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"BRITAIN AT ITS WORST":
THE FICTIONAL MILIEU OF PATRICK HAMILTON

BY

Rosemary Erickson Johnsen

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
1!! partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English
1997

ABSTRACT

"BRITAIN AT ITS WORST":
THE FICTIONAL MILIEU OF PATRICK HAMILTON

by

Rosemary Erickson Johnsen

The work of novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton
(1904-1962), while well-respected by his contemporaries and
always followed by a general readership, particularly in
England, has been largely neglected by the universities.
This dissertation argues that Hamilton's creation of a
distinctive fictional milieu of lower—middle class boarding
houses and pubs addresses the same societal ills examined by
many of his contemporaries, but with a circumstantial
verisimilitude that offers significant advantages to later
readers.

The first two chapters situate Hamilton's novelistic
world, review the principal secondary literature, and
identify existing critical contexts for his work.

Subsequent chapters represent specific aspects of Hamilton's
characteristic setting, the private and public faces of
lower-middle class Britain between the wars. Chapter Three
analyzes Hamilton's portrayal of life in an Earl's Court
residential hotel, while Chapter Four examines the at-risk
residents of a genteel, but impoverished, private boarding
house. Chapters Five and Seven are devoted to different
aspects of pub life, investigating Hamilton's highly-nuanced

presentation of saloon bar culture and connecting his

fiction to the developing field of literature and addiction
studies. Chapter Six discusses Hamilton's Marxist dystopia,
while Chapter Eight, on his World War II homefront novel,
draws together the major elements of Hamilton's milieu and
illuminates how war conditions affected that sphere and its
inhabitants. The concluding chapter provides a final
assessment of the significance of Hamilton's novelistic
research into the condition of lower-middle class Britain
under stress.

Primary texts are the twelve novels Hamilton published
from 1925 to 1955. The results of research conducted in the
Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, Brighton,
U.K., are used to corroborate the accuracy and value of
Hamilton's fictional milieu for literary sociology and to
provide a cultural context for Hamilton's agenda.

Throughout the dissertation, other literary texts function
as points of contrast or signs of alliance, including
essays, memoirs and fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Arthur
Calder-Marshall, Storm Jameson, Doris Lessing, Julian

Maclaren—Ross, and George Orwell.

Copyright by
ROSEMARY ERICKSON JOHNSEN
1997

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks must go to the director of this
dissertation, Professor Victor Paananen, for his support
through many phases of my academic career, and for his
interest in Hamilton's work.

I would also like to thank those who served on my
guidance committee-—Professors Goodson, McClintock, Sherbo,
and Stoddart--for their time and effort. I am grateful to
Professor Erik Lunde for graciously agreeing to serve as
outside reader. For their continued support and
encouragement, I would like to thank Professors Howard
Anderson and Roger Bresnahan.

A College of Arts and Letters Special Research Abroad
Fellowship made it possible for me to consult the holdings
of the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex,
Brighton, U.K. I would like to thank the staff there for
their assistance, particularly Joy Eldridge, Assistant
Archivist. I acknowledge the permission of the Trustees of
the Mass-Observation Archive to cite Archive material.

Brian McKenna graciously shared his D.Phil thesis on
Hamilton, and I am grateful to him for trusting me with his
work. The members of my dissertation writing group provided

encouragement and assistance in writing about Hamilton for a

V

vi
general audience, unfamiliar with his work.
Throughout the long and sometimes exasperating process
of completing my degree, my family has provided the valuable
service of keeping that process in perspective. Bill, thank

you for always believing in the value of my work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One 1
A World of Temporary Refuges

Chapter Two 37
"The Taste of the Don and the Whim of the Film-maker":
Hamilton, his Critics, and Class

Chapter Three 70
"Conversational Centres" at the Fauconberg Hotel

Chapter Four 106
Reduced Circumstances:
The Paying Guests of Craven House

Chapter Five 146
"Conflict and Community": Pub Culture in
Twenty Thousand Streets Unger the Sky

Chapter Six 190
Hamilton: A First Class Fellow Traveller?

Chapter Seven 222
"The Whole Poisoned Nightmarish Circle":
Drinking in Hangover Sguare

Chapter Eight 250
"Not a War to be Taken in a Local-Library Way":
werld War II and The Slaves of Solitude

Conclusion 289
A Literary Sociology of the Ordinary

Works Consulted 297

vii

Chapter 1

A WORLD OF TEMPORARY REFUGES
[Hamilton's] great achievement was
to portray, and to create, a vivid,
fantastic world of comic horror, of
rented accommodations and temporary
refuges, lodging houses, pubs,
cinemas and tea houses, where the
lost, failed and forgotten meet and
bore each other and seek some
respite. It was also the world
that, for much of his own life, he
chose to inhabit. (French, Patrick
Hamilton: A Life)

One of the most individual features of Patrick
Hamilton's writing is its reliance on a generally under-
represented stratum of socio-economic life, best described
as lower-middle class. In fact, many of his characters are
clinging to the bottom of the middle class, trying to keep
from falling out of it altogether. Such a milieu1 re-
creates a quintessentially modern texture, and Hamilton's
fictional world constitutes an ideally appropriate
representation of early twentieth-century British culture.
Doris Lessing attests to this when she reports that "when,
in Southern Rhodesia, I had asked for books about London,
they had sent me his."2

The culture Hamilton charts so precisely is
infrequently represented in such depth in the writings of

his contemporaries. Indeed, some elements of his fictional

1

2

milieu are completely shut out by other, less idiosyncratic
novelists. Furthermore, his novels put an indelible stamp
on what they describe. John Russell Taylor, describing his
own experience reading Hamilton, remarks that after reading
the novels, "there are places, and situations, and types of
people that one can never encounter again without thinking
of Hamilton and seeing them at least partially through his
eyes. In particular there are some back-waters of middle-
class English life which have never been explored so well as
by Hamilton, and sometimes never at all otherwise."3

Furthermore, Hamilton's style is richly circumstantial,
supplying details of contemporary life: transportation,
leisure activities, fashion (much-trickled-down rather than
cutting-edge), public social relations, drink fads, even
currency and coinage. Such insight into contemporary life
is further enriched by Hamilton's insistence on showing what
such things mean to the characters who inhabit his fiction;
further circumstantial material is adduced to show, for
example, what a given expense means in the context of a
barmaid's income, or how leisure must be chosen to fit in
with the requirements of one's job. The significance of
Hamilton's non-Modernist narrative style is that his chosen
fictional world comes through comprehensively; it would be
impossible to substitute another setting or social class.
His choice of milieu would be less noteworthy if his fiction
did not provide a full picture of that world and its

Occupants .

3

Hamilton's fictional output consistently represents his
chosen milieu (his Marxist fantasy, Impromptu in Moribundie,
is the sole exception, and even it shares many features with
his more typical novels). His first novel was Monday
Morning, published in 1925, when he was only twenty-one
years old; his last published work, Unknown Assailant,
appeared exactly thirty years later. From beginning to end,
his novels exhibit characteristic subjects and narrative
techniques. What cannot be overlooked by any reader of
Hamilton's work is its marked individuality—~at times
approaching idiosyncrasy or even eccentricity--including
"his merciless precision and unsentimentality in dealing
with people and situations which seem bound to lead their
creator into sentimentality or sensationalism or both."4
It is this precise and detached authorial attitude, in play
with other relevant factors, including his narrative style
and experience of what his novels describe, that makes his
fictional milieu so compelling.

In his first novels, Hamilton stakes out boarding
houses as promising literary territory, with side excursions
into pubs and theatrical life; later, he concentrates more
exclusively on the public face of lower-middle class
transient life in the form of pubs, cinemas, and tea shops.
His fiction registers impending war; it reveals life on the
homefront once the war is fully underway. Later novels
consider criminals of the most modern stripe: the schizo-

phrenic Bone in Hangover Square and the sociopathic Gorse in

4
the Gorse trilogy. In many instances, Hamilton is alone in
his choice of milieu; when there are fellow novelists
exploring the same territory, the integrity with which the
milieu is represented differs. For example, while there are
other writers who portray pub life, often their perspective
is from the outside.

Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith's valuable study of
Cinema, Literature and Society: Elite end Maee Cultureein
Interwar Britain pinpoints the social level depicted in
Hamilton's fiction as one occupying a painful position--
either ignored or

savagely attacked by the popular novelist as much as by

the intellectual elite. H.G. Wells laid into the

lower-middle class cruelly; so too did Evelyn Waugh,

George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence and Walter Greenwood. In

cinema, too, they played an indeterminate and sulky

role between upper—middle-class glamour and workings
class chirpiness. Only Alfred Hitchcock treated them
in any sense seriously as a film subject, and then only
for dramatic effect.5
It is suggestive that Miles and Smith mention Hitchcock as
someone who looked seriously at the lower-middle class;
Hitchcock, of course, made a film version of Hamilton's
stage play Repe, and much of the darker Hamilton work--
Gaslight (given the Hollywood treatment by MGM with George
Cukor as director), the radio plays, the Gorse novels--would

translate readily into a Hitchcock film. Why a serious

5
interest in Britain's lower-middle classes might produce
such sinister effects is a question to be considered later,
but the relationship between Hamilton's and Hitchcock's work
is another connection between Hamilton and mainstream
culture.

Although Miles and Smith cover much relevant background
for a study of Hamilton's fiction, and in spite of their
marked interest in Leftist and popular fiction, Hamilton
does not appear in their book. They do not limit themselves
to what John Lucas, Andy Croft and others would call the
orthodox (i.e., elite) interwar artists, but manage to

overlook Hamilton nonetheless.6

Perhaps the explanation
for Hamilton's exclusion from their study lies in its
polarized view of the intellectual background of writers of
this period. Essentially, Miles and Smith posit two
positions with an enormous gap between them, a space which
Hamilton would occupy:
It is, of course, simply stating the obvious to point
out that almost all of the 'recognized' artists and
’intellectuals of the interwar period had been to public
schools. For most of the few who had not been through
such an education, moreover, university had a similar
programming effect. The auto-didactical tradition of
the working class may or may not have produced
thousands of 'village Newtons' but, with the exception

of Walter Greenwood, none found their way into the

canon of the elite. (58)

6
There would appear to be nothing between the privilege of
university education and the efforts of the working class to
educate themselves. By linking this limited and
dichotomized state of affairs to " 'recognized' artists,"
Miles and Smith appear to distance their own study from a
(possibly) inaccurate bifurcation, but in practice, they do
not transcend it themselves. The literature they consider
in greatest detail is by Orwell, Eliot, Spender, Aldous
Huxley, and (again) Walter Greenwood. They do expand the
"recognized" working-class writers with brief discussions of
Bert Coombes and Lionel Britton, but they do not, however,
offer candidates to occupy the enormous space between
public-schoolboys and working-class writers. Not only would
Hamilton's fiction fill out our picture of modern British
literature and society, his very presence would serve to let
in some fresh air to the rarefied atmosphere of public-
schoolboys plus Walter Greenwood.

Someone else with indisputable ties to the Left had
earlier identified this problematic dichotomy in similar
terms. Raymond Williams is prompted by a slightly earlier
context--a description of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D.
H. Lawrence as "autodidacts"--but his conclusion is the
same:

So the flat patronage of 'autodidact' can be related to

only one fact: that none of the three was in the

pattern of boarding school and Oxbridge which by the

end of the century was being regarded not simply as a

 

7
kind of education but as education itself: to have
missed that circuit was to have missed being 'educated'
at all. In other words, a 'standard' education was
that received by one or two per cent of the population;
all the rest were seen as 'uneducated' or as
'autodidacts.'7

Williams' solution to this difficulty is to re-position

writers already enjoying common currency--Eliot, Hardy, and

Lawrence--by demonstrating that they by no means lacked

formal education. But to go a step further requires

bringing in additional writers who fill out the picture,
whose existence and writings illustrate the greater
complexity of the total situation. Hamilton and his work
provide a significant counterbalance to such naive and
excessively polarized formulations of class and education.
Miles and Smith devote considerable attention to Aldous

Huxley, whose
writings reveal an acquaintance with the products of
mass culture which is by no means remote. In his
essays the Hollywood film, popular fiction, jazz, motor
cars, the fashion industry and the design and
decoration of hotels and places of entertainment are
dealt with in the concrete detail registering with a
consumer and a participant, and are not simply sketched
with dismissive contempt from the battlements of ivory
towers. (103)

Such comments make one wish Hamilton had been included; the

8
valuable comments made on Huxley's work suggest what the
authors might have made of Hamilton's. What makes Hamilton
a particularly compelling observer of such particularities
of modern life is his lack of self-conscious superiority.
Miles and Smith are persuasive on the subject of Huxley's
simultaneous participation and derision of mass culture:
In "Notes on Liberty and the Boundaries of the Promised
Land" [1931], he elaborates his concern with the topic
[leisure] to provide an image of leisure in the future.
. . "Already mass production has made it possible for
the relatively poor to enjoy elaborate entertainments
in surroundings of more than regal splendour. The
theatres in which the egalitarians will enjoy the
talkies, tasties, smellies, and feelies, the Corner
Houses where they will eat their synthetic poached eggs
on toast and drink their surrogate of coffee, will be
prodigiously much vaster and more splendid than
anything we know today." The passage is particularly
interesting for its relative lack of distancing from
‘Huxley's contemporary world. Contempt for the 'future'
he sketches is fuelled by a scorn for Lyons' Corner
Houses or the ABC chains which are already in place
and, indeed, multiplying. The synthetic poached eggs
Huxley has in mind need no future for their existence;
they are his value-judgement on the fast food of the
interwar period. (112-13)

Hamilton here again provides a valuable complement to more-

9

canonized, elite literature; his participation has been
documented by his biographers, and his attitude is more
detached than that of many of his fellow writers. He sees
the appeal of such places, not simply in the abstract, to
London's lower-middle and working class residents, but he
feels it himself. The fictional scenes in Corner Houses and
ABCs carry an ambiance not found elsewhere in literature, at
least partly because Hamilton himself participated sincerely
in the life of such places. Ella Dawson, the barmaid in
Twenty Thoueend Streete Under the_§ky is good--sensible,
intelligent, well-meaning, agreeable, possessing a "healthy
character"--so her judgment of such places ought to be
credible, as it is not presented in a spirit of mockery or
condescension. When Mr. Eccles takes Ella out to dinner for
the first time (not only the first time Mr. Eccles takes her
out to dinner, but the first time she has eye; been taken
out to dinner) she is initially disappointed by his unexotic
choice of a Lyons' Corner House, but once the scene is fully
set, Hamilton has shown his readers the attractions of such
places. The scene deserves to be quoted in full:

They were seated opposite each other at a table for two

on the basement floor of Lyons' Coventry Street Corner

House. The time was about half—past nine. The

orchestra was playing, drowning Mr. Eccles' voice; and

nearly every table in the vast, marble subterranean

Versailles for London's hungry and teeming non-

descripts, was engaged. Ella had at first been a

10
little disappointed that he should have brought her to
the Corner House; for she had been here before of an
evening, and after the terrific splash he had made at
the theatre, and what with Army people and one thing
and another, she had somehow got it into her head that
when he spoke of Dinner he had in mind somewhere a
little more intimate, original and exciting--one of
those little restaurants in Soho, say, which she had so
often wondered about. But she at once reproved herself
for greed in pleasure, and was in a way relieved to be
on her own ground, where she knew how to behave and
where she was suitably dressed. Besides, she was
intensely fond of Lyons' Corner House--with the
fondness of all healthy-minded beings for palaces-~and
Mr. Eccles took a broad-minded view of the menu which
made her gasp. He ordered two cocktails at once, and
burst into the dizziest soups and lobster extravagances
without turning a hair. He also ordered wine for
himself, and persuaded Ella, much against her will, to
take a little. Ella reckoned that what with the
theatre and all the rest he had spent little less than
thirty shillings on this jaunt already; and as one who
seldom spent more than thirty pence on an outing
altogether, she had a peculiar sense of being wasteful,
and wanted to stop him. At the same time she had a
peculiar sense of enjoying herself, of merely

physically revelling, for the first time in her life,

10
little disappointed that he should have brought her to
the Corner House; for she had been here before of an
evening, and after the terrific splash he had made at
the theatre, and what with Army people and one thing
and another, she had somehow got it into her head that
when he spoke of Dinner he had in mind somewhere a
little more intimate, original and exciting--one of
those little restaurants in Soho, say, which she had so
often wondered about. But she at once reproved herself
for greed in pleasure, and was in a way relieved to be
on her own ground, where she knew how to behave and
where she was suitably dressed. Besides, she was
intensely fond of Lyons' Corner House--with the
fondness of all healthy-minded beings for palaces--and
Mr. Eccles took a broad-minded view of the menu which
made her gasp. He ordered two cocktails at once, and
burst into the dizziest soups and lobster extravagances
without turning a hair. He also ordered wine for
himself, and persuaded Ella, much against her will, to
take a little. Ella reckoned that what with the
theatre and all the rest he had spent little less than
thirty shillings on this jaunt already; and as one who
seldom spent more than thirty pence on an outing
altogether, she had a peculiar sense of being wasteful,
and wanted to stop him. At the same time she had a
peculiar sense of enjoying herself, of merely

physically revelling, for the first time in her life,

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11

in the brilliant sunshine of his financial plane, and

she wanted to do anything but stop him.8
This passage provides a whole range of responses to the
Lyons' Corner House, not simply one or two notes. First, it
is explicitly identified as a place for London's
"nondescripts" so, appropriately, the barmaid feels in
control of its social conventions and self-assured about her

appearance . 9

Further, it does strike Ella as a prosaic
choice, in contrast to "little restaurants in Soho" which
are presumably "more intimate, original and exciting" than
somewhere she feels comfortable could possibly be. On the

other hand, Ella does like the Corner House, not holding it

 

in the contempt of familiarity. (In view of the trilogy's
wholly positive characterization of Ella, it would be a
mistake to read the remark about "healthy-minded beings" as
derogatory.) Finally, the passage suggests what possibili-
ties for pleasure the Corner House contains: the orchestra,
the crowd, the potential for extravagance which Ella had
never before experienced. If Mr. Eccles failed to impress
her when he chose the restaurant, he certainly makes up for
it with his "broad-minded view of the menu," until finally
Lyons' Corner House becomes consonant with the other
luxuries of the day.

So here is a marked contrast between Hamilton and his
fellow-consumer, Huxley. When Huxley creates dark effects
in his Lyons', these are cultural: "Yet the horrors the

artefacts of the present supposedly portend rebound back

12
upon those artefacts in the present, and the interwar Corner
House and Gaumont are filled with a new menace" (Miles and
Smith 113). Hamilton is capable of revealing positive
attributes of Lyons' and ABCs, and when he does choose to
create dark effects, these are not crimes against cultural
refinement but actively criminal, as in the Gorse novels.

When a more deliberately elite, upper-class writer such
as Elizabeth Bowen is added to consideration, Hamilton's
presentation of Corner Houses, pubs, railway buffets and the
like appears even more valuable. One of the most compelling
tensions in The Heat of the Day (1949), Bowen's London novel
of wartime, springs from the fact that Stella's lover, a
traitor to England who sells secrets to the Nazis, is upper-
class and refined, while the ineffable lower—middle-class
and vulgar Harrison is patriotically serving his country.
This irony is used to render even more shocking the
disclosure of their true affiliations at novel's end.

The details of Stella's meals out with Robert and
Harrison comprise Bowen's most circumstantial method of
illustrating the social divide between the two men. At one
of the climactic moments of the novel, just after Stella has
asked him if he is a traitor to his country, Robert takes
her to their 'special' restaurant. There, "they had a
sensation of custom, sedateness, of being inside small
walls, as though dining at home again after her journey" and
she pours out coffee into "gold—rimmed cups."10 The

lighting is dim and romantic, the tables are covered in

13
damask-patterned cloths.

During a parallel climactic scene, Harrison takes
Stella to a snack bar, and the contrasts are emphasized at
every turn:

he pushed against a door showing a dimmed sign, OPEN.

Inside, light came up stone stairs which he took her

down; at the foot he held open another door and she

walked ahead of him into a bar or grill which had no
air of having existence before tonight. She stared
first at a row of backviews of eaters perched, packed

elbow-to-elbow, along a counter. . . Not a person did

not betray, by one or another glaring peculiarity, the

fact of being human. . . . When Harrison had put his

hat on a rack he came back for Stella and put her at a

small table-~of these there were several along a wall,

their tops imitating malachite. He remarked that this
place never seemed to him too bad, and was at any rate

quiet. (216-17)
Now we are in Hamilton country, but with a radically
different guide. The pathetic Louie, who could herself be
one of Hamilton's people, who "all over herself . . . gave
the impression of twisted stockings," is impressed by the
place "because they have ever such a variety of snacks," but
Stella views it as a disaster, symptomatic of all that is
wrong with Harrison (227, 228).

Indeed, at this point, Harrison seems less than fully

human to Stella: " 'What do you eat?‘ said Stella, looking

14
at Harrison with one of those renewals of curiosity" (217).
Obviously this cafe, one of his regular places, strikes her
as bizarre, and she is unable to fathom what one would eat
there. And, of course, the menu and the food turn out to be
grossly inadequate by Stella's standards. In the place of
Ella's giddy perception of Corner House "lobster
extravagances," we find in this novel a truly nauseating
lobster dish, offered up with the added insult of being
specially ordered as a treat: '
In relays everything necessary arrived, including what
Harrison, after a eotto voce aside talk, must have
decided would be most special--lobster mayonnaise on a
bed of greenstuff knifed into dripping ribbons. The
dish, in a glaze of synthetic yellow, was put down in a
Space between knives, forks and glasses to cook in
light. (218)
So far from being a welcome luxury, this lobster is
revolting in every regard: appearance, accompanying
"greenstuff," and presentation. Not surprisingly, Stella
does not care to eat it: " 'You don't much like this
lobster?’ [Harrison asked.] 'Oh yes,‘ she with compunction
said, 'I do.‘ She twisted ribbons of lettuce round her
fork, ate, then went on [talking]" (220). Stella's
compunction is due to her knowledge that Harrison had
specially ordered this dish, and on an assumption, based on
his status as a regular in this cafe, that he finds it

satisfactory. She declines to state her true response

15
because she assumes it would hurt Harrison's feelings; if
Robert were her companion, the dish would go untouched by
both. That Bowen's narrative sides with Stella is apparent
in the revolting description of the meal, coupled with
Stella's necessary compunction and its results ("she twisted
ribbons of lettuce round her fork"). The reader is unable
to view this milieu from any other perspective than
Stella's/Bowen's, which is nearly the opposite of
Hamilton's.

Bowen's perspective reduces the Hamilton milieu to mere
sordidness, but it is equally possible, reading Hamilton in
the late twentieth century, to romanticize his fictional
milieu; any restaurant with an orchestra is bound to seem
"posh" in the McDonald's age. Further, social and moral
codes have become more flexible over the intervening
decades, allowing 1990s readers to minimize details that
would have had significance for Hamilton's first readers.
In The Magic of My Youth (1951), Arthur Calder-Marshall
reminds us of the contemporary resonance of Hamilton's
London:

It was distance that lent enchantment to Tottenham
Court Road at night, allowing me [at age 15] to make it
an image of adult delight. When I came closer to the
reality, I liked it less. Today the Horseshoe is a
model of respectability, a very proper pub for Masons
to banquet in. But even in the thirties, when it was

made over and the saloon bar laid open to the street

16
with great plate-glass windows which could be raised in
hot weather, there was an element of doubt about its
reputation. . . . But in 1923 there was no doubt. It

was Low.11

 

Hamilton's first pub novel, Theindnight Bell, set in the
Horseshoe's neighborhood, was published in 1930, early A
enough to carry the "Low" overtones to which Calder-Marshall
refers. For Hamilton, a serious novelist, to embrace such a
milieu suggests simultaneously how compelling Hamilton found
it and the opportunity his fiction provides its readers; no
other serious novelist has done as much to portray a

realistically "Low" London between the wars.

Hamilton's own participation in the culture he
describes in such detail merits attention only insofar as it
validates his accuracy. Biography has been a dead-end for
Hamilton studies, leading critics ever away from Hamilton's
work in search of titillating details of a sometimes-bizarre
personal life or trying to "explain" his fiction by means of
biographical parallels. To say that, however, is not to
ignore the implications of Hamilton's life for his writing.
Hamilton's portrayal of his chosen milieu can be detailed
and accurate precisely because he lived in it himself.
Biographical verisimilitude is part of what Doris Lessing
sees as setting Hamilton's work above other fiction
concerned with similar subjects. Her reading of Hamilton

uses biography to endorse his work; she gives the writing

17
priority while attesting to its validity. Of the pub
trilogy, Lessing writes
I was reminded of Orwell, too: but though they both
depict the grim, grey, grimy threadbare poverty, the
gracelessness of Britain at its worst, there is an
important difference. That which so repelled Orwell,
and which he described from the outside, Hamilton views
from the inside. Hamilton allowed himself to become
part of the poor streets, of bedsitting rooms whose
amenities depend on the natures or whims of powerful
landladies, of gas-fires always hungry for coins, above
all of pubs, the warm and well-lit refuges for people
who have no other. . . . [T]his is what Hamilton chose
in preference to the pathetic middle-class 'refinement'
of his upbringing, itself precarious and full of fear
and snobbery. (23)
Lessing is right to emphasize Hamilton's inside point of
view, and correct in seeing his immersion in that culture as
a deliberate choice. Being inside, and deliberately giving
the view of the inside, sets Hamilton apart from his peers.
In fact, it is being on the inside, living there as an
intelligent observer, that allows Hamilton to be so accurate
in what he depicts. Commentators who occupy radically
different positions on Hamilton's work generally agree about
the accurate representational nature of his work. Michael
Holroyd describes Twenty Thousand Streets Under the_§ky as a

”social map of [London] as it was in the harsh commercial

18
era of the 1920s and the early 1930s" which provides "the
authentic atmosphere of what it was like to live in England
between the two world wars."12 Reviews of the Gorse books
sometimes describe them as "sociology," while Clifton
Fadiman's hostile review of Heggover Squere complains of
"almost academic obedience to the dicta of psychiatry."13
The attitude taken toward the accurate cultural record of
Hamilton's work ranges from wholly negative ("mere
documentary . . . a figure out of a sociologist's casebook")
through matter of fact ("For sheer sociological observation
the book could hardly be bettered [and] it provides
obviously reliable source-material") to laudatory ("it is to
Mr. Hamilton, rather than to Mr. Graham Greene, that the
social historian will go for authentic atmosphere").14
Hamilton is credited with considerable reliability on such
matters by many critics.

The following pair of examples strike a balance between
over-documenting and ignoring such endorsements of
Hamilton's value. The first is Hugh David's fascinating
study of London's literary bohemia, The Fiteroviene.15
Hamilton's fiction functions in David's book as background,
and while his pub novels are quoted as literary scene-
setting, Hamilton never appears directly under discussion.
Rather than describe the Wheatsheaf, for example, David
quotes Hamilton's description of the fictional Midnight
Bell, since, "had it really existed, the Midnight Bell

would have been its near neighbour and rival. Not only was

19
it supposedly located just off the Tottenham Court Road, its
clientele and even its décor were strikingly similar to
those of the Wheatsheaf" (159). Further, David uses as
shorthand for Dylan Thomas's London the "grey and shabby
metropolis" of Hamilton's pub trilogy and Hengover Squere
(144). The implications of David's attitude toward Hamilton
are numerous; most relevant here is how confidently David
can use Hamilton's fiction as illustration. Hamilton's
depiction possesses both literary merit end accuracy; David
relies on its ability to evoke Fitzrovia and, more
generally, London, and he clearly expects his reader to be
familiar with Hamilton's work.
A second key example is provided by Frank Kermode who,
establishing context for thirties economics, writes that
if you had £5 a week, poverty and privation were remote
considerations. If you were a 'rentier poet' with £500
a year you thought about them only because of a
deliberate and educated act of conscience. And once
committed to this course you might feel compassion,
beyond necessity no doubt, for almost the whole
population; manual workers earned about £3 a week, and
88 per cent of the population had less then £250 a
year. It is true that a family like my own managed
fairly well on £3, and people lived with enviable style
on £5. But the bourgeois poets could hardly be
expected to know that.16

The relevance of this to Hamilton's achievement is clear.

20
However "educated" his communist conscience may have been,
his on-the-ground knowledge of the economics and lifestyle
of the milieu he built his fiction around was the result of
his own permanent residence there. Interestingly, Kermode
cites Hamilton in his footnote to the passage just quoted:
"I take these figures from J. Stevenson, Britieh Sociegyy
1914-1945, (1984). In 2. Hamilton, Hengover Squege, (1941)-
—a novel which scrupulously registers the conditions of life
immediately before the war--a meal for two at a very
expensive London restaurant, together with a great deal to
drink, costs £2. 13s. 7d." (47, n. 11). So Hamilton's
fictional representation is considered sufficiently accurate
to be cited alongside an historical study, and it
underscores the chasm between Hamilton's knowledge and what
"the bourgeois poets could hardly be expected to know."

In an era of politically-committed literature, many
writers were driven to examine socio-economic levels they
were not born into. This was no less than "the task imposed
upon them by the times--to cross no-man's-land, to
fraternize in the proletarian trenches" (Kermode 25). Part
of Hamilton's contribution to our understanding of the
thirties and forties in Britain results directly from his
immersion (by choice) in this world of "temporary refuges"
more often inhabited out of pure necessity. Hamilton's more
thorough transgression creates the opportunity for
achievements not attained by most of his fellow travellers.

Kermode's discussion of Edmund Wilson's story "The Princess

21
with the Golden Hair" and Edward Upward's trilogy, The
Spiral Ascent, illuminates the enormity of the task facing
Leftist writers of the thirties, and in the end Kermode is
forced to make allowances based on their good intentions; he
U

provides a sort of literary handicap for their fiction.

Julian Symons is surely right when, in The Thirties end the

 

Ninetie , he observes that "Kermode sees the absurdity of
[Upward‘s protagonist] Alan's attitude, but seems to feel
that the merit of the attempt to cross the class barrier
outweighs the sanctimoniousness of Wilson's narrator and the
self-conscious superiority of Alan Sebrill."18 Hamilton's
fiction offers a view into the other side of the frontier
with mercifully little sanctimoniousness and self-conscious
superiority.

If the writers of his generation were interested in
frontiers, in crossing borders, Hamilton's chosen mode of
existence represents a real crossing of boundaries.
Affiliation with the kinds of people represented in his
novels was not an intellectual exercise for him, but a way
of life. Kermode's book focuses on transgression as a key
theme of thirties writing; Hamilton, in his life, chose to
transgress the expectations and training of his (nominal)
class.

The concept of literature as "document" was examined
quite earnestly during the thirties, and the implications of
Hamilton's class transgression are particularly important in

the context of his (Leftist) literary generation's high

Vi.

vii

 

 

22
valuation of documentary of all kinds. In 1937, Storm
Jameson called upon Leftist writers to produce "documents,"
‘which were to be
offered to us without the unnecessary and distorting
gloss of the writer's emotions and self-questionings.
Writers should be willing to go and live for a long
enough time at one of the points of departure of the
new society. To go, if you like, into exile. Without
feeling heroic, or even adventurous, or curious about
their own spiritual reactions. Willing to sink
themselves for the time, so that they become conduits
for a feeling which is not personal, nor static.19
liamilton's significance for such a regime is apparent;
«consider, for example, Jameson's prescription that the
‘writer live there "for a long enough time." What time
period might be represented by this is vague, and doubtless
it might vary from one writer to the next, but clearly
Jameson intends to condemn touristy visits and "upper-class
larks."20 Presumably the duration of the visit is
:necessary to achieve the feeling of normalcy Jameson
describes as being neither heroic nor adventurous. Taking
‘this as the standard of duration, Hamilton was eminently
asuccessful; he made the real-life world of pubs and boarding
lhouses so much a part of his own life, that it ceased to be
"exile," making other, more respectable modes of life take

(an that role.

Jameson's ideas have special status as 1930s notions of

23

H Stuart Laing includes Jameson's article in

documentary.
his essay on "Presenting 'Things as They Are': John
Sommerfield's May Day and Mass Observation."22 He sketches
out the sometimes-conflicting aims of Leftist fiction in the
thirties, making use of contemporary criticism and theories
of documentary writing. Laing's picture indicates both the
difficulty of the task and the value of successful efforts:
For novelists working within the milieu of the Left in
the 19308 (whether Communist Party, ILP, Left Review or
other), these problems seems to have resolved them-
selves into the effort to reconcile three competing
influences--influences which at times pulled in
different directions. These were the need for
reportage (describing 'things as they are'), the desire
for a certain aesthetic or fictional structure (at its
crudest 'making up a story'), and the pull towards
a literature of political commitment and political
persuasion.23
Hamilton's fiction is amenable to such a project, and if not
allowed to dominate the discussion, the politics of his
novels can be fruitfully considered. His novels achieve
success in each of the areas Laing outlines: their accurate
reportage is widely accepted by critics, as is the strong
professional craftsmanship behind them, while their
political tendencies (both before and after Hamilton's

conversion to Marxism) create a strong indictment of

contemporary society.

24

While it may be true that Jameson's idea of a point of
departure is more likely to be Nottingham, Hamilton's milieu
is an appropriate "point of departure," and it is one he
became a real part of. The problem with earlier Leftist
writers limiting themselves to factory workers is the
impossibility of becoming one--Jameson remarks that "a
writer living in a Nottinghamshire mining village could not
possibly do his job properly without the help of
confidential reports from the workers themselves, which he
would have to wait for and deserve by his behaviour."24
That a writer might actually become a manual laborer does
not present itself as a possibility; certainly in this
instance Jameson assumes that living "at one of the points
of departure" does not mean full immersion. Partly, of
course, this is nothing more than another testament to the
rigidity of Britain's class system, which made class
differences too visible for full immersion in another class,
and it explains Jameson's starting point.

Jameson's article begins by offering a definition of
socialist literature so general as to be nearly useless, but
part of the purpose of the definition is to overcome the
impossibilities of a middle-class writer being (for however
long) a factory worker or miner: "I believe we should do
well to give up talking about proletarian literature and
talk about socialist literature instead--and mean by it
writing concerned with the lives of men and women in a world

which is changing and being changed."25 While one could

25

argue that such a definition could be applied to virtually
all literature, it is noteworthy that she points away from
exclusively factory-worker books. The Left's conception of
political literature matured during the thirties, and
Jameson reflects its increased interest in what Andy Croft
characterizes as "fiction that had the reliable feel of a
political documentary [as opposed to] political documents

"u Jameson

that tried to pass themselves off as fiction.
broadens the range of possible subjects to include novels
featuring any level of society: "The use of the term
'proletarian novel' suggests, quite falsely, that socialist
literature ought to concern itself only or mainly with
working-class life. . . . The process of change, of decay,
of growth, is taking place everywhere all the time: it does
not matter where you open up the social body if you know

what you are looking for."27

Hamilton's choice, the lower
reaches of the middle class (where it verges on the working
class), seems a very honourable part of the scheme Jameson
prescribes.

The perceived need for documentary was one of the
driving forces behind Mass-Observation, the sociological
enterprise founded by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge, and
Humphrey Jennings in 1937. Mass-Observation employed full-
time researchers to "observe" everyday Britain, and
accumulated material (diaries, monthly questionnaires on set

topics) from volunteers. Harrisson had studied cannibals in

the Pacific, and regretted the lack of similar fact-finding

up
a“.

'l'
hIn

;¢
0"
‘4 I.

...
o‘.‘
‘1

26
and analysis done in England. For democracy to remain
viable, Harrisson believed, it required an anthropology of
ordinary English people and culture. In an early published
work, Britein by Mass-Observation (1939), Harrisson and
Madge made this point emphatically:

If there is any moral responsibility of the scientist

at all, it is that he should spend a part of his time,

or see to it that more than sufficient scientists
should spend more of their time, in studying normal and
everyday behaviour problems of our own lives, as
actually lived in the houses and factories, pubs and
chapels and shops in this sort of civilisation.28
The interest of thirties' middle and upper-middle class
intellectuals in other socio-economic levels often included
only those who were very "other"--northern coal miners and
factory workers. In calling for serious, sustained
attention to be directed to the "normal and everyday," Mass-
Observation's interests parallel Hamilton's.

Among other topics, Britain by MeeeeObservation
addresses several "mass movements," including the football
pools, All-In Wrestling, and the Lambeth Walk. The last
provides an opportunity to explain their mission:

"Lambeth you've never seen" say the words of the song,

and thus emphasise the basic argument of this book--the

ignorance of one section of society about how other
sections live and what they say and think. "Why don't

you make your way there?" asks the song, and this is

27
just the question which this book sets out to ask. Why
not? (142)
What Mass-Observation believed to be essential was not
simply the gathering up of information about these other
sections of society, but also, that the knowledge gained by
crossing the social frontier must be widely available in an
accessible form. In his introduction to the 1986 edition of
Britein by Mass-Observation--which was originally a Penguin
Special--Angus Calder writes of Harrisson and Madge that
both seem to have been relieved to retreat from the
dilemma of their generation into the supposedly neutral
position of the "scientist," where consciousness could
be neither "collective" nor "individual" but
"objective." The social scientist, Madge and Harrisson
argue, must find out "what people do want, do get,
don‘t get and could get to want," and must publish his
findings in such place and form that the masses
themselves will be able to read and check them. Mass-
Observation's role is to describe rather than
prescribe--not to agitate, but to mediate. (xv)
Such a role may explain why the material they gathered and
produced retains its interest. In its unprocessed form, the
information remains concrete and specific, available for
application and interpretation under the changing fashions
of politics and theory, unlike some of the more politically-
charged writings of the period which were intended to

"prescribe" and "agitate."

28
In the "Special Tom Harrisson Number" of Light end Deyk
(1938), Harrisson assesses some of the "documents" produced
by thirties imaginative writers and finds them sorely
lacking.29 What these writers are not providing, however,
he believes Mass-Observation's work will supply. One of
Jameson's fellow contributors in that special "Documentary"
issue of {egg was Arthur Calder-Marshall. Harrisson does
not find Calder-Marshall's fiction remotely "documentary,"
and he complains of the poets' false claims as well:
Any investigation of modern life will at once reveal
the wide divergence between the English "proletarian
novel" and proletarian life, between the conversations
in Calder-Marshall's books and in actuality. Our
forthcoming publications may show the difference.
Good. But not so good when the novelist has foolishly
claimed to be "actual," a mistake the painter has
seldom made. The poets have made it up to the hilt.
Thus Isherwood, Auden's right hand, who should know,
starts off the extraordinary collection of fulsome
eulogies in the Auden New Verse with: "First, Auden is
essentially a scientist." A scientist. He is also
practically everything else, from the Pope to Papeye,
if we are to believe these New Versions.30
Harrisson is clearly enjoying his polemic, but he has put
his finger on some of the key problems of the documentary
agenda, as well as the Auden's group self-serving

.interrelations.

29

Mass-Observation looked into everyday matters; Madge
and Harrisson, like Hamilton, understood that most people's
lives find a center in apparently trivial and mundane
details. For example, while political posturing and
Vjournalistic reports left people irritated and confused,
rather than frightened, concerning the impending war, "gas
masks brought the war danger home to everybody and to every
home“ (Britain 88). Mass-Observation's interviews and
observations showed them how people's perceptions and
feelings changed dramatically when gas masks were issued;
the impending war took on a new reality.

In his April, 1940 report on conversation, Harrisson
reveals both a style and a substance similar to
Hamilton's.31 His report is based on what Mass Observation
called "overheards"; which were produced, essentially, by
eavesdropping on conversations in public places. The
conversations that he quotes in the report were overheard in
Oxford Street, "a big store," a cafe, and a Lyons Corner
House. All of these locales figure in Hamilton's novels,
and some are central to Hamilton's milieu. Notable, too, is
that the people overheard were not discussing the progress
of the war or significant political developments, but the
mundane and everyday, as impacted by the war: the most
common topics Harrisson identified were money and prices
(14%), cookery and food (8%), and household budgets and
problems (7%) .

Mass-Observation's legacy is several published works,

30
later editions or anthologies of significant holdings, many
studies which rely partly on their material, and the Mass-
Observation Archive which contains a great deal of their
original material--not all of it, however, as some, due to
its unprotected existence before becoming the Archive at the
University of Sussex in 1970, has been lost. I will have
occasion to draw on each type of work, as the interests of
Mass-Observation provide an important non—fictional
counterpart to Hamilton's novelistic research, and each type
of Mass Observation material offers its own advantages.

The imperative acted upon by Britain‘s intellectuals in
the thirties, and afterwards, produced a wide variety of
results. On a continuum, with the abstract ideals of the
Auden group (which meant little in practice, as Valentine
Cunningham all-too thoroughly demonstrates) at one end, and
Mass-Observation's gathering of sociological data at the
other, Hamilton would be near midpoint. What does his work
contribute from its place in the middle? The rest of this
study will serve as the beginnings of an answer.

Hamilton's milieu allows his fiction to make a real
contribution to Leftist literature while avoiding many of
the weaknesses found in other middle-class Leftist writing.
He did not write of things he knew little or nothing of, and
he maintained sufficient disinterestedness to produce
successful "documents" while simultaneously being engaged
with the lives he portrays in his fiction. He found his own

way to solve the problems faced by all middle-class Leftist

31

writers. In Literary Englands, David Gervais writes of
Orwell that "his England was as if refracted through his
anthrOpologist's curiosity, a commitment that did not
preclude neutrality when necessary. This was part of his
strength since it enabled him to avoid the more facile and
sentimental kinds of identification with the working class
that many of his contemporaries went in for."32

Hamilton solved this last problem--one of the most
vexing and embarrassing for 19908 readers of Leftist
fiction-—in a way different from Orwell's. He did so by
concentrating on the slice of lower-middle and working-class
existence that he knew, and created such characters as the
barmaid Ella rather than write about factory workers or coal
miners. His characters are what Lessing calls "the working
poor," and their most heartbreaking quality is the
precariousness of their status: "in Hamilton's world
everyone struggles to find a foothold, or to keep one, but
they easily get swept away" (23). Hamilton's fiction does
not allow readers the easy, patronizing sentimentality of
"visiting" the working class; instead, he gets to the heart
of middle-class anxieties by portraying characters who are
struggling, with varying degrees of success, to hang onto

their middle-class status.

NOTES

1. While "milieu" is undeniably old-fashioned, I know of no
better term to indicate a whole way of living, a structure
of feeling in its material and historical circumstances. It
is also the word chosen by Peter Widdowson to suggest
similar essential elements of Hamilton's achievement:
"Hamilton is concerned with a particular milieu, which
begins to take on a mythic status all its own.

