Patrick Hamilton is about to be rediscovored. Michael Holroyd tells
Dan Carrier why he should be remembered
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Scenes from the BBC adaptation: Above Zoe Tapper as Jenny
and Bryan Dick as Bob
Sally Hawkins as Ella and Phil Davis as Mr Eccles. Pictured
page one: Bryan Dick as Bob
Michael Holroyd
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PATRICK Hamilton was never seen as be part of the Bloomsbury
Set, despite being a Bright Young Thing.
It was a surprising emission, considering his Marxist politics,
his profession as a writer and the times and places he saw and lived
through. Whereas his contemporaries – the likes of Virginia
Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa
Bell – were all household names, Hamilton’s works became
famous, rather than his moniker.
This was in spite of being responsible for two thrillers that when
made into films have become landmarks: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope,
and Gaslight, which starred Ingrid Bergman.
Now, in the centennial year of his birth, his most haunting collection
of works, 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, are due to screened by the
BBC – and according to writer and Hamilton fan Michael Holroyd,
the three-part drama will bring the author to a new audience and
underline his rightful place in the canon of 20th-century English
literature.
It also offers a fascinating glimpse into Camden in the 1930s.
Holroyd, who lives in Hampstead and has been awarded the prestigious
David Cohen prize for literature this year, didn’t hear about
Hamilton from anyone. No one recommended he read his books.
“I found him myself by accident, in a public library, when
I was a young man,” he says. “I was browsing when I came
across his book Hangover Square. I found out later that this was
a great place to start. It is a thriller that really thrills, and
after reading it, I was hooked.”
This lead him on to Twenty Thousand Streets – and concluding
Hamilton was an undiscovered genius.
The era in which Hamilton wrote has always appealed to Mr Holroyd.
He has written biographies of Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey and
Augustus John, and believes Hamilton’s legacy is as much of
interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. It
also offers a fascinating insight into the writer’s own, tragic
life.
The first book in the Streets trilogy - broadcast on BBC4 this year
- focuses on the failed romancing of Jenny Maple, a prostitute,
by Bob, a barman in the Midnight Bell. It is a seedy pub at the
bottom of Albany Street. Bob’s infatuation – which ultimately
leads to his downfall – is carefully chronicled. Hamilton has
got under the skin of Bob’s love: and it is not surprising,
says Holroyd.
“The Midnight Bell, written in 1929 when Hamilton was still
24, is the most autobiographical of the three books,” he explains.
“The tension of the narrative rises and in the last pages breaks
through the structure of the novel, involving us in the emotional
wreckage of his life. He is a comic writer who writes tragedies.
It is full of sadness. It’s a real mixture.”
Holroyd says Hamilton was a romantic figure – and this not
only helped him write, it also lead to a sense of disillusionment,
a feeling of love never really fulfilling the hopes attached to
it, that is apparent throughout The Midnight Bell.
While studying at a commercial school in Holborn as a 17-year-old,
he fell in love for the first time.
Holroyd says: “His brother Bruce remembered ‘his surrender
was instant, absolute and agonizing. I could see that her mere appearance
made him almost faint with longing’, he said.”
And it was while studying in Holborn, Hamilton met Lily, a West
End prostitute, upon whom he has based the character Jenny.
Holroyd says the relationship provided an escape from the middle
class sensibilities of his family.
“It was a way into the world of London’s defeated classes,”
he says. “The insignificant, the needy, the homeless and the
ostracised that populate his novels.” According to Holroyd,
Hamilton’s father Bernard was a tyrannical figure.
He would bully Patrick – and was partly the reason Hamilton
retreated into the underbelly of Bloomsbury and St Pancras street
life when he had left home in his late teens. He wanted to escape
Bernard’s influence. This in turn gave him the experiences
and material he needed to produce 20,000 Streets.
Holroyd adds: “His emotional vulnerability helped to make him
one of the chronically dissolute and distressed who wander dingy
London streets and find refuge in its pubs and dosshouses.”
Hamilton’s books were greeted well when they were first published.
But his battle with alcoholism gave him an unsavoury reputation,
while a horrific accident – he was run over and nearly killed
in 1932 – took him further out of the public eye.
His wish to cast off his background to go and find his subject matter
meant he mixed with the ‘lower’ classes – the great
unwashed that 1930s’ intellectuals cared about through their
commitment to socialism, but generally from a safe distance.
This gave him a unique view of the world he was living in: Twenty
Thousand Streets Under The Sky give unique insights into Hamilton’s
Camden, and the life he led.
“He knew Camden between the wars. It was a difficult time –
a time when the only thing that brings happiness is the pub, and
that comes over in his books,” Holroyd says. Nor was he alone
feeling this. “Doris Lessing says he is all you need to read
if you want to know London – she said he created a map of the
city for her,” Holroyd adds. The adaptation of the books into
a BBC drama shows a part of Camden that has changed little in the
70-plus years since the books were written. Hamilton’s world
is instantly recognisable. Although the Midnight Bell does not exist
in name, the pub can still be found in the back streets of South
Camden, with remarkably similar characters to those sketched by
Hamilton.
This, says Holroyd, is part of the writers’ enduring appeal.
He says: “Taking us out of the pub onto the swarming streets
of London, he gives us a social map of this malignant city as it
was in the harsh commercial era of the 1920s and 1930s. His Marxism
became a method of distinguishing between the avoidable and unavoidable
suffering of people, and, in so far as literature can change social
conditions, such a vivid facsimile in fiction may have helped to
do so.
“His Marxism is a sort of wish for a better social system that
will bring less materially driven unhappiness. His Marxism was focussed
on taking away the idea of inequality of wealth but he was aware
that this would not end unhappiness – that’s why his books
have a streak of tragedy running through them. People would still
fall in love and get hurt.
“While the narrative drives you forward, you will absorb the
atmosphere of what it was like to live in England between the world
wars.”
• Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky will be broadcast
on BBC2 on September 9th at 9pm. |
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