Who is Patrick Hamilton ?
Over the years, England has produced a fine collection of writers, including playwrights, novelists, and poets, among others, who have made significant contributions to their literary tradition. Patrick Hamilton is one of the most talented English novelists working today.
Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton (17 March 1904 – 23 September 1962) was a playwright and novelist from England. Graham Greene and J. B. Priestley admired him, and the study of his novels has been revived due to their distinct style, which employs a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture.
They have a strong sympathy for the poor and acerbic black humor. In 1968, Doris Lessing wrote in The Times, “Hamilton was a marvelous novelist who has been grossly neglected.”
Rope and Gas Light, two of Patrick Hamilton’s most successful plays, were adapted into famous films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and the British-made Gaslight (1940), followed by the 1944 American version.
Patrick Hamilton Background
Hamilton was born on March 17, 1904, at Dale House in Hassocks, near Brighton, Sussex, to (Walter) Bernard Hamilton (1863-1930), a writer and non-practising barrister, and his second wife, Ellen Adèle (née Hockley; 1861-1934), who wrote as “Olivia Roy.”
His parents were conceited and snobbish; Bernard Hamilton considered himself to be “a great writer, though the few books he penned- soppy romances and some hotchpotch of religion and spirituality- were mediocre at best,” “frequently boasted about his genealogical table,” and “pretended to be the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland,” and Ellen “treated her domestics with haughtiness” and “attempted to breed
Because of his father’s alcoholism and financial insecurity, Hamilton spent much of his childhood in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and he dropped out of Westminster School shortly after his fifteenth birthday. In 1919, he published his first poem, “Heaven,” in the Poetry Review. His sister Lalla, who acted as Diana Hamilton in Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound, was a model.
Career
He became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen, after a brief career as an actor. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his breakthrough came with the play Rope (1929, known as Rope’s End in the United States).
The Midnight Bell (1929) is based on Hamilton’s falling in love with a prostitute and was later published as part of the semi-autobiographical trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934). (1935).
Many aspects of modern life irritated Hamilton. He was severely disfigured when he was hit by a car in the late 1920s, and the ending of his novel Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), with its vision of England smothered in metal beetles, reflects his disdain for the automobile.
Despite his disdain for the culture in which he operated, he was a well-liked contributor to it. Rope and Gas Light (1938, known as Angel Street in the US), his two most successful plays, made Hamilton wealthy and were also successful as films: the British-made Gaslight (1940), the 1944 American adaptation of Gaslight, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).
Patrick Hamilton Hangover Square (1941), widely regarded as his most accomplished work, continues to sell well in paperback and is regarded as an important part of the tradition of London novels by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. It is set in Earls Court, where Hamilton lived, and deals with both the drinking habits of the time as well as the underlying political context, such as the rise of fascism and reactions to it.
Patrick Hamilton became an outspoken Marxist, though he was not a Communist Party member. During the 1930s, Hamilton, like many other authors, became increasingly angry with capitalism and believed that the violence and fascism of Europe at the time signaled the end of capitalism. This fueled his Marxism, and his novel Impromptu in Moribundia (1939) was a satirical examination of capitalist culture.
Hamilton developed a misanthropic authorial voice in his later writing, which became more disillusioned, cynical, and bleak as time passed. His only work that dealt directly with the Second World War was The Slaves of Solitude (1947), and he preferred to look back to the pre-war years. His Gorse Trilogy – three novels about a devious sexual predator and conman – is not widely regarded critically, though Graham Greene said the first was “the best book written about Brighton,” and the second (Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse) is increasingly regarded as a comic masterpiece.
The novels’ hostile and negative tone is also attributed to Hamilton’s depression and disillusionment with Marxism’s utopianism. The trilogy consists of The West Pier (1952), Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953), which was dramatized as The Charmer in 1987, and Hamilton’s final published work, Unknown Assailant (1955), a short novel written while Hamilton was drunk. [Citation required] In 1992, the Gorse Trilogy was released in a single volume.
Patrick Hamilton Marriage and Death
Hamilton had started drinking excessively when he was still a young man. He died in 1962 of cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure in Sheringham, Norfolk, after a declining career and melancholia. He married twice, first to Lois Marie Martin in 1930, and then to Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot (a novelist who wrote under the pen name Laura Talbot) in 1954, a year after divorcing Lois.
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin houses a collection of Hamilton’s manuscripts and correspondence.
Patrick Hamilton Stage Plays
- Rope (1929)
- The Procurator of Judea (1930; unpublished)
- John Brown’s Body (1931; unpublished)
- Gas Light (1938), also known as Angel Street
- The Duke in Darkness (1943)
- The Governess (1946; unpublished)
- Caller Anonymous (1952; unpublished)
- The Man Upstairs (1953)
- Miss Roach (1958; unpublished)
- Hangover Square (1965; unpublished)
Radio Plays
- Rope. BBC National Programme, 18 January 1932. Adapted from the stage play qv
- Conversation in a Train. BBC Regional Programme. 2 June 1936
- Money with Menaces. BBC National Programme, 4 January 1937
- To the Public Danger. BBC National Programme, 25 February 1939
- Gas Light. BBC Home Service, 24 November 1939. Adapted from the play qv
- This is Impossible. BBC Home Service, 27 December 1941
- The Duke in Darkness. 17 April 1944. Adapted from the stage play qv
- The Governess. BBC Home Service, 1 November 1948. Adapted from the stage play qv
- Caller Anonymous. BBC Home Service, 7 March 1952
- 20,000 Streets Under the Sky. BBC Radio 4, 17 Nov 1989