[Generally] it is floated in a realistic medium of sharply-
observed gesture and scene, reinforced by a brilliant ear
for dialogue. One is persuaded that the scenes and
characters have solid and credible existence, are not merely
hackneyed type-images or caricatures. Indeed, at its best,
the depressed world of Hamilton's books bears down on one
with a force and actuality that is hard to evade" ("The
Saloon Bar Society: Patrick Hamilton's Fiction in the
1930s," in John Lucas, ed., The 1930§: A Challenge to
Qrthodoxy [Sussex: Harvester, 1978], 118-19).

2. Doris Lessing, "A Blank Look?" review of Hogarth edition
of Twenty Thousand Streets Under thejSky, Listener, 17
September 1987, 23. Subsequent references cited in text.

3. John Russell Taylor, "Patrick Hamilton," London Magazine
6.2 (1966), 59.

32

33
4. Taylor, 53.
5. (London and New York: Methuen/Croom Helm, 1987), 47.
Subsequent references cited in text.
6. John Lucas, ed., The 1930s: A Chellenge to Orthodoxy
(London and New York: Harvester/Barnes & Noble, 1978); and
Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: Britieh Fiction in the 1930§
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).
7. Raymond Williams, The Countrygend thejCity (St. Albans,
Herts: Paladin, 1975 [f.p. 1973]), 209.
8. Tyenty Thoueend Streehernder the_§hy (London: Hogarth,
1987), 375-76. The trilogy was first published as a one-
volume trilogy in 1935 by Constable; it is comprised of The
Midnight Bell (Constable, 1929), The Siege of Pleasure
(Constable, 1932), and The Plains of Cement (Constable,
1934).
9. Earlier in the trilogy, the beautiful prostitute-elect,
Jenny, who also likes Lyons', is described as "something of
a Langtry in these places."
10. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), 186. Subsequent
references to this edition cited in text.
11. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951), 95~96.
12. Introduction to Hogarth edition of Twenty Thousand
Streete Under the Sky, 10.
13. New Yorker, 14 February 1942, 67.
14. M. Laski, review of The West Pier, The Spectator, 31

August 1951, 280; I. Quigly, review of Unknown Assailant,

34
The Spectator, 18 November 1955, 694; and review of The West
Pier, TLS, 7 September 1951, 564.

 

15. (London: Michael Joseph, 1988). Subsequent references
cited in text.

16. hTetory end Velue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 46-
47. Subsequent references cited in text.

17. See 28-30 for the introductory discussion of both
works, and 53-57 for further discussion of Upward's trilogy.
18. Revised edition, (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990),
175.

19. "Storm Jameson on Documents," Fee; no. 4 (1937), 13.
20. This last phrase is used of Hamilton by Brian McKenna
in "Confessions of a Heavy-Drinking Marxist: Addiction in
the Work of Patrick Hamilton," in Beyond the Pleasure Dome,
ed. by Sue Vice, Matthew Campbell and Tim Armstrong
(Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 231-44.

21. Andy Croft devotes a chapter of Red Letter Days to "A
Long and Draughty Sermon: Documentary Novels," which
includes an interesting analysis of the Left's changing
ideas about the relationship between politics, fiction and
documentary. He highlights Jameson's article: "One of the
few attempts to provide a theory of documentary writing was

made in a symposium in Fact in 1937. Among the

 

contributors, the novelist Storm Jameson argued for the
importance of documentary" (254). (Other contributors to

that issue of Fact include Arthur Calder-Marshall, Stephen

35

Spender and John Allen.) Asa Briggs refers to the piece as

"Storm Jameson's perceptive article on 'Documentary,‘ " and

pronounces it "a key document for a key decade" (foreword to

Class. Culture_end SocLal Change, ed. by Frank Gloversmith

 

 

[Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980], 12).

22. In Frank Gloversmith, ed. , Class. Culture and Social

 

Change: Ahew Viey of the 1930e (Sussex: Harvester, 1980),

142-60.

23 . 145 .

24 . 14-15 .

25 . 9.

26 . Red Letter Days, 249.
2'7 . "Documents," 10.

28 . Arranged and written by Tom Harrisson and Charles

Madge, (London: Cresset, 1986 [f.p. 1939]), 231. Subsequent

references cited in text.

29 . "Mass-Opposition and Tom Harrisson," February 1938

(Vol 2.3): 8-15. Mass-Observation Archive File Report A6.

This article is interesting for several reasons. A review

W

 

 

 

0f The Year's Poetry (1937), Letters from Iceland, Ne
“\riting IV, and New Verse, it is also Harrisson's statement
of contempt for many of his contemporaries and the
1Importance of his own goals in co-founding Mass Observation.
The special issue begins with a poem by Nevill Coghill
entitled "Observations on Mass-Observation," and Harrisson

uses that negative poem as his own jumping-off point.

my]

NJ

‘I
M-

'II

36
Valentine Cunningham describes Harrisson's article as "one
of the period's best pieces of literary criticism" (334),

and among its revelations is the genesis for Cunningham's

 

Cunningham's Britieh Writeee of the Thirtiee

method .
1988) is in many ways a

(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
(listended and bulging version of what Harrisson does here to

an real point, accumulating images from the poets' own work

in order to turn those images against them.

"Mass-Opposition and Tom Harrisson," 11.

13(3.
"Conversation," 26 April 1940.

31. M-O A File Report 83,

13:2. Literary Englands: Versione of "Englishness" in Modeph

‘Vlritin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170

 

 

Chapter 2

"THE TASTE OF THE DON AND THE WHIM OF THE FILM-MAKER":
HAMILTON, HIS CRITICS, AND CLASS

Contemporary reception does not guarantee later
<:xfltical attention, as witnessed by the fact that Hamilton,
cicascribed by John Betjeman in 1956 as "one of the best
lfixmglish novelists,"1 has received little critical attention
from academics. Michael Holroyd identifies the title
limnages--"the taste of the don and the whim of the film-
lniiker"--as "the two ill-matched steeds to which a
litlblisher's list of reprints is harnessed--and they draw it
litmto some strangely paradoxical country," continuing that
"t1here can be no more striking example of this state of
affairs than the plight of Patrick Hamilton."2 Hamilton is
]Known as a thriller writer, Holroyd observes, because of the
f1.1m versions of R_oge_ and Gaslight, but "his finest work .

- is unknown because it does not appear on any English
literature syllabus and has not attracted Alfred Hitchcock"
(103-04).

Nonetheless, it must be noted, Hamilton's work has
never completely disappeared from view. In The Concept ef

WE, Astradur Eysteinsson persuasively argues that to

cliscuss a literary work is, in effect, to canonize it:

37

I)
ID

i

no
it.
'4-

\“

(v4

k"

38

Any mention of a work rests on the assumption that it

is exemplary in one way or another, and thus in a sense

involves its canonization. If we think of canonization

in this broad sense (which is a necessary criterion for

the narrower sense), we realize that the only act of

'noncanonization' is complete silence. (83)
ILamilton's work has been granted a minor role in most
Juiterary histories covering the first half of the twentieth
century, thus establishing a series of contact points with
IPJre-existing areas of study. There has been some work on
Iiiimilton's relevance to crime fiction, for example, and to
1:1)e study of literature and addiction, and there has been
Elassessment of his place as a novelist of World War II.
ILeaftist criticism has been most frequently brought to bear
<31: Hamilton's work, particularly through studies of the

1930s.

I‘IAMILTON ' S CRITICS

Any summary of Hamilton's critical fate must begin by
recording the problematic nature of his position. Like that
of other minor literary figures, Hamilton's work has been
Vwalnerable to wholesale appropriation and misrepresentation
by critics with causes, but it has also been championed by
“any writers and reviewers. Biographically-(mis)informed
criticism has dominated, compounding the problem of
I'lamilton's work being viewed from a predetermined point of

‘View. The task to be faced in the present study is not

39
rescuing Hamilton's work from oblivion; instead, it is a
matter of addressing some tenacious misconceptions and
clearing a space to let interpretative issues arise more
naturally from the work itself, rather than forcing it to
illustrate some predetermined principle.

Book-length studies on Hamilton consist of three
t>1ographies and one unpublished doctoral dissertation.3
There have been a few critical articles, and Hamilton is
sometimes included in literary histories (or is conspicuous-
ll]? absent), but most critical comment appears in the form of
l><>ok reviews or introductions. Bruce Hamilton's 1972 memoir

of his brother is the first and most significant of the
1:11ree biographies, not so much for its merits, which are
limited, but for the influence it has wielded over all
Subsequent work. His book set the Hamilton agenda: which
.illcidents are important, what tone is to be taken. Nigel
~Jc>nes is absorbed completely by Bruce Hamilton's book; he
wrote his own biography of Hamilton in such a way that one
reviewer, quite accurately, found Bruce Hamilton to be its
"real hero."4 Sean French is more skeptical, recognizing
that The LiLht Went Out is "a work of piety that is also an
act of belated revenge" (5), but could not altogether avoid
its influence. There is a notable shortage of primary
material, and what little there is has passed first through
the hands of Bruce Hamilton and then to his widow Aileen,

Who openly hated Patrick Hamilton.

Bruce Hamilton's method for exacting revenge on his

N
‘0.

Q
M-

Jan

oL:

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40

more accomplished younger brother is simple. Throughout his

biography, under cover of "painful honesty" and
"forgiveness," he draws attention to faults, ascribes blame,

and surreptitiously seals negative judgments, all the while

offering himself to his reader as humble victim. Nigel

Jones, who is very sympathetic to Bruce Hamilton, reports

that Patrick Hamilton never liked his brother very much

( 315). Furthermore, Jones discovered a manuscript version

of an autobiographical novel, written by Bruce Hamilton,
which ends with its narrator murdering his much-resented

brother (vii-viii). In spite of such evidence of Bruce

Hamilton's problematic status as the first and last word on
Hamilton, Jones never questions the former's judgment.
The Light Went Out originated the now widely-accepted

View of Hamilton as a tragic failure and famous drunk, a

fact rarely noted by those who perpetuate it.5 John

Betjeman's remarks in the Spectator demonstrate that as late
as 1956, when Hamilton had published everything he ever

would, he was not a notorious failure and drunk, but notably

invisible as a literary "personality." The image of drunken

fElilure comes later, and is directly attributable to Bruce

Hamilton ' s memoir .
By concentrating so much on what Hamilton did not

accomplish, The Light Went Out presents an account of the

Published works that undervalues them. Bruce Hamilton often

Seems not to understand the merits of his brother's work

and, in spite of his oft-repeated claim to be the critic

41
most valued by Hamilton, he has surprisingly little to say
about it. While his preface claims that the "biography
originated in my conviction that he was one of the major
novelists and most considerable playwrights of his time"
(xi), Bruce Hamilton's comments on his brother's texts seem
intent on exposing what the former sees as their weaknesses.
Jones' biography is not much better at handling
Iiamilton's novels. He treats literary text as if it were
astraightforward (auto)biographical material. His discussion
c>f Hamilton's romance with Lily Connolly, for example,
relies heavily on excerpts from Hamilton's trilogy of pub
novels. Jones seems unaware of any reason not to substitute
ffiction for life, and does so unabashedly, as in this
Passage:
We do not know exactly in what circumstances Patrick
first met Lily, but given his inveterate habit of
transcribing his real life experiences in his fiction,
it can be deduced that the encounter resembled the
meeting in Tyenty Thoueend Streehe Under the_§ky of the
barman Bob and the street-walker Jenny in the pub, The
Midnight Bell. (134)
This is followed immediately by a lengthy quote from the
rlovel, which functions as a substitute for biographical
linformation. Equally disturbing in a professional
.Journalist is Jones's sense of who constitutes a credible,
'reliable source. In his introduction, he labels Hamilton's

drinking buddies "objective outsiders" (6), an idea most

era
In '9
O

36‘
V

«H

 

42
professional biographers would scoff at. Further, much of
his most damaging material is either unattributed or founded
on dubious sources. Jones' book is not good journalism,
responsible biography, or worthwhile literary criticism.

Perhaps most damaging to Hamilton's literary reputation
is that, like Bruce Hamilton before him, Jones seems unable
or unwilling to make a case for reading Hamilton. In his
introduction, he cites a desire to "[bring] a wider audience
for [Hamilton's] work" as one of two "main aims" (7), but
almost four hundred pages later, he has not suggested any
reasons for reading Hamilton's fiction. Its main attraction
for him seems to be the scandalous inferences readers can
gather therein about Hamilton's life. He goes through the
motions of generating interest in the literature--suggesting
comparisons with other writers, making connections among
Hamilton's writings--but in the end fails to do so with any
success.

Sean French's biography represents a significant
departure in terms of its attitude toward Hamilton and his
work. French rejects the model of Hamilton as failure and,
as a necessary preliminary to considering Hamilton's
literary achievements, takes a skeptical stance toward Bruce
Hamilton's memoir. French's other significant contribution
is using the rough typescript of an early draft of The Light
flehh_ghh (the original title of which--"Patrick: A Tragedy"-
-indicates Bruce Hamilton's attitude toward his subject) to

point up weaknesses in the published version. For example,

43
that draft included a story of Bruce Hamilton not being
taken backstage after the final performance of The
Governess; in a footnote, French explains that "this passage
is typical of what was lost when Bruce's memoir was cut and
reworked for publication. Gone are the specific incident and
the personal resentment that may have influenced Bruce's
judgment. All that remains is the general statement that
Hamilton abased himself before his friends" (308).

Brian McKenna's Oxford dissertation, "Gender
Representation, Sexuality and Politics in the Writings of
Patrick Hamilton," belongs to both principal camps of
Hamilton studies, the biographical and the political.
Indeed, he has found a singular way to tie the two together,
with his categorical claim that "primarily, like many other
revolutionaries, [Hamilton] drank to get rid, temporarily,
of capitalism." Further, McKenna identifies the audience
for his dissertation as being specifically and exclusively
radical and, presumably as part of this radical agenda, he
eschews the whole notion of a canon:

It is part of the function of this thesis to help
restore Hamilton's reputation as a writer of
significance--but without resorting to hagiography, or
underwriting the notion of a 'canon' to which Hamilton
could be said to deserve promotion. The present work
is more concerned with hey his oeuvre can be read than
with yhy (although it is concerned with that also):

with the ways in which, despite its problems and

44

limitations, this body of work can be rendered valuable

to a radical audience of the 1990s and beyond.
The dissertation follows the pattern of the biographies, for
far from resorting to hagiography, McKenna, like Bruce
Hamilton, Jones and French, relies heavily on what Joyce
Carol Oates has aptly called "pathography."6

McKenna, like other Leftist critics, seems strangely
reluctant to claim much for Hamilton's work, summing up in
his abstract, "it is concluded that, despite its
demonstrable limitations and inherent problems, much of
Hamilton's work can be rendered valuable to a contemporary
radical audience, interestingly implicated as it is in the
social and psychological crises that afflicted the British
ruling order in the inter-war period of the Cold War."
Hamilton's fiction offers insights that are necessarily
ignored by such a position, which limits Hamilton's work in
two significant ways. First, it emphasizes supposed
weaknesses in the literature--"demonstrable limitations and
inherent problems"--when in fact Hamilton's books are
accomplished and interesting. They do not need to be
"rendered valuable" by trendy theories; they assert their
own value. Further, McKenna's position suggests that the
only conceivable audience for Hamilton's fiction is a
radical one, which is simply untrue. The adaptation of the
Gorse books was shown on British television and then offered
to the American Public via Masterpiece Theatre, indicating a

much larger audience than the minority segment of the

 

45

population composed of self-identified radicals. The
comments of many readers and reviewers indicate the value of
Hamilton's work for those who do not consider themselves
radical, and for those who are radical but do not limit
their reading to politically-motivated literature.

Biographical criticism is far from being the latest
rage, and may seem outright passe in our era of self-
consciously sophisticated literary theory, but its
persistence in Hamilton studies requires that it be
addressed. Indeed, its persistence has done Hamilton's work
more harm than good by minimizing approaches better
calculated to place Hamilton's work in academic circles.
This effect is evident in the most cursory glance at the
results of such criticism, for the biographical approach
means that nothing else need be sought but biographical
models or parallels for the literature, obscuring the need
for literary history, for a search for literary and cultural
contexts, and for consideration of literary predecessors or
followers. Rather than placing the subject's work in a
larger literary and cultural context, biographical criticism
concentrates on marking out parallels which are all too
often specious. When Nigel Jones takes the shortcut of
"deducing" that Hamilton and Lily Connolly's first meeting
must have "resembled" that of Bob and Jenny in The Midnight
BeTT, he makes no allowance for the fact that Bob only
speaks to Jenny because his duties as waiter require him to

do so. When the prostitutes enter the saloon lounge and

46
seat themselves at a table, they are isolated from the
others already there, and when they finally make their
separate departures, the only person they have spoken with
is Bob. His initial exchange with them is dictated by duty,
and all subsequent conversation is built around the
mechanism of waiter and paying customer. It is not clear
what might be "deduced" of Hamilton's initial contact with
Lily Connolly, since the circumstances must have been
substantially different--Hamilton would have been under no
job-obligation to interact with her.

Biographical predominance also results in an insistence
on fiction being transcribed autobiography while,
paradoxically, slighting the verisimilitude conferred by
experience (in Hamilton's case, at least). Brian McKenna,
for example, complains that Michael Holroyd's introduction

to the Hogarth edition of Twenty Thoueend Streets Under the

 

Shy "exaggerates the touchstone value of [Hamilton's]
personal experience" and that to agree with this "Holroydian
myth" about Hamilton's writing would "make his work
vulnerable to a debunking consonant with a banal literary
ideology which insists on feeling for the authorial pulse of

a text."7

McKenna himself, however, denigrates Hamilton's
most important fiction as mere autobiography, denying its
author the credit for talent, originality, and skill that he
deserves. First, McKenna asserts that "The Midnight Bell

confessionalizes the author's own involvement in the late

19208 with a prostitute called Lily Connolly" (235); and

 

47
then that "Hangover Sguare constitutes a fictionalization of
Hamilton's infatuation with an Irish actress called
Geraldine Fitzgerald, whom he pestered for a time in 1936"
(236). McKenna's procedure reveals his inconsistency in
complaining of Holroyd's interest in Hamilton's experience
but, more importantly, it also trivializes what Hamilton
learned by way of that experience. Holroyd recognizes the
value of Hamilton's immersion in a culture not his by birth,
but for McKenna, biography is simply about sex and its
transference into the pages of a novel.

Biography overwhelms the book-length work on Hamilton,
but it also makes itself felt in the reviews, most of the
introductions to editions of Hamilton's novels, and some
critical articles. Hostile reviewers, like Brigid Brophy,
use Bruce Hamilton's biographical information to discredit
Hamilton's work, while sympathetic critics like Donald
Thomas rely on biography as an introduction to Hamilton's

8 The title of Brian McKenna's essay on Hamilton

fiction.
in heyond thepPleasure Dome, "Confessions of a Heavy-
Drinking Marxist," indicates the priority McKenna gives to
biography in that essay, as well as in his dissertation. It
seems no one can write about Hamilton's work without
throwing in some biographical tid bits. Angus Hall wrote
the most interesting biographical article on Hamilton. Hall
visited Hamilton, in the rOle of disciple, shortly before

Hamilton's death. His article describes their meeting,

providing first-hand biographical reportage, and offers

48
insightful literary judgments on Hamilton's work.

Hamilton's indeterminate situation--never completely
lost from view, but never fully assimilated into the
stabilizing mechanism of the academic canon, either--has
meant a long series of rediscoveries. Reading through the
reviews of Hamilton reprints during the last twenty-five
years produces a cumulative testimonial to the power of his
fiction. New readers find a reprint, are compelled to find
other Hamilton novels, and write reviews exhorting their
readers to do likewise. Only Hamilton's fuller admission
into the canon will prevent repetitions of this cycle, for
the organized and sustaining attention of the academic canon
functions as a sort of literary memory, allowing critics to
build on previous work rather than having to start anew each
time.

Leftist critics--trying to rehabilitate thirties'
Marxism by disputing the widely-accepted notion that
thirties politics have been exploded by (among other things)
the renunciations of Auden and Isherwood--have paid
considerable attention to Hamilton. Indeed, the nearest
Hamilton comes to having an academic presence is through the
work of such Leftist critics as Peter Widdowson, John Lucas,
and Andy Croft. There is a price to be paid for this kind
of attention, however, for these critics place the highest
value on the most overtly political of Hamilton's work even
though that segment of his work is the least successful.

Impremptu in Moribundia, his Marxist fantasy, is by far the

49

weakest of his novels (and the only one never to be
reprinted after its original publication), but it is singled
out for praise by Arnold Rattenbury and Peter Widdowson.9
This is not very far removed from what Raymond Williams has
characterized as "the kind of literary criticism which has
made Marxism notorious: 'Is the work socialist or not in
tendency? is it helping forward the most creative movement
in society?‘ where literature is defined solely in terms of
its political affiliations."10

Political interest often drives one of the areas where
Hamilton's work is most frequently mentioned, studies of the
19308. While there have been some very interesting studies
aimed at broadening the context of English literature
between the wars (which in practice usually means
'reassessing' the thirties), most of these studies pose
obstacles for students of Hamilton's work. These obstacles
generally arise from the political agenda of these studies,
which emphasize the political content and motivation of the
literature they discuss. The political aspect of literature
between the wars is not uninteresting, but pursuing that
element exclusively obscures other aspects and problematizes
issues which are insignificant under other critical rubrics.
Nonetheless, Hamilton's inclusion is certainly welcome and,
in fact, such works provide the most promising point of
entry for Hamilton's advance from the margins of literary
history to the relative safety of the syllabus. Frank

Kermode, John Lucas, Andy Croft, Frank Gloversmith and

 

50

Robert Hewison all include Hamilton as part of their
thirties restoration projects, and Hugh David's study of
Fitzrovia considers Hamilton a spokesman for the decade.11

Andy Croft's hed Letter Deye (1990) is the "study of a
small but significant success story, the intervention in the
life of the novel by the British Left" (25), and is
comprehensively researched and often insightful. Croft's
book brings to the reader's attention new names, or new
works by familiar names, and simultaneously provides
contemporary context through reviews and similar commentary.
Croft's goal of "restoration" can only succeed with those
already converted, however, because he makes virtually no
literary distinctions. Politics are his primary interest.
Thus, in Croft's study, Bruce Hamilton's political activism
is contrasted favorably with Patrick Hamilton's lack of
"interest in political activity" (129). While Croft offers
some interesting comments on Twenty Thoueend Streets Under
the Sk , his praise of Bruce Hamilton's novels is
consistently stronger, and it is clear that Croft values the
latter's overt Marxism more than he does Hamilton's finely-
tuned presentations of characters on the fringe of society.

In The Fitzrovians (1988), Hugh David asserts that as
"the writings of Julian Maclaren-Ross uniquely preserve the
texture of life in the London of the 19408, as to a lesser
extent those of Michael Arlen and the early novels of
Patrick Hamilton do for the twenties and thirties

respectively" (245). Here, then, is Patrick Hamilton

 

51
presented as a specifically "thirties" writer; how is it

then that Valentine Cunningham's monumental Britieh Writere

 

of the ThirtTee (1988) contains not one reference to his
work? He is not even included in Cunningham's voluminous
bibliography of literary texts. One possible explanation
can be gleaned from Brian McKenna's remarks on the book.
McKenna has no reservations about biography's intrusion into
literary criticism, and he assesses Cunningham's book like
this:
The fundamental achievement of Britieh Writers of the
Thirties ought not to be scanted. Its imaginative
recreation of a multi-layered discursive structure of
feeling imbricated in an entire literary generation
yields many telling connections. For example,
Cunningham's concatenation of male homosexuality, the
legacy of the Great War ('the absent soldier father'),
and a particular strain of upper-middle-class Thirties
English radicalism is convincing and vindicates the
welcome historicity of his semiological enterprise.
Perhaps the absence of Hamilton's fiction from Cunningham's
book has less to do with literary interest than with an
unsuitability for the kind of biographical analysis McKenna
describes, in which the "legacy of the Great War" is reduced
to little more than a tendency to homosexuality and
affection/affectation for working-class conquests.
Nonetheless, Hamilton's absence from Cunningham's work is

conspicuous in view of his inclusion in most studies of the

52
thirties. If Britieh Writere of the Thirtiee is
comprehensive, how could Hamilton be omitted? Hamilton's
fiction is an important part of that decade, and his work

ought to be in Cunningham's book.

CLASS ISSUES

The predominantly biographical and political analyses
of Hamilton's work intersect at the essential crossroads of
class. A Leftist political approach makes the socio-
economic class of the writer a pressing issue, while
biography must address the question of the biographical
subject's class. George Orwell recognized that to write
about "the terribly difficult issue of class" required
identifying one's own class. He begins the second part of
The Roed to Wigen Pie; with "a certain amount of
autobiography, and I would not [write] it if I did not think
that I am sufficiently typical of my class, or rather sub-
caste, to have a certain symptomatic importance. I was born
into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle

class."12

The cumbersome nomenclature indicates once again
how difficult it is to define classes, let alone decide to
which class individuals belong. In discussing his own
class, however, Orwell isolates some of the key issues
surrounding Hamilton's own class, and the one Hamilton wrote
about in his first two novels. It is worth looking at

Orwell's analysis.

The first key point concerning "the English class-

53
system is that it is he; entirely explicable in terms of
money" (154). Those with less money but more social
pretensions (or self-imposed obligations) are in serious
trouble by the 19308; the remains of that class, like
driftwood, have washed up in the geographical territory of
Hamilton's novels:
Of course it is obvious now that the upper-middle class
is done for. In every country town in Southern
England, not to mention to dreary wastes of Kensington
and Earl's Court, those who knew it in the days of its
glory, are dying, vaguely embittered by a world which
has not behaved as it ought. (154)
The foundation of life for such people is its duality; as
Orwell explains it,
theoretically you knew all about servants and how to
tip them, although in practice you had one or, at most,
two resident servants. Theoretically you knew how to
wear your clothes and how to order a dinner, although
in practice you could never afford to go to a decent
tailor or a decent restaurant. Theoretically you knew
how to shoot and ride, although in practice you had no
horses to ride and not an inch of ground to shoot over.
(155)
In Craven Heuse, Hamilton explores the nuances of life for
such people, its terrible boredom and their painful
awareness of how they have come down in life; Hamilton based

that book on his experiences in a Kew boarding house, one of

54
several he and various family members lived in. Hamilton's
own class, then, is this dying class described by Orwell,
and Hamilton's family was slipping quickly.
"But the real importance of this class," Orwell argues,
is that they are the shock-absorbers of the
bourgeoisie. The real bourgeoisie, those in the £2,000
a year class and over, have their money as a thick
layer of padding between themselves and the class they
plunder; in so far as they are aware of the Lower
Orders at all they are aware of them as employees,
servants and tradesmen. But it is quite different for
the poor devils lower down who are struggling to live
genteel lives on what are virtually working-class
incomes. These last are forced into close and, in a
sense, intimate contact with the working class, and I
suspect it is from them that the traditional upper-
class attitude towards "common" peOple is derived.
(156)
Such a description implies a great deal for Hamilton's
position, and looking at what he might have been expected to
do shows how he used his own class position as an
opportunity for illumination. Hamilton uses his knowledge of
this borderland, not to perpetuate the usual "attitude of
sniggering superiority" (156), but to examine its residents
and the pressures under which they live. Because this class
functions as the "shock-absorber," its members are all too

aware of the pressures exerted on them. On the front line,

55
as it were, they must interact daily with people of other
(lower) classes, contact which must reveal the lack of
disparity in financial resources. What separates this
shock-absorber class from those beneath them is more "socio"
than it is "economic"; they maintain their tenuous status
through careful husbandry of limited financial resources and
will power. Their close contact with the lower classes, and
the inescapable awareness of how tenuous their position is,
combine to create a terrible fear: without constant
vigilance, they could lose the small bit of prestige they
retain, a prestige which must be all-important to them
because in it lies the only advantage they possess in a
class-oriented social system.

Orwell's model for class-interrelations corroborates
the wisdom of Hamilton's novelistic choices, just as
Orwell's life matches up with Hamilton's in several key
aspects. "As for the terribly difficult issue of class-
distinctions," Orwell advises at the end of Wigan Pier,

the only possible policy for the moment is to go easy

and not frighten more people than can be helped.

If you belong to the bourgeoisie, don't be too eager to

bound forward and embrace your proletarian brother;

they may not like it, and if they show that they don‘t
like it you will probably find that your class—

prejudices are not so dead as you imagined. (263)
Hamilton never went in for the sort of intervention Orwell

warns against, the kind that was all too common among

56
middle-class intellectuals of the thirties. When Hamilton's
brother faults him for never having had any real contact
with the working class, he misses the point.

Orwell has been for some years a whipping-boy of the
Left; for example, Andy Croft's openly Leftist study
complains often and bitterly about Orwell's sell-out. It
must be said that his task, like Hamilton's, is a
particularly difficult one: important, but often—neglected
and liable to carping criticism (such as that from Bruce
Hamilton mentioned above). Victor Gollancz, in his foreword
to the Left Book Club edition 08 Wigan Pier admits on the
one hand that "the whole of this chapter [eight] throws a
most interesting light on the reality of class distinctions.
I know, in fact, of no other book in which a member of the
middle class exposes with such complete frankness the
shameful way in which he was brought up to think of large
numbers of his fellow men" (xv), but condescends to Orwell
by claiming that "the fact is that . . . Mr. Orwell is still
a victim of that early atmosphere, in his home and public
school, which he himself has so eloquently exposed"

(xvii).13 Orwell's matter—of-fact thoroughness is thus to
be used against him. While Gollancz ostensibly appreciates
Orwell's honesty, he turns it against Orwell to claim that
he has not risen above the very thing he has so fully laid
out for our instruction; had Orwell not provided the frank
expose, he could not be so handily accused of self—

deception.

57

The implications of Hamilton's class transgression are
particularly important in the context of his literary
generation. While all commentators acknowledge that
Hamilton crossed class divides during his life, the
particularly vexed question of class in England denies
simple readings (as Orwell shows), and some would have it
that Hamilton's behavior was no more than "clearly an upper-
class lark" (McKenna, "Confessions" 232). In a curious
paradox, many of the Leftist critics who write about
Hamilton seem intent on elevating his socio-economic status,
minimizing his participation in the milieu of his fiction
(and thereby minimizing the value of that participation) in
order to create a standard of the upper-class intellectual
that simply will not withstand scrutiny in light of
Hamilton's life. McKenna's passing characterizations of
Hamilton strike this note, describing him as "the
upper-middle-class Communist writer Patrick Hamilton" and
"Westminster Old Boy and Savile Club Member."“ Many
objections can be made to such descriptions, including the
facts that Hamilton never joined the Communist Party, and
that he left Westminster after two terms, aged fifteen,
never to resume his formal education. His financial
situation is of particular importance, however, and his
financial support, before he began making money from his
writing, came from his sister, Lalla, and her married
boyfriend, Sutton Vane, who had made enormous profits from

Vane's play, Outwerd Bound. Hamilton's financial support

58
originated in an illicit liaison connected with the stage,
rather than from respectable, and respectably-aged, family
coffers.

McKenna's characterizations of Hamilton are no more
misleading than Andy Croft's presentation of Bruce
Hamilton's personal history and literary accomplishments.
While the information Croft outlines is literally true, it
suggests an altogether different mode of life than that
lived by Bruce Hamilton, and one in marked contrast to the
generalizations offered by Nigel Jones (185) and Bruce
Hamilton himself (80), that of Bruce Hamilton as a young man
rather at a loss for what to do with his life. Croft's
characterization of Bruce Hamilton is illuminating, however,
because it suggests a possible explanation for the Left's
emphasis on upper-middle-class writers. The context for
Croft's introduction of Bruce Hamilton (and his brother) is
an argument that in the 19308 it was already-established
intellectuals and writers who turned Left rather than Left-
thinking people who took up literature (122). This
combination establishes both quality (successful writers and
recognized thinkers) and disinterestedness (people who did
not stand to gain economically from Leftist principles).
Such a position can lead not only to over-estimating initial
status (as thinker, writer, socio-economic elite) but can
obscure subsequent developments. Both problems occur in
Leftist discussions of Hamilton's class.

What is provocative and unusual about Hamilton's life

S9
is not that he drank heavily, nor that he took an interest
in Marxism, least of all that his sex life was
unsatisfactory, but that he became something other than what
Westminster was intended to train him for; he crossed some
real frontiers. His example forces reconsideration of class
issues; the Leftist critics appear to be projecting from
what he might have been but chose not to be, rather than
examining what his life created. Many features of
Hamilton's life suggest that the label "upper-middle class"
is inaccurate; these include his lack of education, his
peripatetic existence both before and after reaching
adulthood, the general seediness of his life and apparent
preference for such modes of living, the fact that his
second wife, Ursula Stewart, considered marriage to him her
own "upper-class lark," and a reliance on income produced by
his writing (in later years, this meant royalties from
earlier work).

All critics would do well to bear in mind Raymond
Williams' warning that "a man cannot be interpreted in terms
of some original sin of class" (C&S 292). Furthermore, the
Hamilton family fortunes began to decline when Hamilton was
still a young man. Nigel Jones reports that Hamilton's
introduction to boarding-house life occurred in 1916, when
he was twelve:

in reduced circumstances, Nellie [Hamilton's mother]

was forced to dismiss her last two servants and move

into a genteel boarding-house. . . . From 1916 until he

60

was able to afford a comfortable flat of his own in the

late 19208 after his first success as a writer, Patrick

spent a considerable portion of his life as a guest in

a series of boarding-houses, rented rooms and small

private hotels in London, Hove and Brighton. (49-50)
What Jones describes is not an upper-middle class existence,
and it required the income from his writing to allow
Hamilton his flat in London and membership in the Savile
Club.

Hamilton's example raises some interesting questions
about class. Jones offers a useful summary when he writes
that "most of [Hamilton's] male literary contemporaries--
people like Greene, Waugh, Lowry, Auden and Isherwood--went
from the security of wealthy homes, public schools and
Oxbridge straight into jobs as teachers or tutors and thence
to literary and financial success" (50). Hamilton matches
up with this picture at only one stage: the final one. It
is debateable whether Hamilton eye; belonged to the upper-
middle class. His mother was the previously-divorced
youngest daughter of a dentist. His father, although the
inheritor of a large fortune and educated at Cambridge, was
forty at the time of Hamilton's birth, with the fortune
rapidly disappearing and no profession to fall back on other
than his rather dubious literary productions. If Hamilton
gee upper-middle class as a child, at some point he ceased
to belong to that class, although it would be a challenging

task to label the rather ambiguous status he achieved.

61

David Gervais, in Literary England: Veredohe of
"Englishness" in Modern Writing, discusses George Orwell's
shifting class allegiances in terms which shed some light on
Hamilton's situation. Orwell, Gervais argues,

needed to detach himself from his background as a

matter of conscience. A book like The Roed to Wigeh

Tie; is about losing a class as well as discovering

another. Its solidarity had to be based on a voluntary

alienation (though in Wigan Orwell always had the
accent of a gentleman).15
Orwell's example makes Hamilton's shift seem less
deliberate, more a matter of finding his true place rather
than exercising his conscience. The difference between
Hamilton's class shift and Orwell's can be seen in Orwell's
greater distance from his subject matter. Distance from
both his own background and his new interests is one result
of Orwell's program of voluntary alienation. In Gervais's
terms, this is "prefer[ring] to study society at one remove.

. Underlying . . . Orwell's dourness is the same
detaChed stance of the anthropologist and the traveller"
(158). Hamilton's point of view, while detached enough to
be credible, is more engaged than Orwell's; he became part
of what his fiction describes.

One essential feature of class shifts is that while
writers endeavoring to find a new place for themselves may
never fully become part of the new group, they will

definitely cease to be welcomed by their original class.

62
Gervais points out that

As an old Etonian and former colonial civil servant,

Orwell knew that any feeling of solidarity with

'ordinary' English life that he won through to was

likely to come at the cost of a sense of dislocation

from the class into which he had been born. To belong

to one England meant exile from another. (171)

Only latter-day Leftist critics could consider Hamilton part
of the upper-middle class.

Hamilton's situation can also usefully be compared to
Arthur Calder-Marshall's. Calder-Marshall provides an even
better basis for comparison with Hamilton than does Orwell
because, like Hamilton, he lived a surprisingly transient
existence for a member of the socio-economic class into
which he was born. As Calder-Marshall describes in his
memoir, hegic of My Youth,

My father was possessed of a restless spirit which took

him abroad for years at a time and sent his family

posting from one furnished house to another. He was,
he was fond of saying, a modern Ishmael; and in the
fifteen years of my life before he bought my
grandfather's house at Steyning, we had lived in eleven
different houses. It was an interesting experience,
because the home life of our landlords, revealed by
diaries, letters and even account-books, provided us
with vicarious enjoyments denied to children in more

settled homes.16

63

In spite of this existence, however, Calder-Marshall
received a public school education which culminated in an
Oxford degree, in sharp contrast to the irregularity and
paucity of Hamilton's formal education, which ended at age
fifteen when he left Westminster after two terms (although
he later took a short course in shorthand and typing--
definitely not in the best Oxbridge tradition).

Calder-Marshall was deliberately slumming in the cause
of Leftist politics and, in fact, Julian Maclaren-Ross
offers some amusing anecdotes about Calder-Marshall's

N Calder-Marshall's slumming and

earnest communism.
Hamilton's regular mode of existence share telling points of
intersection. For instance, when, at the end of Magic of My

Youth, Calder-Marshall writes that "the house where

 

Vickybird was staying was in a pleasant, shady street, a lot
posher than the place where I was rooming in Hampstead"
(221), he is consciously placing himself in a non-posh
(anti-posh) location. Comparing the time frame of Calder-
Marshall's revelation with the Hamilton biographies reveals
that Calder-Marshall is referring to the Hampstead pub where
he and Hamilton first met (while both were lodging there).
While Calder-Marshall was in the pub as an exercise in
gathering material, Hamilton was there unselfconsciously, by
preference.

Indeed, this period in Calder-Marshall's literary
career follows shortly after his attempt, under the same

motivation, to "go native" as a schoolteacher. He describes

64
his decision in terms which suggest his earnest desire to go
into the trenches of non-privileged existence, all to serve
the cause of gathering material for a Leftist novel:
University standards might appear absolute in the
academic world, but they were incredibly remote from
the hurly-burly of the novelist's world. Fitzrovia
which I had considered in some way a counterbalance was
really just as parochial and far more depressing.
Contact with life in the raw was what I needed; and was
life ever rawer than in a school? (206-07)
So Calder-Marshall went to an employment agency and
announced that " 'I've come to the conclusion that I have
been over-educated. I want to declass myself. I should
like a job in the worst school you have on your books' "
(207). Such a spirit is far removed from Hamilton's matter-
of-fact immersion in the world of second-hand car salesmen,
would-be actresses, boarding houses and pubs.
Calder-Marshall's novels are identified by Frank
Kermode as instances of thirties fiction much esteemed at
the time but now largely ignored, another connection to
Hamilton's position. Commencing to discuss the public
schools of the period, Kermode deliberately "begin[s] by
saying something concerning a now-forgotten public-school
novel for which, as I remember, my contemporaries had in
those days considerable respect. Arthur Calder-Marshall's
Dead Centre, published in 1935, describes, with a certain

originality of form, the vicissitudes of a school year"

65
(22). Julian Symons finds "some of Arthur Calder-Marshall's
novels, including Dead Centre and About Levy, . . . more
successful [than much proletarian fiction of the thirties]
because of a less obvious emphasis on social concern and a
more limited scope" (167). Curiously, the novel that
Calder-Marshall was researching when he met Hamilton turns
out to be what Kermode describes as "a more ambitious novel,
also much admired in its time, called Ede in the Sky (1937);
it contains many instances of social injustice" (24). Such
a summary suggests both its values (ambition, contemporary
admiration) and its limits (its "many instances of social.
injustice" are in a tediously raw form). Hamilton's work
has aged much better.

In fact, Calder-Marshall functions in hietory end VeTue
as an accurate indicator of the thirties; well-respected
during the period, with 'typical' attitudes, behaviors, and
writings. Trying to convey something of the complex
interrelations between the Communist Party and the middle-
class Left, Kermode asserts that "Arthur Calder-Marshall can
once again give us an idea of the mood of the bourgeois
convertites [in his] book called The Changing Scene" (37).
Calder-Marshall is a noteworthy counterpart to Hamilton in
terms of political ideology and what might be called
"thirties experience;" the differences serve to illuminate
Hamilton's position and the merit of his writing.

Class and experience come together in the specific

incident that McKenna has in mind as "clearly an upper-class

66
lark" complete with "fetchingly camp description"
("Confessions" 232): Hamilton‘s night in the doss house.
McKenna's position seems to be that since Hamilton spent
only one night in the doss-house, that experience has no
value. Certainly Hamilton's own earning power kept him from
needing doss-houses, but, unremarked by McKenna is the fact
that Bob, the character who experiences the doss house in
The Midnight BeTT, is also just passing through, temporarily
brought low by his own bad judgment, problem drinking, and
obsession with Jenny. It is too limiting, regardless, to
isolate the single night in the doss house; that experience
was part of Hamilton's sustained contact with the lower
reaches of pub culture. Notably, McKenna does not take
issue with the credibility of The Midnight BeTT's doss-house
episode; instead, he is addressing the issue of Hamilton's
attitude toward his own experience. Certainly to have been
there at all, for a sharply observant writer like Hamilton,
puts him in a position to re-create the experience
fictionally. "At least we feel," David Gervais writes of
John Betjeman and his famous poem, "that he has actually
heeh to Slough" (187).18 So too has Hamilton "been there,"
and stayed for a long time; his observations and experiences
were used in constructing the distinctive fictional milieu

of Britain at its worst.

NOTES

1. "City and Suburban: Moustache or Clean-Shaven?"
Spectator, 28 December 1956, 930.

2. Michael Holroyd, Unreeeived Opinione (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 103.

3. Bruce Hamilton, The Light Went Out: A Biogrephy of

 

Petrick Hehilton (London: Constable, 1972); Nigel Jones,
Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Petrick Hehilton
(London: Scribners, 1991); Sean French, getrick Hehilton: A
the (London: Faber & Faber, 1993); and Brian M. McKenna,
"Gender Representation, Sexuality and Politics in the
Writings of Patrick Hamilton" (Dissertation, University of
Oxford, 1991). Subsequent references cited in text.

4. D. J. Taylor, "Dangerous Liaisons," review of Jones, The
Sunday Times (London) 8 December 1991, 10.

5. Nigel Jones goes even farther than not noting who
provided this picture of Hamilton, he claims that "there is
something noble in Bruce's selfless devotion to his brother;
without his love and effort, Patrick might be just one more
forgotten literary sot" (380). The lasting record of the
fiction and printed plays stands apart from Hamilton's life,
so "forgetting" would require an act of will. Furthermore,

far from saving Hamilton from a fate as "just one more

67

68
forgotten literary sot," it was Bruce himself who wrote that
image into the record.
6. Joyce Carol Oates, "Adventures in Abandonment," rev. of
Teen Stefford, by David Roberts, New York Timee Book Review
28 August 1988, 3.
7. "Confessions of a Heavy-Drinking Marxist," Beyond the
TTeeeure DoheddWriting_end Addiction free the Roeentice, ed.
Sue Vice, et al (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994),
232. Subsequent references to this article cited in text.
8. Brigid Brophy, "Biberon," rev. of The Light Went Out and
the 1972 Constable reprints of The Slavee of Solitude and
Hangover Sguare, The Listener 13 July 1972: 54-55; Donald
Thomas, "The Dangerous Edge of Things: The Novels of Patrick
Hamilton," Encounter 69.2 (1987): 32-40.
9. Arnold Rattenbury, "Total Attainder and the Helots,"
Renaissance and Modern Studdee 20 (1976): 103-119, rept. in
Lucas, Challenge to Orthodoey (1978): 138-60; and Peter J.
Widdowson, "The Saloon Bar Society: Patrick Hamilton's
Fiction in the 19308," Renaissance and Modern Studdee 20
(1976): 81-101, rept. in Lucas, Challenge to Orthodoey
(1978): 117-137.
10. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York:
Columbia 0 Press, 1983 [f.p. 1958]), 276.

11. Frank Kermode, History end Velue; John Lucas, ed., The

 

 

1930§z A Challenge to Orthodoxy (London and New York:

Harvester/Barnes and Noble, 1978); Andy Croft, Red Letter

69

heye: Britieh Fiction in the 1930§ (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1990); Frank Gloversmith, ed., QTeee, Culture and
Sociel Chehge: A New View of the 1930§ (Sussex: Harvester,
1980); Robert Hewison, Unde; Siege: Literary LiTedin London
1939-45 (New York: Oxford 0 Press, 1977); and Hugh David,
The Fiteroviehe (London: Michael Joseph, 1988).
12. (London: Gollancz, 1937), 153. Subsequent references
to this edition cited in text.
13. Gollancz himself is, of course, free of all class
prejudice for, as he is careful to explain in a parenthesis,
"I am a Jew, and passed the years of my early boyhood in a
fairly close Jewish community; and, among Jews of this type,
class distinctions do not exist" (xv).
14. Dissertation abstract; "Confessions" 234.
15. David Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of
"Englishness" in Modern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 158.
16. Arthur Calder-Marshall, The Magic of My Youth (London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951), 93. Subsequent references cited
in text.
17. Memoirs of the Fortiee (London: Cresset, 1988 [first
published 1965]).
18. "Slough," from Contindel Dee (1937), which opens with
this stanza:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn't fit for humans now,

There isn't grass to graze a cow
Swarm over, Death!

Chapter 3

"CONVERSATIONAL CENTRES" AT THE FAUCONBERG HOTEL

Mondey Morning (1925) is Hamilton's first novel,
written when he was twenty; he signed his Constable contract
on the novel three days after his twenty-first birthday
(French 55). The novel's protagonist, Anthony Forster, has
much in common with his creator. They have similar back-
grounds and interests, they make a start on undistinguished
careers in the theater, and both aspire to be writers.
Monday Morning leads naturally into the graphic features of
the narrative style favored by Hamilton, in which emphasis
is given through capital letters, italics, and quotation
marks. The novel also inaugurates Hamilton's habit of
requiring some unusual typesetting. In almost every
Hamilton novel, there is some feature requiring
extraordinary typography; here, it is Anthony's drafts,
complete with linings-out.

Anthony's chosen vocation as a writer mirrors
Hamilton's own, but with a difference that marks Hamilton's
control of his craft even at age twenty, writing his first
novel. Hamilton actually wrote his novel, making humorous
capital out of Anthony's inability to do more than fantasize

about his own novel. Hamilton's title refers to Anthony's

70

71
oft-repeated resolutions to begin life--or at least his
novel--on the following Monday morning.

Anthony's novel, as it appears in Monday Morning, never

 

amounts to very much. At times, Anthony's unwritten novel
appears to merge with the novel Hamilton has written. While
sitting in the train en route to London after the death of
his aunt, for instance,
For no reason the name "Fuller Maitland" leapt into his
brain. . . . He wondered who Fuller Maitland was. He
had seen his name somewhere. It would be rather a good

thing to put into a novel. A man who suddenly thought,

for no reason, of the name "Fuller Maitland." At a
critical moment. . . . He found another comfortable
position and began to doze. . . .1

Might this be Mondey Morning? Speculation is cut off by
Anthony's doze, and Anthony's notion of "a critical moment"
falls to one side, obscured by the mundane realities of a
journey by train. Hamilton's preference for the everyday
and material over the drama of the "critical moment" signals
his choice of subject matter. It is the details of his
chosen milieu that receive priority; sociology supplants
drama.

Anthony's vague ideas concerning the subject matter and
objectives for this novel remain unchanged throughout Monday
Morning:

An unhappy but vivid ending would be desirable, so as

to make it true to life. Also there would be the

72

frequent use of a word often represented in these days

by its coy synonym "sanguinary." Frequent use. This,

too, would serve to make his novel true to life. (26)
Such ideas signal one of the most significant differences
between Anthony's novel and Hamilton's. The "true to life"
novel Anthony imagines is not true to everyday life at all;
it is melodramatic, the never-plotted events intended to
illustrate clichéd and abstract themes. Hamilton's novel,
in marked contrast, is realistic and rooted in the domestic
round of the marginal people he concentrated on throughout
his career as a writer. Monday Morning illuminates life in
a residential hotel which is populated by transient and
financially insecure, yet respectable, people.

Thinking of the novel as primarily about hotel life
explains why Anthony and Diane's romance is, as most critics
have noted, only realized intermittently. Sean French
observes that while "the narrator wants to despise Diane"
and presents her as shallow and conceited, "he also wants
the reader to forget about these criticisms and consider her
an ideal heroine as the book reaches its climax" (57).
Monday Morning is not principally about the romance--or
Anthony's novel-writing or theatrical career--but about the
codes which govern life at the Fauconberg and in rented
rooms on the road. The romance is mere window dressing in a
shop devoted to recording a brand of everyday existence
often overlooked in literature.

Another novelist who chose hotel life to be the subject

73
of her first novel is Elizabeth Bowen, whose H§§£,0f the Dey
provided a contrasting take on the characteristic Hamilton
milieu in the first chapter of this study. Bowen, six years
older than Hamilton, had published collections of short
stories before The Hotel (1927), but it was her first novel.
That both Hamilton and Bowen chose a hotel as the setting
for their first novels is intriguing, particularly since the
two novels came out within two years of each other. Bowen's
treatment of the subject provides an illuminating foil to
Hamilton's, but there are more points of agreement here than
are to be found in their later work.

Bowen's hotel is "away," on the Italian Riviera, and
its residents are higher on the socio-economic scale than
the inhabitants of Hamilton's Fauconberg. Bowen's
characters are not, however, wealthy (they are not James or
Wharton characters); they must watch their spending. The
men are university-educated--Victor Ammering, for instance,
although a drab and aimless young man, has a "Public School
and University education"--and all are mostly idle. They
live a leisured existence. These are people who would not
go to Brighton; Mrs Pinkerton dismisses Nice as "a kind of
French Brighton."2

Hamilton's novel gives a feeling of closeness, while
Bowen's perspective is more that of an outside observer.
The details of hotel life that interest both novelists,
however, lead them into unexpected similarities. Bowen's

description of dining-room protocol, for example, reads like

74
Hamilton. Behind the double doors into the dining room,
Bowen writes,
one could see visitors take form with blank faces, then
compose and poise themselves for an entrance. Some who
thought punctuality rather suburban would gaze into the
unfilled immensity of the room for a moment, then
vanish repelled. Others would advance swimmingly and
talk from table to table across the emptiness,
familiarly, like a party of pioneers. Men came in
without their wives and did not always look up when
these entered. (18)
Bowen also uses some of the same theatrical images Hamilton
tends to favor. In these hotel novels, routine events
become productions: "Tessa and Sydney had been sitting on
interminably; they had watched from rise to fall of the
curtain the whole drama of lunch” (21).
The fundamental attitude presented by the two

novelists, however, remains quite different. Imagining the

Saracens attacking the hotel, Sydney asks Milton " 'how many
of us they would really care to take away?‘ " (35). Her
conclusion is " 'not many,’ " for she "sees" the other hotel

guests "as they were to remain--undesired, secure and null"
(35). Such a tone suggests the importance of what Hamilton
records in his hotel and boarding house novels--he examines
those "undesired, secure and null" people in order to show

that they are more than Sydney believes them to be. In The

Hotel, Bowen attends to Hamilton-type residents of the

75
hotel, and does so sympathetically, but they are the
character actors who frame the Bowenesque stars. Hamilton
makes them the principal actors and draws our attention to

them.

LIFE IN A RESIDENTIAL HOTEL

That hotel life will be a principal focus in Monday
Morning is evident from the beginning of the novel. The set
piece which opens the novel shows readers Anthony's room in
Hove. The description of the Hove room is calculated to
establish Anthony as a typical young man through the art he
chooses for his walls, and the presence of such objects as a
cricket hat, a thrice-smoked pipe and a chess board. Direct
presentation of Anthony comes when he is standing on the
steps of the Fauconberg on a January day; one of his first
Monday mornings in the novel.

His first encounter with the Fauconberg is when its
"proprietress" shows him over the hotel. She

came and brightly welcomed Anthony. She took him to

his room. She showed him the billiard-room, the ball-

room, and the dining room. She told him the time of

the meals, and she said "Nowadays they don't dress for

dinner unless they want to." Then, after laughing

instructions for finding his room again, she left him.

(6)
The Fauconberg's topography and rituals are thereby

established immediately, although, as it transpires, most of

76
the residents do wear "evening dress" (9) for dinner, thus
refuting her report.

Anthony's relation to his various on-the-road
landladies is clearly difficult, marked by deference on his
part. Confronted with his first landlady on the theatrical
tour, in Sheffield, he is in agonies of indecision about
what is expected of him. He considers going in to town, but
frets about how to notify his landlady:

if he went downstairs he might meet the girl, and he

couldn't very well say, "Will you tell your mother I'm

going out, but I'll be back in time for supper?"

Perhaps she wasn't the landlady's daughter, and perhaps

the landlady didn't mean to give him supper.

On the whole it was best to wait, and if the
landlady didn't come up to him, he would wait till ten,

and then go to bed. (185-86)

His actions are circumscribed by fear of offending the all-
powerful landlady, and he is prepared to go without his trip
to town and his supper rather than risk affronting her
dignity. On a subsequent tour, now wiser and more
experienced, Anthony seizes on Mr. Brayne as

the best person to lodge with. There was no quaking

before the landlady with Mr. Brayne. When Mr. Brayne

wanted more coal Mr. Brayne went to the top of the
stairs and asked for more coal. And when he wanted hot
water at any quaint time he asked for it. And he asked

for a kettle at nights with which to fill his hot water

77

bottle, and if it wasn't there he asked for it. And he

bought most of the food, and would always severely

audit, if not actually dispute, his landlady's bill at
the end of the week. And Anthony benefitted by all

this. (263-64)

The brave demands of Mr. Brayne suggest, more than anything
else could, just what the timid lodger could expect to do
without: sufficient coal for the fire, hot water, a kettle
at night, decent food. The psychological warfare between
lodger and landlady is exposed through Mr. Brayne's
victorious assault, and the financial battle is hinted at
through his severe audits and disputes of the landlady's
bill.

Financial issues in Mondey Morning are linked
inextricably with some kind of personal or domestic
consequence. What interests the narrative about Anthony's
stage career, for example, is not his theatrical
achievements, but his salary and concomitant domestic
arrangements. When hired at Brayne's instigation for "The
Coil," Anthony is "to assist the stage manager, play a small
part, and have six pounds a week" (151); when he loses the
assistant stage manager job because he has no idea what a
prop might be, his salary is "reduced to four pounds" (158)
and he is relieved to be rid of the assistant stage
manager's responsibilities. On a later tour, he is "given a
much larger part with a much larger salary"--ten pounds a

week (270). All of Anthony's dealings with "The Coil"

78
follow this pattern of specifics concerning living
arrangements and rates of pay with no information about the
play itself, or even Anthony's role in it. Hamilton
provides only a brief glimpse of Anthony's first entrance on
stage, so we know he is wearing evening dress and is
presumably a foppish young man, but that is all the
information provided. Knowing little about his original
small part, the reader knows even less about that "much
larger part."

Inherited money is a further source of income for
Anthony, and it too is linked to domestic detail. After the
death of his aunt, "Anthony now had three pounds ten
shillings a week of his own. This was to be sent to him
every week. When he was twenty-one, he understood, he was
to have quite a decent amount of money. Not enough to marry
on, but quite a decent amount of money" (87-88). That
additional income turns out to be "about eight pounds a
week. On that they could be comfortable. (They only charge
two pounds ten shillings per head at the Fauconberg and
places like it. That's three pounds extra for enjoyments and
dress.)" (220-21).

Hamilton often makes explicit the connections between
income and purchasing power, to the point of identifying the
wasteful or trivial allocations his characters make. In
Hangover Sguare, for instance, Bone thinks of his financial
resources in terms of actual--as opposed to ideal--

expenditure. Bone plans carefully how he will survive on

 

79
the bit of money he has left from his mother, and concludes
that "if he could live down to four pounds a week (and he
somehow did manage, or nearly manage, to do this in spite of
everything)" he can go on for quite some time. The need to
"live down," however, does not preclude Bone from budgeting
his income into wasteful categories of expenditure; his
budget translates directly into "two pounds a week for
living, two pounds for drinks and smokes and Netta."3 The
Christmas money from his aunt, a hoped-for windfall,
rePresents nothing other than "ten pounds of concrete,
Clearly visualised pleasure, with a beginning and an end--
ten pounds' worth of Netta's company. He was going to keep
it in a separate pocket, and see when it had gone" (45).
Indeed, his Christmas money is "ten pounds extra now, to
Spend all on smokes and drinks and Netta!" (19). Not only
does he know where the money will go, but he thinks of the
conIlection between money and purchase as being so clear that
he (can convert directly from the pound figure to the rather
vagiiue commodity of Netta's company. This is not a direct
traI'lsaction; he will spend the money Q Netta's company but
”11 1 not give it t_o her in exchange for her company.
heedey_hg;h1hg offers a more innocuous instance of this
nethod of perceiving and managing money. When Anthony
d§§ ides he will buy Diane the pendant (for nineteen pounds),
thfi bulk of the money will come from what he saved while

Q\lring with "The Coil," but there is "a rather fascinating
‘1»

L

‘y of getting" the rest of the purchase price. The details

80
of Anthony's scheme are classic Hamilton, as is the idea
that it is "fascinating" rather than boring, sordid, or
embarrassing. In short, Anthony will skip lunch for a fixed
period of time: "At the Fauconberg they would charge him
fifteen shillings the less if he went without his lunches.
He would go without his lunches and eat bread and cheese in
his room. This for two weeks and he would have enough
money" (222-23). After buying the pendant, however,
"Arrthony did not enjoy the subsequent lunchless fortnight"
(225); the plan was more agreeable than its implementation.
His scheme of improving his French over lunch comes to
nothing, of course, and his lie to the hotel about having
his lunches out traps him in his room; he is reduced to
miserably eating his bread and cheese and having a bath.
The inescapable connection between money and material living
is Ilever overlooked by Hamilton, and it is captured here in
th" context of the complicated code governing life in a
reg idential hotel. Anthony is insufficiently anonymous to
be iable to go out for his lunch, and sufficiently cowed by
hotel mores to wish to avoid giving offence.

Introspection on the part of Hamilton's characters
oiitlisn takes the form of cliche; characters think in expected
ways and make stereotypical resolutions for change.

Amkhllony's novel-writing plans, Diane's schoolgirl plots, Mr.
abfiyne's life goals; all these fit the usual Hamilton

lp’ial
thern. Not having been taught to think independently or
‘9»

§~lue their own status, Hamilton's characters rely upon

81
prefabricated patterns of thinking, feeling, even aspiring
to change. Their lack of independence is one marker of how
narrow, yet noteworthy, a class segment Hamilton has
captured in his fiction. In Wigan Pier, Orwell identifies
enforced passivity as a burden of the working class: "This
business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept
waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's
convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand
influences constantly press a working man down into a
passive rfile" (49).

However, when Orwell talks about the activity of the
"other" class, as in the following passage, he is clearly
describing a class other than that which populates
Hamilton's milieu:

A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with

some expectation of getting what he wants, within

reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of
stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front;
they are no more gifted than others and their

'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but

they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference

and consequently have the cheek necessary to a

commander. (49)

Hamilton's characters, then, seem to be neither fish nor
fowl. Neither totally acted upon, nor possessing mental
independence and self-confidence, they perch precariously on

a border which seems to possess the drawbacks of both

82
adjacent classes with few of their advantages.

Bowen's characters, in contrast to Hamilton's, strike
out into self-consciously individual territory. In The
heheT, Cordelia Barry, though only a schoolgirl, articulates
the essential dullness of hotel dwellers; they are not
exciting enough, they do not meet the normal standards for
novelistic analysis. When Milton tells Sydney and Cordelia
that he comes to the hotel "for people," their response is
unanimous:

"Oh!" they both exclaimed. "What an extraordinary
thing to come for! -- To come hehe for," Sydney added.

"Don't you know any people? Do you like them so
much?" Cordelia inquired. "How funny! I only like

people in books who only exist when they matter. I

think it is being in danger or terribly in love,

discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is
thrilling and that you have to have people. But people

in hotels, hardly alive . . . !"

 

"Well, you don't know what may not be happening to
them," Sydney, emerging from her detachment, felt it
necessary to point out instructively. (81-82)

This idea, presented by Cordelia in melodramatic terms, is
obviously not to be taken at face value. Bowen is, after
all, writing a novel about a group of hotel residents.
Nonetheless, the novel contains two major groups of
characters: the Hamilton-type hotel dwellers, and characters

more typical of Bowen's later work. The "major" characters

83
are of prime interest in the novel's agenda while the
Hamilton-types are scenery, window dressing. Bowenesque
characters are the principal actors: Sydney, Mrs. Kerr,
Ronald, and Rev. Milton. Hamilton types include the two
spinsters (Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald), the Lee-Mittisons,
Colonel Duperrier and his invalid wife The spinsters' first
names are mistaken in the narrative, signalling their
essential lack of importance. Early in the novel, Miss
Fitzgerald is Emily (5 and 7), but later, she is Eleanor
(109).4

Miss Pym, however, is the first to discover Mrs. Kerr's
character flaws. Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald "drew in each
other's ideas and gave out their own by a gentle process,
like breathing" (8); with Mrs. Kerr, however, "her waves
came back bewildered, broken against something. She could
not bear the ordeal of this gracious listening. Was Mrs
Kerr like this when Sydney Warren talked?" (9). And of
course, it will be revealed much later that Mrs Kerr was
awful to Sydney, that what everyone (Sydney included)
thought was a wonderful friendship was a cruel manipulation
of a younger woman by an older. Sydney herself ends up
"bewildered, broken against something" in Mrs. Kerr.

The two spinsters do have an importance in the closed
world of the hotel. They are characteristic of this
lifestyle, people with empty lives and no family. They
have, primarily, each other. The aftermath of their

terrible row opens the novel, and the problem flickers

84
throughout. Final closure is granted by their
reconciliation: "The Hotel from up here was as small as a
doll's house; shoulder to shoulder they sat and looked down
on it. Hand in hand, reunited, in perfect security, they
sat and remembered that day" (175). The hotel itself
features in their reconciliation; it is part of their
renewed peace.

The spinsters lend themselves to the kind of
capitalization Hamilton uses. Miss Pym thinks of their
quarrel as "a Moment, not a succession of moments" (8), and
she talks to Mrs. Kerr of "Straightforward Persons who can
be frank with themselves and admit that they do like to
escape the difficulties of Life and the unpleasantness--if
they can do so without depriving themselves of experience or
evading Responsibilities, or hurting Other People' " (8).
The hotel denizens, Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, think and
speak in the sort of clichés Hamilton's characters are
forced to live by. I

The Lee-Mittisons are also lifelong hotel dwellers, and
have tried to build a full life around hotel mores. When Mr
Lee-Mittison is first introduced, at lunch, he is "going a
round of the tables with an open botany-case" (18). The
Lee-Mittisons work constantly at trying to build and
maintain relationships with their fellow guests, but always
with Mr. Lee-Mittison as a kind of father figure in the
center:

The Lee-Mittisons always went out of their way to be

85

pleasant to strangers, making efforts to draw them as

soon as possible into the social life of the Hotel

centring round Mr Lee-Mittison. They had been
predisposed in Milton's favor by the fact that he had
come downstairs to breakfast and ordered an egg: this
seemed to them virile. Very few people came down to
breakfast, a discouraging meal to which the Lee-

Mittisons by a punctual appearance and bright nods

round tried in vain to impart an atmosphere. (30)

Such efforts, however draining, are clearly doomed to
failure. The hotel and its conventions dictate how the Lee-
Mittisons proceed; they read Milton's presence at breakfast,
and the egg he orders, as telltale indications of his
character. Further, they work with the "discouraging meal"
they are given, rather than cutting off in a different
direction.

These things make the Lee-Mittisons pathetic,
especially in light of their long history of living in
hotels. They are rootless, and their years of constant
social effort have exhausted them. When Mrs. Lee-Mittison
tries to picture living in an Italian house, she cannot get
across the threshold because she knows so little of life in
one's own house she cannot even imagine it. Her happy
fantasy disintegrates at that point:

The villino suddenly dropped away from her eye as

though she had put down a telescope, and as her life

sprang back into focus she must have been dizzy, for

86
she felt sick at the thought of their hotel bedrooms
that stretched, only interspersed with the spare-rooms
of friends, in unbroken succession before and behind
her. She felt sick at the thought of for how many
mornings more she would have to turn the washstand into
an occasional table by putting away the basin and jug
in the cupboard and drape with Indian embroideries the
trunk in which they concealed their boots. (36-37)
Bowen feels sorry for them, which is better than the
contempt usually manifested by novelists, but still more
remote than Hamilton's concern. His novels identify with
this class of people, while The Hotel observes them

sympathetically from outside.

CONVERSATIONAL CENTRES

Hamilton's descriptions of the social mores which
prevail in the Fauconberg are heavily framed, as one would
expect for an author taking on a relatively rare novelistic
subject. Hamilton's introductions to hotel mores are both
blunt and prescriptive; they are a clear fictional rendering
of inside information and social nuances, the gathering of
which required remarkable gifts for discerning observation.

The report of Anthony's first evening in the lounge
describes what people wear, what they talk about, and how
the conversations proceed. This scene takes place during
the lull before dinner, while the residents are waiting for

the gong to signal the exodus to the dining room. Most of

87
the residents are in "evening dress. The women were mostly
in black lace dresses" (9). As the social round proceeds in
the lounge, "frequently there would be the clicking noise of
a key at the front door, and young men with double-breasted
blue overcoats would come in; they were tired, untidy,
office-dirty, and they went upstairs" (11). These people
are never identified as part of the conversational scene;
when they come down, rid of their office dirt and Tube
grime, they have been somehow transformed into hotel
residents, and the narrative is not interested in their day
jobs.

Conversation proceeds formally, along fixed lines.
While Anthony tries to look engrossed in his cigarettes and
an old letter,

All about were conversational centres for Bridge,

Dancing, "The Beggar's Opera," Setting up as a

Dressmaker, The celibate disposition of the Prince of

Wales, The Differentiation between Einstein and

Epstein, The Adventure of Mrs. Jackson with a Rude 'Bus

Conductor. The wife of the Lord Carson man told a

young man that she would tell his mother about him.

One of the knitting old ladies said that she thought

his mother knew. (10-11)

Hamilton's eccentric use of capitalization serves here to
set apart these topics and suggest their artificial nature.
The mixed bag of topics listed indicates clearly how trivial

they all are--not just the obviously silly topics, but, by

88
extension, even erstwhile serious topics can be assumed to
undergo a silly discussion. Finally, to describe them as
"conversational centres" rather than conversations
underscores the formal, choreographed nature of resident
interactions.

The behavior required of one in Anthony's position,
revealed implicitly from the beginning, receives a formal.
airing-out near the novel's mid-point. Hamilton spells out
clearly the social expectations, including specific examples
of both prescribed and proscribed actions:

The right procedure, if you were a new arrival at the

Fauconberg Hotel, was to sit quietly in the lounge,

smile weakly at the jokes, not to speak, but to wait,

and hope, till some intrepid and particularly
chivalrous person spoke to you. If that happened you
might make a diffident reply, and perhaps tell a very
short story. Then you had to wait until somebody
offered to play billiards or Bridge with you for the
evening, or until Betty took you up. Soon you would be
talked about as quite a nice new arrival, and
interesting too, and soon you would be one of them.
You were certainly not supposed to presume at the
outset that a hotel was a hotel and that you had the
same conversational rights as anybody else--the same
conversational rights, for instance, as the people who
could remember Mr. Braddon (they always called him

Jackie; poor fellow; got killed in Soudan), or the

89

people who remembered the hotel three years ago. (It

was a far jollier place then. The life seemed to have

gone out of it now, somehow.)

This is why Mr. Brayne gave offence when he first
arrived at the Fauconberg. Anthony found him, one
morning a little before lunch, talking fluently and
unconsciously to those around him, with no respect for
conversational rights whatever. (141-42)

The expectations are precise in Spite of being unspoken; the
established residents expect new arrivals to follow the
unwritten rules and then, as a matter of course, those
newcomers will become "one of them." Mr. Brayne's
extravagant willfulness marks him out here, as before, as
unusually independent of the conventions which keep most
residents in their place.

The artificial manner in which Hamilton has chosen to
present dialogue draws attention to it, both to its content
and to its formulaic nature. Once Anthony finds his first
tour lodgings, in Sheffield, the landlady takes him to his
room, where the pair engage in the following conversation:
"Here it was observed that the weather was much colder, that
the train was late, that it had been raining all the morning
in Sheffield, that the English climate was fickle, that
Anthony should be brought tea and bread and butter" (184).
Their exchange is not presented as dialogue in the usual
fashion, but rather, as a list of topics. A curious follow-

up is the fact that Anthony's conversation with the

90
prostitute he encounters in Piccadilly is composed of the
same topics--the cold and the general nastiness of the
English climate (301-02)--suggesting the artificial rigidity
of all social contact.

Notable too is the way misunderstanding can be masked
by an appearance of mutual comprehension. Anthony and his
Sheffield landlady also provide an instance of that
phenomenon. He returns home very late, presumably at no
small inconvenience to her, but she brings him bread,

cheese, and cocoa. Knowing full well that he is very late,

Anthony says " 'I hope I'm not late.‘ " She replies to his
misrepresentation, " 'Ah, well, what does it matter so long
as it was a nice girl!‘ She laughed at this, and Anthony

joined in, with the air of one who says, 'We two understand
each other perfectly, don't we?‘ " (194). The reader knows
that Anthony has been alone at the movies, and then with
some men from the cast--there was no girl, nice or
otherwise. The air of perfect mutual comprehension is
wholly false.

Anthony's first meal in the Fauconberg is at a table
set for two, with a "thin, elderly woman" (12) as his table
partner. Their demeanor too suggests the rigid difficulties
of boarding-house life; they experience awkward pauses and
"bad silences," and the arrival of their food, which
requires part of their attention, is felt by both as a
social relief. Their topics are also detailed precisely and

artificially: "the conversation ran from Germany to London,

91
to crowded trains, to Richmond Park, and suddenly to John
Masefield, because she had heard him lecture a few days ago.
Thence to English Poetry and Literature. . . . Then to
Foreign Literature" and finally, "while consuming the flimsy
sweet they came to more personal matters" (13).

Later, when Anthony is more fully assimilated into
Fauconberg society, the novel reports on a rainy after-lunch
in the lounge. The social intercourse is more intimate than
it has been in previous scenes, but the conversation is
presented in the same manner as before. In the lounge,

the people talked about "Monsieur Beaucaire," and about

Valentino, and Novarro, and Moreno, and Novello, but

they couldn't see what other people saw in them at all.

And they talked of playing cards. The children talked

of playing hide and seek and thought they were going to

have a very enjoyable afternoon. Anthony talked to

Diane. (91)

Conversation is the heavily-ritualized field of combat for
boarding-house dwellers. It is the main arena open to them
in the constrained existence they must, of necessity, lead.
Mr. Brayne's refusal to shoulder his responsibilities
suggests how these conventions can be used aggressively, to
keep others out, or, as he chooses, to muscle in on the
society over the unvoiced objections of others. Craven

House will do still more with this element of boarding-house

 

existence, and in The Slaves of Solitude, with the

introduction of Mr. Thwaites and his eccentric and

92
domineering verbal style, it will become of paramount
importance; even in Mondey Morning, however, the reader
cannot overlook its essential nature.

Like the residents of the Fauconberg, Bowen's
characters in The Hotel are locked in social ritual. Both
novels attend to the protocols obtaining in such hotel
activities as meals, dances, and afternoons in the sitting-
room. The characters, particularly those in the Hamilton-
type category, literally cannot deviate from the code set
out for them. This is particularly true of their
conversational exchanges. After Sydney destroys their
tennis match, for example, Colonel Duperrier "had several
pleasant remarks in reserve to brush away Sydney's
discomfiture, but some kind of an explanation from her was
needed to unlock them; he did not know how to begin. She
did not apologize, and his embarrassment grew" (12). Since
Sydney will not initiate the typical exchange, Duperrier
cannot proceed.

Psychological depth is prized by Bowen, while Hamilton
largely avoids it to present social--or sociological--depth.
Part of the attraction of The Hotel is its combination of
Hamilton's kind of emphasis with the concerns more usually
associated with Bowen. The conjunction of the two
viewpoints is revealing, for the novel occasionally
illustrates what happens when the two collide. Conversa-
tional styles, ways of speaking to other characters, mark

the gulf between them. When Ronald Kerr asks Colonel

93
Duperrier, Eileen and Joan Lawrence if Sydney and Milton are
in fact engaged, Eileen appeals back to Ronald:
"But yeh ought to know something about it, anyway; she
will have told your mother."

"I don't think she has," said Ronald vaguely.

"I'm afraid not. I suppose my mother's not the proper
sort of matron. She would hardly, I suppose, provide
the bosom that young women on these occasions are
supposed to require. I'm afraid she may perhaps feel
like I do, that one's friends, however various and
delightful they may be at other times, are least
interesting--while of course deserving all respect--at
these moments when they approximate most closely to the
normal. What people call life's larger experiences,"
said Ronald, "are so very narrowing."

"What a vocabulary you've got, Kerr," said Colonel
Duperrier, respectfully offering his cigarette-case.
"I've never heard such a flow of language. Write?"
(129)

There are several noteworthy features in this exchange.
Ronald's evaluation of his mother, for instance, is typical
of the complex thought behind Bowenesque character's
relations to others. Mrs. Kerr is indeed DQL the proper
sort of matron, so not only has Ronald thought a great deal
(an inordinate amount) about his mother and her character,
but he has come to an accurate understanding of her. The

condescension toward other, "normal," people which he shares

94
with his mother would include nearly everyone in Hamilton's
entire ouevre. Duperrier's response is equally telling for
his side of the divide. His comment on Ronald's "flow of
language" is sharp, and the more interesting if one studies
Ronald's speech: the vocabulary is not in fact very
complicated, while the style creates the impression that it
is. Even more piquant is the Colonel's idea that Ronald's
pomposity makes him fit for writing, setting Ronald apart
from the ordinary people he mocks.

In The Hotel, in contrast to Mondey Morning, key scenes
are filled with psychological depths and profound, although
often subterranean, communication. When Mrs. Kerr and
Sydney visit the patisserie, for example, almost ten pages
are given over to their complicated conversation; they speak
of their relationship, of Ronald's relation to each of them,
of abstract ideas of friendship. Mrs. Kerr, the novel makes
clear, is being cruel to Sydney, but at no point does either
character misunderstand a single nuance. The encounter ends
when Mrs. Kerr sends Sydney in to pay the bill:

To Sydney the cumulative effect of this succession of

touches (especially the last: herself brandishing with

commercial insistence a long bill that her bewildered
debtor felt unable to meet) was of vulgarity. The
attribution to herself of an irritable sex-
consciousness vis-a-vis Ronald did not hurt, but
sharply offended. Mrs Kerr, however, sitting there

with her half-smile, her evident deprecation of the

95

interlude, her invincible air of fastidiousness, had

maintained her own plane, whereupon 'vulgarity' would

be meaningless. Sydney could only suppose that cruelty
as supremely disinterested as art had, like art, its
own purity, which could transcend anything and

consecrate the nearest material to its uses. (118)

The subtle method Mrs. Kerr has of administering all these
blows to Sydney, and Sydney's elaborate reading of Mrs.
Kerr's manner, would be impossible in a Hamilton novel,
where characters are apt to misunderstand far more direct
and simple communication than that employed in Bowen's
patisserie scene. Milton's encounter with Mrs. Kerr in the
hotel drawing room is of the same type; long, excruciatingly
subtle, yet entirely effective.

The shared inner life of these characters is contrasted
explicitly with their surfaces. At one point during the
patisserie scene, Sydney calms herself by imagining an
observer's perspective: "Presently she let herself fall back
on an outside consciousness of their both being well-
dressed, distinguished-looking and leisurely, and thought
how plainly this must appear from the other side of the
street and how, if she were someone else, she would stand on
the pavement and look at them" (115). The observed
encounter and its reality could not be farther apart. The
surface is brought to our attention in order to debunk it,

and to provide an ironic contrast to what is "real."

96
HOME CIRCLE OR ISOLATION CHAMBER?

The Oxford English Dictionary's basic definition of
"home" provides a spectrum of possibilities, from the
prosaic "dwelling-place" to the more suggestive "home-circle
or household."5 The idea that "home" is "the dwelling in
which one habitually lives, or which one regards as one's
proper abode" offers the most potential for considering the
Fauconberg, "home" to people who lack a fixed home of their
own ("one's own house"). The positive aspects of hotel life
can make it satisfactory as a home, rather than a necessary
evil or makeshift arrangement. When he first arrives at the
Fauconberg, Anthony feels homesick for his previous hotel in
Sussex: "He thought of his aunt, and the things she would be
doing at this hour, down at Hove. He saw her sitting alone
at their table, choosing her dinner with the agreeable Swiss
waiter. . . ." (9, text ellipses). A sentimental gloss of
"home" is cast over the hotel in which Anthony lived
formerly, and these terms emphasize some positive aspects of
hotel life. Later, at the end of his first theatrical tour,
he is "looking forward to long, peaceful evenings at the
Fauconberg, and the return of Diane" (219). Evenings at the
Fauconberg can clearly serve as satisfactory evenings at
"home."

When Anthony imagines his life together with Diane,
hotels are an assumed part of that life, and the Fauconberg
itself can serve as "home." He does not imagine the two of

them away from the Fauconberg, but in the hotel and

97
participating in its life: "Sometimes he simply dreamed
that he was back at the Fauconberg, and Diane told him that
she loved him, and they danced the last dance together, and
took a long walk after it" (269). When Diane and her mother
set off for their vacation in France, there is a crowd of
residents on the steps to see them off. After the taxi
drives off, there is a flurry of comments about Diane and
friendly jokes about Anthony's crush on her. The long-term
residents bond together as a near-family, an effect which
will become more pronounced in the small society of "paying
guests" in Craven House.

Holidays at the Fauconberg have special features which
depend upon the Fauconberg's being a large residential
hotel. The novel ends in the first hours of the New Year,
and both Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are described in
Mondey Morning. When Anthony returns again from tour, it is
Christmas Eve, and "the people of the Fauconberg had all
just gone into the dining-room for the biggest Dinner of the
year. . . a turmoil of not very funny fun" (292). New
Year's Eve is a fancy-dress ball, and at midnight everyone
"crowded on to the balcony of the Fauconberg . . . till they
heard the distance hurrying bells coming through the air of
the cold, clear night. Three cheers and some more dancing"
(310). Even Anthony, with his determined pseudo-
sophistication, finds the experience thrilling. The
enforced element of public involvement in one's life can

thus provide benefits as well.

98

Nonetheless, while the Fauconberg can serve as a
pleasant enough home for some of its residents, the
implications of its being the place "one regards as one's
proper abode" can turn ominous. Hamilton does not focus on
the dark elements of hotel life in Mondey Morning. but the
picture will become increasingly gloomy as his novels
mature. Sean French finds Hamilton's first novel
"significant" for "its technical strengths: the delineation
of character, the ear for dialogue, the skill of transition
between scenes, the sense of pace. In a book that is
reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse, it is remarkable how much of
the Hamilton world is already there in embryonic form" (56).
Monday Morning is indeed the first charting of Hamilton
territory: the culture of boarding houses and tea shops; the
geography of Earl's Court and Brighton. In his early
novels, the dreariness of such a way of life is hinted at,
but the insouciance of youth manages to rise above it. The
milieu of Monday Morning is recognizably Hamilton's, but an
inherent optimism that the deserving can surpass their drab
surroundings creates a radically different impression than
that created by Hamilton's later novels.

An illuminating comparison can be made between the
Fauconberg Hotel's presence in hengover Squepe with its
representation in Monday Morning. The repetition of the
hotel's name invites the comparison; the results suggest how
far the tone of Hamilton's fictional milieu has sunk over

the intervening sixteen years. The timid optimism of the

99
earlier novel has given way to morbid gloom. George Harvey
Bone's return to the Fauconberg after his Christmas visit to
his aunt emphasizes his disaffection with his residence:
He went up the steps, and into the Fauconberg. He had
to pass through the lounge on his way upstairs. It was
all decorated for Christmas (he had forgotten that,
although he had seen it decorated before he went away),
and the only people about were some children who were
trying to play blow-football (evidently a Christmas
present) on one of the green baize tables normally used
for bridge. He knew nobody in the little hotel--the
large glorified boarding-house--and he did not mean to.
He just slept in a small room at the top, and came down
to breakfast when everyone else had gone. For the rest
he slunk in and out, only exchanging the time of day
with the gloomy porter. (23)
The decorated lounge seems a sham, an empty gesture to a
quality of life no one could attain at the Fauconberg; yet
this very same lounge is introduced in Mondey Morning in
rather different terms. Upon his arrival, immediately after
unpacking his bag, Anthony
ran downstairs to what Mrs. Egerton had trained her
guests to call the Lounge. This was a sort of hall,
and entrance, and centre of the Fauconberg hotel. It
was a fair-sized room, deadened by thick carpets.
There was a large fireplace with a black and grey fire,

dull red, leather armchairs and sofas, and some small

100

tables. In the centre a palm, and in one corner a

woman having tea. (8)

The lounge (Lounge) is here explicitly identified as the
"centre" of hotel life, and it is in this room that Anthony
socializes with Diane, and the city workers are seen
returning. Bone's relation to this room forms a marked
contrast to Anthony's.

Early in Mondey Morning, Anthony reports to St. John,
his friend at the Earl's Court crammer's, that he's "
'staying at a sort of hotel place here' " where " 'the
people are rather weird, but one can keep absolutely apart'
" (38). As a summary judgment, this has some interesting
features. First, it is significant that Anthony describes
the Fauconberg as "a sort of hotel place" rather than just
as "a hotel." Anthony, after all, has been used to living
in residential hotels. Even more importantly, his idea of
keeping "absolutely apart" is exploded almost immediately,
most obviously through his romance with Diane de Mesgrigny,
but the novel reveals a whole series of relationships
constructed with fellow hotel residents. Some of these are
casual relationships while others are more deve10ped, but
Anthony's life at the Fauconberg is founded upon a whole
edifice of resident interactions. "Keeping absolutely
apart" is a condition reserved as the fate of George Harvey
Bone in Hangover Square and the "rather weird" people are
harmless in Monday Morning.

In Hangover Sguare, fellow residents are notably absent

101
from the narrative. The hotel manager and the porter appear
as characters, but the other residents are only sketched in,
identified as people who speculate about Bone and his life.
Their speculations are largely negative:
Without knowing it he was something of a character in
his hotel. Practically only seen late in the deserted
breakfast-room each morning, and then again walking
late at night through the lounge to bed, he was yet
part and parcel of the small hotel as a whole, and
contributed to its atmosphere. . . . Many guests
wondered where he worked during the day. Because he
was out all day they were certain that he worked at
something, and because they could not gain the faintest
conception of what this was, they concluded that it was
something not altogether reputable. Only the porter,
to whom he gave a weekly tip of two shillings, knew of
the complete emptiness and unemployment of Mr Bone's
life. (208)
Indeed, Earl's Court itself has become demonic, instead of
the temporary landing place of those moving on to better
things. Even the furnishings take on a dark significance:
"that gas-fire--what sinister, bleak misery emanated from
its sighing throat and red, glowing asbestos cells! To
those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl's
Court" (27). The fire is later likened to a demonic altar:
"That quite pleasant and not undignified little week-end was

now lost and to be forgotten for ever--converted into a

102
small, cynical joke, to be offered up to the beast Peter and
the cruel, dissipated Netta on the altar of a gas-fire in
Earl's Court" (28). Bone's weekend at his aunt's, pleasant
and relaxing, cannot withstand the combined negative
influences of Netta and Peter on the one hand and Earl's
Court on the other. By emphasizing both the gas fire and
the district, this passage not only insists on the
participation of Netta, Peter, and Bone in the 'sacrifice,’
but suggests that Earl's Court is part of the problem.

That Hamilton was aware of this change cannot be
doubted. The second outside observer presented in Hangover
S uare, John Halliwell, is described in terms not unlike
those employed in Mondey Morning to describe Anthony
Forster. Halliwell appears only briefly, in the one chapter
given over to him, the first chapter of the eighth part. He
comes from Sussex, and begins his working life in London for
”a firm of insurance brokers in the City who thought highly
of him for his industry, integrity, and good nature" (201).
Halliwell lives in Earl's Court, and spends most of his non-
working hours

out of doors in the immediate neighborhood. For he was

alone in London for the first time, and at an age when

the external world generally bears a totally different
aspect than the one it bears to its more battered and
jaundiced inhabitants--at an age, indeed, when even the
scenery of S.W.7 might be associated with the beginning

of life rather than the end of all hope, and its

103

streets and people charged with a remarkable mystery

and romance of their own. (201)
Halliwell's idea of worldliness is to frequent pubs, where
he indulges in the proto-typical Hamilton starter drink,
port:

most of all he preferred to go to the saloon bars of

public-houses, and having one or two drinks, watch and

listen to people who were older than himself. On these

occasions he would drink small glasses of port, which

was the only alcoholic drink he at all liked. He was

not even certain that he liked this, but he was anxious

to acquire the worldly feeling of liking and taking

drink, just as he was anxious to acquire the worldly

habit of going into public-houses. (201)
The cumulative effect of Hamilton's work is to suggest,
powerfully, how an innocent desire to "acquire" such worldly
feelings and habits can lead characters like John Halliwell
and Anthony Forster to inhabit conditions like those of
George Harvey Bone and Patrick Hamilton. At the conclusion
of MOnday Morning, Anthony and Diane's encounter with the
drunken men is comic; but it attains a new gloom when viewed
retrospectively. Escaping the New Year's dance at the
Fauconberg to enjoy their new status as affianced lovers,
they walk "through the clear, resounding Squares." The
novel concludes thus:

Once they passed two drunk men. "Let us weigh the

matter out," said one drunk man to the other. "You're

104
good fellow, but let us weigh the matter out."

Diane and Anthony slipped around a corner. "You
wait till we're married, Diane, I'll come back miles
worse than that. . . ." (312)

That Hamilton's first novel should end with the accurate
reportage of drunken dialogue is fitting; but the self-
prophecy of drunken excess concludes a comic novel on a dark

note .

NOTES

1. (London: Constable, 1925), 88-89, original ellipses.
Subsequent references cited in text.

2. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943), 25. Subsequent
references cited in text.

3. (London: Constable, 1972 [f.p. 1941], 19. Subsequent
references to this edition cited in text.

4. This is not an error created by the Penguin edition.
The first American edition and the scholarly edition by the
novel's original English publisher both contain the same
discrepancy. (New York: Dial Press, 1928), 8, 10, and 182;
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 7, 9, and 124.

5. The complete text of definition 2a: "A dwelling-place,
house, abode; the fixed residence of a family or household;
the seat of domestic life and interests; one's own house;
the dwelling in which one habitually lives, or which one
regards as one's proper abode. Sometimes including the
members of a family collectively; the home-circle or
household. In N. American and Australasia (and increasingly
elsewhere), freq. used to designate a private house or

residence merely as a building."

105

Chapter 4

REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES: THE PAYING GUESTS OF CRAVEN HOUSE

The three novels which constitute Hamilton's "early"
period are Monday Morning (1925), Craven Houee (1926), and
Twopence Coloured (1928). Read as a group, these early
novels outline many of Hamilton's concerns. They are of
interest not only for their foreshadowing of the later
novels, but are impressive productions for such a young
writer, well worth reading simply for pleasure. Hamilton
described his mature view of Craven House when he reread it
in 1943 prefatory to revising it:

I have spoken of authors slowly reddening to the roots

of their hair over passages in their early books.

Sometimes they do this over their early books from

start to finish. Although it was written when I was

only twenty-one, I can definitely say that Craven House

does not come into this class; and that if it can still

find readers, I should still like it to be read.1
Hamilton was right to place a high value on Craven House; it
deserves to find readers.

In terms of its place in Hamilton's fictional milieu,
Craven House addresses the uncommon novelistic subject of

boarding-house life. After Mondey Morning's Fauconberg

106

107
Hotel, Craven House seems terribly intimate, and the setting
has moved from Earl's Court to the less transient, more
domesticated area near Kew called Southam Green, which is
clearly modelled on Turnham Green. Gone are the
cosmopolitan residents of the Fauconberg: the Swede who
takes Anthony out drinking, French Diane and her mother, and
the South American who wants Anthony to advise him on a
program of reading in English literature. The nearest
approach Craven House makes to a foreigner is Mrs. Nixon,
with her aggressive, yet false, Scottishness. Perhaps as
another manifestation of the transition to the smaller
boarding house, Craven House includes intimate scenes in
private areas of the house, which Mondey Morning avoided.
These scenes reveal clearly, however, that residents remain
strangers to one another, even those who share a room. The
novel's protagonist, young Master Wildman, sharing a room
with his father for the first time, decides he should "take
this opportunity of studying a Major's habits in his natural
sources, so to speak, and thrilling to the adventure of it,
arranges a little aperture in the [bed] curtains for his
purpose" (24). And indeed he is amazed by what he sees, all
of it perfectly innocuous: his father reading in bed, saying
his prayers, and finally, kissing goodnight his son, who is
feigning sleep. On the basis of that kiss, Master Wildman
exclaims to himself, " 'by jove, he must like me!’ " (26),
as if the idea were new to him. Meanwhile, up the hall, the

Spicers are enacting their own version of long-married

108
strangers sharing a room, their years of marriage
underscoring the strangeness.

Hamilton's touch has become even surer, his mastery of
how to present boarding-house life even more complete than
it was in Monday Morning. Craven Houee is more ambitious
than its predecessor, covering several time periods--1911,
1914, 1918, 1924--and presenting more numerous fully drawn
characters. The life of the house itself, as it existed
both before and after its human occupants, brackets the
action.

Hamilton uses Craven House to reveal the experience of
life in a small but genteel boarding house, of the sort
where the residents are "paying guests." He recreates the
closure of such a world, and identifies fully the
geographic, social, and financial contexts in which it
exists. Focusing on the conditions of life within Craven
House (both material and social), Hamilton informs us of the
mores of boarding-house life and the family-based structure
of relationships within it. While the novel's focus is
narrower than that of Mondey Morning in some respects, the
treatment is more comprehensive: servants achieve
significance in the narrative, and the landlady's life and

character are portrayed unusually sympathetically.

THE CONTEXT OF CRAVEN HOUSE
Keymer Gardens, Southam Green, the neighborhood of

Craven House, is established directly and economically. The

109
Green, the High Street with all its activities and
businesses, the District Line station: all are vividly
sketched in the first few pages of the novel. London itself
is in the background, and while it can be reached by the
District Line, its existence is vague, definitely elsewhere
and other:

the sound of the Southam Green High Road, a quarter of

a mile distant, and the sound of all London behind it,

beat faintly yet incessantly, like the roar of a

waveless sea, upon the inured ears of the inhabitants.

Such noises, nevertheless, were unable to disturb the

lazy peace manifest in Keymer gardens. They served,

rather, to emphasise the hush. (1)

After the residents of Craven House are asleep, "sometimes a
faint cry arises, as of a whole city in agony, from the
plains of London behind. And through all the night, from
lost distances, engines are clanking, gruffly shunting,
whistling-~the dim, hectic functionings of a nightmare"
(28).

Excursions made by the residents of Craven House, such
as Mr. Spicer's pub crawls and Master Wildman's vacation
treats, are to familiar Hamilton venues. Master Wildman's
"Easter holidays were short and rainy holidays, but none the
worse for being rainy. You were taken to the Moving
Pictures about once a week and once to the Theatre itself,
where you saw Sherlock Holmes in person, and afterwards had

a dazzling tea at Lyons' Corner House" (43). Lyons also

110
features in the children's illicit Gamage's outing; it is
part of Master Wildman's largesse toward Elsie. He takes
her there in an attempt to give her a great treat, with
rather mixed results: "It is very crowded in the small
Lyons' establishment they enter; it also takes them a great
time to get served; the waitress, who belongs to the
sneering school of assistants, is not over-civil. ('Got a
good mind to leave her tuppence,‘ threatens Master
Wildman.)" (79).

The war, too, receives typical Hamilton treatment.
Southam Green and Craven House experience their war much as
Thames Lockdon and the Rosamund Tea Rooms, in The Slaves of
Solitude, will experience theirs: in small, pinching ways.
The war years

were very unhappy and bewildering years for Southam

Green. . . . Years in which (apart from the stalking

affliction of Armageddon itself) a thousand local

inconveniences and petty tortures were experienced--
years in which the main streets grew mudded and more
mudded with the wretched hue of the national uniform,
and blocked with the forlorn, drab length of the food

queues--years in which the act of Shopping became a

sharp enterprise, a trial of wits and patience with the

retailer, who was no longer the ingratiating creature
of the old days, but master of the situation, and
taking surly advantage of it--years in which the

Servant Problem first arose in stark uncompromise, and

111

an alarming bent in the Lower Orders towards Answering

Back first became acute--potato years, corned beef, and

Best Margarine (we like it almost as much as butter)

years. (97)
Not only does Hamilton focus on the domestic side, but he
does not present a heroic picture of life on the homefront,
with the middle classes happy to do their bit for the boys
and jolly Old England, choosing instead to consider "petty
inconveniences." Hamilton's choice of focus is accurate, in
the sense that the people he is writing about would be
likely to focus on it themselves. A Mass-Observer reporting
from Whitehall on Nuremberg night noted that where there
were large groups of people hanging about waiting for
something to happen or some news, "in all the talk groups
where they were of mixed company, built up from those
gathered around, the talk came down from the crisis to how
they lived in the last war and the present conditions"
(Britain 62). Earlier, this Observer reported one specific
instance of this phenomenon, where the conversation went
from "what the soldier has to go through, then the wages of
the soldier; this starts a talk on what people can manage to
live on" (61). This gradual transition is an important one,
and in concentrating on the daily and mundane, Hamilton is
in consonance with the "ordinary" people who populate his
novels.

Significant changes in relations between social classes

are also suggested by Hamilton's description of the war

112
years, but the novel does not directly address the subject,
relying primarily on implicit criticism. As a rule,
political comment in the novel is implied, as in the
treatment of Mr. Spicer's war experiences. He did not have
the heroic war he envisioned during his soul-searching pub
crawl, but he did enlist and serve:

Mr. Spicer returned to domesticity with a quantity of

Little Stories (touching or otherwise); a vivid and

unutterable sense of the lurid bestiality of his short

experience in France, but no sense whatever of it being
in any way other than righteous, seemly, eternal, and
cumulatively expressive of the highest glories

achievable by men. (103)

Spicer's essential character remains unchanged, as witnessed
by his new trove of "Little Stories," as does his political
consciousness ("righteous, seemly . . .") but his experience
in France was real, not to be shucked off by his usual
methods for avoiding reality. While this sentence contains
a wealth of ironic political comment, it is implicit rather
than overt.

If the narrative does not offer political commentary,
however, that is because Craven House and its environs do
not do so either: "how far purely international and
political factors entered the question, it is not within the
scope of this chronicle to discuss. Nor was it discussed
with any great earnestness or at any great length at Craven

House" (93). Patriotism in Southam Green is a bit

113
ludicrous; it

made itself felt in the neighbourhood, in the erection

of ordinary flags, beflagged royalties, beflagged

ministers, beflagged generals, beflagged bulldogs and
other beflagged popular symbols on, outside, or in
places hitherto consider exempt from decoration. There
was really little scope for more direct participation
amongst the rather elderly population of Southam Green.
when all was said and done the high-intentioned
inhabitants of Southam Green had only flags and

reviling to fall back upon. (93)

The war, for those who remained in Southam Green, remains
remote. Flags, reviling, and "a thousand local
inconveniences" are the sum total of their experience of the
Great War.

It is further testament to the closed world of Craven
House that stereotyped characters are those brought in from
outside; only Craven House residents have more than one
dimension. Some of these outsiders are pure types, not
actually brought into the novel's action--"The Men" who fix
the chimney after a storm, for example, and "another (and
blackened) man, who appeared before breakfast, and who was
unseen by Miss Hatt's guests, but was nevertheless conceived
ideally by them, and in the nature of an eternal verity, as
the Sweep" (68). Their names, and the narrative comment,
draw attention to their existence as pure types. Other

outsiders make appearances, but, as non-denizens, are

114

sketched in broadly and stereotypically. The removal men
(Ernie who sings, George and Mr. Ewart) and Edith's
connections who hold the Christmas party so fatal to Audrey
are examples of working-class characters, about whose
stereotyped presentation some critics have complained. None
of these critics have complained, of course, about the same
kind of treatment meted out to Anthony's coworkers at the
Xotopol Rum Company, like Mr. Shillitoe,

a large, fair and virile man of about forty years,

brought up at Westminster and Trinity College,

Cambridge, but never brought down again. Mr. Shillitoe

pronounced his long i's as long a's, and failed to

pronounce at all several consonants provided by the

language. The strained and high-pitched effort of his

voice was almost fascinating to hear. (127)
Barbara Cotterell, although a participant in several scenes,
is finally a one-dimensional figure; her situation,
accessories (the idiotic dog and the little dog-whip she
carries) and behavior are all extremely stereotypical. What
distinguishes the stereotyped characters from the fully-
drawn is not their social class, but their status in
relation to Craven House: the outsiders, regardless of
social class, are painted one-dimensionally, while the
residents are more nuanced in characterization.

In fact, one of Barbara Cotterell's main functions is
to clarify the social status of Craven House's residents.

She temporarily distracts Master Wildman from Elsie, causing

115
that pair a great deal of unhappiness before they eventually
unite, but an equally important role she plays is that of
class foil. She is, personally, a contrast to Elsie, and
generically, a contrast to the social class represented by
the residents of Craven House. It is to the latter role
that the narrative first directs the reader's attention.
Elsie knows Miss Cotterell from school, and has invited her
to visit Craven House:
Now the introduction of Miss Cotterell . . . to Craven
House is not without significance, for it is the
meeting of two very clearly defined, but widely opposed
types of the Southam Greener, and Elsie has
accomplished a rarer thing than she knows. It is a
meeting between the Craven House class of persons, who
have long thrown down their higher social cards, and
taken to good humour, and a class of persons still
steadily at the game. . . . For Miss Cotterell
undoubtedly belongs to a class of persons now becoming
more and more common in Southam Green--an exalted class
of persons, who without having any more in actual
pounds, shillings, and pence, look in a rather superior
way at Craven House--being that class of persons who
possess a Car, and a little dog, and a polo-playing
uncle. (116)
Living in Craven House is a sign of social slippage, but the
distinction noted between social standing and "actual

pounds, shillings, and pence" is an important one. Craven

116
House is placed socially, but not economically, below the
Miss Cotterrel class of Southam Green residents, a fact
which helps pinpoint Craven House's station above a whole
imagined range of boarding houses which are both
economically and socially lower. If the residents have
slipped into Craven House, this implies, there are other
places waiting for them to slip into if they do not exercise

care .

BOARDING-HOUSE CULTURE
The novel opens with a static scene characteristic of
Hamilton's construction techniques (and a technique which
will be borrowed by his second wife for her novels)2; the
first action involves the landlady, Miss Hatt, and the cook,
Edith, preparing for the arrival of a new Paying Guest.
Such an opening signals the principal focus of the novel:
the texture of life in a small, genteel boarding house.
Hamilton uses the "selling" of Craven House to Major Wildman
as a clever mechanism for describing the basic material
conditions of life within:
When, two days ago, the retired Major Wildman stood
taking his leave at the door of Craven House--a
captured, though still verbally uncommitted and airy-
gestured, paying guest--[Miss] Hatt, already a little
intoxicated by her own timid but glib reiterations of
the beautiful luck and blessings falling in the course

of nature upon a Major taking up residence in such a

117

house, capped the ecstasies of hot water at all times

of the day, fires in the bedrooms, hot-water bottles,

and three towels changed twice in the week, with the
rash and thoughtless promise, "Oh, yes? Well, we have

a five-course dinner, you know. That'd be starting

with fish, you know . . and dessert. . . ." (3)

But in fact, of course, dinner has not been so grand as all
that, and "Mrs. Nixon had hitherto learnt to expect nothing
before the joint in the evening fare, and to regard the
dessert, as it lay chilly upon the table, more in its
traditional and ornamental aspects than otherwise" (3).
Thus the reader is informed not only of the material
conditions of life at Craven house, but also which features
are important to Miss Hatt and the paying guests, and which
therefore might be judged inadequate and in need of
exaggeration.

Hamilton is interested in the actual texture of
boarding-house life, and so he concentrates on the minutiae
of social protocols, conversation, and the functional
aspects of this mode of life. Such set pieces as the two
boys playing cricket and Mr. Spicer's drunken search for
female companionship add to the reader's enjoyment but are
clearly of secondary importance. They are clever turns,
comic relief--the serious business of the novel is to take
readers inside Craven House and its mores. Narrative events
are weighted accordingly; the climactic scene at the dinner

table, in spite of all its farcical elements, is treated

118
with the underlying seriousness required by the demise of
Craven House. By introducing Jock, with his malicious lies,
tales of socialist-baiting, and patent cruelty, to side with
Mrs. Nixon, whose cruelty has been demonstrated throughout
the novel, against Elsie and Master Wildman, Hamilton
suggests that while in some ways this may be merely boarding
house strife, the antagonists represent more then petty
conflicts.

Most of the events portrayed in the pages of Craven
hehee are trivial rather than grand, and even those events
which constitute crises are played small and accurate; this
is in keeping with the primacy of Craven House existence.
The most significant real-world happenings occur in Book
Two, "these chapters of stormy interlude" (105), which is by
far the shortest of the novel's three books, taking up
little more than ten pages. In this interval, however,
Britain declares war, Mr. Spicer enlists, Elsie and Master
Wildman reach adulthood, Major Wildman dies, and the war
ends.

The treatment given Mr. Spicer's infidelities
illustrates clearly Hamilton's interests in domestic detail
and the comic set piece; that he enjoys providing the latter
does not negate the priority of the former. Mr. Spicer's
first pub crawl, which has as its ultimate goal an illicit
liaison, is described in some detail although introduced
with a disclaimer that it will do no such thing: "We must

therefore satisfy ourselves with simply sketching the routes

119
taken by Mr. Spicer on this highly sinister good tramp of
his, as well as some of the adventures met by the way, and
make no other comment" (58). In fact, Mr. Spicer is
described in plentiful and comic detail as he flirts with a
barmaid, tries to pick up a prostitute in Hyde Park and then
loses his nerve, and ends up in another pub, attempting to
flirt with another barmaid. His second pub crawl, which
also begins at Hyde Park Corner, revolves around the need to
make a decision about joining the Army to serve "God, King
and Country" (94). While it takes him into seven pubs, Mr.
Spicer's drunkenly single-minded topic is patriotism: his
own, that is. Both pub crawls are examples of comic set
pieces; they flesh out the narrative but are essentially
self-contained units of humor. They are not connected to
the main narrative developmentally or thematically.

Through these pub crawls, Mr. Spicer's interest in
women is established simultaneously with his incompetence
and inability to arrange the details of an amorous I
encounter. This is what makes the Catherine Tillotson
letter such a surprise, and it underscores the novel's
determination to expand upon the domestic. We do not read
about Spicer's exploits with his "little companion,
Catherine Tillotson"--her existence only becomes known after
the relationship has ended--but we do read about the scene
he and his wife endure on account of it. In fact, the
narrative draws attention to its chosen emphasis on the

domestic scene as opposed to the amorous adventure:

120

All such vain and unprofitable questioning as to Where

he Picked her Up, or What on Earth Induced him, or How

Ever he Could, or If he had Always, or How far he had

Gone, being sad questionings and problems gone over by

Mrs. Spicer for years after the event, without any

satisfactory answers ever coming to light, we will

confine ourselves to relating the mere incident of our
involved Tea merchant's downfall before his wife, and

the confrontation with his sin. (199)

Like Mrs. Spicer, the reader must rest uninformed about the
details of Mr. Spicer's liaison with Catherine Tillotson,
but knowledgeable about the ensuing domestic fracas. It is,
like most confrontations described by Hamilton, both
ludicrous and deadly serious. The impending confrontation
is foreshadowed by way of "a curious moment" which "[falls]
upon Mr. and Mrs. Spicer shortly after the New Year" (73).
Mrs. Spicer discovers, in one of his pockets, a letter
addressed to her husband "in what she afterwards summed up
to herself as a Feminine Hand" (73). On this occasion,
there is no scene; apart from some vague mutterings, nothing
happens.

The scene about Catherine Tillotson, however, is
striking in its reliance on silly domestic detail; there is
nothing grand or tragic about the Spicer's confrontation,
but it rings true to the focus on Craven House life. The
narrative recalls the "curious moment," as Mrs. Spicer once

more tackles the project of cleaning Mr. Spicer's coats.

121

Before setting out on his walk, Mr. Spicer "takes manifold
old garments from the cupboard, taps them easily to see
there are no moth [sic], or letters or anything, secreted
therein, and says he thinks he will be getting off" (197).

But of course he is mistaken; there Te a letter. He
returns from his walk in high spirits and very talkative;
his wife waits until they are getting ready for bed to
confront him about Catherine Tillotson. Mrs. Spicer punches
him in the face three times, knocks the blue cricket cap he
sleeps in off his head, and corners him on the bed. They
have a ridiculous disagreement about the meaning of the word
"brothel," brought on by Mrs. Spicer calling her husband
one, and are walked in on by Miss Hatt, bringing news of her
own "most funny letter" (201) announcing the arrival of the
Russian lady. Mrs. Spicer threatens to divorce him, but in
the end, the status quo prevails. Every detail included in
this confrontation--the presentation of the conflict itself,
Miss Hatt's intrusion of her person and boarding-house
society, and the scene's conclusion in the Spicer's time-
worn tussle over the bedclothes--underlines the primary
importance of Craven House mores. The novel bypasses
opportunities to enlarge theatrically or melodramatically
upon the theme of "a good woman done wrong," for example,
and it declines to dignify the confrontation by discussing
moral issues such as fidelity. Instead, it underlines
precisely hey Craven House residents would deal with a

personal crisis, and emphasizes their predilection for

122
maintaining the status quo, at any personal cost.

The short chapter "A Winter at Craven House" enumerates
sources of conflict and ways of waging battle without
violating superficial etiquette. The winter, reducing
residents even more completely to life inside the house,
aggravates friction. Christmas, as always in Hamilton
novels, is included; details of the festivities, such as
they are, further emphasize the fragility of boarding-house
existence and the trivial nature of triumph (the Major's red

domino costume) and failure (Mr. Spicer's "Tricks") alike.

THE CRAVEN HOUSE FAMILY

The relationships among the residents of Craven House,
as befits their status as paying guests, are more complex
and developed than were those among the Fauconberg's
residents. Relationships in Craven House are built on the
model of an extended family, and this interpretation is
foregrounded in the history of Craven House's existence as
boarding house. When the idea of taking in paying guests is
proposed, it appears to be the solution to a host of
problems: it would generate income, it would help to fill
the "house rather too large for their needs," and, most
important of all, it should "solve the Long Evening Problem,
which was becoming a very acute and painful problem to Mr.
and Mrs. Spicer and Miss Hatt" (5). Thus the family note is
struck even before the lodgers enter the scene; the

description of the Spicers and Miss Hatt calls to mind a

123
childless couple, with too much space in the house, and too
little activity. Paying guests will fill the role of
children.

In many important respects, the residents of Craven
House do interact as if they were family members. The half-
grown Master Wildman treats the house as if it were his
family home and its residents one extended family. He
leaves his sporting gear lying about, a bike accident
"[sends] Miss Hatt rushing for the pink lint," and of all
his other biking adventures--"innumerable punctures, other
calamities, and speeding triumphs"--the residents are "kept
elaborately advised" (44). On Sunday, the residents go off
to church as a group, and they discuss the service
afterwards in intimate, critical terms. Meals at Craven
House are events, markers of time in an otherwise
undifferentiated boredom, and they also illustrate the
essentially family-based structure of relationships. On the
day of Mr. Spicer's first pub crawl, his late return poses
first a puzzle, then a quandary for his fellow residents:
"the appearance of Miss Hatt, in her Sunday evening-dress,
denotes that supper may soon be taken, but for the fact that
Mr. Spicer is not yet In--a most extraordinarily Out,
inconsequent and mystifying Mr. Spicer being the subject of
some mute speculation by Miss Hatt's guests, for all their
easy chatting" (66). Finally, at Mrs. Spicer's suggestion,
they start supper anyway,

which is like a class without a master, and none the

124

less jolly for that--in that an air of gay anarchy

prevails, particularly with regard to the carving of

the joint, which the Major is at last persuaded to
tackle, hacking off and distributing exquisitely
unfamiliar parts to eminently charmed recipients, and
giving, on the whole, rather better measure than the

absent expert. (66)

Upon his return Mr. Spicer, "still in a fuddled condition"
(67), which he tries to hide from the company, cannot help
but remark surlily upon the fact the Major usurped his place
as "father" and carved the joint. Family motifs recur
throughout this episode. Miss Hatt's appearance signalling
supper, the obvious history of Mr. Spicer's role as "father"
and carver of the joint, his disgrace and discomfiture at
being deposed: all of these suggest a rigid establishment of
behaviors based on family models. It is like "being mother"
by pouring out tea; the family pattern is superimposed on
unrelated people, with no reduction in consistency
corresponding to the absence of blood relation. If
anything, the absence of real family ties makes the
participants follow the pattern more rigidly than they might
otherwise.

Further, everyone in Craven House seems aware of the
details of one another's business (although Elsie, through
her mother's unnatural malice, turns out to be ignorant of
her eye business when she has been left a legacy). After

the death of his father, Master Wildman learns shorthand,

125
but does not actively seek a job. The residents of Craven
House, knowing the details of his financial situation, are
concerned about this state of affairs: "Now as it was known
that Master Wildman had but three pounds a week, left by his
father, as income, and but three hundred pounds in the Bank,
it was clear that each of these weeks [of delay] was drawing
Master Wildman nearer and nearer to facts it would one day
be unpleasant to face" (121). There was eventually "so much
concern amongst his well-wishers at Craven House as to
cause" each of them to act upon his or her concern, which
generally takes the form of "declaring" something upon the
subject. Mr. Spicer is finally deputized, as "father," to
speak to Master Wildman about the seriousness of his
situation and to offer assistance in getting a job in the
city.

The implications of Craven House residents not truly
being an extended family are largely negative; that is, they
get most of the disadvantages, but few of the benefits, of
being related. Tied to the intimacy is a nearly unbearable
burden of good manners and civility. These people can and
do suffer in their close proximity to one another, but are
not permitted to argue or misbehave. Those impulses are
translated into face-saving covert battles such as the
laundry skirmishing of the ladies, where they take out their
aggressions by imposing on one another's airing space.

Unreasonable expectations for non-family who must live

in family-like proximity can also be discerned in the egg

126
episode. What happens is simple enough, although
significant: "One morning, early in the New Year, Craven
House sustained a minor shock. It was not conceived as a
shock, really. It was over in a moment, and only recalled a
long while afterwards, when it was seen in a new light"
(120). The eggs are off, and not for the first time. Mrs.
Nixon, per usual, supplies the catalyst: " 'I wonder,‘ said
Mrs. Nixon, 'you don't change the man altogether.’ 'Oh, do
you?‘ said Miss Hatt, sharply, and then the shock was felt.

'I won't have another egg in this house!‘ said Miss Hatt"

 

(120-21). The unrealistic, indeed unbearable demands, make
this incident the means of exposing that Miss Hatt "had a
temper." Certainly she would, being human; but it has not
manifested itself, and it strikes her lodgers as
inappropriate or undeserved ("her guests stared at her").
The dynamics are like those of a family, but more demanding
in not permitting tempers, in requiring good manners.

The "aching politeness" required of Craven House
residents produces some astounding results, from the Long
Evening Problem, through the "Little Music" with its
excruciating commentary (18-19) to the "Bit of a Smoking"
Mr. Spicer gives Mrs. Hoare's telescope (195). There shbuld
be no doubt that such apparently superficial problems as the
"Long Evening Problem" are serious, or, at least, are
capable of producing serious consequences. After five

months of cohabitation in Craven House, "the evenings on the

 

whole were reaching a pitch of ennui and amiability almost

 

 

127
intolerable--if not positively approaching the danger mark"
(6). Boredom and excessive politeness are the principal
manifestations of the approaching danger, but these cover
the potential for social enormities. The two women have
their first cross words as a result of the "Long Evening
Problem," and the final dinner-table scene which is Craven
House's downfall can be seen in some ways as representing
the ultimate negative end of ostensibly-minor boarding-house
social problems. The idiocies resulting from the
impossibility of speaking frankly while living in close
quarters, culminate in the "Peculiar Spill" (218) caused by
Miss Hatt's outburst. To attempt to write off the
passionate uproar of the dinner-table scene as a "peculiar
spill" suggests the lengths to which Craven House residents
are driven in their efforts to paper over discord.

Miss Hatt, in contrast to the powerful and unpleasant
landladies found elsewhere in Hamilton's work, is treated
sympathetically. The novel pays tribute to her
difficulties, both practical and emotional. To preside over
the class of people who live in Craven House is guaranteed
to provide blows to one's self-respect:

Mrs. Hoare does not insult Miss Hatt much more than her

other guests insult her, by implications of reduced

circumstances and having come down in the world, but
she does, of course, insult her. She has come, indeed,
it is widely know, from the Land--as opposed not to

Water, but the middle and lower orders. She herself is

128

a little touchy on the point of getting this
registered. (111)

To rule a roost composed of those who have come down in the

world is to be implicated in their downward slide; the

landlady herself becomes another symbol of their disgrace.

In the summing up which precedes the climactic dinner-table

scene,3 the novel describes Miss Hatt's situation with

great sympathy:
For Miss Hatt, who has kept up a gallant show for
something like fifteen years against the sprawling and
lazy insults of the intruders she has contracted to
warm, shelter, clean, tidy, and feed in her own house,
is no longer the same Miss Hatt. For the sum of three
and a half guineas--a wistfully ideal sum, each guest
being on very secret and very Special Terms--the sum of
three guineas and a half, coyly demanded, and received
weekly with furtive and apologetic compliments from
each guest in turn, has proved a very untidy sum with
respect to that Tidy Little Sum she once looked forward
to as a result of her labours; and Miss Hatt is
suddenly brought up against the fact that she has been
slaving her middle life out in mothering a brood of
secretly allied and hostile human beings, who break up
her house, and demand replacements, and give out an air
of conferring a benefit with every week they remain
with her. Which is a black fact to come up against

when those fifteen years have been spent in an unending

129
series of fifteen-hour days (6.30 a.m.--9.30 p.m.) in
which you have worked on and on and on, and been merry
and merry and merrier, until you are giddy and sick
with fatigue, and fall upon your bed, at last, with the
one long sigh you are allowed to express, to fall
asleep. (208-09)
This aspect too resembles the family dynamic: Miss Hatt, the
hardworking and uncomplaining landlady, has given over her
life to "mothering" people not her children, and for dubious

rewards.

SERVANTS
Another important development in Qpeyeh_hehee is the
introduction of servants. The Fauconberg, in Monday
Morning, would have required a staff of menial laborers for
its running, but none appears in the novel. Nigel Jones
advances the idea that Hamilton introduces servants only to
caricature them. Craven House, he writes,
is also a world of "upstairs, downstairs," with the
domestic servants even more crudely caricatured, from
their very names ("Audrey Custard") to their
Cockneyfied, stereotyped modes of speech. This last--
as it does in Dickens's case--reflects the author's own
middle-class origins, and his inability to get inside
and accurately reflect real working-class life. (113)
While the servants, like most other characters in Hamilton's

world, do present stereotypical elements, a closer

130

examination of their roles in Craven House reveals a more
complex situation than that described by Jones. The
parlourmaid, Audrey Custard, in particular offers a
noteworthy range of Hamilton's responses to working people,
and if Jenny Maple of Tyenty Thoueend Streehe Under the_§hy
was originally conceived of as a servant who slides into
prostitution, Audrey Custard can be seen as her predecessor.

In 1941, when Michael Sadleir asked Hamilton to revise
Craven House, he identified the servants as one of its most
interesting features: rereading the novel, Sadleir found
that " 'the two maids in the kitchen impressed me much more'
" than before. Servants are important and deserving of
respect: one basis of the novel's condemnation of Barbara
Cotterell is that she cannot keep servants in her employ,
probably because of her contempt for people she can only
think of as "the Creature[s]" (234). At the same time,
however, the novel acknowledges the servants' remoteness
from the lives of Craven House's other residents. After the
house is empty, and Master Wildman goes through it, we are
given a rare glimpse of the servant's realm: larder, cellar,
scullery, servant's sitting-room, and the kitchen itself.
So far removed from this realm is Master Wildman, that "he
had forgotten there would be an oven" (242), an observation
that is surely calculated to draw attention to itself.

Chapter Two is "An Account of Two Servants and a
Parrot," and the domestics, particularly Audrey, are

compared to this bird several times during the course of

131
Craven House. Mac, the parrot, is sixty-eight years old
when the novel begins. He is introduced in terms which
emphasize his involuntary imprisonment in the house and the
callousness of his owners, suggesting a more overt instance
of what is also true for Audrey Custard and Edith Potter.
Audrey and Edith are paid twenty and twenty-five pounds a
year, respectively. To earn these wages, they do exhausting
manual work from "the first grey stealth of dawn” (29) to
10:15 at night, at which time they are permitted to "creep
by candlelight from the bottom of the house to the top.
This is done with so stealthy a tread, with such respectful
whisperings, as to make the action seem almost apologetic.
To the others, prone in their dark rooms, it is a vaguely
necessary happening, irrelevant to the main purpose of the
day" (28).

The parrot, of course, is idle, but his idleness, like
the servant's labor, is imposed from above and with no
thought to what his own preferences might be. Both servants
and bird are expected to live up to the romantic ideals of
their mistress, and all fail to do so. These ideals are
described at some length, but in their place, "Miss Hatt was
compelled to substitute the human and untheatrical realities
of Miss Edith Potter and Miss Audrey Custard" (29). The
ideals are stereotypical and romantic, and it is hard to
imagine them being fulfilled anywhere except on stage. In
spite of being "untheatrical," Edith the cook is "so out-of-

drawing and blotchy in appearance" that the others must

132
"interpret her as a 'Dickens' character" (30). Of greater
interest--to the residents of Craven House and the story
itself--is Audrey the maid. Audrey's first job in the
morning is to scrub the front steps, "a horrid and biting
occupation" and then to rake out the previous night's fire,
"a vision of sackcloth and ashes in literal truth" (31).
Audrey has too many menial tasks to live up to Miss Hatt's
rather outlandish aspirations for her.

The parrot, likewise, requires a great deal of
imagination to be forced into the mold desired by Craven
House's residents. As he will not conform to their
expectations, they falsify or exaggerate to construct a more
ideal version: "The parrot, during this winter season, was a
fair success. Its imaginatively edited remarks were one of
the principal topics at meal times. As were also, and in
the same tone of amused relish, some of Audrey's and
Edith's" (72). The connection between servants and bird is
explicit here; Craven House's residents reveal similar
attitudes toward them and take similar liberties with their
speech and behavior. That these falsified reports would be
a "principal topic" is another way of indicating the boredom
of living in Craven House; the topics are limited in number
and require an assumption of enthusiasm far beyond what they
would naturally generate. The novel's description of the
parrot underscores not only its situation, but also hints at
the futile lives of its human housemates:

its prevailing mood was one of good-tempered caustic

133
bitterness against its captors--a mood which its
abundance of years had served to emphasise rather than
soften. It occasionally obliged with a clever mimicry
or a relevant saying, which would be repeated for days
by the inmates of Craven House, but this was rare. So
rare, indeed, that when the parrot had said absolutely
nothing worth considering for a month or so on end the
disappointed humans were compelled to invent--or at
least to distort.
It bit you whenever it could. (32)
The remark about biting is designed to startle; it comes at
the end of this section with its tone of remorse, is marked
off into its own paragraph, and is the only second-person
reference in this section about the bird. Certainly it
raises questions about the servants, not allowed to bite but
perhaps feeling their own captivity.
The link between servants and bird is extended
explicitly in a discussion of Audrey's relations with Mac:
At ten o’clock on the morning of August 3rd, 1914,
Audrey Custard was in the study of Craven House, giving
new sand to, watering, and otherwise refreshing a
sluttish and chaotic parrot. A kind of link had arisen
between Audrey Custard and this caustic bird, inasmuch
as it was the sole living creature she could meet on
equal terms, and to any extent assert her own
personality with. This, it is true, only amounted to a

rather futile round of such condemnations as "You

134
rascal, Polly," or "Oh, you had bird, Polly," together
with their dreamy reciprocal questionings, "Aren't you
a rascal, Polly, eh?" and "Aren't you a bad bird,
Polly?" But the bird would invariably reply, "Rats,
sir!" in a very friendly and shrewd style, and a
*pleasant ten minutes was spent. (92)
Even this relationship, however, cannot survive her eventual
disgrace. Audrey, in happier days aligned with the parrot,
is snubbed even by him once she has been dismissed for
"Talking Back." That in her better days she was equal to a
pet bird is its own condemnation, but to leave Craven House
less than one is unspeakable. Audrey finds herself alone,
and turns to the parrot:
[S]he stumbles down the stairs, and reaches the front
door without meeting any one.
But at the front door she stops a moment, and then
turns back, and goes in to the parrot. "I'm going, you
Bad Thing," says Audrey. "I'm going!" But the
creature that has been so friendly and jolly with her,
all these years, gives no sign now in the darkness,
save the black flutter of a wing, and a distant throaty
cackle. "Oh, you Naughty---!" says Audrey, but can get
no further than that. (161)
Her disgrace is complete, sealed by the bird with whom she
communed when no one else cared about her.
Audrey's role as servant is to mediate between Miss

Hatt and her boarders, carrying out tasks that Miss Hatt is

135
unable or unwilling to do. She functions as a buffer
between the landlady, who must maintain her gentility, and
unforeseen disasters. This role, which is thrust upon
Audrey, is in evidence from the beginning of the novel.
When the Major, newly-resident in Craven House, rings his
bell after retiring for the evening, that event is, in
Craven House terms, nothing short of a crisis: "a house-bell
is suddenly heard tinkling in the kitchen below. 'That's
his bell!‘ whispers Miss Hatt, aghast, and flies out into
the hall. She has not to call for Audrey, for Audrey is
there already, flushed and wide-eyed, breathlessly awaiting
orders for the crisis" (19). Audrey is called upon to
mediate not only this crisis, but she will also be the go-
between during the next one precipitated by the Major's
extravagant bathing habits. The Major, of course, "has been
Used to things" and is unaware of Craven House's flutter;
Miss Hatt, on her way to bed, hears him "making innocent
splashing noises" (20, 21). It is the others, more
conscious of their reduced circumstances, who interpret
these manifestations of better things as a crisis.

Audrey is thus an integral part of making sense of
Craven House's inmates, yet that function requires that she
behave as if nonsensical things do in fact make sense; she
alone bears the brunt of pretending all is well. The
Major's request for a nighttime bath throws Craven House
into a flurry of confusion; it is Audrey's job to field his

demand with a calm front. Audrey is sent up to the major's

136

room to "see what he wants" and is quizzed upon her return
by Miss Hatt:

"Well?"

"He wants a bath, ma'am."

"Bath? What did he say?"

"He said, 'Can I have a bath, please?‘ ma'am."

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'Yes, sir,‘ ma'am."

There is a pause. Maid and mistress look blankly at

each other. (20)
Audrey's options are circumscribed by her position; all she
can say to the Major is "yes, sir." Hamilton draws
attention to this position by bracketing "yes, sir" with the
reporting "I said" and the other courtesy title Audrey must
use, "ma'am." Audrey must explain to an uncomprehending
Miss Hatt the plain-sense meaning of a request with no pre-
existing Craven House protocol (and thus no meaning).

Audrey's importance as a character is hinted at from
the beginning, when Miss Hatt's good mood at novel's
commencement is partly attributed to the character of "her
new maid, Audrey (a treasure, she believed)" (4). Audrey is
new to Craven House, arriving shortly before the
protagonist, Master Wildman, and the possibility is offered
that she will turn out to be a "treasure." This is an overt
connection to Jenny Maple, whose new employers believe,
fearful of disappointment, that she too will turn out to be

a "treasure."

137

Further, Audrey is shown to be kind, always an
important attribute in Hamilton's scheme. When Mrs. Nixon
beats Elsie after the forbidden Gamage's outing, there is
quite a stir in Craven House. Edith the cook opines that
Mrs. Nixon's methods of bringing up are only proper. She
refers to her own mother, who " 'knew 'ow to bring us up' "
the highlight of which bringing up is apparently the time
she beat Edith's brother vigorously. Edith approves of
this; Audrey is "taken aback" and "rather wants to get this
episode justified" (83). Her kindness is no protection for
the fate which befalls her later on; quite the opposite,
probably. Her disgrace thus becomes more painful.

Audrey's descent into disgrace is traced through its
minor manifestations; her experience is another instance of
Hamilton's conviction that danger is always around, waiting
to be triggered by some apparently innocuous mistake. Just
as one drink can lead inevitably to drunkenness and
alcoholism (Jenny Maple's one glass of port, for example),
so one haircut and one Christmas party destroy Audrey
Custard (" 'It was that party that done it,’ she says. 'I
ought never to 'ave gone to that there party' " [160]).

Audrey's disgrace and departure are given one chapter,
entitled "Audrey Answers Back." This chapter begins with
retrospective insights from various Craven House residents
and ends with the bald statement: "And that is the end of
Audrey Custard. Who Answered Back" (161). Hamilton's

delineation of Audrey's undoing is suggestive:

138
Whether or no any signs of the terrible series of
ungovernabilities, Answerings Back, and ignorances of
her place, which finally dashed poor Audrey Custard to
ruin in the space of a week, were to be seen coming in
the distance: and whether or no it was the bobbing of
her hair that began it; or the moving pictures, which
taught a young girl to get above herself, Mrs. Spicer
said; or the war, after which they had never been the
same, Miss Hatt said; or that Young Man, who had
probably put her up to it, Mrs. Nixon suggested--were
matters of opinion and long discussion after the event,
but Liberties Audrey had absolutely begun to take, a
good while before it. (145)
It is a "series" of events, not a random assortment, which
implies the inevitable ordering of events that lead up to a
tragedy so characteristic of Hamilton's work. Once set in
motion, the series plays out swiftly; after all her years at
Craven House, Audrey's demise transpires "in the space of a
week." The transition is abrupt and insurmountable: "It all
comes suddenly the next day. At one moment Audrey is a
reproved and intimidated serving maid, but none the less
practically accepted as an eternal fixture--and the next
moment she is an outcast forever" (154).
Audrey's dismissal is the most painful crisis in the
book, the only one with no redeeming qualities or eventual
solution. The conclusion of this crisis has no denouement,

which accurately reflects Audrey's powerless situation.

139
Immediately upon her dismissal by Miss Hatt, Audrey
disappears from both boarding house and novel. The arch
narrative voice, not unwilling in other places to give
information about events beyond the scope of the novel's
action, declines to throw the reader a sop in the form of
comments on Audrey's future happiness (even though she did
have a boyfriend in London at the time of the rupture, and

an aunt willing to take her in).

THE CONCLUSION

The ending of Craven House is important in suggesting
the pivotal role the novel plays in Hamilton's oeuvre; it
signals the transition underway between the relative
insouciance of youth and the grimmer realities the later
novels reconstruct. Nigel Jones objects to what he calls
the "contrived happy ending," finding that it "cuts against
the whole grain of the book and we must assume that here
Patrick bowed to more traditional norms and conventions, and
tacked on a conclusion that went against his own better
judgement" (113). Not only is this interpretation
presumptuous, but it misses Hamilton's essential kindness,
and the rightness of Elsie's reward for all her suffering.

The ending, in fact, is rehearsed earlier in the novel,
during the children's trip to Gamage's. Elsie is promised
the trip, an almost unheard-of treat from her mother, but
forfeits it when she accidentally overturns an ink bottle on

Miss Hatt's drawing-room tablecloth. The descriptions of

140
Elsie's fear, her anxious wait and timid intervention, and
her mother's cold, rigid cruelty make painful reading.
Master Wildman, having his own boyish generosity, invites
Elsie to go to Gamage's with him while Mrs. Nixon is away on
a visit to her sister. He takes her on the tube, he buys
her a present (she chooses "a bottle of gum, which, being
marked twopence, she feels it her duty to have") and takes
her to tea. Upon their return, Mrs. Nixon is home, and
gives Elsie the beating which puts all of Craven House in a
flutter. Master Wildman pleads with his father to
intervene, and after supper, when the adults play whist, he
visits Elsie in her room. He consoles her as best he can--
"she has never had such kindness from him before"--and
offers to tell her a story (" 'Ghost or Detective?‘ "). By
the end of Master Wildman's rather outlandish story, she has
recovered sufficiently to fall asleep: " 'Elsie!’ says
Master Wildman, using her first name for the very first time
in his life. And 'Elsie!’ he whispers, but there is no
reply at all, for Elsie is fast asleep. Wherefore, Master
Wildman, in a gentlemanly but disappointed manner, rises
quietly, ties the cord of his little dressing-gown, and
softly leaves the room" (91). That scene forms the end of
Book I, while the end of the novel is built around their
adult union. In the closing scene, Elsie and Master Wildman
both refer to that earlier experience, and Master Wildman
makes playful use of the story-telling offer to declare his

love for Elsie. It is not a tacked-on and wrong ending; it

141
is the compassionate ending we have been promised.

The novel's signals are mixed. That such an ending
remains possible indicates that happiness is not out of
reach, that a comic resolution is still available; the later
works do not hold out that hope. Likewise, Mrs. Hoare and
her odd habit of using initial letters rather than whole
words is a harmless eccentricity which nonetheless points
forward to Mr. Thwaites and his verbal tics, judged in The
Slaves of Solitude as far from harmless. At the same time,
however, Master Wildman's summation of Craven House life
marks its tragic character. In spite of all the silliness,
this is not the comedy Wildman--and the reader--thought it
was:

"I thought it was a comedy, Elsie. I thought it was a

silly comedy. I thought it was all so funny. . . . But

it's not now, Elsie, now it's over--now they've all
gone away. "

"Fifteen years," says Master Wildman. "That's getting

on for a quarter century. . . . And after all that

noise, and all that silly laughter, and all that aching
politeness and cheerfulness, they've gone away and left

it to itself." (247-48)

These comments underscore the transitional nature of Craven
Hehee, for while Mondey Morning clearly is a comedy, and
Craven House might be taken for one, there will be no

mistaking Hamilton's later works for comedies.

142

TWOPENCE COLOURED

The novel after Craven House is Twopence Coloured
(1928), a deliberately long and "serious" book. It tells
the story of Jackie Mortimer, a nineteen-year-old orphan
who, after seeing a play in Brighton, decides to "Go upon
the Stage" (4). En route to London to do just that, she
fortuitously meets Richard Gissing, an older, successful--
and married--actor and author who agrees to help her start
her career. Against his advice, she joins the chorus line
of a travelling show; from there, her career proceeds
through a series of uninspiring provincial theatrical tours.
Eventually--and inevitably--she and Gissing become
romantically involved. They cannot marry because his wife
refuses to divorce, but they live and perform together.
While they are on the road in Sheffield, Gissing
unexpectedly dies. Jackie takes a few roles after that, and
backs a production of one of Gissing's early plays.
Eventually she realizes that "she was (she now understood)
neither a very clever nor exceptionably sensitive being"
(334). She decides to quit, and accepts a marriage proposal
from Gissing's brother, Charles; at novel's end, Jackie
looks forward to the fact "that very soon she would be taken
away" (374) from London and her theatrical career.

Ironically, the principal achievement of Twopence
Coloured is to underscore how accomplished are Hamilton's
other novels; in several respects, this novel represents

Hamilton's usual method gone astray. The details are often

143

tedious or irrelevant; the love story, although presented
seriously, is unconvincing. As in Mondey Morning and Craven
hedge, Hamilton has little to say about the dramatic
productions themselves, a serious fault in this book, which
takes theatrical minutiae as its subject. The novel's
"satire is directed entirely at the trivia of the stage"
(Jones 130), a too-limited subject for such a long novel,
particularly since it represents no larger social structure.

Furthermore, the theatrical career of Jackie Mortimer
never gets anywhere; as usual, Hamilton has chosen the
lower-middle level to examine, but while the results of that
emphasis in general life are instructive, in theatrical life
they are simply dull. The details of Jackie's struggles are
not particularly interesting or instructive for, while the
chorus-girl beginning can lead tellingly downward, as in the
novels of Jean Rhys, or compellingly upward to success, the
flatness of Jackie's career goes nowhere. The "brief period
allotted to her as a West End actress" (252) is in a
thriller, written by Gissing, called "The Knocking at the
Gate." She considers this play to be "restarting her
theatrical career" (231), and it runs for four and a half
months. There are no long-term consequences of that limited
success, however, and she herself notes, late in the novel,
that "the whole West End acting world, with its social
intrigue and garrulity, remained a closed door to her"
(368).

Interestingly, while Michael Sadleir (who liked the

144

book) describes it as having " 'a much more specialized
appeal' " (French 74) than did Craven House, Hamilton wrote
to his brother as the novel was nearing completion that it
was " 'not nearly so specialised' " (French 72) as his first
two novels. Hamilton's assessment, in the letter to his
brother, reveals plainly what he wanted to achieve:

It is a much grimmer book, and not nearly so

specialised. And it's much longer, and more amorphous,

and interesting in itself. You could rob it of its

humour, style, and piquancy (let us hope they exist)

and it might still remain interesting as a document.

(French 72)
This deliberate attempt to write a "serious" novel,
ironically, renders it void of the sociological inquiry and
insight of his other novels. While Craven House is a tragi-
comedy, it provides an examination of a class and way of
life; Tw0pence Coloured offers no such reward for its
readers. Hamilton's acknowledgement--in 1927--of the value
of creating literary documents is worth noting, even though
Twopence Coloured is not the valuable social record many of
his other novels are. Working in his usual fictional
milieu, Hamilton did create some documents of lasting value;
he was in tune with his time, and possessed the gifts

required to succeed.

NOTES

1. Revised edition, (London: Cardinal, 1991 [f.p. 1943]).
2. Lady Ursula Chetwynd-Talbot, who published five novels
under the name Laura Talbot. The first of these appeared in
1950, after her relationship with Hamilton was established
but before their marriage, and the last in 1961. Her novels
are interesting counterparts to Hamilton's, but beyond the
scope of the present study.

3. "We have given the last little dinner scene in some
detail so as to demonstrate the nature of the nerve-tearing
labours imposed upon Craven House at a moment when its whole
structure is hanging by a thread; and to extenuate, if such
a thing is possible, the disgraceful public explosion that
is to follow. And we should recall, once more and as
further extenuation, the relations existing between guest
and guest, and Miss Hatt at this critical juncture" (207-
08).

145

Chapter 5
' "CONFLICT AND COMMUNITY":
PUB CULTURE IN TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY

In Craven House, London featured as a backdrop to the
main action; menacing, but in the distance. In the middle
of the night, while Craven House and Southam Green sleep,
"sometimes a faint cry arises, as of a whole city in agony,
from the plains of London behind" (28). In his trilogy of
pub novels, The Midnight BeTT (1929), The Siege of Pleasure
(1932), and The Plains of Cement (1934)--published in one
volume as Twenty Thoueend Streehe Under the Sky in 1935--
Hamilton takes his readers directly to the center of that
"city in agony." The Midnight BeTT, like Craven House, is
an eponymous novel, but it takes its name from a pub rather
than a boarding house.

Each of the trilogy's novels tells the story of one
person connected with the pub. The Midnight BeTT tells the
story of the pub's waiter, Bob. His savings, accumulated
before the novel's opening, represent his safety net in
maintaining his marginal socio-economic status, and it
allows him to dream that someday he might live on his
savings while undertaking a career as writer. During the
course of the novel, however, Bob loses everything because

of a destructive relationship with a young prostitute, Jenny

146

147

Maple, whom he hopes to reclaim from the streets. Every bit
of his savings, his job at the pub, even his forlorn hope of
writing a novel are lost, and he returns to being a sailor.

The Siege of Pleaeure is Jenny's story. The narrative
opens in the aftermath of Bob and Jenny's relationship, but
most of the action is retrospective, taking place before the
events chronicled in The Midnight BeTT. The novel portrays
Jenny's short-lived career as a servant and abrupt
introduction to alcoholism and the world of prostitution.

The final story belongs to Ella, the barmaid at the
Midnight Bell. Plain, kindhearted, and uninterested in
consuming the alcohol she dispenses to others, she nourishes
an unrequited love for Bob. The antithesis of Jenny, in The
Midnight BeTT, Ella is partial witness to his self-
destruction. In The Plains of Cement, Hamilton reveals the
circumstances of her life contemporaneous with Bob's story.
She is caught in a dead-end job, aware of the hopelessness
of her love for Bob, but trying to hope for something
better. The novel follows the development of Ella's
possible escapes from her confined life, all of which come
to nothing, leaving her even more alone than she was when
the novel opened. The Plains of Cement, a strong novel on
its own, gains greater power as it ties together the two

earlier novels in the trilogy.

148
THE PUB NOVEL AS GENRE
In writing a series of pub novels, Hamilton has turned
his attention from the private institutions of rootless
people--residential hotels and boarding houses--to one of
their most important public refuges. The trilogy
constitutes a significant instance of a relatively neglected
genre, that of pub fiction. As Nigel Jones observes,
"considering the high profile the public house has in the
lives of most British citizens, it is odd that pub
literature occupies such a small niche."1 Nick Kimberley,
in his review of the Hogarth edition of Tyenty Thoueehd
Streets Under the Sky, not only confirms the relative rarity
of pub fiction, but suggests why such a genre might be
important:
Fans of Coronetion Streeh and EastEnders may have
noticed that a pub can provide dramatic focus, a site
where conflict and community come to the surface (some
of you may even have noticed this in real life, too).
But not only does it offer a spectrum of dramatic
tensions, it also obscures those tensions through that
great social equaliser, alcohol. Given that potential,
it's strange that the pub novel has never become a
genre in the same way as, say, the sports novel or the
hospital novel. The absence of the genre makes Patrick

Hamilton's trilogy of London novels, Twenty Thousand

 

Streets Under the Sk , all the more remarkable.2

Most of the major events in the trilogy, aside from Bob's

149
first encounter with Jenny, happen elsewhere. The pub is
indeed a location of "conflict and community," but for Bob
and Ella, who work there and live upstairs, it is only a
part of their lives. A time-consuming and demanding part,
of course, but ultimately a job much like any other job
available to people of their class.

To whom do pubs matter? Drinkers, of course, or the
majority of those who frequent pubs, but the pub is
fundamentally a business concern. This fact, often
overlooked by the large numbers of people who are inclined
to be sentimental about pubs, or at least about their own
local, implies how disparate an interest may be taken in
pubs as institutions. For Ben Davis, interested in the
architectural issues of pub buildings and decor, such a
multifaceted interest is a given:

Let us, however, be strictly unsentimental. As long

ago as 1938 The Architects' Journal pointed out in a

special issue that the essential pub character is

important to the brewers who make money out of it. It
is equally important to governments, sociologists and
social drinkers, and perhaps above all to the licensee,
who is the key man in the business.3
Some of Davis's categories are fairly obvious, but they
provide a salutary reminder that many other people besides
drinkers (whatever their scale of consumption) take a
serious interest in pubs. Not included in Davis's list are

those who take a negative interest: temperance reformers of

150
various stripes.

Mass-Observation took an interest in pubs early on, and
saw their potential as sites of sociological inquiry.
Valerie Hey, while critical of M-O's patriarchal attitude,
describes their study of Bolton pubs as

a radical departure from previous methodology which had

been to compile quantitative evidence concerning

alcohol abuse, pubs becoming thus categorized under the
heading of "Crime and Delinquency"; problems rather
than institutions. It is Mass-Observation's serious
commitment to seeing pubs as venues for the expression
of social relations that provides a fascinating
opportunity to "eavesdrop" on the gender/class

ideologies of the 19308 and 19408.4
Hamilton too perceived the sociological potential of pubs,
and knew from first-hand experience that as social
institutions, pubs were anything but uncomplicated. Two
decades after Tyenty Thoueend Streets Under the Sky,
Hamilton mocked those who believed pubs to be an equalized
arena for social intercourse. In Unknown Assailant, he
"quotes" a fictional biographer of Gorse (the main character
of Unknown Assailant) on pubs:

"The English public house, as is well known," he wrote,

"is a meeting place for all types. Class distinctions

vanish and all men, 'over a pint,‘ thrash out the

problems of the day on an equal and amicable footing."

Here, Hadlow—Browne, of course, disclosed his lack of

151
knowledge of public houses.5
Hamilton's own experience of pub life has particular value,
for this is a world that cannot be fully viewed other than
from inside, a phenomenon I examine at length in my chapter
on Hangover Sguare. What outsiders see is one version of
pub reality; what the heavy-drinking habitués see is an
alternative, no less real but very different. The author's
own experience becomes significant, and Hamilton, like
Alcoholics Anonymous, believes that only an insider can
apprehend, and thus represent, alcoholic existence.6
Hamilton chose to entitle his uncompleted autobiography
"Memoirs of a Heavy Drinking Man," an odd title which draws
attention to his alcoholism without romanticizing it. When
Hamilton began planning The Midndght BeTT, he wrote to his
brother
What a miraculous opportunity for reaping my wild oats!
If ever a man knew the atmosphere and life and ethics
of these places it's me. And what an opportunity for
my own particular brand of fun! Drunkenness. I should
be able to write a rollicking little masterpiece.
(French 90)
The final product is far too dark to be described as "a
rollicking little masterpiece," of course, but it does
reflect Hamilton's expertise in what he summarizes as "the
atmosphere and life and ethics" of pubs.
The point must be made, however, that Hamilton's

interest in authentic details, in verisimilitude, becomes,

152
when pubs--and drinking--are the issue, partial and limited.
His expertise in this area translates into a drinker's
perspective, rather than a more objective, wide-ranging one.
Reading the novels is to be impressed by how well Hamilton
knows the culture; reading histories of the pub is to
realize how narrow a perspective is relied upon.

Ben Davis's book on The Treditional English Pub: A Wey
of Drinking is the work of an architect interested in
professional details, but Davis takes the attitude of an
admirer and patron of pubs.7 His analysis and suggestions
are therefore not bloodless, but sympathetic and interested,
which highlights observations such as this: "A pub, as we
are too often reminded by marketing men, is a retail outlet.
If it is nothing more than this it will fail, but the fact
cannot be refuted, and in seeking the essentials we must
ensure that the mundane physical requirements of delivery,
storage and service of the merchandise are also taken care
of" (2). The business aspects of the pub, from
profitability to managing "the merchandise," are wholly
neglected by Hamilton. This is not a failing, but a result
of Hamilton's focus on the margins of the lower-middle
class; the publicans and brewing companies are left to their
own devices.

In Hamilton's trilogy, although both main characters
live in the pub and readers are ostensibly given an inside
view of the whole pub, in fact the scope is narrowed to

include only part of the life of the Midnight Bell. The

153
Midnight BeTT establishes immediately which segment of the
pub will be its subject. The novel's first chapter
introduces Bob and Ella, providing important information
about their backgrounds, personalities, and relationship.
The second chapter introduces the Midnight Bell or, more
precisely, its Saloon Bar and Lounge: "Those entering the
Saloon Bar of 'The Midnight Bell' from the street came
through a large door with a fancifully frosted glass pane, a
handle like a dumb-bell, a brass inscription 'Saloon Bar and
Lounge,‘ and a brass adjuration to Push."8 Having thus
brought the reader into the Saloon Bar by the street door,
Hamilton describes the setting at length--this is the
description quoted by Hugh David in The Fiteroviehe.
Expressly excluded from consideration are the Public and
Private Bars:
In here [the Saloon Lounge] and in the Saloon Bar 'The
Midnight Bell' did most of its business--the two other
bars (the Public and the Private) being dreary,
seatless, bareboarded structures wherein drunkenness
was dispensed in coarser tumblers and at a cheaper rate
to a mostly collarless and frankly downtrodden stratum
of society. The Public Bar could nevertheless be
glimpsed by a customer in the Saloon Bar, and as the
evening wore on it provided the latter with an acoustic
background of deep mumbling and excited talk without
which its whole atmosphere would have been lost--

without which, indeed, the nightly drama of the Saloon

154

Bar would have been rather like a cinematograph drama

without music. . . . (17, text ellipses)
The saloon bar and lounge provide the widest cross-section
of patrons. As noted in The,Midnight BeTT, the saloon bar
customers are not working class, but middle-class or on the
lower fringes of the middle class. The saloon bar is the
refuge of Hamilton's class; while it is part of Hamilton's
milieu, the other bars are not.

Furthermore, Hey's discussion of pub rooms, from the
"absolutely taboo to women" Vault up through the "women's

9 reveals that

rooms" like Snugs and bar parlours,
Hamilton's choice also provides the most mixed gender
interaction in a largely male preserve. Women are permitted
in the saloon lounge, either accompanied by their husbands

or "deposited" there.10

At the same time, since
unaccompanied men are verboten in the snug, they are clearly
the norm in the saloon bar. The saloon bar, then, provides
the best gender mix to be found in the pub; couples,
unaccompanied men, and "deposited" wives.

So deeply does Hamilton draw readers into the world of
the Saloon Bar and Lounge it is easy to forget that those
other areas exist. When the TLS reviewer complains that the
barmaid and waiter would not have the same day off, he has
forgotten about those other areas and their staff. Ella
hears the news of Bob's departure from another Midnight Bell

barmaid, "Freda, the barmaid round in the public bar, who

did not sleep in, and whom Ella did not know very well or

155
like particularly" (498). In spite of the pub staff's
Christmas festivities, this is the first we have seen of
Freda; totally inconsequential in terms of the story, these
bars and their people are none the less there, in the
background.

The saloon bar is Hamilton's turf, and his presentation
of the neophyte's view of the saloon bar could almost have
come straight out of Davis' non-fictional recommendations
for their arrangement and decoration. Early in The Siege of
Pleasure, when Jenny and her friend Violet are picked up by
two men, they go--at the men's suggestion--to the King's
Head in Hammersmith, which is

a large and respectable house in the most crowded

section of King Street. They went through a door

marked "Saloon Lounge" into a spacious room with
chocolate-coloured wood panelling, and copper-covered
tables all round. There was a bar at one end, and one
or two shining specimens of old-time armour in the
corners. It was fully and brilliantly lit, though it
was not yet completely dark outside and few of the

tables were engaged. (264)

The physical descriptions, the interactions between Bob and
Ella and their customers, the behavior of the patrons are
all part of Hamilton's evocation not of pubs in general, but
of the saloon bar and lounge.

What is the value of such detailed presentation of what

some might say is "only" a pub? Peter Widdowson, writing of

156

"The Saloon Bar Society," complains that, in fact, "the
'Midnight Bell,‘ which should be a focal image of a non-home
in the wastes of London, of a phoney warmth and security,
remains no more than a punctiliously observed pub."11
Brian McKenna agrees with this assessment, claiming that
Hamilton's pub "verisimilitude can seem to be vacuous"
("Confessions" 231). Too many details, a result of
Hamilton's determination to get it right, makes critics in
pursuit of a socio-political indictment (Widdowson and
McKenna) suspect that the author may be enjoying himself too
much. Widdowson notes disapprovingly that

it is possibly significant that here even drinking--

Hamilton’s most suggestive expanding metaphor--fails to

transcend the jottings, precise and detailed as they

are, of an individual who spends much time in its

vicinity and therefore believes that it contains,

intrinsically, a common metaphorical significance.

(124)
Curiously, Hamilton's attention to detail also makes his
novels vulnerable to another kind of "debunking": complaints
of inaccuracy, presumably based on the commentator's own
experience of pubs. The TLS review of The West Pier casts a
glance back over Hamilton's career, and complains of
inaccuracy in the details of pub life in the trilogy:

In Tyenty Thoueend Streehe Under the_§hy it does not

seem to matter very much that the glasses are left

unwashed at the end of each evening or that the barman

157
and barmaid have the same day out. These are factual
inaccuracies excused by the force of the narrative.12
I have already discussed the question of the alleged
staffing problems at the Midnight Bell, and would like to
consider the question of washing-up. The first closing
shown in ThedMidnight BeTT has Bob showing out a few
reluctant patrons; upon his return, he finds that "Ella,
about to retire, was patting her hair for the last time in
her little bottle-surrounded mirror" (43). The following
morning we see "the less spectacular side of Bob's
employment" (43). He takes care of the brass, and prepares
the new fire in the Lounge while Ella works behind the bar.
When Ella becomes the protagonist, we are told that after
closing, Ella "wiped the bar and tidied up roughly (ready
for next morning) in the same old way" (510). Clearly the
glasses eye "left unwashed at the end of each evening."

Once again, Hamilton and Mass-Observation can be
brought together to resolve this apparent inconsistency, for
Mass-Observation has nothing less than a "Report on the Use
of Towels for Drying and Polishing Glasses in Public

«H Their findings corroborate Hamilton's

Houses.
encyclopedic knowledge of pub practices, for more than half
of the 140 pubs studied "definitely allowed" dirty glasses
to accumulate, "so that there was more than just the
closing-time residuum left to be cleaned after the pub was

shut. Of these, about a third leave the cleaning until next

morning, before opening time." Furthermore, the cleaning

158
practices are related, to some extent, to the class of pub
involved: "A class-correlation, however, did bring out the
fact that the more classy pubs tend to wash up as they go
along to a rather lesser extent than other pubs." Twenty-
nine percent of B-class pubs, the class of the Midnight
Bell, left the washing up until the following morning.

But what is going on here? The pub towel report, bound
to draw the ire of the theory police, indicates the high
value Mass-Observation placed on precisely the kind of
detail that makes high-minded critics suspicious. Mass-
Observation clearly believed it was worth doing this kind of
work. Mass-Observation originated in the same impulse that
drove the well-known literary figures of the 19308, but what
gives their work a lasting interest is its creation,
complementary to Hamilton's, of a record of a long-gone era.
Tom Harrisson complained of the timelessness of the Auden
crowd's literary productions, not meaning the word as a
tribute but as a criticism of the disembodied, immaterial
nature of their writing. Work like the pub towel report can
be seen as an answer.

One peculiarly significant aspect of pubs is how money
is handled. A pub is a place where money is spent in the
same way that it is earned by workers: piecemeal, a little
bit at a time. Patrons must pay as they go, and even heavy
drinkers could not be described as extravagant. Such
boundaries make the pub a perfect site for Hamilton's

analysis of what ails the socio-economic system, for no

159
other setting would provide the same constellation of
material circumstances. The pub, then, is not just a
tosspot's choice, and the accuracy of its presentation does
matter.

As Hamilton's superior knowledge of pub "trivia" is to
be trusted, so are his instincts in creating the record at
all, for literary works can accomplish things no other kind
of writing can. Pierre Bourdieu, in The Rulee of Art, makes
this point in the context of Flaubert:

There is no better testimony of all that separates

literary writing from scientific writing than this

capacity, which it alone possesses, to concentrate and
condense in the concrete singularity of a sensitive
figure and an individual adventure, functioning both as

metaphor and metonymy, all the complexity of a

structure and a history which scientific analysis must

laboriously unfold and deploy.“
Hamilton's novels, in a compact and graceful form, record
the same kinds of details about everyday life in England
that Mass-Observation believed it was important to record.
The details are not only accurate, they are a central part

of Hamilton's success.

FITZROVIA AND THE LITERARY PUB
There's no literature at the Midnight Bell, only Mr.

Sounder, in spite of the Midnight Bell's clear connection to

H

Fitzrovia. The literary pub regulars, like Julian

160
Maclaren-Ross, create the impression of a scene comprised of
writers in the foreground and others non-existent or purely
background--like the rather generic noise from the public
bar that filters into the saloon bar in the Midnight Bell.
As Hugh David demonstrates, the shifting of literary bohemia
from hangouts such as the Café Royal to the seedier
Fitzrovia district proper was well underway by the mid 19208
(125). He notes, too, that whether viewed from outside or
inside, "Fitzrovia had none of the neat coherence with which
it has been imbued in many later accounts and memoirs," and
claims that "for most of its life Fitzrovia was no more
colourful or exciting than any other district" (164).
Hamilton's rendition of Fitzrovia, in a period predating its
19408 heyday, confirms David's analysis. The only literary
regular that the Midnight Bell boasts is Mr. Sounder, and he
is "not a particularly welcome figure" (21).

Mr. Sounder is the first Midnight Bell customer (and
regular) introduced to the reader, but any suggestion that
this signals the importance of literary production is
immediately dashed. First, Mr. Sounder cuts a ridiculous
figure:

His appearance was eccentric. Though of short
stature he wore a thick beard and moustache which
(though they did not in fact decrease his height)
created an illusion of dwarfishness. This impression
was augmented by the hair on his head, which went back

in a thick mane magnificent for his age, which was

161

something over fifty. But then Mr. Sounder went in

greatly for hair. Apart from that already mentioned,

he had a great deal of hair upon his hands, and great
deal of hair between his eyebrows, and great deal of
hair in his ears, and rather more hair coming in two
exact little sprouts from his nostrils then modern
fashion allows or nicety dictates.

He wore, and had worn for years without
interruption, a thick tweed suit, a soft collar, and a
heavy bow tie. But sometimes his tie was a piece of
black ribbon tied into a bow. (21-22)

Mr. Sounder's stature is further reduced by the gap between
his background and his achievements, for "he had been to
Oxford University, and was a man of letters--mostly to the
papers" (22). His literary activity takes the form of
writing "articles and short stories for the press, which
were very occasionally accepted. He called this Turning Out
Little Things from Time to Time. An enormous Thing
perpetually in progress was postulated but left in the dark"
(22). Partly because he spends so much time at the pub,
however, Mr. Sounder's "enormous Thing" is destined to
remain forever in progress, never completed.

The Little Thing he has Turned Out when the novel opens
is a letter to the eyep. He has brought a copy of the paper
with him, to share with his adoring public. Ella takes pity
on him and reads it; it turns out to treat "in a manly but

rather vituperative style with the topic of woman's hair.

162
He personally liked it long. That much was clear from the
start" (23).

Later, the specimen of Mr. Sounder's poetry Hamilton
provides is on a par with his Little Thing about women's
hair; reading Sounder's poem about Westminster Abbey,
"knowing the subject, [Bob] was able to get a pretty fair
picture of Mr. Sounder sitting in the Abbey and enjoying the
scenery and organ" (67). Hamilton cannot pass up the
opportunity to mock Mr. Sounder's poem by citing its vapid
rhymes and cliched content. A sample of the beginning will
suffice to reveal the poem's merits and the novel's attitude
toward it:

Beginning with an impassioned apostrophe to the

"fretted lights and tall, aspiring heye," Mr. Sounder

went straight ahead to describe the music, which was

coming in "wave on wave," and which in so doing (as we

 

might have known) his "soul did Teye“ in all sorts of

mystic feelings. (67)
Not only does Hamilton draw attention to the rhymes by
presenting them out of context, as it were, rather than
'transcribing' the whole poem, he underscores them further
by italicizing the words forming the rhymes. The appeal to
the reader's recognition of the banality of both image and
language--"as we might have known"--8eals judgment on the
poem. The description continues through the rest of the
sonnet, each cited rhythm further condemnation of Mr.

Sounder's gifts for poetry and his pretensions as a literary

163
man. Insinuating himself into the good graces of Mr. Loame,
the actor, in order to be bought drinks by the latter, Mr.
Sounder uses a mixture of self-promotion and flattery. It
transpires that Mr. Sounder has
Little Things in--ah--Mr. Loame's line--dramatic
sketches, to be blunt--which he thought Mr. Loame might
just like to cast his eye over. But he had only Turned
them Out every now and again and was quite willing to
admit that the dramatic craft was very different from
the literary one. That was where Mr. Loame came in.
(116-17)
If this is Fitzrovia, ThedMidnight BeTT suggests, it is
rather overrated as an alternative literary salon--though
not, perhaps, as a pub world. One of the Midnight Bell's
regulars is specifically identified as living in Fitzroy
Square. He is known as the "Illegal Operation," for the
obvious reason; again, Fitzrovia is hardly a literary
paradise in Hamilton's view. Early in The Plains of Cement,
Hamilton describes the environs of the pub, which is "in the
vicinity of the Euston Road and Warren Street" (333-334).
The novel proposes "a student of the streets" visualizing
the pub's geographic base, and this is what he would see:
The respectable, residential precincts of Regent's
Park, the barracks and lodging-houses of Albany Street,
the grim senility of Munster Square, the commercial
fury of the Euston and Tottenham Court Roads, the

criminal patches and Belgian penury of Charlotte and

164

Whitfield Streets, the vast palace of pain known as

Middlesex HOSpital, the motor-salesman's paradise of

Portland Place itself--all these would crowd in upon

each other in the microcosm thus discriminated--a

microcosm well-nigh as incongruous and grotesque as any
that the searcher might be able to alight upon in the

endless plains of cement at his disposal. (334)

In imagining this variety, and insisting upon its grotesque
and unappealing nature while omitting any reference to those
writers and artists who "occupied" its pubs, Hamilton has
turned his back on the widely-held perception of Fitzrovia's
publand as an artistic bohemia.

This non-literary view of Fitzrovia may be self-
explanatory, or even self-serving. One of John Betjeman's
principal observations about Hamilton in "Moustache or
Clean-Shaven?," one that could only be made by an interested
and informed contemporary like Betjeman, was that Hamilton
was literally invisible.16 Julian Maclaren-Ross's
description of himself as "a professional writer as opposed
to being a professional literary man"17 (Memoirs xv)
applies even more acutely in Hamilton's case than in
Maclaren-Ross's own. Maclaren-Ross, after all, was often
seen in Fitzrovia, and tales of him are not hard to find.
Hamilton, in contrast, must have been there--familiarity
with the literature of Fitzrovia and with Hamilton's pub
trilogy makes plain just how much time Hamilton must have

spent there--but while its real-life denizens remark on

165
Hamilton's fiction, they never betray any personal
acquaintance or report sightings of him. Based on
Betjeman's testimony, it is not difficult to imagine that he
was there, unnoticed and unrecognized.

The only person who claims to have seen Hamilton in
that cosy, pub-regular way is Arnold Rattenbury, who says he
encountered Hamilton

as very much the junior in groups of pub-goers

including such people as Randall Swingler, Claud

Cockburn, Reggie Smith. . . . After Swingler's

disappearance into the army and my own re-emergence

from it in 1943, and while Hamilton, I now realise,
must have been.writing The Slaves of Solitude and The

Governess I saw him now and again in necessarily

changed company--John Davenport, Arthur Calder

Marshall, Jim Phelan, Maurice Richardson, I would have

thought Julian Maclaren Ross, though he says not.

(When social meeting-places for writers in the wartime

blackout were three or four contiguous Soho pubs and

another pair off the Strand, many more than Dylan

Thomas and Patrick Hamilton drank solidly and long:

Orwell, more often considered a sobersides, for

one . )18
Rattenbury, however, is remembering these people and events
more than fifty years later. He puts names to an awareness
that Hamilton must have been there, but these names are

driven by that "must have" sense rather than actual

166
recollection. This is demonstrated by his reference to
Julian Maclaren-Ross, which is footnoted to Memoire of the
Forties. Which of the others may have been named in the
same spirit it is impossible to tell.

Maclaren-Ross is worth looking at in the context of
Fitzrovia and Hamilton's presentation of its mores and
inhabitants. If Arthur Calder-Marshall is a noteworthy
counterpart to Hamilton in terms of political ideology and
what might be called "thirties experience," Julian Maclaren-
Ross fulfills similar functions under an equally-important
constellation of Hamilton concerns: pubs, drinking and
addiction. Maclaren-Ross enjoyed few privileges of the
Calder-Marshall stripe (which is perhaps one reason he
lampoons Calder-Marshall's affectation of working-class
traits); like Hamilton, he needed to earn money by his
writing, and he too lived a life of rented rooms, pubs, and
bad restaurant meals. The similarity of their professional
contexts and fictional interests make the contrasts that do
exist particularly informative.

Most critics speak of Maclaren-Ross in terms nearly
identical to those used of Hamilton by his commentators:
failure to live up to early promise and tragedy are the
normative critical and biographical emphases. Robert
Hewison and Hugh David describe Maclaren-Ross as "finally a

tragic figure"19

and "in the last analysis a tragic figure"
(David 180). Dan Davin baldly summarizes Maclaren-Ross as a

"major talent of minor accomplishment."20 That Hamilton's

167
critics overstate hie failings can be seen in the contrast
between his financial circumstances and Maclaren-Ross's.
Hamilton's plays, through their movie adaptations and
countless stage performances, generated a substantial
regular income for their creator. Without that income,
"there is no doubt that . . . Hamilton could not have
financed his consumption [of alcohol]" (French 191). In
contrast, Maclaren-Ross's later years were filled with
"endless pressure to finish small things quickly to get
money for the rent, for food, cigarettes, alcohol, and
taxis" (Davin 11). Their expenditures were similar in kind,
if not in scale, and it was Hamilton's literary success that
allowed him to spend £2,000 a year on whisky in the mid-
1940s“; Maclaren-Ross never achieved such (doubled-edged)
success.

Both Hamilton and Maclaren-Ross were solitary figures,
heavy drinkers who maintained severely professional
standards for their writing. Rayner Heppenstall's fictional
alter-ego in The Lesser Infortune is amazed by a thinly-
veiled Maclaren-Ross: "I gazed at these manifestations of
sinful pride and marvelled at the purity of the man's

ambition and resolve."22

At the same time, their
professionalism never entailed life-as-research; while both
writers made use of their experiences, they did not permit a
desire for fictional material to select those experiences in
advance. This puts them in marked contrast, not only to

more-privileged Marxist writers of the thirties and forties

168
like Calder-Marshall, but to other professional writers such
as Graham Greene.

Maclaren-Ross's tale of his encounter with Greene is
profoundly illuminating, with Maclaren-Ross's lived
experience contrasting frequently with Greene's deliberate
pursuit of material, a contrast Maclaren-Ross emphasizes.
Greene is shocked to learn that Maclaren-Ross is selling
vacuum cleaners door-to-door (although Greene's housekeeper
had immediately identified him as a salesman), but assumes
this to be in pursuit of material; in fact, Maclaren-Ross is
doing it because he " 'wouldn't have any money otherwise' "
(16). Even their shared Catholicism represents a divide
between lived-life and reflective arrangement: "Greene said:
'Yes, I was converted in 1926.‘ I said: 'I was baptized one
in 1912,’ which disconcerted him more than the vacuum
cleaners" (18).

Further, Greene enjoys the workings of a whole system
of support and defense. His wife screens him from what she
views as wastes of his time--"she was sure that he would
have liked to read my stories but she was also sure that I
would understand why this would not be possible" (27-28)--
and Greene trails in his wake a whole entourage of lawyers
and accountants, while Maclaren-Ross must rely on his own
efforts and such advice as his friends can supply.

The fictional milieus of Maclaren-Ross and Hamilton
share considerable overlap. Both wrote "thrillers" of sorts

(and took a keen interest in the genre), and both portrayed

169
the seedy life of pubs and rented accommodation. Hugh David
believes that Fitzrovia brought together the "disparate
elements" of Maclaren-Ross's life:
Not only was Fitzrovia's undercurrent of shady wheeler-
dealing reminiscent of so much of the thirties
roadhouse talk of Bognor [but] as the years went by he
found his talent uniquely well honed to the task of
immortalising that milieu of which he discovered, or
made, himself the uncrowned prince. (177)
Such a description could well be applied to much of
Hamilton's work, and in fact, Maclaren-Ross saw Hamilton as
a model for what he wanted to accomplish. When, in 1938, he
met with Jonathan Cape after the publisher had seen some of
his short stories, they discussed
Arthur Calder-Marshall, who had done successfully in
some of his work what I was trying to do--namely to
create a completely English equivalent to the American
vernacular used by such writers as Hemingway, Cain and
O'Hara, concentrating in my case mainly on the middle
and lower-middle classes, an area cornered so far by V.
S. Pritchett and Patrick Hamilton. (9)
Maclaren-Ross distinguishes the level represented in Calder-
Marshall's fiction from the one he and Hamilton portrayed in
theirs--middle and lower-middle class--and identifies their
ability to re-create the very texture of language as the
collective strength of the writers he names.

Maclaren-Ross, like Hamilton, denies the simple and

170

sentimental reading of Fitzrovia as a place where, during
its forties heyday, "every night saw Dylan Thomas and Julian
Maclaren-Ross, a tight clique of Apocalyptic poets and
other, similarly impecunious members of the new literati
clustering amiably round the Wheatsheaf's bar" (David 164-
65).23 Maclaren-Ross's formulation, as the ultimate
insider, has particular significance. Alan Ross's
description of an evening in the Wheatsheaf, one for which
"absolutely everyone was there" (Memoirs 159), left out
whole categories of important people. According to
Maclaren-Ross,

But there were other figures whom he did not mention

and possibly did not notice, without whom the

Wheatsheaf wouldn't really have been complete: they

made up the background and the unsung chorus and

occasionally, on an off-night, the entire cast.

These fell roughly into three categories:

Regulars, Wits and Bums. (159)
This kind of observation matches neatly with Twenty Theusand
Streete Under the_§hy, though it might be argued that
Hamilton has overcompensated, and left out the writers
altogether. Mr. Sounder, of the pseudo-literary persuasion,
and Mr. Wall, two of the Midnight Bell's regulars, have
cultivated their own style of being bar bores to the points
of being unable to adapt. Put together, they are
"notoriously incapable of hitting it off, and the thwarted

condescension of the one, together with the invulnerable

171
impudence of the other, were features of "The Midnight Bell"
in the evening" (65). Life at the Midnight Bell, or at the
Wheatsheaf, is not comprised of wonderful evenings and
scintillating wit, according to Hamilton and Maclaren-Ross,
but a great deal of boredom and frustration and a great many

"off nights."

LIFE AT THE MIDNIGHT BELL

Twenty Thoueend Streets Under the Sky has an unusually

 

large number of characters for Hamilton's fiction.. Most
Hamilton novels present only a handful of characters by name
or in any depth; here, more characters, of more backgrounds
are introduced than is Hamilton's common practice.
Nonetheless, the trilogy really belongs to Bob and Ella,
both of whom work and live at the pub.“ The openings of

all three novels establish an impression of loneliness,
monotony, even fear. In The Midnight BeTT, Bob wakes from a
dream of sailing to re-enter the painful drudgery of his
everyday existence; upon waking, "the burden of cold and
ever-recurring existence weighed down his spirit. Here he
was again" (11). Jenny's novel begins with a prologue which
places her, for readers of The Midnight Bell, on the street
shortly after her final encounter with Bob. She is
frightened by the prospect of imminent arrest by a policeman
who "was clearly out to get her" and by the prospect of
Bob's reappearance; in order to get off the streets, she

lets herself be picked up by someone whose appearance "as a

172
business proposition" she does not approve (222). Ella's
story opens with an even more resolutely downbeat note;
London and the Midnight Bell are identified as weird and
dangerous places, while her own physical plainness and dull
life are described.

The opening of The Plains of Cement has not only its
regular task to perform--setting the scene, introducing the
characters, grabbing the reader's attention--it must also
connect itself to The MidnTght BeTT without simply repeating
what is in the earlier novel. The connection between the
two novels carries great weight, for a significant part of
Ella's aloneness is revealed by the disjunctions between
Bob's version of events and her own. In an early stage of
his self-inflicted troubles with Jenny, Bob reflects on how
much easier Ella's life is than his own: "He envied her her
plainness and goodness. . . . It was a facile mode of life,
and he wished his own temperament was the same" (100, text
ellipses). What The Plains of Cement achieves is to show
just how wrong Bob is--Ella's life is anything but "facile“-
-and to show just how alone Ella is, when the person closest
to her totally misses her struggles and pain.

Hamilton singles out several key aspects of existence
for those who work at, as opposed to patronize, the pub.

His interest in language, how these marginal people have
only cliches with which to communicate, is evident in The
Midnight BeTT and The Plains of Cement. As Andy Croft

notes, the trilogy novels

173

were partly comic novels, stories of working-class and
lower middle-class London whose humour depended on the
ironic distance between a knowingly pretentious style
and an unpretentious subject matter. Hamilton's
frequent use of 'Komic Kapitals', for example,
simultaneously subverts the power of received ideas and
phrases, dignifies his inarticulate characters--by
separating them from their second-hand expressions--and
draws attention to the politics of expression, custom,
etiquette and class snobbery. (144)

In a similar vein, Arnold Rattenbury sees Hamilton's

characters as trapped by their language:
Moreover the characters themselves are increasingly
liable to further restriction by those other sealed-in
qualities of drunkenness, schizophrenia, silence
between classes, somnambulism, blindness, but chiefly--
and from the start--by a strangle-held version of
English language. They can only express themselves
codedly, by clutching at single phrases which may have
once expressed a thought but are now become mantras,
catch-phrases, slogans only thought to express a
thought or belief. (204)

Both critics are correct, for in these novels Hamilton does

not simply present the language of these characters, but he

provides an authorial voice to comment and explain. Several

features require attention.

First, while these characters rely on stock phrases,

174
they also make use of cliched images from other media,
particularly films, to communicate with others. When Jenny
and her fellow prostitute first come into the Midnight Bell,
for example, movie images allow them to communicate across a
considerable social divide. The older woman, trying to
compliment Bob, compares him to " 'that man we saw on the
pictures the other night' " (32). In spite of the
comparison's reductive nature and the transparency of the
ruse, "the compliment enriched his soul, as he stood there"
(33). Trying to convey to these two women his image of his
father, an American policeman, Bob fails until Jenny calls
on her knowledge of American films: "Jenny, however,
suddenly and surprisingly, caught on to the idea. 'Like
what you see on the films,’ she said" (34). Bob is pleased
by her response, seeing in it an indication of her
comprehension.

This habit is not limited to Hamilton's characters; he
himself used movie images as communication. When explaining
his romance with the prostitute Lily Connolly to his
brother, he relied on actresses and their images to convey
his vague ideas of "Romance" and "Thought." Sean French
finds that such a mode of description "undermine[s] its
reality" (91), but as a literary device in Hamilton's
fiction, it is offered as a means of communication available
to people lacking sophisticated language or simply in need
of illustrating their point to someone who might not

understand it.

175
The language limitations faced by these characters are
fully spelled out in The Plains of Cement. It must not be
overlooked, however, that their use of cliches and stock
phrases is defended. Hamilton does not make fun of them, or
imply that they are stupid because they necessarily
communicate in such stale and limited ways; as Croft notes,
he is illuminating a larger problem, one that they do not
control. Ella, we are told, like a poet breathes new life
into old forms:
Nor was she by any means inarticulate. The banality of
the expressions she employed in voicing her thoughts
was no criterion of those thoughts' real shrewdness or
aptness. Infinitely stale and hackneyed idioms she
certainly used, but this was merely because, having
access to the wisdom of the ages, she used the
expressions sanctified by the ages. Ella always meant
what she said. She breathed life into old forms.
Hence, when Ella remarked, say, that "the longest way
round is the shortest way home" she was not echoing a
proverb as a parrot would. On the contrary, after the
continually recurring experience in her everyday life,
of the fact that short, hasty, or violent methods on
behalf of any and generally involve the frustration of
the whole endeavour, she had long sought in her
thoughtful mind for some law to convey the detached
instances of this phenomenon, and had at last alighted,

with joy, upon the ready-made aphorism. (335)

176
Two points that Hamilton is at pains to make--he includes
several detailed examples of how Ella's trite phrases are
not mindless repetitions--are first, that "a poet could have
done no better" and second, that "a superficial observer
. might easily mistake for dullness her genuine love of
artistic self-expression" (336).

Furthermore, her use of language is a defense
mechanism, one which allows her to cope with situations that
might otherwise be unbearable. Her job, for instance, would
be untenable for "a virtuous, homely, and simple-minded
young woman“ without a technique for rendering it
manageable. For Ella, it is her use of cliches that
transforms her surroundings:-

"We get all sorts in here," she would say, in her slow,

amiable way. Or, "Oh yes. They get ever so fresh,

sometimes." Or, "It's a funny business, that's a

fact." And having thus peacefully called upon her

wonderful inner machinery for rendering the abnormal
normal without a qualm, she would not give the matter

another thought. (334-35)

Language may be a limitation, or a trap, for those on the
margins of the lower-middle class, but it can also serve an
important purpose.

Another issue that receives attention in Twenty
Thousand Streets Under the_§hy is drinking, although the
trilogy is not primarily an exploration of alcoholism.

Jenny's drinking, discussed in the next chapter, is

177

alcoholic; Bob's could be characterized as problem drinking,
not yet deteriorated into full-blown alcoholism. His
drinking is identified as an issue almost immediately, in
the opening scene of ThedMidnight BeTT. It is implicated
in his depressing return to wakefulness: "Why had he slept?
He remembered coming up here, a happy man, at half-past
three. . . . Then he cursed himself softly and vindictively.
He faced facts. He had got drunk at lunch again" (12). Not
only is he introduced with an afternoon hangover, but the
situation is recurring rather than unusual-- Bob got drunk
at lunch egeTh. Ella mildly chastises him for his behavior,
mentioning " 'all them drinks' " and observing that " 'If
this was my place, I'd've sent you out of the bar' " (15).
Bob's denial and rationalization are given short shrift by
sensible Ella:

"I wasn't drunk."

"Well, you weren't far. I thought you said you was

giving up drink, Bob?"

"Well, T can't help it, if they give 'em to me."

"Oh yee," said Ella, with profound sarcasm. "The

Penalties of Popularity, I suppose." (15)
If Bob had said he was giving up drink, and particularly if,
having said so, he is unable to do so, clearly he already
has a drinking problem before the action of The Midnight
heTT ever begins.

Drinking is implicated in many of his mistakes,

including the first, his too-friendly remark to Jenny: "the

178
three beers he had had--all this time plotting their subtle
loosenings along his brain--now had a sudden piece of luck
and managed to release his next remark before he was ready
for it" (32). Here drink is personified, given
responsibility for a mistake that Bob made.

Nonetheless, Bob is not too far gone. His drinking
does increase, and his control over the circumstances of his
consumption can be weak at times, but he still has standards
by which to judge his intake: "He had been fooled. He had
not, after all, had a great time: he had merely been
drinking again. . . . He had spent two pounds. He had, in
fact, done it again: and he was becoming, according to his
own standards, totally dissolute" (62). The ending of The
MidnTght BeTT strongly suggests that Bob has recovered from
both Jenny and his problem drinking. His descent into
alcoholism is abruptly arrested, and not until Hangover
Sguare will Hamilton fully explore the nuances of
alcoholism.

Most important in The Midnight BeTT is Bob's money,
which, as Sean French correctly notes, is "at the centre of
the story" (96). Bob's savings are treated very seriously
in the novel. Special attention is given to the painfully
built up credits and the wild flurry of debits brought on by
Bob's infatuation with Jenny. The two fit together in an
essential relation; our knowledge of the credits makes the
debits more painful. As long as he has the slowly-building

savings, Bob can deceive himself about his aspirations to be

179
a writer, and believe that his job as waiter is only
temporary. The money on deposit when the novel opens is
Bob's hedge against life; his job may be tedious and not
spectacularly remunerative, but his savings allow him to
remain in the respectable reaches of the lower-middle class.
He is aware of this himself: "Not that Bob had any greed for
money itself, or had any formulated intentions towards his
own. It merely stood between him and the dire need to toil,
and made a man of him" (45). Once the money is gone, at
novel's end, Bob is effectively demoted to laboring class
and must resume his career as a sailor. The tale of that
saving's gradual accretion and sudden dispersal signifies
the great fear of those precariously-situated characters who
inhabit Hamilton's fictional milieu: any assault on their
limited means drives them out of the middle class
altogether.

It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that Bob's
money is the most important thing in his life, or that
making Jenny more important than it dooms him to failure.
Ella, wondering about his afternoons off, suspects him of
having a girl, but "he did not really want a girl. There
would be a Girl one day, but at present he walked, on his
Thursday afternoons, with far richer and more tremulous
absorptions--those of his youth, and his aspiration, and his
eighty pounds" (45).

The money on deposit dates from before the novel's

opening, but the stages of its growth, and Bob's increasing

180
pleasure in it, are carefully detailed:
His eighty pounds resided at the Midland Bank in the
Tottenham Court Road. It had once been only forty-
seven pounds, which had come to him on his mother's
death seven years ago. It had only been within the
last two years or so that he had begun properly to
save. He could still remember the calm satisfaction
with which he had brought it up to fifty: the self-
applause caused by its reaching sixty: the elation and
sheer priggish conceit of seventy--and now it was
eighty--eighty exactly. Having, like most of us, a
congenitally decimal mind, he always enjoyed his money
most when the sum was exactly divisible by ten.
Eighty-three, for instance, would be quite a bore--ju8t
a depressingly distant halting-place on the road to
ninety. (45)
While we are not shown any actual deposits, Hamilton
explains the method behind Bob's savings plan: his "nightly
aspiration was five shillings. He was a young man who kept
a keen eye upon his finances, and a pound a week in tips he
regarded as a peremptory necessity" (25). To that end, he
exercises several stratagems, for "he believed it possible,
by energy, subtlety, and dexterity, to manipulate and
augment the largesse of his customers. The great thing was
always to have plenty of coppers" (25). Through the course
of Bob's first working evening in the novel, Hamilton

provides periodic updates on how Bob is doing: he "achieved

181
twopence," "he had already made one and six", "he had made
four and ninepence already" (26, 27, 34). The sixpence
Jenny gives him (36) puts him over his scheduled goal, but
Bob's total for the night is a negative: he lends Jenny ten
shillings (38) which, in spite of her promises to repay, it
is obvious to the reader Bob will never recover.

Because Bob's money is built up so painstakingly, he
knows exactly what things are worth in terms of time and
labor. In a pub with Jenny, he calculates their drinks in
time:

"What'll you have?" he asked. "Same again?"

"That's right."

He got up and brought them to her. They came to one

and eight--a good hour's work at "The Midnight Bell."

(127)

Hamilton's predilection, noticeable from his first novel, to
explicitly tie expenditure to income finds a very fertile
field in the world of the Midnight Bell.

Bob's withdrawals commence fairly soon after he begins
his pursuit of Jenny, and they escalate in their violence.
His first withdrawal takes the most rationalizing on his
part. Having already spent money on Jenny that he could ill
afford, Bob decides to withdraw five pounds from his
account. To allow this unprecedented debit, he

came to a new theory of Money. He was shrewd enough to

see that his eighty pounds was not really lying at the

Bank. Long ago embraced in oceans of money and credit,

182
it existed merely in his mind and that of the Midland--
had no reality. The whole thing being, then, purely
arithmetical and immaterial, if he drew from the sum he
would not be subtracting anything from a lump of money,
but simply changing his mind about what he possessed--
revising his mental attitude towards his own wealth.
(83)
But of course, for Bob and those in his class, the only safe
attitude towards money is a concrete one; by keeping
diligently on top of his shillings and pence, Bob has
amassed those pounds at the Midland Bank. To become
theoretical about money is fatal, and indeed this new
"theory of Money" signals Bob's submission to his fate. Bob
is aware of his "sophistry" in coming up with this new plan
but, notably, the compensation is "having in his hands, in
crisp notes--five pounds to do whatever he liked with" (84).
His next withdrawal is also for five pounds (132), but
the third increases to ten (153). Part of that money--six
and a half guineas--goes for a new suit, so all is not
thrown away. He draws ten again (168), but then, on
Christmas Eve, takes twenty-five in expectation of a trip to
Brighton with Jenny (196). When she attempts to cancel the
trip, on the pretext of a more important obligation with a
"PrOper gentleman" (199), he simply hands the money over to
dissuade her from going. Having done that, and gotten her
agreement to a Boxing Day departure for Brighton, he asks

the landlord at the Midnight Bell to cash a check for his

183
remaining twenty-five pounds. He tells himself that "he
would never spend all this, but . . he wanted to leave a
broad margin and feel secure. It was awful to think that it
was the last of his money, but he just wouldn't think about
it " (208). Jenny stands him up, he gets blind drunk, and
is robbed of his money. The final indignity is that he must
borrow money from Prunella, one of Jenny's fellow
prostitutes, to stay in a doss house. The sum Prunella
supplies is, ironically, five shillings--the amount of Bob's
nightly aspiration in better times.

Meanwhile, Ella has her own money problems, and her
painful ending is set up by her hopes of escape them. She
balances several possibilities, but all come to nothing,
each in a particularly rude and crushing fashion. These
possibilities, while they remain alive, underscore her
essential helplessness and passivity. Bob dreams of
writing; when he has come to the end of his rope, he returns
to his previous profession (one could even say, rather
melodramatically, that he runs away to sea). These kinds of
options, flawed as they are, are not available to Ella, who
must wait, endure, and hope if she is able.

As a woman, she is even more powerless than Bob to be
an active agent in her own life. This state of affairs is
made more painful by her awareness of it. Christmas, a
fixture in Hamilton's novels, drives home to Ella the
futility of her life. Her Christmas gift for Bob--who,

unbeknownst to Ella, is nearing his final defeat at Jenny's

184
hands--gets no response from him, and she feels exhausted by
the world's indifference:
So much for Christmas presents. And, alas, it was
beyond reasonable expectation to imagine that a silk
handkerchief wrapped around a box of twenty Players
could make a man love you.

Two hours later she was still awake and it was
raining in the dark of Christmas Day. It poured down
gently with a steady level of dripping murmur on the
roof--like something wishing to instil in her, in the
quiet blackness of the night, a sense of the hidden but
ever present realities of her lonely and meaningless
struggle in the world of London--of the endless
procession of solitary nights after senseless working
days--of the endless procession of meagre triumphs and
frustrations in connection with the disinterested
agents of her fate--Mr. Eccles, her stepfather, Master
Eric, India, Christmas, Bob, the Governor. And though
months had passed, with all these playing their
stimulating or wearying parts, where was she now? In
her cave, at night, with the rain coming down on the
roof. And on Christmas Day--like the last Christmas
Day, and the next. And still she could not sleep and
still the rain came down. (494)

These "disinterested agents of her fate" represent pitifully
small hopes, and their lack of fruition underscores

Hamilton's championing of London's invisibles. Throughout

185
The:glain§ of Cement, Ella is pursued by Mr. Eccles, a
ridiculous and annoying middle-aged suitor who, nonetheless,
offers the possibility of financial support and thus is
tolerated by Ella as long as she can manage it. The
luxuries he offers her--a night at the theater, a meal at
the Lyons' Corner House--show how limited are her means.
Additionally, her disliked stepfather is seriously ill, and
for a time it looks as if he will die, leaving her mother in
peace and both women with a small legacy. Finally, she gets
a lead on a job as nanny to the children of a wealthy family
about to go to India. Ultimately, however, Mr. Eccles
becomes unbearable, her stepfather recovers, and she does
not get the India job. Bob leaves the pub to return to the
sea, and Ella is left even more alone than she was when the
novel started. The novel ends with Bob's replacement, John,

overhearing Ella's weeping.

As the public refuge of his boarding-house and hotel
characters, the pub has great significance for Hamilton's
fictional milieu. As a setting, it provides a chance to
examine the mores of a widespread social institution, one
whose routines are manifestations of larger social truths.
As Andy Croft summarizes the achievement of the trilogy,
"the three novels contain a strong presentation of the
political structures behind social ritual, the powers of
oppression and collusion attached to ideas of class and

gender" (146).

186
Furthermore, Hamilton's choice of a pub as setting for
Twenty Thoueend Streete Unde; the Sky allows him to bring to
life such overlooked and heavily-stereotyped figures as the
barmaid and barman. Hamilton draws attention to this in The
Plains of Cehent when he observes that what Ella considers
to be her "real" life is a complete blank to those who
stereotype in order to render other people invisible:
for those who saw the neat, beer-pulling, chaffing Ella
in the bar of "The Midnight Bell" carried social
introspection no further than the epithet "barmaid,"
and it no more occurred to them to suspect that she had
some such human background and spiritual resource, that
she carried on a complete life of her own in other
words, than it would have occurred to them to suspect
her of murder or arson. Not even the Governor or Bob
suspected. (390)
In Ella, Hamilton has captured the essence of life for those
who inhabit his fictional milieu. Her loneliness,
surrounded by the socializing pub world, is total and

unrelieved.

NOTES

1. Quoted by B. McKenna, "Confessions," 231.

2. "One Man in His Time," New Statesman 17 July 1987, 29.
3. The TreditioneidEnglish Pub: A Weydof Drinking (London:
Architectural Press, 1981), 2.

4. getrierchy end Pub Culture (London: Tavistock, 1986),
39.

5. The Gor_e Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 584.

 

6. In a curious coincidence, Alcoholics Anonymous was
founded in America in 1935, the same year Tyenty Thoueehd
Streets Under thedSky was published as a one-volume trilogy.
7. In reference to a new pub of which he approves, the City
of London Yeoman, Davis comments, "would that all owners of
pubs would provide us, the drinking public, with
environments as satisfying and acceptable in new pubs" (21)
and considers that in general, English pubs are "probably
the most civilised social-drinking environment yet produced
anywhere" (3). Davis admires pubs and identifies himself as
a customer.

8. Twenty Thoueend Streets Under the Sky (London: Hogarth,

 

1987 [f.p. 1935]), 16. Subsequent references to all three
of the trilogy's novels are from this edition and will be

cited in the text.

187

188
9. Because she is working with names that vary slightly
from pub to pub, her category for the saloon bar and lounge
is "Lounge/parlour/‘best' room" (46).
10. "Deposited" is Hey's term, and not inaccurate; I use
"permitted" intentionally, to suggest the level of welcome
that would have been accorded to women in any area of the
pub. “When Hamilton describes the first appearance of Jenny
and her friend, he refers to their "quaint chaperonage" of
each other; as remarkable as they are, two prostitutes in
the Saloon Lounge, even they perceive the need for not
entering alone.
11. "The Saloon Bar Society: Patrick Hamilton's Fiction in
the 19308," in The 1930ez A Chellehge to Orthodoey (London &
New York: Harvester/Barnes & Noble, 1978), 123.
12. "Patrick Hamilton's Novels" 7 September 1951, 564.
13. File Report 1491, dated 5 November 1942.
Interestingly, the attached list of pubs included in the
study lists the Fitzroy Tavern, alone under the geographic
heading of "Euston."
14. Translated by Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996), 24.
15. Hugh David, The_§iteroviehe (London: Michael Joseph,
1988), 158-59.
16. Spectator 28 December 1956, 930.
17. Mehoiregef the Fortiee (London: Cardinal, 1988 [f.p.
1965]), xv.

189
18. "Literature, Lying and Sober Truth: Attitudes to the
Work of Patrick Hamilton and Sylvia Townsend Warner," in
Writing and RediceTieh, ed. John Lucas (London & New York:
Longman, 1996), 222. Subsequent references cited in text.
19. Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939-4; (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 66.
20. Dan Davin, Closing Times (London: Oxford U Press,
1975), 22.
21. B. Hamilton 110, calculation repeated in French 190.
22. Quoted in Hewison, 66.
23. David does not offer this summary as his own view, but
rather as the kind of sentimentalizing too many people--both
those who were part of Fitzrovia and those who were not--
have indulged in.
24. Not only is Jenny's story briefer, and only loosely
tied to the central location of the Midnight Bell, but
Hamilton cannot muster the same sympathy for--or
identification with--her character that are obviously felt
for Bob and Ella. A fuller discussion of Jenny and her

story appears in the next chapter.

Chapter 6

HAMILTON: A "FIRST-CLASS FELLOW TRAVELLER?"

My chapter title comes from Terry Eagleton, that
monument of the British Left, who thus entitled--without the
question mark--his review of Sean French's biography.1
Marxism or, more generally, Leftist politics, constitutes
one of the most important concepts for Hamilton studies but,
curiously, encircles only his least-interesting literary
production. The main literary focus for this chapter is
necessarily Impromptu in Moribundia (1939), which Brian
McKenna accurately labels Hamilton's "one explicitly Marxist
novel," ("Confessions 240), but The Siege of Pleasure and
The Plains of Cement are discussed as informative examples
of how politics and novel-writing interconnected for

Hamilton.

CRITICAL ISSUES

Ideologically-motivated critics, including McKenna,
Andy Croft, and Peter Widdowson, are generally the most
committed to paying attention to Hamilton's work; at times,
they have been the only critics disposed to do so. In the
same kind of paradox that makes Hamilton's political

commitments important but not productive of his best

190

191
literary output, however, these critics, while very properly
taking an interest in an often-overlooked and talented
writer, do not produce commentary calculated to draw new
readers to Hamilton's work. Either they are writing
strictly for the already-converted (politically speaking) or
their commentary focuses on Hamilton's politics to the
exclusion of his literary merits. To put this another way,
Hamilton's most interesting fiction is not produced by his
undeniable commitment to Leftist politics; when the only
critics writing about Hamilton are determined to emphasize
his politics, they necessarily miss, or even misrepresent,
Hamilton's achievements.

Having said that, however, I must add that one of the
most perceptive critics of Hamilton's fiction is Arnold
Rattenbury, who also has Marxist affiliations. What makes
Rattenbury so insightful, in part, is that he eschews both
the kind of automatic response Raymond Williams complained
about and the sometimes-casual sweeping judgments of people
like Eagleton, who Rattenbury describes as "that ubiquitous
professor" (227). Eagleton's review of French's biography,
which was headlined on the cover of The London Review ef
hedge as "Everybody's Favourite Sad Stalinist Drunk," annoys
Rattenbury considerably. He complains about Eagleton's
triviality for much of the review, and about his political
correctness. When Eagleton finally gets serious, Rattenbury
says, "it is too late. Eagleton, the layout man, the

journal both of them work for--Media and Academe--have

192
connived at Hamilton's trivialisation and belittlement"
(227).

The final result of this attitude--smugly complacent
university Leftism--is that while a critic whose ideological
motivation is explicit, Peter Widdowson, makes a too-small
claim for Hamilton's work, a critic who disavows politics
aims much higher on Hamilton's behalf. Widdowson's
principal claim in "The Saloon Bar Society" is that
"Hamilton, at his best, does for pre-war England what
Isherwood's 'Berlin' novels do for Germany" (117).2
Meanwhile, John Bayley, who believes that "Hamilton's
Marxism may play a needful part in his inspiration as a
writer but it is of no Great interest to his appreciative

reader,"3

places a very high value on Hamilton's fiction.

In Bayley's view, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the_§hy's
true individuality . . . consists to a very large
extent in the dé ustation, as the French say, of
boredom: excruciating, fascinating, endless banality,
interspersed--not varied--with a pathos so homely and
total that it brings tears to the eyes. Beckett and
Pinter have nothing on Patrick Hamilton at his best: in
fact, beside him they seem as mannered and formulaic as
the Jacobean dramatists do after Shakespeare. (6)

Since scholarly study proceeds by forging connections with

previous work, this paradox creates problems for anyone who

wants to advocate Hamilton's work without placing the

politics first. The largest body of criticism on Hamilton

193
emphasizes his Leftist affiliations, but does his work a
disservice by minimizing its value. To connect with those
who have asserted the worth of Hamilton's fiction requires
assembling an eclectic body of mostly minor critical pieces,
many of them reviews.

The lack of agreement on Marxism's role in Hamilton's
work is hardly surprising, considering the lack of agreement
about the extent of his real-life involvement in the CP.
While there are some critics who casually attribute party
membership to him, those most likely to know say he never
joined. Sir Kenneth Robinson, a Marxist friend of
Hamilton's, told Jones in an interview that Hamilton " 'was
not a joiner' " (191), of political parties or any other
group. Bruce Hamilton claims that his brother "never became
a party member, or any sort of an activist" (81), a view
that Andy Croft corroborates.

This, of course, raises the question, why not? It is
true, I believe, that Hamilton would have made a curious
member of a political movement structured around large
groups, masses of people. A determined individualist, he
fits oddly with an aggregate mentality. It is irrefutable,
in any case, that Hamilton did things his own way, Marxism
included. Even those most adamant about Marxism's
significance for Hamilton's life and work are forced to
admit that he did not adhere to any party line. In his
review, Eagleton puts it like this: "though his Marxism was

certainly idiosyncratic--what other Communist cheered on the

 

194

invasion of Suez?--it was a good deal more central to his
literary vision than his biographer's resolute
depoliticising of him allows. . . . Hamilton retained some
bizarre version of his leftist faith until the end" (12).

If Marxism was "central to his literary vision" (12),
Eagleton makes no move to suggest how this might be true.
In turning to Hamilton's fiction, I will examine the
political qualities of Hamilton's most Marxist-oriented
novels. Hamilton's work is the best place to seek answers
to these questions about politics and literary value in that
work. Rather than imposing a preformed model on his
fiction, it is more profitable to examine what is in the

novels themselves.

PUBS, PROSTITUTES, AND POLITICS

Shortly before his quasi-official conversion to
Marxism, Hamilton was following his long-established
interest in the submerged classes; he was planning a book
about a prostitute. This project was conceived as an
economic expose about the pressures on servants which make
them vulnerable to prostitution. This conception of the
project, however, is very different from the resulting short

middle novel of Twenty Thoueend Streets Under the Sk . In

 

May of 1927, he was already describing his idea to his
brother; it was to be "a novel 'about both servants and
harlots (possibly the slow transformation of the one into

the other)‘ . . . a 'kind of Mrs Warren's Profession brought

195
up to date', an expose of the economic exploitation of
working-class women" (French 119-20).
Later, early in 1928, he wrote to his brother that "
'the only book of importance on my horizon is the prostitute
one' " and he planned to write two novels simultaneously, "
'slowly constructing the prostitute one, and writing another

short one for publication' " (French 90). "The short one"

 

was a novel about pubs, the "rollicking little masterpiece"
that became The Midnight Be_i. In the planning stages,
then, The Siege of Pleasure was to be an important novel
illuminating Leftist political doctrine, while The Midnight
heii was to be short and entertaining. The final products,
however, do not match those projections. There is a marked
contrast between the explicitly Marxist conception Hamilton
began with and the bourgeois novel he ultimately published
as The Siege of Pleasure.

Hamilton is far more compelling on the subject of Bob's
life than he is on Jenny's, and the part of Jenny's life
that receives the most insightful treatment is her drinking
problem rather than the larger economic forces allegedly
acting upon her. In the end, Jenny's personal qualities are
more responsible for her fate than is her socio-economic
position. The Siege of Pleasure never justifies Jenny or
her casual cruelty to men, especially Bob, but it does an
effective job of examining her abrupt descent into
alcoholism. In other words, the individual consciousness

and addiction receive far more convincing treatment than

196
that provided for economic forces acting upon a vulnerable
servant-class girl.

Jenny's character--in the sense of her own inner
character or personality--is singled out as reprehensible,
missing qualities that good people, such as Bob and Ella,
possess. 'The cards, of course, are stacked against her from

the beginning, for her story follows The Midnight Bell, in

 

which Hamilton shows all too clearly her lack of integrity
and other failings. Because the time frame for The Siege of
Pleasure is mostly before and very slightly after the events

of The Midnight BeTT, rather than synchronous, we do not get

 

to see the relationship with Bob from Jenny's point of view.
While sympathetic to her plight in some ways, the novel's
judgements on her character remain sufficiently harsh as to
undercut our sympathy for her.

The glass of port may have set the events in motion,
but Jenny was ripe for such a fate anyway, as the novel
makes plain. She is not excused from responsibility for her
personal failings, but blamed squarely for them:

Probably there was never any doubt of Jenny's social

destiny, but can it not at least be said that that

glass of port unlocked her destiny? Her ignorance, her
shallowness, her scheming self-absorption, her vanity,
her callousness, her unscrupulousness--all these
qualities--in combination with her extreme prettiness
and her utter lack of harmony with her environment--

were merely waiting and accumulating in heavy suspense

197
in the realms of respectability to be plunged down into
the realms where they rightly belonged: and a single
storm, lasting no longer than six hours, achieved this.
(329)
It would take an unusually strong exposition of the forces
acting upon Jenny to counteract this really damning catalog
of character traits. In fact, the strongest force exposed
in the novel is a tendency to alcoholism, and were those
character faults in abeyance, Jenny would not have had her
chance at that fatal glass of port. The novel builds up to
her first exposure, takes readers carefully through that
first night of drinking, then describes how Jenny's reaction
to it is peculiarly her own; that is, rather than being
turned off drink by its calamitous effects, she consciously
chooses to pursue its risks and rewards in the future.
Jenny's exposure to alcohol is preceded by her thoughts
on the subject, as clear a statement of the Hamilton one-
false-step-leads-to-ruin philosophy as any of his novels
provide.
Jenny had inherited from her mother what her mother
called "a horror of drink." She knew that so soon as a
"taste" was acquired, ruin followed in clearly
discernible stages. The danger lay in once starting: a
single drink had been known to lead to ruin. On the
other hand she had no desire to be fanatical, and for
one in full control of herself a "nice glass" of

something, before or after a meal, could do no harm.

198

(264-65)

Thus Jenny, at eighteen, foresees the danger awaiting her in
very melodramatic terms ("ruin"). Her decision to join the
others in drinking stems from her desire to fit in, her
highly favorable impression of the saloon lounge, and the
kind of rationalization--a "nice glass" that could do no
harm--people often call on when they want to do something
that goes against previously-held principles. As Bob came
to a new theory of money in order to begin withdrawing his
savings, Jenny comes to a new theory of drink.

Jenny's understanding of the risks of alcohol
foreshadows how completely she will fall to its charms.
Strengthening the effect is the language Hamilton uses to
describe her first drink, language that parallels
contemporary medical understanding of cocaine's effect on
the body: "It was like the effect on the body of good news,
without the good news--a delicious short cut to that
inconstant elation which was so arduously won by virtue from
the everyday world" (271). Jenny's feelings become even
more positive the next morning, when she has something on
her conscience that she would prefer to forget. Scotch,
although at first she hates the taste of it, helps wash away
her fears about the road accident:

It seemed to trickle down and heat and awaken every

little cell and channel with its brisk medicining. It

was like what she had felt last night--a little nicer

if anything. Last night it had been like the feeling

199

of good news without the good news. Now it was like

the news that her bad news was not such bad news after

all. (321)

The presentation of burgeoning addiction means that
alcoholism, rather than general economic pressures, seem
most responsible for Jenny's slide into prostitution.
Hamilton considered "A Glass of Port" as a title for Jenny's
novel, and he emphasizes that first glass of port in the
novel's summary of Jenny's initiation into prostitution.

The drink itself is the catalyst: " 'All through a glass of
port,’ Jenny, the girl of the streets, had said. She had
said it in jest, but who shall decline to surmise that she
had not stumbled upon the literal truth?" (329).

Economic factors are not left out of The Siege of
Pleasure; but they are subordinated to the other factors of
personal qualities and alcoholism. The allusions to
economic pressures are illuminating. Their routine quality
suggests that Hamilton's reconstitution of Marxist ideas
into fiction is only partially successful. The fictional
milieu he was so gifted at creating finally takes precedence
over the abstract political ideas introduced. As ideas,
these economic allusions appear, rather inertly, and are
immediately undermined by reference to some personal
attribute or deliberate decision.

For example, when her "gentleman" takes her to a pub
the morning after the accident, he is very nonchalant about

her job. Can't she telephone? Send a wire? And is it a

200

job worth keeping, anyway? Jenny, enjoying the pub's fire,
the drink he bought her, and the cigarette he lit for her,
thinks that

he would never understand. He was just a "gentleman"--

an idler without knowledge of the laws governing

workers. She took another sip, and looked wretchedly

at the decayed, wanly lit fountain. She ought to have

gone by now. But she couldn't leave this fire just for

a moment. (320)
For these ideas to be more than an automatic response or
mere gesture, Jenny would have to be more governed by those
laws than she is. While mention was made during the course
of the story of her tedious and difficult labor as a
servant, Jenny only worked in that capacity for a few days.
To be precise, she worked one Thursday evening and one
Friday. The idea of being a fashion model is tempting when
Andy first mentions it to her, and she is much impressed by
the leisure of her "gentleman friend," but these things are
explained as expressions of her personal vanity.
Notwithstanding these quickly sketched socio-economic
aspects, Jenny is described, in this concluding section, as
having "resolved to abandon herself to the pleasures and
perils of drink" (329). Her decision, the novel insists, is
based on her strange affinity with alcohol. It is not a
result of her subaltern position in a capitalist society,
which is driving her into prostitution (although the latter

presumably would be closer to Hamilton's stated intent in

201
writing the novel).

The temptations offered to Jenny by this "gentleman"
appeal to her for reasons that return us, once again, to her
shallow personality and desire for alcohol. He tempts Jenny
by offering her lunch at the Clarendon. Jenny immediately
leaps on the most superficial aspects: "that swell place at
Hammersmith! . . .That would be something to tell 'em. What
would Violet think of that?" (322). He further offers her
ten pounds cash, and to take her to "the pictures." This
manner of spending her day is contrasted with the drudgery
of being a servant--"and the alternative to go back, and
plead lying excuses, and wash dirty dishes, and make beds,
and cook!" (323)--but what settles the matter for Jenny is
not her oppressive life as a servant, but the chance to show
off to others and, inevitably, the opportunity to drink
more. As the scene ends, her prevaricating turns into
acceptance. That acceptance, significantly, takes the form
of another drink: " 'That's better,‘ he said. 'Will you
have another now?‘ 'All right,‘ she said. 'Ta' " (323).

While The Siege of Pleeehre provides one way to measure
the effects of Hamilton's politics upon his fiction, because
of its explicitly near-Marxist conception, The Plains of
Cement offers another sort of opportunity. Hamilton's road
accident, in January 1932, temporarily halted his literary
production; when he resumed writing, it was to work on The
Plains ef Cement. In between the accident and that novel

was his much-discussed conversion to Marxism. 1933 was the

202
year of his brother's trip to the Soviet Union, which marks
the time Hamilton became seriously immersed in Marxist
theories, periodicals, and activities. The trilogy's final
novel, then, is his first after his conversion; it ought to
reveal something about how his new political philosophy
affected his work.

There is no clear consensus on this; like much of the
discussion of Hamilton's politics, it seems to hinge on
previous conviction. Brian McKenna voices the Marxist line
when, taking his cue from Peter Widdowson, he first
complains of the emptiness of Hamilton's pub verisimilitude
in the first two novels. He finds a new value appearing in
The Plains of Cement, however, that can be attributed to
Hamilton's new-found Marxism:

This stricture applies less fittingly, it seems to me,

to the third volume of the trilogy, The Plains of

Cement--written after Hamilton's intellectually

enriching conversion to Marxism in 1933--where London

and its pub world are metaphorized to render the human
alienation at the heart of the crisis of capitalism in

Britain in the 19308. ("Confessions" 231)

McKenna's interpretation overlooks the fact the Hamilton's
conversion was not a sudden and dramatic shift. The Siege
f Pleasure, as we have seen, was very Marxist in its
conception; McKenna, however, lumps it in some broad
category of pre-conversion. Andy Croft, while committed to

revealing the value of interwar Leftist fiction, sees it a

203
bit differently than McKenna. After quoting the conclusion
of The Midnighi Bell ("for there is this about men . . ."),
Croft observes that
This was the argument of all Hamilton's fiction, the
enduring capacity of ordinary people--the common
people--for optimism, generosity and goodness. Though
the trilogy was begun before Hamilton had any interest
in politics, he was a committed Marxist by the time he
completed it. Yet there is no new tone of hectoring
"politics" in The Plaine of Cehehh, the third volume.
Ella's story is pitched at exactly the same level of
mundane detail, emotionally charged rituals of trivial
dialogue and small-scale tragedy. Marxism had only
confirmed Hamilton's faith in human personality and
potential, endorsed his interest in the way working-
class society was informed by received lower-middle-
class ideas, convention and idiom, increased his
fascination for the fine calibrations of every day
class consciousness and class conflict. (145)
McKenna's view and Croft's are obviously incompatible.
McKenna finds the third novel substantially different from
its predecessors, while Croft finds it to be a continuation
of themes and techniques found in the earlier novels. While
Croft praises the third novel for a lack of "hectoring
'politics,’ " McKenna sees the politics as a tool for
rendering global significance to what is trivial in the

first two pub novels. McKenna, however, trivializes

204
Hamilton's work in ways similar to those Rattenbury
complains about in Eagleton's case: wanting to find that the
post-Marxist novel shows a great leap forward, McKenna feels
the need to belittle its predecessors.

Considering what is in the novels themselves, rather
than presuming a change in their quality based on knowledge
of Hamilton's "conversion" to Marxism, one can see how
skillfully Hamilton makes use of what readers already know
from the first novel to demonstrate the fatal isolation of
London's Ellas and Bobs. Croft is right to say the story is
pitched at the same level; added power is gained by its
interconnections with The Midnight Bell. The best place to
look at politics in The Plains of Cement is through the
character of Ella's stepfather, Mr. Prosser. It is around
him that Hamilton supplied most of the economic and
political rhetoric.4 It is noteworthy, then, that Ella's
stepfather is judged by standards that suggest however much
the abstract and political may have fueled Hamilton's plans
for this novel, the individual and personal end up taking
precedence.

Mr. Prosser is judged negatively, a judgment we learn
of before we actually meet the character. For Ella, whose
judgment we are given no reason to doubt, he is a bad
person. Neither she nor her mother can take any
satisfaction in her mother's remarriage; in fact, the
subject is the biggest obstacle to their otherwise congenial

relationship. For Ella,

205
to hear her mother being called Mrs. Prosser--that was
to say after a fiend in human shape--was often more
than Ella could bear, and she would be on the verge of
crying out upon her mother for her responsibility in
the error.‘ Her mother, however, bore such an
apologetic and uncomprehending air about the matter,
and had obviously so completely forgotten the variety
of motives which seven or eight years ago had prompted
her to commit the act, that Ella always reproached
herself for her resentment, and remained silent. (390)
Marriage to him was an "error," one which presumably is
responsible for much of Mrs. Prosser's "apologetic and
uncomprehending air." What we see of her in the novel is
pathetic; timid and mousy to an extreme, she shyly
encourages Ella regarding Mr. Eccles in hopes that financial
well-being would allow Ella to rise above the circumstances
in which her mother is trapped.
In Mr. Prosser's defense, Ella's mother feebly offers
the notion that "he was not as Bad as he was Painted," a
question the authorial voice takes up: "Whether, actually,
Mr. Prosser was, or was not, as Bad as he was Painted (by
Ella at any rate) was another matter" (391). This is
followed by authorial commentary on how larger economic
forces had driven Mr. Prosser down, from his former small
eminence as a saddler with an independent business until
just after the first World War, to his present miserable

situation as an unemployed laborer. This, according to the

206
omniscient voice, is owing to "the laws governing the benign
progress of capital" which "had by slow and painful methods
pinched and thrust him from the ranks of the petty-
bourgeoisie into the ranks of the proletariat" (391). He
has never gotten over this descent, and is a very sour and
unpleasant man:
there was thus much to excuse him, but not enough to
account for his invincible and chronic silence and
savagery, which he wreaked upon his wife, and which
arose, perhaps, less from sheer distress than from a
vindictive sense of vanished superiority. Ella,
uncomprehending of social causation, saw no excuse.
(391)
Two voices are brought to bear on the question of Mr.
Prosser's socio-economic "excuse": the authorial voice,
which says there was "not enough" excuse in the
circumstances of his life in a capitalist society, and
Ella's own voice, who puts aside "social causation" and
judges him from her own simple, virtuous point of view. It
is as a mean-spirited person, not as a victim of a corrupt
socio-economic system, that Mr. Prosser is finally judged.
Further damnation is brought on Mr. Prosser's head by
his hypocritical relations with the prostitute who lives in
the top-floor flat. Mr. Prosser
had been known to publicly storm at her and Show her Up
(as the phrase was) from his landing, although, oddly

enough, he had himself acquired the sinister reputation

207

of having been Seen with her in a public-house not far

away, and even of having been in the early days one of

the actual smuggled concupiscent gentlemen in the

nightly Takings-Place Above--but this was gossip. (454)
Dismissing it as "gossip" is a half-hearted gesture; we are
not meant to disbelieve it based on that description. After
Mr. Prosser is taken ill, the prostitute takes charge of the
flat, the invalid, and Ella's mousy mother. Eventually, it
is she who brings Ella the (bad) news that Mr. Prosser is
better. She comes to the Midnight Bell to announce his
recovery with great satisfaction, causing Ella much pain by
forcing her into a false attitude of agreeing with the
wonderful nature of the news. The prostitute, on the
strength of this good news, gets drunk, and is picked up by
a "stout middle-aged gentleman" (493), with whom she will
(Ella imagines) return to her flat above the Prosser's, thus
closing the circle yet again.

While the novel records Mr. Prosser's demoralizing
treatment under the socio-economic system, it finally
insists that he be judged for his personal failings. Those
larger forces, undeniably malignant and at work, do not
exculpate him. At the same time, Ella's rather capitalist
conviction, arrived at reluctantly but inevitably, that his
surprising £500 legacy is worth more than he is, is not
derided or mocked, but endorsed by the novel. The Plains of
Cement, Hamilton's first post-Marxist novel, does not mark a

sudden deviation from his previous path as a result of his

208
new political philosophy. If anything, it shows how
committed he was to exposing social ills person by person,

rather than in terms of masses of any kind.

ON THE PLANET OF MORIBUNDIA

The only overtly Marxist novel Hamilton wrote,
Impromptu in Moribundie (1939) ought to reveal the clearest
version of Hamilton's politics. Looked at carefully, it
yields up what can be described as, at best, an ambivalent
verdict on the intersection of Hamilton's literary strivings
and political commitments.

Impromptu in Moribundie is generally described as a
"Marxist fantasy," but this label, while accurate, does not
adequately capture the work. It is, as Peter Widdowson
writes, a "fable"; alternatively, it is a dystopia. While
not a particularly elaborate example, it is also science
fiction of the H. G. Wells stripe (although Wells is one of
the writers Hamilton's novel takes to task). The novel's
beginning sets the tone and suggests what it takes from each
of the above-named categories:

It is now generally known that, after the general

controversy and outburst attendant upon John Sadler's

initial heroic journey to another planet, and later the
partially fruitless attempt of the Gosling brothers, it
had been decided by Crowmarsh to keep my departure
hidden from the press and unknown to the general

public. This was as much for Crowmarsh's own personal

209

safety as for reasons of scientific detachment. (1)
The allusion to top-secret scientific advances, the
references to other known space travellers, the suggestion
of danger and sabotage, all these are intended to provide
authenticity and significance.

The plot of Moribundie revolves around the unnamed
narrator's journey to a planet named "Moribundia," and the
novel details what the unnamed narrator finds there. His
destination was deliberately selected by Crowmarsh, the
scientist who invented the spaceship Asteradio, rather than

5 Once

being the chance result of a random hurl into space.
the narrator arrives, he discovers that "Moribundia" is in
fact very like England. Through a series of adventures--on
buses, in posh hotels, at men's clubs, at "Seabrightstone"
on a illicit weekend--the narrator learns many lessons
relevant for the English. Most of these lessons are
political in nature, although the narrator also forms
impressions of science, religion, and literature while he is
on "Moribundia." Advertising is one of the more prominent
objects of satire; Moribundians live as if they were in
advertisements, saying and doing the foolish things people
are made to say and do in ads. While this may point out the
complete unreality of advertising, hardly anyone would be
confused by the difference between advertising's "reality"
and everyday life.

The two most prominent devices in the novel are

backwards spellings and the "ballooning" speeches of

210

Moribundians, in which their ideas appear in cartoon
balloons, plainly visible above their heads. Hamilton's
more usual defense of "his" people's enforced reliance on
stale cliches for communication is given a rather nasty spin
on Moribundia through these balloon speeches. Indeed, there
is a problem throughout the novel distinguishing between the
perpetrators and the victims of these Moribundian
monstrosities-—there is no sympathy for those who "balloon"
their speech, when surely it is simply an exaggerated
version of Ella and her truisms.6

The political theme of life on Moribundia is
"Unchange!" and the middle class--in its stereotypical
manifestation as little men in bowler hats-~18 blamed for
the moribund state of affairs. Throughout the novel,
Hamilton strives mightily for authenticity, primarily
through repeated references to the "well-known" facts of his
case. This technique--referring after the fact to
ostensibly well-known but actually fictional/mythical
published sources--is one Hamilton will return to in the
Gorse novels, when once again he finds himself compelled to
establish authenticity externally, rather than creating it
on the page. Moribundia, in spite of these attempts, lacks
the verisimilitude of his more realistic novels.

Much of the novel can strike the reader as schoolboy
humor: undeniably clever, but soon irritating because it is
both undisciplined and juvenile. The novel takes what can

only be described as cheap shots at famous people. James

211
Jeans and Henry Newbolt are the sources of the novel's two
epigraphs; both come under fire in the novel under their
reverse-spelled names. Modernist writers are given the same
sort of treatment; Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence, among others
are chastised for their sterility, which is presented as
nothing other than a sign of the times. The results are
fairly typical of how things go wrong in Moribundie, for
Hamilton is discussing a very valid complaint against the
Modernist writers--their excessive subjectivity and inward-
turning gaze--but the complaint is made in such a whining
and fretful manner it can hardly achieve its purpose.

A consistent problem, already mentioned, is that the
novel tries to have it both ways by sending up and
reaffirming at the same time, making the human object of the
satire insufficiently well-defined. For example, the
portrait of cockneys and the "hopeless" Juggins family is
intended to take umbrage at the stereotypes rampant about
working class people. Cockney humor is dissected, as are
those ideas about how working class people will only ruin
good things (should they ever get any). The Juggins family
actually does keep coal in its bathtub and breaks up the
piano to use it for firewood. While on the one hand, this
shows up the ridiculousness of these middle-class ideas, it
also works as mockery of the working-class family. The
novel's ambivalent attitude towards Cockneys is evident when
we meet our first cockney on earth, before the narrator sets

off on his journey: "The door was opened by the famous and

212
incongruous Albert Fry, that curious Cockney figure so
devoted to Crowmarsh, and bustling always so buoyantly,
naively, and possessively about the outer fringe of his
master's mysteries" (9). Surely this is itself a
condescending and stereotypical portrait of a cockney.
Overall, I believe the target of Hamilton's satire is not
always distinguished carefully enough; it is as if he gets
so caught up in the fun he loses sight of where the tar is
flying.

The principal key to understanding Moribundia's
relationship to England is itself seriously flawed because
of a similar ambivalence or inconsistency. Their
relationship, the mechanism that drives Hamilton's
narrative, is stated plainly at the end of the second
chapter: "I had by that time gleaned the inner secret of
Moribundia--the land in which the ideals and ideas of our
world, the striving and subconscious wishes of our time, the
fictions and figments of our imagination, are calm, cold
actualities" (42).7 Clearly, a concrete manifestation of
abstract ideas provides the opportunity to critique them
differently, to lay out their implications and reveal their
true ugliness. The actuality of Moribundian life permits
Hamilton to do some interesting things with subconscious
ideas; for example, the notion that wealth is a sign of
virtue, never expressly stated or even fully formulated in
England, is manifested on Moribundia by money magically

appearing overnight in everyone's pockets according to his

213
or her desserts.
The problem is that the central theme self-destructs as
a result of its very actuality, for this grants a literal
truth to these oddities. That literal truth pulls against
the satire, particularly the dominant satire directed
against advertising. On the subject of hotels, for example,
the narrator observes that
It is in keeping with the general character of
Moribundia, which, as I have said, is the land of
ideals made concrete, that its hotels are everything
that they proclaim themselves to be. Up there, if a
hotel calls itself the "Grand," the "Splendid," the
"Royal" or the "Palace," it is because it is, in cold
fact, really grand, really splendid, or really
furnishes an appropriate setting for kings and queens.
(86)
If all things in Moribundia truly are what they claim to be,
then it is hard to make much of a case against them. Is the
charge laid against advertising that it is specious,
misleading, and unrealistic? Then Moribundia's quite
literal truth-in-advertising neatly refutes that charge.
The disjunction between grandiose claim and jejune reality,
one of the great faults of modern society, disappears on
Moribundia.
One of the novel's most noticeable devices, the
backwards spellings, offers an opportunity to use Hamilton's

first, and most lighthearted, novel to form a judgment on

214
Moribundia, his most political novel. Nearly everyone who
comments on Moribundie cites instances of the backwards
spellings; they are, along with the balloons, one of the
most striking surface features of the novel. The question
remains, however, how the reader should view such atrocities
as "gnikrow ssalc," "Drofxo Teerts," and "Teivos Noinu."8
Hamilton has provided the key himself, in Mondey Morning:
the political spirit expressed in Moribundia is enthusiastic
but immature.

Anthony Forster, the young protagonist in Menday
Morning is treated sympathetically, but he is gently mocked
for his silliness, the schoolboy residue that he retains as
he enters the adult portion of his life. His ideas are
often stereotypical and sometimes outright laughable, as
when he thinks about his future en route back to London
after the death of his aunt: "Not that Anthony did not
relish a bitter fight for fame. But he did not like this
way of setting about it. A far nicer way of doing it would
be to starve somewhere, in a garret, writing immortal
things, and being free. Even being found dead one morning
in the red, new sunlight. . . ." (88, text ellipses).

Before we ever see Anthony in the novel, we are shown
his room in Hove. Its contents are described at length in
order to give an impression of his character and, to a
lesser extent, of his mode of living. There can be no doubt
that he is held up as an example of a schoolboy not yet

matured into adulthood:

215

And by the bed was a small wicker table. On this
a chess-board, a box of chessmen, Staunton's Chess
Handbook, Wisden's Cricket Almanack, and ”The Cloister
and the Hearth."

The front cover of the last was open, and there
was an inscription on the fly-leaf. This was not an
ordinary inscription. It would be gathered from some
quaint turns in the phrasing, and the spelling, and
numerous elaborate curls and flourishes in the
lettering, that the writer was giving his impression of
what he though, perhaps, a very old-fashioned
inscription might have been like. It was certainly no
success as this.

First, the writer's great, unbridled delight had
been to alter each available "8" into "f," which
peculiarity, to begin with, an old-fashioned
inscription never had. And then, having tasted a
substitution or two, and found them good, the writer
had lost his head quite, and turned even each sibilant
"c" into "f."

"Thif book," it went, "if the fole property of one
Mafter Anthony Charterif Forfter, and waf purchafed by
him in the yeare of Grafe One Thoufand, Nine Hundredf
and Twenty One, fhortly after leaving Weftminfter
Fchool, where he refeived an college education af
befitf a young gentleman.

"A moft model young perfon, loved by all hif

216

friendf, refpected by all hif acquaitenfef, and gone in

fear of by hif enemief.

"May hif life prove an highly merrie one, and
pleafaunt, and fucfefful."

"Fucfefful" was surely a triumph. The author
might have done well to finish on "Fucfefful." But he
could not forbear one final poke,in the tombstone
manner--"Not gone before but loft." (3-4)

Anthony's silly play with language, given in plentiful
detail, is one sign of his immaturity. A nice young man,
yes, but not particularly outstanding in intellect,
maturity, or insight.

A final passage from Mondey Morning makes the
connection clear between Anthony's "f" game and other idle
and foolish ways of passing the time:

A train came in on adjacent rails, and Anthony
played the game of imagining that his own train was
moving. Then he played the game of F with the
advertisements in the carriage.

"Doctor Collif Browne."

"Haftingf and Ft. Leonardf."

"When Knightf were bold

They all wore armour.
Nightf hot or cold,
Wear Fwan Pyjama."
The last did not adapt itself well. He tried

another game which had occupied him a good deal lately-

217
-the game of turning upside down, or reading backwards.
Doctor Collis Browne was good--"Enworb Silloc
Rotcod."
And Swan Pyjama--"Amajyp Naws."
Something said that the train was about to start.
and five minutes later the train moved out. (86)
Here is backwards spelling explicitly identified as a
mindless game played by a young man killing time waiting
while for his train to depart. These passages, taken
together, render their own verdict upon one of Moribundie's
most prominent devices. Backwards spelling is amusing,
distracting, but most significantly, it is juvenile. Why
would Hamilton, almost fifteen years after Mondey Morning,
choose just this cumbersome trick to use in his only
explicitly Marxist work? His Marxism is perhaps not
entirely grown up.

Evidence for this interpretation can be found outside
of the literature as well. Hamilton's interest in Marxism,
while not uncommon for someone of generation, of course had
its own specific origin, one which reveals a great deal
about Hamilton's attitude in embracing it. Bruce Hamilton
first came to be interested in Marxism through a short-lived
scheme of learning Russian in order to be a translator. The
language idea fell by the wayside, but he made a trip to the
Soviet Union. He shared his enthusiasm with Hamilton, who
promptly began reading Das Kapital and whatever other

Marxist books he could get his hands on. Meanwhile, Bruce

218

Hamilton, back in London, sent Leftist periodicals to his
brother, then living in Norfolk. In a letter thanking his
brother for sending copies of Labour Monthly and other
Leftist periodicals, Hamilton describes his new-found
enthusiasm in very telling terms:

"What delights they are! Needless to say, I propose to

contribute to all regularly . . . and really believe

that one may have found some form of adult replica of

the weekly bliss of the Magnet or gee!" (Jones 194).
How adult the replica is remains open to judgement; the
failure of Impromptu in Moribundie makes clear that, however
interesting Hamilton may have found Marxism, it did not make

a productive basis for his fiction.

NOTES

1. Terry Eagleton, "First-Class Fellow Traveller," review
of Patrick Hamilton: A Life, by Sean French, London Reyiey
of Books 2 December 1993, p. 12.

2. I would argue, in contrast, that Hamilton's fiction--and
not just his best--does far more than Isherwood's rather
self-regarding stories.

3. Review of Hogarth edition of Tyenty Thousand Streets
Under the Sk , London Review of Booke 1 October 1987, 6.
4. The other place Hamilton seems to have followed his
politics is in the introduction of the upper-middle class
characters with whom Ella interviews for the India job.
They are nothing short of a caricature, and provide the
least convincing possible escape for Ella. Ella's brief
encounter with them, rude and unpleasant people that they
are, makes little impression in the novel. It is not
possible to believe in these people.

5. "If only it had been at night, if only the stars were
shining and I had been able to see where I was going, to
perceive my destination as an actuality, a solid orb,
however tiny, occupying its own position in space, I believe
I could have faced matters with greater calm. . . . One

unforgettable night Crowmarsh had actually shown me my

219

220
destination through the telescope, and I had felt very
grand, and audacious, and noble, and unutterably large; but
where was it now, and why was I feeling so unutterably
small?‘ (8).
6. Ella, in fact, can do even better than balloons when it
comes to reading Mr. Eccles' thoughts: "And because she
could read practically every thought gong on in his silly
head about five seconds or so before he uttered it she did
not have to hear his dashingly suggestive 'I de like Bubbly,
don't you?‘ (as he steered her across the traffic to a
public-house standing conveniently over the way) to be
apprized of the next trick up his sleeve--the fact that they
were about to drink champagne" (424). The ridiculous words
Mr. Eccles chooses further corroborates the aptness of the
comparison between Moribundian balloon-speak and the real-
world language of Hamilton's people; but without the mixed
signals of blame or judgment.
7. Moribundia's actual manifestation of what England
desires, secretly or openly, is also spelled out in the
context of literature. The chapter on Moribundian
literature concludes by asserting that "this concrete world
[Earth/England] is coming to grips with that ideal one
[Moribundia]" (253).
8. Their cumbersomeness is particularly noticeable in
contrast to Orwell's achievement in Nineteen eighty four:

the awkwardness of Hamilton's "gnikrow ssalc," for example,

221
becomes even more exasperating next to Orwell's graceful

"proles."

Chapter 7

"THE WHOLE POISONED NIGHTMARISH CIRCLE":
DRINKING IN HANGOVER SQUARE

He had forgotten again. He was

drunk. He was ashamed of himself.

He took another gulp at his gin.

While hengover Schere (1941) provides the basis for

variously-emphasized readings, most academic critics have
analyzed it as an indictment of political events in pre-WWII
Britain. For its many non-academic readers, the novel
survives in contemporary awareness as a crime novel or
thriller. Christopher Morley observes that "no slaughter in
fiction was ever more desirously anticipated by the average
reader than good simple George Bone's murder of the glamour-
bitch, Netta,"1 a sentiment shared by other commentators.
Hangover Sguare is also, however, a notable fictional
portrait of alcoholism. It is a stellar example of what
John W. Crowley calls "the drunk narrative: a mode of
fiction that expresses the conjunction of modernism and
alcoholism in a pervasive ideology of despair."2 In this
chapter, I first examine the frontiers of addiction as
charted by the novel, then analyze the narrative structures
used by Hamilton to re-create such key aspects of alcoholic

experience as claustrophobia, repetition, and despair.

Hangover §guare, set in Earl's Court and Brighton,

222

223
shows the phoney war period through the eyes of a pub-
crawling group of various disreputables. The central trio
is comprised of Netta Longdon, bit-part film actress; Peter,
her ex-blackshirt lover; and the protagonist, George Harvey
Bone, who nurses an obsessive love for Netta while being
treated with contempt by her and the rest of the group.
Although not affluent, these people do not work, but spend
their time drinking--in pubs, at home, at private parties,
anywhere, everywhere--and borrowing money from others.
Bone, in addition to alcoholism, depression, and his
masochistic obsession with Netta, suffers from
schizophrenia; when in his "dead" moods, he plans how he
will kill Netta. The central plot of the novel is
constituted by Bone's cyclically made, forgotten, and re-
made plans to murder her. Eventually, on the day Britain
declares war, he murders both Netta and Peter, then commits
suicide.

The phrase "hangover square" is of key importance for
the novel, marking it as pre-eminently a novel of
alcohOlism. As Bruce Hamilton notes disapprovingly, the
novel "explore[s], with such awful percipience, every shade,
every nuance, every degree in the processes of getting
intoxicated and sobering up" (96-97). He credits Patrick
Hamilton himself with coining the phrase, making a joke on
Hanover Square3 as the two walked through it (95); in the
novel, the phrase is attributed to Mickey in a parenthesis:

"('Taking a little stroll round Hangover Square'--that was

224
Mickey's crack.)."4 Mickey's role in Netta's group is
peripheral, yet, paradoxically, crucially enabling to their
imagined well-being. He appears less frequently than does
Peter, and he is absent from several significant episodes,
including the first trip to Brighton- He is, however, on
the scene just after Bone finally commits murder, and adds
to Bone's difficulties by wanting to visit Netta's flat.
Characteristically, he interprets Bone's trembling and upset
state as yet another visitation from " 'our old friend
Hangover Square' " (275).

Mickey, although only twenty-six years old, is a has-
been, whose job in Asia has ended (the novel offers no
reasons for this), leaving him "unemployed . . . [on] the
hard, frozen plains of Earl's Court" (32). His associates
value him

because, by his excesses, he put his companions in

countenance, making their own excesses seem small in

comparison. Your hangover was never so stupendous as

Mickey's, nor your deeds the night before so

‘preposterous. The follies of each individual were

forgotten, submerged in his supreme folly; by his own

disgrace he brought grace to others. For this reason,
if he tried to live soberly, and in the desperation of
his self-inflicted illness he was sometimes forced to
do this, his friends at once revealed their cold
dislike of his change of front, and by combined

chaffing and indirect bullying soon forced him to

225

return to the character in which he was of such service

to them. (32)
This description combines several 'explanations' of
alcoholism: it is a disease; but a "self-inflicted" one; yet
forced upon an unwilling Mickey by his fellows. Bone
believes, however, that Mickey shares "something of his own
private loathing of the life they were all leading, and the
same occasional, hopeless aspiration to live otherwise"
(32). It is precisely those most enmeshed in their
addiction who feel this way: Bone and Mickey can only
aspire, hopelessly and helplessly, to live apart from their
addiction. As in the epigraph I chose for this essay,
"again" and "another" are the operative words for the
alcoholic's existence, and it is that quality of experience

Hamilton has caught so well in Hangover Sguare.

FROM SOCIAL DRINKER TO DRUNK

Hamilton's meticulous presentation of Bone's
experiences--both in and out of the pub--addresses a central
task of writers interested in alcohol addiction: charting
the frontier which lies between social and addictive
consumption. At what point does drinking cease to be an
enjoyable social activity and become one's primary
occupation? This is a question not readily answered, as the
British psychiatrists Kessel and Walton note in their book,

Alcohelism:

The difference between having a drink and becoming

226
drunk depends upon the quantity of alcohol taken.
Between the drinker and the alcoholic there is another
kind of difference. It cannot be measured in amount of
alcohol nor even be shortly defined. It depends upon
intangibles, upon personality and upon opportunity,
upon circumstance and often upon chance. Yet the steps
from social to excessive drinking can be demarcated and
it is the extent of his passage along this road that
defines the alcoholic.5
Moving along a continuum of alcoholic behaviors implies a
borderland, a location where the subject's situation is some
unidentifiable shade of gray rather than predominantly light
or dark. That the difference between drinker and drunk
cannot be shortly defined lends extra significance to in-
depth fictional portrayals, like those found in Hangover
Sghare, which can enlighten through accurate representation.
Thomas Gilmore, in considering some of the risks of
addictive consumption, identifies the border between renewal
and destruction as a key issue for modern novelists:
alcohol, which in some uses seems to be a life-renewing
force, is always potentially and sometimes actually a
destructive force. When heavy drinkers themselves or
when representing characters who are, modern writers
seem particularly interested in exploring that
borderland where the renewal of life, by extending the
limits of ordinary perception or experience, impinges

on destruction or death.6

227

The shift from renewal to destruction parallels the
transition from social to alcoholic drinking. Arthur
Calder-Marshall, who actively pursued Fitzrovia's pub
culture, provides anecdotal testimony to the significance of
this issue:

I enormously enjoyed evenings at the Fitzroy, the

Marquis of Granby and the Plough, and the companionship

of painters, writers and models older than myself [an

undergraduate]. The illusion that I was at the centre

of the intellectual and artistic tavern life of the

great city was at first complete; then gradually it

began to dawn on me that the painters and writers whom

I met there were only part-time artists and their main
occupation was drinking.7
How does one make the transition from full-time artist and
social drinker to alcoholic, part-time artist? Novelists
who have the background to write convincingly of the
crossover are, as a direct result of their expertise, at
risk of being unable to do the writing. Hamilton knows this
frontier as well as anyone, and his pub novels reveal an
unusual commitment to treating the subject fully and
unsentimentally. The characters in his pub novels are fully
immersed in their own addiction; like Bone, they assuage
their shame at being drunk yet again by "[taking] another
gulp" of the drink in front of them.

In Monda Mornin , Hamilton foreshadowed the harsh

condemnation of Netta and her friends in Hangover Sguare

228
through his descriptions of what Anthony Forster, the young
protagonist of Mondey Morning, learns of "the ways of
actors" (158). Their casual appropriation of one another's
cigarettes and matches are noted, for instance, as is their
heavy drinking. The characters in Mondey Morning remain
actors who drink, while Hangover Sguare's Netta, theatrical
hanger-on and would-be actress, is a drunk. She has made
the transition to full-time drinker; the scenes in the
earlier novel reveal people in earlier stages of drinking
life, although their mores would lead quite naturally to
full-time drinking and would-be acting.
Anthony is instructed in the drinking customs of the
theatre community almost immediately after joining it. He
learnt that the first thing done with an actor is to go
and have a drink, and the next thing to have another.
And he learnt that you didn't say "Thanks awfully,"
when the actor paid for it, and suggest that you should
pay your share, but paused awhile until he said "Well--
cheerio," and then drank. And when the drink was
finished you didn't say, "Let me pay for some more
drinks now, in return," but you said, "What are you
taking?" and the actor probably said, "Bitter," and you
said "Two hitters, please," to the barmaid. And when a
third actor came in and said, "Well, what are you two
going to have?" you didn't say, "I don't think I'll
have any more. I've had two hitters already and my

head's feeling rather funny, and anyway it'll be

229

frightfully expensive for you to pay for drinks for

both of us," but you said, "I'll have another bitter, I

think." (158-S9)
By the time their play, "The Coil," goes on tour, Anthony is
conversant with these habits, drinking more and staying
abreast of the social niceties. After he joins the "middle-
salaried male members of the company" on their Sunday pub
crawl in Sheffield, he "was given four half-pints of beer
and a double whisky. Just as he had finished some quick
arithmetic, and was going to ask everybody what they would
have, 'Time' was shouted amid the bawling, and the actors
sidled mechanically out into the street, and had another
happy conference in the middle of it" (188). Then they
repair to another pub, one which serves illegally after
hours, where they drink a great deal more. After "a table
and an actor started swimming firmly for his forehead,"
(190), Anthony sets out to find his way, through the
deserted streets of Sheffield, to his "combined room." He
finally arrives, but only after an exercise in drunken
comedy, with him prancing and swaying and getting lost.
This approach has changed in Hangover Sguare, where the
results of excessive drinking are decidedly not comic, but
awful.8

The downward trend is apparent not only in the course
of each novel, but in the overall change in tone. Ten years
after M nda Mornin , Hamilton published the trilogy, Twenty

Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which is committed to pub

230

culture to the extent of being set in a pub but does not
serve principally as an expose of alcoholism. Hamilton
devoted the interval between the trilogy and hehgeyer_§ghere
to his stage play, Gaslight, the two highly-praised radio
plays, hghey with Menaces and To ThedPublic Dan er, and his
Marxist dystopia, Impromptu in Moribundie. Hangover Sgpare
marks Hamilton's return to his usual territory after an
absence of over five years, and while the pub trilogy
addresses the problem of alcoholism, the subject has become
central in Hangover §guare.

The trilogy's Bob and Jenny are clearly precursors to
Bone and Netta, but the misery of the first pair pales
before the mature form of alcoholic infatuation, which is
fatal to Bone and Netta. Alongside the deteriorating
setting and problem drinking, the central love relationship
becomes more obsessive, hopeless, and destructive. The
decline marks the characters themselves--Bone is less
functional than Bob, and Netta is more deliberately cruel
than Jenny--the 'progress' of the relationship, and the
ultimate fate of those involved. Bob loses his life savings
and most of his self respect, but can finally put his
disgrace aside and start again; for Bone, there can be no
redemption, only suicide. Bob flirts with crossing the
frontier between problem drinker and full-time drunk, but
Bone really makes the trip, never to return. He comes near
salvation more than once, but cannot survive. The very

nature of his chances for redemption indicate the

231
hopelessness of Bone's situation.

Bone's first chance to recover is during his brief
period of calm after the first trip to Brighton, when he
thinks that

he had burned his passion out. It was only just in

time. His whole health would have been wrecked if he

had gone on like that. But now the climax had come: he
had had a rest: the 'flu, and the 'dead' moods (both
brought on, he believed, by drinking and nervous
exhaustion) had receded, and he could start again. He
limited himself to two beers in the morning: had lunch
at the hotel, slept in the afternoon, had a few more

beers in the evening, and went to bed early. (212)

This is still a crushingly lonely existence, however, and
certainly a very compromised model of a sober life.
Nonetheless, he does feel better, and it is during this
period that he and John Littlejohn talk of rooming together,
an arrangement that might have changed his life permanently.
Bone returns, however, to his old cycle of heavy drinking,
'dead' moods, and misery. The pain is increased because he
is aware of his fall and what it is likely to cost him: "he
knew he was making a fool of himself: he knew he ought to
run for his life: but how could he?" (223). There is no
uncertainty regarding the stakes involved: even Bone
realizes that it is a matter of life and death for him, and
it ultimately becomes a matter of life and death for Netta

and Peter as well.

232

Bone's second glimpse of salvation is snatched even
more swiftly from him. His evening in Brighton with Eddie
Carstairs, Johnnie Littlejohn, and the famous actors marks a
turning point in his emotional life. Finally he feels
accepted and successful, and he learns that people more
substantial than Netta and Peter can value him. This is the
only time in the novel Hamilton allows Bone to be happy.
His happiness here turns out to be even more fleeting than
his pleasurable moments on the golf course, however. As
this penultimate section of the novel closes: "He flung
himself on the bed, and hid his face in his arms,
incontrollably, vastly sobbing, incontrollably, vastly
happy. And then, of course, a little later, something
snapped in his head" (259, emphasis added). Bone's mental
illness becomes increasingly difficult to shake, until,

finally, it has become inescapable.

THE TWO PUBS

The narrative of hehgever Squepe is structured to
reveal the difference, fully visible only to those who have
experienced addictive drinking, between the two co-existing
views of drinking culture: the observer-participant's and
the addict's.9 Capturing this division is crucial for any
project of recreating alcoholic existence, and Hamilton's
novel gives it full weight. The outer view of pub life can
be found elsewhere in literature; Gordon Comstock's

observation of the Crichton Arms, in Orwell's Keep the

233
Aspidistra Flying, is a characteristic example. Peering
into the crowded saloon bar, "Gordon's heart sickened. To
be in there, just to be in there! In the warmth and light,
with people to talk to, with beer and cigarettes and a girl
to flirt with!"10 It is the inner view that is so
infrequently found in British literary fiction, and
deliberately giving the view of the inside sets Hamilton
apart from his peers.

The life described so exactly in Hangover Sghare
dictates the claustrophobia of the novel, because it is a
life fully visible only to those who are trapped within it.
The two briefly-used outside perspectives in the novel, John
Littlejohn and John Halliwell, are used to illustrate this
maxim. These two voices are introduced in ways that suggest
their important structural roles; John Littlejohn appears at
the opening of the novel's fourth part, while John Halliwell
is introduced at the opening of the novel's eighth part.

Halliwell is eighteen, recently arrived in London from
Sussex, and he provides a fresh, optimistic point of view,
sorely needed by this point in the novel. He spends many of
his evenings in the saloon bar, trying "to acquire the
worldly feeling of liking and taking drink" (201) and
observing those older than himself. He is interested in
Bone's circle, envying them their apparent sophistication
and the youth which, at about age thirty, has not yet
abandoned them. He vouches for the attractions of Netta's

"dark beauty" (203) and for Bone's good nature and kindness.

234

Littlejohn, too, endorses Netta's physical appeal but
moral emptiness, and Bone's true goodness. He is a
particularly relevant and significant observer of Netta, the
bit-part film actress and theatrical-set habitué, given his
position "in the West End as accountant to Fitzgerald,
Carstairs & Scott, the well-known theatrical agents and
producers" (96). This firm is the one that Netta most longs
to be part of, and its Eddie Carstairs is the man she
pursues throughout the novel, so that John Littlejohn, when
he gives his opinions of Netta, speaks not only for himself,
Bone's only friend, but also for the specific part of the
theatrical world Netta most covets. As the firm's
accountant, Johnnie is uncontaminated by the corrupting
elements of the theatrical business, uninterested in seeking
parts or posturing self-aggrandizingly, while his close
participation with the business, both with its owners and
its clients, is demonstrated thoroughly in the novel. Of
his personal fitness to judge character, the omniscient
voice is clear that Littlejohn, "though a kind-hearted and
polite man, was no fool: anything but it" (95), and when he
meets Netta, he at once takes her measure. Littlejohn,
then, is the witness best suited to judge Netta, to endorse
the conclusions drawn from Bone's confused ideas and
experiences.

The strengths of these outside points of view are also
used to underscore the message about alcoholic existence in

the pub. If Halliwell is uniquely positioned to offer a

235

young, fresh opinion of Netta, and Littlejohn is equally
well-placed to judge her since he is an experienced man in
her line of work, hehh of them testify to the inner/outer
divide of Bone's drinking life. Halliwell consciously
studies Bone's circle, observing their habits and
speculating about their lives. He is impressed by them: not
only their self-confidence, high spirits, apparent
sophistication, and film connections, but "the amount they
drank and the money they spent in conjunction with their
seeming total idleness or unemployment" (202). In
Hamilton's public-school analogy, Bone's group is "the
'bloods' " and Halliwell is the "new boy" (203).
Halliwell's view is in marked contrast to everything the
novel reveals about their real existence: the acrimonious
fighting amongst themselves, constant hangovers, physical
illness, and financial worries. The outside is about fun;
the inside is its "queasy authenticity."11

John Littlejohn provides further insight into the
participant/addict divide. When he first visits Bone in
Earl's Court, Bone entertains his guest in a series of pubs,
first locally and then in the West End. The second pub Bone
chooses is one of his "regular places," and it is described
invitingly:

The long, warm, bright days still persisted, and the

door of the pub was flung and fastened back. It was

cool, dark, and restful inside and pleasant with the

peaceful beginnings of the little house's evening

236
trade--two men talking quietly, another reading a
newspaper, the flutter of a canary in a cage, the
barmaid vanishing into the other bars and returning,
the occasional oily jab of the beer-engine and the soft
spurt of beer. It was good to sit back in this cave of
refreshment, and stare at the blinding brilliance of
the day outside, the pavement, the dusty feet of
temperate but jaded pedestrians. (95)
This is what Littlejohn sees, and what most other casual
customers would see as well; it is the warm-weather version
of the outside view, as characteristic as the cold-weather
version voiced by Gordon Comstock. The initial appeal of
pub culture lies in such a picture: peace, relaxed
socializing, and refreshment, both liquid and spiritual.
Once trapped inside, however, the view changes dramatically,
and the regular's sense of belonging can become menacing.
Addictive participants have a sort of x-ray vision, allowing
them to see behind the pleasant surface:
But, of course, [Littlejohn] could not see what George
could see--the wet winter nights when the door was
closed; the smoke, the noise, the wet people: the agony
of Netta under the electric light: Mickey drunk and
Peter arguing: mornings-after on dark November days:
the dart-playing and boredom: the lunch-time drunks,
the lunch-time snacks, the lunch-room upstairs: the
whole poisoned nightmarish circle of the idle tippler's

existence. He saw merely a haven of refreshment on a

237
summer's day. (95)

What must not be overlooked is that both views are valid,

 

true to the experience of the observers. For Hamilton truly
to reveal Bone's existence, his novel must spend most of its
time in the Bone-circle, replicating the closeness and
futility of that kind of pub life. Occasional glimpses of
other viewpoints serve to mark the contrast and suggest the
possibility of such an underground existence in any/every
pub. The novel is, in that sense, an exercise in the
sinister consciousness-raising of heir; once acquainted with
both surface and depths, one cannot escape imagining depths

whenever enjoying the surface.

HAMILTON'S METHODS

Discussion of what issues Hangover Sguare addresses
would be incomplete without some consideration of the means
by which those issues are addressed. Hamilton chose an
ideal method of re-creating alcoholic existence, and the
novel benefits from his provision of what might be best
described as variations on a theme; these repetitions re-
create the claustrophobia and repetitiveness of drunken
life. Descriptions of Bone and his actions are followed by
scenes of his efforts to try to remember, and make sense of,
what readers have already seen happen. Bone's
schizophrenia, along with everything else, worsens, both
gradually over time, and in sudden bursts. The transition

into the "dead" mood, which was originally simply "a funny

238
click, a pop, a snap," becomes a "frightful crack" (193) in
its later manifestations. The effort of trying to recover
from the hangover, and from the schizophrenia, is eventually
abandoned as hopeless.

Hangover Sguare is, like most of Hamilton's novels,
noticeably circumstantial. Verisimilitude is pursued
everywhere: Hamilton never stints on prices, locations,
train times, restaurants, street names, even newspaper
headlines. Verisimilitude in presentation of the addict's
experiences in the saloon bar profits from the narrative
strategies Hamilton has chosen. The pattern of action
abruptly arrested, followed by a period of trying to
remember, and then an attempt at recovery, followed by
another cycle, ad infinitum, recreates the addict's point of
view; here, Bone's. This structure can become a contested
issue; some readers eventually reject the pattern, and thus
the novel.12 Instead of being lamented, the novel's
patterns of repetition should be seized on as an
opportunity, afforded to his readers by an expert, to watch
addiction play itself out. The novel is, indeed,
excruciating reading at times, but that is faithful to the
inside perspective Hamilton provides.

Bone's schizophrenia is a device which allows Hamilton
to put an extra spin on the underlying narrative pattern of
variations on a theme. The novel includes Hamilton's usual
realistic depiction of pub life, but adds to it recognized

mental illness. Schizophrenia in Hangover Sguare functions

239
as alcoholism writ large, and the narrative implications of
Bone's schizophrenia are considerable. In the guise of
Bone's mental illness, Hamilton is able to present,
intensified in form, the experiences of the alcoholic: after
Bone feels the click inside his head, he entertains
extravagant notions of reality, he does not know where he
is, where he has been, or what he has been doing. When he
is in one of his " 'dead' moods," when "life, in fact, which
had been for him a moment ago a 'talkie', had all at once
become a silent film. And there was no music" (3), he
realizes clearly that "this Netta business had been going on
too long. When was he going to kill her?" (6). During these
moods, he plans carefully how he will kill her; when his
mood is "normal," he knows nothing of it. In this fashion,
the narrative can represent the "Jekyll and Hyde" effect of
addictive drinking; Bone becomes someone different,
depending upon whether he is drunk (in a "dead" mood) or
sober (in a "normal" mood). Further, in making Bone
schizophrenic, Hamilton has created a bona fide version of
the alcoholic's talent for self-deception, for Bone is
sincerely ignorant of his own dark side.

Hamilton's presentation of schizophrenia in Hangover
Sguare was timely and topical, particularly for someone with
Hamilton's interest in crime. In May, 1944, Vera Brittain,
well-known writer and pacifist, wrote an article entitled
"Political Schizophrenia," which begins with an extended
definition:

240

Within recent years, those who follow the accounts of
murder trials and other criminal cases have become
familiar with a psychological abnormality known as
"schizophrenia." This technical expression means
"divided mind," and those who suffer from it are
directed, as it were, by two distinct personalities,
the one normal and benevolent, the other sometimes
eccentric and malevolent. In literature the classic
instance of this phenomenon is the story of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde.13
It is noteworthy not only that Brittain should feel
compelled to explain schizophrenia at such length--defining,
describing, and offering a literary example of it--but that
she suggests it is cutting-edge in criminology.“
"Sociopath" has replaced "psychopath" in the last twenty
years; clearly "schizophrenic" was the villain for
aficionados at the time of Hamilton's novel.15

Hamilton's delineation of Bone dovetails neatly with
Brittain's description and, in fact, its merits have been
discussed by critics and reviewers. Many accord it
considerable credit as an accurate depiction of someone
suffering from schizophrenia; a position courted by
Hamilton's choice of epigraph, taken from Black's Medical

M Perhaps the most significant implication of

Dictionary.
this credibility is the certification it provides for Bone's
other illness: schizophrenia is universally acknowledged as

a mental illness, in contrast to the violent disagreements

241
about whether alcoholism is a disease, a moral failing, or
simply a bad habit. By including a generally-recognized
mental illness, Hamilton has raised his alcoholic
protagonist partially above that debate and staked out a
promising arena for serious representation of addiction.
Like the pub world, which is simultaneously benign and
malignant, Bone, as an alcoholic and schizophrenic, is
himself (in his person) an instance of conflicted
representation. His "public" self appears benign even to
those who, like the manager of his hotel, dislike him. The
manager
would have been glad, in her heart, to have got him out
of the hotel. There was no means of doing this,
however, as he was regular in his payments, and, at
least within the walls of the hotel, quiet and
impeccable in his behaviour. Indeed, apart from one
slight eccentricity--that of having adopted, and of
feeding with milk from outside, the hotel cat, whose
affections he had completely captured--his normality
was nowhere to be questioned. And even this little
eccentricity, if such it could be called, was, she had
to admit, of the most amiable kind. (209)
His surface normality hides a profound abnormality; his
amiability, real enough, hides violence. The novel makes
this point directly, at the end of section five:
Living in a vacuum, with practically no vision of the

future, and practically no awareness of the past, she

242

[Netta] bothered very little about anything--least of

all about George, who, oddly enough, and unknown to

both of them, at certain seasons directed his mind
exclusively to the problem of killing her by violence.

(126)

What is seen from the outside is, at one and the same time,
both accurate and unseeing; even Bone cannot transgress the
boundary between his sane and crazed selves. His crazed
self cannot comprehend the apparent laziness of his sane
self, while that consciousness is unaware of the plans his
crazed self makes.

The obsessions of Bone when in his "dead" moods are
very like drunken obsessions, for the notorious persistence
and obsessive repetition of the drunk need little
transformation to appear as schizophrenic obsessions. Bone
knows he is obsessed in multiple ways, that there is an
inner/outer divide even to his love for Netta:

He could see through them, and, of course, he hated

them. He even hated Netta too--he had known that for a

‘long time. He hated Netta, perhaps, most of all.

You might say he wasn't really 'in love' with her: he

was 'in hate' with her. It was the same thing--just

looking at his obsession from the other side. He was

netted in hate just as he was netted in love. (29)
Bone is resigned to his obsession(s) with Netta, yet, para-
doxically, it is when he is crazy that he decides to free

himself by acting.

243

The fusion of mental illness and alcoholism is mirrored
in Bone's confusion between the violence he plans and his
own geographic solution. Killing Netta and going to
Maidenhead become inextricably linked in Bone's mind; both
seem to him necessary preconditions for ending his excessive
drinking. For Bone, the geographic solution merges with
murder to offer catharsis. He believes that he cannot leave
Earl's Court for Maidenhead unless he first commits murder,
and he believes he must leave Earl's Court to stop drinking:
"Was he, then, going to kill them Th Brighton, hey: today or
tomorrow? Yes. Of course he was--no more putting off. He
had got wise to himself now. Here was half the summer gone:
it would be cold soon, and he would have to wait another
year. Another year in Earl's Court!" (163). Earl's Court
and Maidenhead are linked in a mutually-feeding obsession.
As his hatred of Earl's Court increases, Bone's vision of
Maidenhead and ihe powers becomes increasingly bizarre; as
Maidenhead is endowed with more and more recuperative
powers, Earl's Court becomes increasingly scapegoated by
Bone.

Brian McKenna recognizes the interweaving of Bone's
masochistic love for Netta, his mental illness, and his
drinking problem: "Of a piece with this obsessive-compulsive
disorder [his love for Netta] is George's dependence on the
bottle, which he needs in order to cope with Netta but which
intensifies his schizophrenia (as well as being analogous to

it)" ("Confessions" 237). To say that Bone needs alcohol

244
"in order to cope with Netta" seems naive; of more interest
is the relationship among these elements of Bone's travails.
It is difficult to separate them but, in terms of the
narrative, it seems clear that the alcoholism drives the
rest.

Bone's own awareness that his various "failings"
interconnect deserves to be taken seriously; in the passage
quoted earlier, he attributes his physical and mental
illnesses to the combined agency of drinking and nervous
exhaustion. While Bone is addicted to self-destruction in
myriad ways--drinking, smoking, Netta, untreated mental
illness--his alcoholism overarches the others, compounding
their effects and making escape from them well-nigh

impossible.

George Harvey Bone's situation and experiences are
singular, of course, but they suggest unseen dimensions
possibly possessed by ordinary places, people, and
activities. Hangover Sguare puts readers inside the circle
of alcoholism; it provides both inner and outer visions of
the pub. These are noteworthy achievements. "Alcohol is
the symptom, the motif, in Hamilton's world, of the personal
crisis, of irresponsibility, of failure, of fear and
breakdown, of an inability to cope with the world, and of
decline and inadequacy," writes Peter Widdowson;
"Occasionally, it transcends itself and becomes a metaphor

for some wider malaise."“ That, for Widdowson, is its

245
only possible accomplishment: to be a metaphor for an
abstract political principle. At times, in Hamilton's pub
fiction, Widdowson notes disapprovingly, "the bottle of Haig
in the suitcase means alcoholism. Nothing more" (124).
Alcoholism in literature, however, is one of the principal
subjects of the steadily growing field of literature and
addiction studies, and Hamilton's contribution to this
important area should not be overlooked.

In order to re-create alcoholic experience, Hamilton is
relentlessly specific; the particular alcoholic, Bone, and
his precise activities, construct one version of experience
from which readers may generalize. The setting is part and
parcel of George Harvey Bone's spiral into death; it is also
a vital part of the fictional milieu of Hamilton's oeuvre.
Bone lives out his drama in Earl's Court, and the novel
begins to convince its readers that the geographic solution
is more than mere fantasy:

Earl's Court in the rain . . . The summer had crashed:

it had crashed at Brighton: It would never rise again.

Only rain now--the grey, wet end of hope and love.

Where was he going? He had a week to decide.

Where? Anywhere, Notting Hill, Bayswater, South Ken,

Shepherd's Bush, Knightsbridge, but never again Earl's

Court. Good-bye to the Square, the Gardens, the

Mansions; the Penywerns and Neverns; the Private

Hotels; the Smith's, the Station, the Turkish Baths;

the A.B.C. and Express Restaurants; the pubs, the

246

florists and tobacconists, all the bleak scenery of his

long disgrace and disaster--good-bye for ever. The

grey, ending rain was cool and blessed on his face.

(210; original ellipses)

The novel's full title, Hangover Sguare: A Story of Darkest
Eerl'e Court, indicates not only the importance attached to
the particular location, but also what attitude will be
taken toward it. Hamilton's novel exposes the darkness
behind the dreary facade of Earl's Court through a realistic
and circumstantial treatment of the alcoholic round of its
pub dwellers.

Hamilton uses the unlikely setting of Earl's Court, "a
typically bourgeois middle-class pseudo-frolicsome semi-
suburb of London" (Morley viii), to produce a stunning
portrait of alcoholism, social malaise, political dangers,
even murder. Hangover Sguare draws together the principal
components of Hamilton's fictional milieu--pubs, transient
accommodations, cafes--and puts it under an even more
microscopic gaze than before. The impending war and George
Harvey Bone's insanity lend added horror to the everyday

horrors of this world and the lives of its inhabitants.

NOTES

1. Introduction to Murder With a Differenee: Three Unusual

 

Crihe NoveTe (New York: Random House, 1946), vii.

2. The White Logic: Alcoholieh_end Gender in Ahericeh
Moderniet Fiction (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1994), x.

3. The spell check on Word Perfect 5.1 baulks at "Hanover"
and proposes, appropriately enough, that the writer meant to
write "hangover."

4. (London: Constable, 1972 [f.p. 1941]), 18. Subsequent
references to this edition cited in text.

5. Neil Kessel and Henry Walton, (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1965), 11.

6. Equivocel Spirite: Alcoholism and Drinking in Tyentieth-
Qentury Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1987), 12.

7. The Magic of My Youth (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951),
176.

8. Hamilton's commitment to what may be called--a bit
melodramatically, perhaps--the dark side of pub life
contrasts with the interests of a fellow writer like Julian
Maclaren-Ross, a contemporary whose pub credentials are as

faultless as Hamilton's own. In his Memoirs of the Fortiee,

247

248
and story collections like The Nine Men of Soho, Maclaren-
Ross makes light of the consequences of leading such a pub-
based life and presents himself as a sort of ideal pub
companion: heavy-drinking, yes, but always witty and
accommodating. ‘Hamilton's work traces the downward spiral
in ways that Maclaren-Ross's does not.
9. Observer-participants are not defined by how much they
drink, and they certainly need not be teetotallers; they are
people who have observed, and probably have participated in,
pub life.
10. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954 [f.p. 1936]), 81.
11. Nick Kimberley, "One Man in His Time," review of Twenty
Thousand Streets Under the Sky, New Statesman 17 July 1987,
29.
12. For example, Brian McKenna's doctoral thesis laments
this aspect of the novel, finding it monotonous and
irritating.

13. Testament ofge Generation: The Journalism of Vera

 

Brittain and Winifred Holtb , ed. Paul Berry and Alan Bishop
(London: Virago, 1985), 242.

14. And, indeed, Hangover Sguare predates Brittain's
article by 3 years.

15. In the 19508, when Hamilton wrote the three Gorse
novels, he again examined a criminal with a contemporary
relevance; although he never uses the terms "psychopath" or

"sociopath," his explanations of Gorse's personality and

249
behavior capture the peculiarities of that criminal type.
16. "Schizophrenia: . . . a cleavage of the mental
functions, associated with assumption by the affected person
of a second personality."
17. "The Saloon Bar Society: Patrick Hamilton's Fiction in
the 19308," The 1930§z A Chellehge to Orthoddey, ed. John
Lucas (Sussex and New York: Harvester/Barnes and Noble,

1978), 118.

Chapter 8
"NOT A WAR TO BE TAKEN IN A LOCAL-LIBRARY WAY":
WORLD WAR II AND THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE

The Slaves of Solitude (1947) is Hamilton's last great
novel. In the fifteen years he lived after its publication,
he wrote the three Gorse novels which, although they
represent an important change in direction for his writing,
are not up to his highest standards. He also worked on two
versions of a never-published autobiography, "Memoirs of a
Heavy-Drinking Man," whose title indicates the main reason
for the falling off of literary production during this
period. Hamilton's drinking problem was killing him, and he
underwent several "cures," including electro-shock therapy,

none successful.

HAMILTON'S MILIEU DURING THE WAR

The Slaves of Solitude makes a fitting end to the
period of Hamilton's best work, and to the present study,
because it draws together the major threads of Hamilton's
fictional milieu. Its principal character is Miss Roach, a
lonely single woman of 39 who has been bombed out of her
London flat and is living in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a
boarding house within commuting distance of her London job.

She represents the kind of people Hamilton has always

250

251
written about: insignificant, overlooked, rootless. Her
encounters with the other main characters--the American
Lieutenant Dayton Pike, German Vicki Kugelmann, Mr.
Thwaites--take place in familiar Hamilton settings of
boarding house and pub. The novel is set in late 1943, when
all are worn out by the war but the end is not yet in sight,
and in Thames Lockdon, modelled on Henley-on-Thames. In The
Slaves of Solitude, Hamilton focuses nearly equally on both
the private and the public institutions of his milieu, and
shows how these reacted to the pressures of the war, a story
few other novelists would bother to tell.

In Elizabeth Bowen's war novel, The Heet of the_hey,
also a homefront fiction, the protagonist Stella asks " 'Now
who can be ordinary?--it's too late. All the years to have
been ordinary in are gone' " (221). This sentiment fits
with the widely-held view of the "People's War," but is
countered by Hamilton's characters. His war novel disproves
Stella's claim that people can no longer be ordinary, and it
does so by demonstrating the ways in which they are
ordinary; the novel records what ordinary looks like under
such unusual circumstances.

Alan Munton's book, English Fiction of the Second World
her, calls The Slaves of Solitude "the outstanding novel of

non-combatant experience."1

Hamilton, Munton notes,
"specializes in finding meaning in the insignificant" (51)
and this novel "record[s] the minute details of social

inhibition and the subtle destructiveness of private

252
languages" (53). These features are present in all of
Hamilton's work, but achieve particular significance when
placed in contrast with the rhetoric (and activity) of the
People's War. In Craven House, Hamilton sketched in the
ordinary person's experience of World War I, noting the
everyday and trivial ways in which the war made itself felt
in places like Southam Green (the southwestern suburbs of
London). The Slaves of Solitude represents a more in-depth
look at how the fictionalized Henley-on-Thames, Thames
Lockdon, coped with World War II.

Novels about the war, or set on the homefront during
the war, have considerable significance. Munton points out
the role that these novels have played in widely-accepted
views about the war experience:

One difficulty in using the term "People's War" in a

discussion of war fiction is that the concept is partly

built up from that fiction itself. . . . This tendency
is not sufficiently marked for the People's War concept
to seem to chase its fictional tail, but it does
suggest that fiction is not an autonomous activity
separate from historical developments, and that under
certain circumstances it can possess the same

persuasive status as fact. (9)

Munton's comments suggest that English fiction of WOrld War
II is a particularly clear example of how the sociology of
literary texts can have consequences outside the realm of

literature and literary criticism. Throughout his career,

253
Hamilton's novels created this kind of record for his chosen
milieu; in The Slaves of Solitude, with the addition of
World War II, his work approaches a category of literature
already recognized as having special sociological status.

Hamilton's treatment of the war is characteristic of
his interests; the news is strictly in the background, and
the war itself is personified in order to highlight its
mundane, everyday ramifications. Its frustrations are
legion, and although each annoyance is minor in and of
itself, the cumulative effect is wearing. In particular,
two aspects of homefront experience parallel boarding-house
culture in Miss Roach's life: nagging admonition and lack of
available resources.

The novel describes Miss Roach as having to "timidly
run, on her way to the office, a sort of gauntlet of "No's"
and "Don'ts" thumped down on her from every side" (101).
Through Miss Roach's experience of them, new life is
breathed into those British war campaigns with which we are
familiar, but only in a remote or abstract way. Hamilton
uses cataloguing, juxtaposing the sensible ("she was not to
use unnecessary fuel") with warnings less obviously linked
to the war effort ("she was not to leave litter about") in
order to show how hemmed-in someone like Miss Roach felt--
and indeed was--during the war.

Another element of homefront life that resembles
boarding-house life is a widespread lack of common household

items. Shopping is a trial for Miss Roach because

254
the war, in its character of petty pilferer, had been
as busy in this little town as in London, and, for a
woman's personal needs, the shops had little save
frustration, irritation, or delay to offer in almost
every department. There were no stockings, there was
no shampoo, there was no scent, there were no hairpins,
no nail-varnish, no nail-varnish—remover, no ribbon .
. (161)
The list continues, all of its items daily supplies with
little apparent connection to the war effort. Miss Roach,
worn down by years of such unavailability, feels snubbed.
As soon as she leaves the Rosamund Tea Rooms, she is
confronted with:
NO CIGARETTES. SORRY
in the window of the tobacconist opposite. And such
was Miss Roach's mood nowadays that she regarded this
less as a sorrowful admission than as a sly piece of
spite. The "sorry", she felt certain, had not been
thrown in for the sake of politeness or pity. It was a
sarcastic, nasty, rude ”sorry." (100)
The war makes itself felt everywhere; Thames Lockdon is "not
even permitted to be Thames Lockdon, all mention of the town
having been blacked out from the shop-fronts and elsewhere
for reasons of security" (100). The war has crashed into
the library, as well: "the pilferer was an insatiable
reader, too, and Miss Roach spent a good deal of time at the

library failing to find anything she wanted to take out"

255
(162). It seems to generate crowds:
In the war everything was crowded all the time. The
war seemed to have conjured into being, from nowhere,
magically, a huge population of its own--one which
flowed into and filled every channel and crevice-of the
country--the towns, the villages, the streets, the
trains, the buses, the shops, the hotels, the inns, the

restaurants, the movies. (26)

Inevitably, the war effort has resulted in rationing (65).
It has also affected social relations, mixing together
oddly-assorted groups of people (118-119), and it makes it
way into the hospital, where Mr. Thwaites must wait, in
agony, due to "a hitch in the arrangements" (214) related in
an uncomprehended, vague way to the war.

The war, for people like Miss Roach, is principally
confusing. Hearing overhead the planes returning from their
bombing mission over the continent, Miss Roach worries about
the unfathomable complications of being part of a country at
war. What is she to make of these planes, on "her" side,
"coming back from burning and burying and exploding German
Vickis, German small children, German charwomen and others.

It was all very confusing" (134, text ellipses). When
she is finally goaded by Vicki into declaring her
patriotism, she does so in terms suggestive of her lack of
engagement with the war effort: " 'I'm just not going to
have remarks made like this when people are dying all around

us for what they think's right.’ Miss Roach realized that

256
this was rhetorically and logically a little feeble, but she
could do no better" (198). This is the best she can do, and
it is notable primarily for its reference to others: since
others are dying for what They believe, they must be
supported in this fashion by Miss Roach, who leaves her own
beliefs well out of it.

Finally, however, the novel turns against the view of
the war it has so circumstantially laid out. After her
return to London, Miss Roach is reminded of the seriousness
of the war, and concludes that it must be faced in more
meaningful ways than she has become accustomed to facing it
while in Thames Lockdon. It is wrong to think of the war as
a pilferer, and petty nagger. People must not duck reality.
At Claridge's, she sees

many men in uniforms, English and American.

These uniforms reminded her that she was back in
the centre of things, the world and the war. She was
glad to be back, in spite of the danger of bombs. You
had to square up to the war. The horror and
despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms resided in just
the fact that it was not squaring up to it. The
Rosamund Tea Rooms was hidden away in the country,
dodging the war, in its petty boarding-house lassitude
almost insensible of it, more absorbed in the local
library. And this was not a war to be taken in a
local-library way. (237)

The situation cannot be so easily remedied, however, for the

257
Rosamund Tea Rooms had far more problems than simply not
facing up to the war. As a continuation of the boarding
houses examined in earlier Hamilton novels, it must be seen
as unable to change its ways. How could the Rosamund Tea
Rooms "face up" to the war? Its problems are inherent in
the boarding-house mode of living, and the war simply added
another layer of unreality and bizarre pettiness.

The Rosamund Tea Rooms' inability to deal meaningfully
with the war is also related to the time period Hamilton
chose as the setting for his novel, a drab and difficult
period of the war effort. At the end of 1943, little of
dramatic import was happening, the war had been going on a
very long time, and the end was not yet in sight. Munton
describes the difficulties posed by such a period:

To periodize the war requires the political

interpretation of an historical moment that is not yet

complete. . . . Periodization became more difficult
after the end of 1942, when for the British the war
ceased to be a matter of spectacular defeats or

victories and became a hard and persistent struggle.

(25)

Finishing the book after the war, Hamilton added a sketch of
post-1943 developments to the novel's conclusion.

Hamilton's intermittent work on the novel over a period of
several years, however, lends itself to the successful
capturing of the mood relevant to the novel's timeframe.

Resignation is the only way for Miss Roach to cope.

258
The Lieutenant, nearly as exasperating and incomprehensible
as the war itself, soon becomes too much for her to try and
analyze. She decides to simply endure: "But she was by now
resigned to being perplexed by the Lieutenant--whose
appearances and disappearances, whose enthusiasms and
fluctuations . . . could be withstood and surmounted by
resignation alone" (109). The Lieutenant, an American
soldier whose presence in England has not yet become
directly useful to the war effort, serves as an analogy for

the war effort itself, as these affect Miss Roach.

LIFE IN THE ROSAMUND TEA ROOMS
The setting for the Rosamund Tea Rooms is not
substantially different from the context of Craven House and
the Fauconberg Hotel. The novel's first sentence begins
with London: "London, the crouching monster, like every
other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own
obscure, malignant way" (1). Set outside of London, the
novel's opening section takes pains to establish London's
still-exerted influence:
The area affected by this filthy inhalation actually
extends beyond what we ordinarily think of as the
suburbs--to towns, villages, and districts as far as,
or further than, twenty-five miles from the capital.
Amongst these was Thames Lockdon, which lay on the
river some miles beyond Maidenhead on the Maidenhead

line. (1)

259
Images of commuters rushing in and out of the city are
reminiscent of Craven House; here, instead of the District
Line, transportation is provided by regular trains from
Paddington Station. We are to see Thames Lockdon as under
the influence of London, an influence newly-powerful because
of the war. Miss Roach exemplifies this spreading of
London's sphere of influence, as the blitz has forced her to
commute by rail from Thames Lockdon rather than by tube from
West Kensington as formerly.

Thames Lockdon, as the author's note observes, "bears a
rough geographical and external resemblance to Henley-on-
Thames" where Hamilton made his home throughout the war.
Henley was fictionalized by George Orwell as Upper Binfield
in Coming Up For Aig, an earlier novel intent on examining
the town's ordinariness. In The Slaves ef Solitude, Thames
Lockdon is specifically situated as "a place to pass
through, above all" (3). As he did in Craven House,
Hamilton supplies a description of the components of the
town center and summarizes its features as "characteristic
of the half-village, half-town which Thames Lockdon was--a
place a stockbroker or bookmaker, passing through in his car
in peace-time on the way back to his centrally-over-heated
flat in a London block, would designate as 'very pretty' "
(3). The yoking of stockbroker and bookmaker is curious,
but suggests how easily pigeonholed Thames Lockdon is by
those who pass through it.

The misleading name of the Rosamund Tea Rooms is our

260

first clue about how dysfunctional a place it is. No one
knows where "Rosamund" originated, and the establishment is
no longer a tea shop. Among its many effects, the war is
responsible for the latter change. The landlady, Mrs.
Payne, bought the shop before the war and had minimal
success running it as a tea shop; the outbreak of war
suggested its more profitable potential as a boarding house.
When Miss Roach first came to the Rosamund Tea Rooms,
thankful to be alive and with very few possessions, it
seemed a safe haven:

Thames Lockdon had been "heaven." . . . And the town

was "pretty," and the food "very good," and the people

"very nice"--even Mr. Thwaites had seemed "very nice."

But now, after more than a year of it, Mr.

Thwaites was president in hell. (7-8)
Miserable as she is when the novel opens, things will only
get worse for Miss Roach. Her salvation arrives, finally,
in the form of a small legacyliand sufficient renewal of
energy to leave the Rosamund Tea Rooms and Thames Lockdon.
What has changed over the year she has been there? Nothing.
The course of the war has worn down the nonheroic residents,
but the problems that arise, and are exacerbated by the war,
are characteristic of boarding-house life more than anything
else. Once again, Hamilton has chosen as his subject the
mores and methods of life for the class of person which
inhabits second-rate boarding houses.

Mrs. Payne is a classic landlady, subduing her "guests"

261
and channeling their behavior into increasingly narrow ruts.
She holds the power to do 80, particularly under the
circumstances of war: there is great demand for housing out
of, yet convenient to, London, and Mrs. Payne has "never had
a room empty." The structure of life in her boarding house
is near-tyrannical and very uncomfortable for the residents.
In particular, the arrangements for meals are excruciating,
and Mrs. Payne's notes constantly badger the residents.
Readers are introduced to Mrs. Payne's notes before we
actually see the landlady in person. These notes serve
myriad functions, not the least of which is to crush
independent behavior on the part of the residents:
One's responsibility in regard to the black-out had
been the occasion of one of Mrs. Payne's famous notes.
"N.B. Vieitoregyill beTheld personally responeible for
completingptheir own bleek-oute in their bedroohe"--
this being pinned, sensibly enough (Mrs. Payne was
nothing if not sensible), underneath the electric-light
switch. Mrs. Payne left or pinned up notes everywhere,
anywhere, austerely, endlessly--making one feel,
sometimes, that a sort of paper-chase had been taking
place in the Rosamund Tea Rooms--but a nasty,
admonitory paper-chase. All innovations were heralded
by notes, and all withdrawals and adjustments thus
proclaimed. Experienced guests were aware that to take
the smallest step in an original or unusual direction

would be to provoke a sharp note within twenty-four

262

hours at the outside, and they had therefore, for the

most part, abandoned originality. (5)

This "nasty, admonitory paper-chase" finds an echo in the
hectoring signs posted by the government; Miss Roach runs
that gauntlet on her way to and from work, while at home she
must face Mrs. Payne's notes.

Meals are another means of oppressing the Rosamund Tea
Room's residents. "About the dining room," the novel
asserts, "there was something peculiarly and gratuitously
hellish" (8). The furnishings are leftovers from the tea
room days, and residents are seated at an assortment of
small tables. Each has a regular spot, and all suffer under
the peculiar restraint imposed by these separate tables:

in the small space of the room, a word could not be

uttered, a little cough could not be made, a hairpin

could not be dropped at one table without being heard
at all the others; and the general self-consciousness

which this caused smote the room with a silence, a

conversational torpor, and finally a complete apathy

from which it could not stir itself. No one, it

seemed, dared to speak above the level of a murmur. (9)
No one except Mr. Thwaites, who seizes on this arrangement
as a perfect setting for his verbal bullying. Mrs. Payne,
of course, "made no attempt to assist her guests in their
predicament, for she was careful never to appear at meals"
(10). Miss Roach's situation is particularly painful, for

she is seated at a table with Mr. Thwaites and feels

263
constitutionally incapable of demanding a change:
How she had originally got "put" at this table Miss
Roach could not remember, but there was nothing to be
done about it now. Nothing, that is, apart from asking
to be put at a separate table, which, in a room and
atmosphere of this sort, would bring about a sensation
such as she was incapable of creating. (11)
The rigidity of such a manner of living means that, aside
from Mrs. Payne and her weapon of nasty notes, the dwellers
of the Rosamund Tea Rooms can barely cope with the
unexpected. When Mr. Thwaites dies unexpectedly, there is
no protocol for broaching the subject, and so no one knows
how to proceed. Ironically, had he been there, Mr. Thwaites
would have taken on the responsibility:
When they were all seated, all wondered who was going
to begin it. Normally such a thing would have been
left to Mr. Thwaites himself, but the circumstances
prevented precisely this, and at last Miss Steele
undertook the task.
"Well," she said. "It's very terrible about Mr.
Thwaites, isn't it?" (217)
The difficulties of communication are nearly insurmountable.
Much of the stylized interaction covers potentially-serious
matters which, under normal circumstances, will never be
allowed to see the light of day. During the argument which
culminates in Miss Roach pushing Mr. Thwaites on the stairs,

for example, the conversation is unusually revealing. It

264
also, in its frankness, illuminates just how much has been
lurking beneath the surface. In Hamilton's image, "there
was another pause, and then Vicki made the remark which,
blowing up the ammunition dump, disclosed the amount of
ammunition stored away" (196). Presumably this revelation
came as something of a surprise to everyone, observers and
participants alike.

Similarly, after the crisis of Mr. Thwaites' death,
when Miss Roach has decided to leave and learned of her
inheritance, although no resident speaks directly to Vicki,
they find a way to tell her what they think. Miss Roach,
tailoring her remarks to Miss Steele for maximum effect on
Vicki, gets "the impression that Miss Steele, instead of
really speaking to her, was, like herself, really speaking
to Vicki" (226).

One of the reasons Mr. Thwaites has been so successful
in his bullying is that he uses these social and
conversational conventions against the other residents. He
is willing to speak while others are intimidated, and he
deliberately poses conversational problems. Mr. Thwaites is
not to be seen as independent or original; his investment in
this rigid code is, if anything, greater than that of the
others. It is simply that he has grasped how to turn those
conventions against other people. When he is first
introduced, we are told that he had spent his whole life in
boarding houses and private hotels, that "such places, with

the timid old women they contained, were hunting-grounds for

26S
his temperament--wonderfully suited and stimulating to his
peculiar brand of loquacity and malevolence" (12). The
effect of his verbal bullying is captured nicely after he
has started flirting with Vicki: "It was easy to see what he
was getting at: at the same time it was almost impossible to
do otherwise than pretend that one saw no such thing--a
classical Thwaitesian dilemma" (148). In this manner,
Thwaites can take any conversation well past the point it
ought to be taken; the flustered recipient of his remarks
can do little but utter "the drearily familiar 'What do you
mean?’ " (149).

Because Miss Roach is coming out of such a context,
where life is constricted and communication impossible, she
is initially willing to overlook Lt. Pike's faults; he
offers a kind of conversation she is totally unused to. Lt.
Pike is found to be, by both Miss Roach and the authorial
voice, inconsequent. This is a serious charge;
inconsequence is damning in Hamilton's fiction because of
his belief in people's responsibility to and for other
people: to behave inconsequently is to toy with the lives
and feelings of others. The restrictions of boarding house
life, however, invest inconsequent others with a certain
appeal. Lt. Pike's initial attraction is that he represents
freedom from, even opposition to, the over-rigid protocol
Miss Roach is used to living with at the Rosamund Tea Rooms:

On Miss Roach and Lt. Pike's first trip to the pub,

the Rosamund Tea Rooms were mentioned, and he asked

266

what the hell sort of a joint was that anyway? He just

couldn't get the hang of it. This attitude delighted

her. She said that if it came to that, she couldn't
get the hang of it either, though she had been there

more than a year. (29)

Miss Roach's delight is quite sincere, aided of course by
her consumption of alcohol, but honest. She has been
miserable at the boarding house, and is exhilarated to hear
it assessed so frankly, and in the exotic Americanisms of
Lt. Pike. Afterwards, she thinks of him as having "been on
her side against the Rosamund Tea Rooms" (35).

On their second visit to the River Sun, he takes their
collusion against the boarding house one step farther; he
buys her dinner upstairs at the pub. She protests that the
boarding house must be informed of her non-appearance, so he
phones. He declines to give a detailed report of the kind
she would like--who he spoke to, what they said--but instead
has taken

an inconsequent attitude in regard to the Rosamund Tea

Rooms and any social consequence whatsoever.

She was far from being in a mood to criticise this
characteristic trait tonight, however. On the
contrary, in her escape from the long inhibitions
enclosing her at the Rosamund Tea Rooms, she was
disposed to regard it as a merit. (36)

Once his inconsequence extends itself to other arenas,

however, Miss Roach has increasing difficulty reconciling

267
herself to it. His attitude towards herself puzzles her
enormously, and when Mr. Prest informs her of the
Lieutenant's various amours and his proposals of marriage to
many women (besides herself, as Mr. Prest presumably does
not know she had received an offer to be a "Laundry queen"
[45]), she sees this as the final, painful proof of his~
inconsequence. Ultimately, his inconsequence becomes
unbearable. Without the window provided by her boarding-
house existence, the.Lieutenant would probably have been

dismissed out of hand by the sensible Miss Roach.

WOMEN IN PUBS

The war also gives Hamilton an opportunity to record
the significant social changes brought about by the war;
again, not sweeping or abstract changes, but changes in the
daily minutiae that affect the lives of ordinary people.
Women in pubs, one of the areas that interested Mass-
Observation, gets an airing in The Slaves of Solitude. The
studies conducted by Mass-Observation and Hamilton's
fictional portrayals corroborate each other, and offer
further proof of Hamilton's sociological accuracy. Without
conducting formal research, Hamilton pinpoints the changes
and understands their significance.

Mass-Observation produced several reports on the pub-
going habits of women during the war: "Social Change I:
WOmen in Public Houses" (undated), "WOmen in Pubs" (3 March

1943), "Report on WOmen in Public Houses" (30 March 1943),

268

and "A Note on Behavior of Women in Pubs in Certain London
Areas" (11 June 1943).3 Mass-Observation believed that
women's changing habits of pub-going was one of the most
noteworthy of the wartime changes, one that would require
watching during the postwar period. Women had already been
identified by Mass-Observation as being particularly
affected by the war in terms of everyday modes of living.
In a July 1941 report on "Habit Changes in Wartime," Mass-
Observation determined that "from answers to this particular
series of questions it would appear that in many ways war is
impacting much more heavily on women's habit patterns than
men's."4

Looking at changes in women's pub habits, Mass-
Observation believed, is one way of considering how women's
overall position has changed as a result of the war. Their
first report on women in pubs makes this claim clearly, for
they begin by quoting Mrs. Corbett Ashby on the enormous
force of public opinion wanting to push women back to their
post-war status. Women's pub-going is an important marker
of their changing status and will be an important gauge of
whether or not they consolidate their gains:

Just how enormous or otherwise this force is, we shall

be discussing in a later bulletin. But it is clear

that there are a great many places out of which women

will have to be pushed if they are to return to the

1939 position. War-jobs are not by any means the only

places in which women have become entrenched during the

269
war. They have not only taken over mens' activities in
working hours, but to a very considerable extent in
leisure hours too. Perhaps one of the most significant
changes is the extent to which they have entered during
the war into the life of public houses. We give below
the results of a small survey undertaken last month in
one London borough into the changing position of women

in pubs, and people's feelings about it. (FR 1661, 1)
Their pub studies relating to women's pub-going and the war
(as opposed to their earlier work on pubs in Bolton) were
based on research in Metrop, their pseudonymous London
borough (most likely Fulham). Their March 1943 report was
based on five pubs with a total of fifteen bars. One study
found that 33% of men and 52% of women were "favourable"
regarding young women going to pubs while 40% of men and 28%
of women were "unfavourable" (FR 1611), and another study
found that 27% were favourable on young women going alone
while 43% favoured the general idea of young women going
into pubs (FR 1635). The reports, taken altogether, explain
the multitude of attitudes behind those percentages.

First, Mass-Observation records the mixed attitudes
toward women in pubs, including some ambivalence on the part
of the women pub-goers themselves. A 50 year old artisan-
class woman,5 for example, told the observer

I think it is a very good thing, just as it should be,

women going into a public house the same as a man would

do. You might as well say, should women ride in buses.

270
You can't build special pubs for women any more than
you can run special buses. We're all just people
nowadays. And I don't think men resent it; they like
to be able to take girls to a pub without being thought
low. Its a great improvement on the old days, so long
as women don't overdo it. I don't like to see a woman

drunk. (FR 1611, 5)

She believes that women have the right to patronize pubs,
and that the new state of affairs is an improvement for
everyone. At the same time, she worries about women
"overdoing it," a concern that will be repeated over and
over in Mass-Observation's reports. The observer summarizes
the general version of this complaint: "it is clear that a
strong social feeling exists against women being in pubs
which has little to do with their behavior. The feeling
that it is 'unwomanly' and 'not nice' to visit pubs was
often expressed vehemently" (FR 1611, 3).

Support for this notion comes from a variety of
sources. A 55 year old working-class woman, herself a pub-
goer, said

"Well, I shouldn't like my Emmie to go running around

pubs on her own--indecent I calls it. Of course, if

you goes in with other women you never know what will
happen; people think you're cheap. Its all right for

an old body like me, but youngsters, no." (FR 1611, 3)
Clearly the issue appeared very complicated, and Mass-

Observation records many interpretations, often

271
inconsistent.

There are also, of course, those who are against women
being in pubs and who will concoct any complaint against
them. One landlord of a large pub opines that

The trouble now is this lipstick . . . these young

girls . . . it comes off . . .

They don't last more than six weeks at the most.

They're worn absolutely threadbare. That's the point.

You must wash them more now because of this lipstick.

Probably before the war it never came off, but it comes

off now. (FR 1491)

To save this gentleman's towels, apparently, young women
ought to be kept out of pubs.

The age and class of women are both important factors
in determining their attitude towards pub-going. A survey

resulted in these figures:

 

 

wemen pub goers 30 end ovep under 30 yre
Go alone sometimes 45% 25%
Never go alone 55 75 (FR 1611, 4)

This chart disguises a significant class factor: "22% of
both middle and artisan class women admitting that they
sometimes visited pubs alone, compared with 61% of working
class women" (FR 1611, 4). Older working class women,
according to the report, were most likely to enter a pub
alone.

Furthermore, even while more women are beginning to go

to pubs more frequently than formerly, there are definite

272
limits on their participation in pub culture. They are
still a definite minority; according to a random sample, 82%
of men and 58% of women said they do go to the pub, while
18% of men and 41% of women said they do not (FR 1635).
This is a substantial difference.

Among those who go to pubs, there is also a noticeable
difference in how often they go. In Metrop, in 1943,
"nearly three-fifths of the women now visit pubs at times,
compared with rather over four fifths of the men" (FR 1611,
1). But men are more likely to be regulars, if a regular is
defined as someone who visits "the local weekly or more
often." (FR 1611, 1). The observer reports that "in a
street sample in the study area [Metrop] . . . among the
pub-goers, the men go much more often than the women. There
are five regulars among male pub-goers for every three among
women" (FR 1635, 5).

What drives Mass-Observation's interest in this topic
is how the war has affected these behaviors, and the reports
on pub-going characterize the war's effects on the ebb and
flow of pub-going. They offer several noteworthy
observations on how the war has affected pub-going as a
whole. Certain kinds of war news, for example, drove up pub
attendance: "The general indication from these figures and
others at interim dates is that more people tend to

patronise public houses when the news is very bad and there

is nothing much which they feel they can do about i " (FR

 

1635, 2; their emphasis). People went to pubs for reasons

273
which might be anticipated; the news is bad, and people need
others to share it with. Pubs are refuges for many people,
and the war simply underscored that fact:

It was not personal disaster which produced peak pub

attendances, but national disaster which seemed

avoidable at the time. The highest attendance recorded
was on the eve of the fall of Crete (31.5.41), a point
of extreme depression when it looked as though reverses
would never stop, and when many people felt that the

war effort was not all-out. (FR 1635, 3)

During the mid-war years, people went to pubs not to
celebrate, but to seek relief from bad news. People go to
the pub when they feel "depressed and personally aimless,
other factors being equal" (FR 1635, 3).

Earlier, Mass-Observation used Saturday night
headcounts in late 1939 and early 1940 to conclude that "the
immediate effect of the war on pubbing was to stimulate it
tremendously." One of the reasons for this was purely
social, again pointing to the necessary social functions
pubs perform for at least some segments of society: "there
was more to talk about than usual, and the pub is above all
a place where people can get together and talk to one
another in groups."6

A final purpose of their 1943 work on women and pubs
was to consider what might follow once the war is over. Are
these changes permanent, or merely transitory effects of

living during a time of war? One of the most interesting

274

features of Mass-Observations discussion is how much it
resembles contemporary discussion of pub facilities,
suggesting that whatever gains women made during the war
were not fully consolidated afterwards. Mass-Observation's
report considers the kinds of amenities that might be
provided to make pubs more appealing to female patrons--
gardens, more plentiful and more comfortable seating,
facilities for children--and speculates that

How far such changes as these will be made in the pubs

of the future depends partly, at least, on whether

women continue to patronise them after the war is over.

It seems likely that the large-scale change which

war has brought to pub-life will persist and that young

people, including young women, will become a permanent

feature of the British pub. (FR 1611, 8)
Mass-Observation, in its role as recorder of sociological
data, does not analyze why or how these war-time changes in
women's pub-going occurred. Their general remarks have some
bearing, but they don't explicitly address the new position
of women. Hamilton, however, takes this task on, and
examines not only what changes occurred, but why they did
and how people like Miss Roach felt about them. Hamilton's
novels, in fact, both reflect and reveal changes over time,
showing the subtly transforming relationships his female
characters have to pubs. In the mid-19308, Hamilton gave
readers Ella and Jenny in the Midnight Bell; the end of that

decade frames Netta in the pubs of Earl's Court; finally,

275
during the war years, Miss Roach's relation to the River Sun
and the Dragon (a country inn which provides black-market
steaks and other illicit goodies) explores the changes
wrought by wartime.

Pub-going is an important part of Miss Roach's wartime
relationship with Lt. Pike, and the influence of alcohol is
established openly. In taking her to the River Sun, the
lieutenant gains an advantage, for his personal charms--
"gorgeous American teeth in a warm, broad American grin"--
operate in "occult collusion with the gin and french" he
buys her (29, 35). Unusually for a Hamilton novel, the
heavy drinker is not the protagonist but an alien; instead
of a sympathetic Bob or Bone, it is Lt. Pike who drinks
excessively and addictively. Arriving home after work, Miss
Roach is bemused by Lt. Pike's invitation to the River Sun.
She accepts, but subsequently notes several markers of his
heavy drinking. Initially, these are inconclusive; they may
be signs of alcoholism, but perhaps are not. Miss Roach is
aware, for instance, "that the man, without being drunk, had
been drinking during the afternoon" and when she observes
him in the Saloon Lounge, she sees not just the gorgeous
teeth and the friendly smile but that "his eyes were
slightly bloodshot, and at moments she thought that this was
due to the cold, and at moments she thought that this was
due to his drinking alcohol regularly and heavily" (29).

The matter is left for future determination, as Miss Roach

ceases to be critical: "soon enough her heart, in occult

276
collusion with the gin and french inside her, began to warm
towards him" (29). Of course, even on their first visit to
the pub, Pike sends out many warning signals concerning
alcohol. Miss Roach orders a small drink, but he brings her
a large. She tries to refuse a second drink, but is instead
given another large.

The novel is more interested, however, in exploring the
changed and still-changing relation of women to the pub, and
Hamilton's commentary on women's pub experience bears out
Mass-Observation's research on the same subject. It is the
war, and not Lt. Pike, which has made Miss Roach, along with
many other women, a pub-goer:

It was not, as might be thought, the Lieutenant who had

introduced Miss Roach to the River Sun or to the habit

of meeting and drinking in bars. The blitz in London,

with its attendant misery, peril, chaos and

informality, had already introduced Miss Roach to this

habit. (47) '
Hamilton explains the phenomenon in The Slaves of Solitude,
carefully establishing Miss Roach's new behavior as
characteristic of a whole class:

yet another small population . . . of which Miss Roach

was a member--of respectable middle-class girls and

women, normally timid, home-going and home-staying, who
had come to learn of the potency of this brief means of
escape in the evening from war-thought and war-

endeavour. (47)

277
The appeal of pub-going is complex, and the novel tries to
identify the main constituents of that appeal for the pubs'
newest patrons: "the company, the lights, the conversation,
the novelty or humour of the experience" and, most important
of all, "the drink itself" (47). The experience is novel,
but gradually becomes more accepted by these women; their
attitude is changed through their experience of pub culture
and drinking.

Significant about the change, as explained by both
Hamilton's novel and Mass-Observation's research, is its
complexity. Old habits are not cast off lightly, and the
ambivalence of those affected is established. The women,
like Miss Roach, who discover pub going, are "originally
half-scandalised by the notion of drinking in public or of
drinking at all" but eventually come to a limited acceptance
of their new habit: Miss Roach "had no longer any fear of
entering public-houses, and would, if necessary, and
provided she was known in the place, enter one
unaccompanied" (47). Clearly Miss Roach's relation to pubs,
while new and noteworthy, is fraught with difficulties not
faced by her male counterparts. Valerie Hey's remarks about
pubs being male domains, where women are sometimes permitted
on sufferance, are apt. She asserts that "the public house
is a political institution expressive of deeply held gender
ideologies" (72), and complains that even those interested
in charting the social waters of pub life have not explained

why this is so:

278
In concluding this chapter, I hope I have made it clear
that "public" houses have never really been public for
women, and that claims to have studied them as social
institutions, as living "social organisms," or
whatever, that fail to explain why women have been
prevented or discouraged from securing access to them
are totally inadequate. (59)
As the phrase "social organisms" is Mass-Observation's, Hey
thus finds their study to be inadequate, in spite of her
praise for its original and valuable approach to pubs as
social organisms rather than problems. It should be noted
that Hamilton makes no effort to explain this either; The
Slaves of Solitude is interested in examining the process of
change without scrutinizing the reasons for women's prior
exclusion from pubs. Both Mass-Observation and Hamilton's
novel, however, provide a way to view a relationship in
flux; that they choose not to conduct their analysis from a
feminist perspective does not render their portraits

useless, or even inadequate.

THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE AS WARTIME NOVEL

I have already noted that wartime novels are a
recognized instance of the sociological functions of
fiction. The Slaves of Solitude ought to be examined for
its contribution to that category. One of its most valuable
features is the ways in which Hamilton has made

personalities reflect larger political beliefs; the novel,

279
like Hangover Square before it, politicizes the personal
qualities of characters. This technique brings abstract
political concepts down to a more material level, where
their implications can be examined.7
The Slaves of Solitude represents an unusual
achievement. Munton's study accords it high praise, but
underestimates some of its potential. Munton quotes from
Nella Last's Mass-Observation diary, noting that "I know of
no war fiction which recognizes women's subjectivity as
existing in the way described here" (31). He goes on to
argue for the importance of the subject, and its lack of
representation in fiction. This lack of representation,
Munton believes, is a serious flaw in the novels of World
War II:
This passage shows her being defined by others, or by a
popular culture that can be appropriated for her to
play her part. Such a crisis ought to be the content
of war fiction, making accessible the otherwise
withheld experience of women. Narrative fiction would
privilege and legitimize events and feelings which as
diary entries are soon overwhelmed by the banal chaos
of passing time. Such fictions have not been written,
perhaps because realistic writing lacks the technical
resources to engage with difficult mental states.
Modernism, always ready to welcome the disturbed
subject, had broken up by 1939. (31)

Munton, in asking for the privileging of both events and

280
feelings along with the unveiling of "difficult mental
states" appeals to the modernist thread of fiction, the main
segment attended to by academics interested in twentieth-
century literature.

The novel of individual consciousness, often stressing
subjectivity rather than "mere" plot-- the form as practiced
by writers such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, to name a
pair of examples much admired by academics--is the strain of
novelistic philosophy Hamilton eschewed from the start.
While Bowen, in The Hotel, was concerning herself primarily
with the consciousness of the elect, interesting few,
Hamilton, in Mondey Morning, addressed himself to the
details of their unrecorded lifestyle and revealed the
depths of their external self-consciousness and prescribed
ways of thinking.

Searching self-analysis is rarely found in Hamilton's
characters, and when they do indulge in introspection, the
result often obfuscates rather than clarifies. Miss Roach,
trying to understand her mixed relief and pleasure when
Vicki initially minimizes her own pub dates, goes to great
lengths to explain away the obvious, understandable, and
true interpretation of her reaction. Miss Roach initially
hits on the best explanation--she wants to keep dates with
Americans as her own achievement--but goes through a
complicated series of unconvincing rationales. Finally, she
decides

it was not a question of envy: it was a question of

281

fear of having been mistaken in a specific type of

person [Vicki].

Miss Roach, glad thus to have explained this
feeling to her entire satisfaction, was destined,
however, to receive something of a shock in Vicki's
next remark. (55)

The effort of introspection, because it is designed to
delude herself, is completely wasted. Reality will force
itself upon Miss Roach's tenuous self-exploration.

When she does understand something significant about
herself, it is in passing and quickly suppressed. Her
annoyance with Vicki troubles her; if she heeded her
feelings, she would save herself much trouble, but instead,
she is determined to suppress her intuition. Miss Roach

was, she saw, always having thoughts for which she

rebuked herself. It then flashed across her mind that
the thoughts for which she rebuked herself seldom
turned out to be other than shrewd and fruitful
thoughts: and she rebuked herself for this as well.

(61)

The restrictions of Hamilton's characters are not only
external, but internal as well. Introspection is a waste of
time, because these subjects are so hemmed in they can only
rationalize away the truth. Miss Roach's emotional life is
so controlled that, after Mr. Thwaites' death, she wonders
"was she to be haunted by the fear, until her dying day,

that she, in the one moment of real fury she had ever

282
allowed herself in her life, had caused a death?" (219).8
People who can allow themselves only one moment of powerful
emotion are not likely candidates for fruitful
introspection.

Even at the end of the novel, when the nightmare at the
Rosamund Tea Rooms is over, Miss Roach is still deceiving
herself. Having learned of Lt. Pike's habit of proposing to
all and sundry, she still chooses to believe "that the
Lieutenant probably liked her better than all the others,
and she could probably have had the Laundry if she had
really tried" (239). Communication with others, like
introspection, is always partial, incorrect, unJamesian.
Throughout their relationship, Miss Roach tries to interpret
Lt. Pike's remarks, but of course she is never able to read
him at all, and Vicki poses a real problem of interpretation
for Miss Roach.

These two approaches--the profound psychological
explorations of the modernist writers and the sociological
depths of Hamilton's fiction--are not alternatives demanding
a choice. Both methods, in the hands of gifted writers, can
produce enormous insights. For Hamilton's people, their way
of life is what makes them "disturbed subjects"; the lasting
record he created constitutes an important legacy.

Moreover, I would argue, The Slaves of Solitude does perform
the task Munton describes; it does "privilege and legitimize
events and feelings which as diary entries are soon

overwhelmed by the banal chaos of passing time" (31).

283

AFTER THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE: RALPH ERNEST GORSE

Hamilton's only published works after The Slaves of
Solitude were the three Gorse novels. These, which were
planned as a series of four novels, examined a sociopathic
criminal, Ralph Ernest Gorse. The novels, unlike Hamilton's
other fiction, are set retrospectively, in the interwar
period. Throughout the novels are allusions, characteristic
of true-crime writing, to Gorse's murderous career and
eventual end on the gallows. The first novel, The W§§t Pier
(1951), portrayed Gorse's early career. His criminal
tendencies are evident even while a schoolboy, and the
central crime in this novel is the defrauding of Esther
Downes, a young working-class girl. One of the novel's
assets is its portrait of Brighton, a place Hamilton knew
well and used effectively as a counterbalance to London in
his earlier novels. No less an authority than Graham Greene
called The Weet Pier "the best novel written about
Brighton."9

Mr Stimpsoniend Mr Gorge (1953) has Gorse switching his
territory to Reading and his criminal attentions to Mrs.
Plumleigh-Bruce, a Colonel's widow. Once again, in spite of
much doom-laden foreshadowing, Gorse's crimes consist only
of swindling Mrs. Plumleigh—Bruce of £500, although Mr.
Stimpson tries to foil Gorse's efforts. Hamilton's long-
time publisher, Michael Sadleir, did not care for the novel,
complaining that all of its characters are unpleasant, but

it was favorably reviewed upon publication.

284

Unknown Assailant (1955), Hamilton's least substantial
novel in every respect, showed Gorse swindling a naive
barmaid, Ivy Barton, of her savings, assisted greatly--if
unintentionally--by Ivy's snobbish father, who loses £200 of
his own money in the bargain. It was the last published
work of his career, and makes clear the huge gap between
Gorse's actions and the dramatic commentary of the three
novels. These novels retain a certain interest, through
Hamilton's depiction of local atmosphere, snobbery, and the
sociopathic personality, but are not his best work and
certainly do not live up to the plan he had conceived for
them.

For these reasons, the Gorse trilogy does not merit a
full chapter in the present study, although under a
different focus it could be examined at more length. In
turning to crime as his subject, Hamilton addresses a
different kind of sociology than previously; from the
everyday and ordinary, he has turned to the pathological.
In many ways, this decision reflects the post-war world and
was foreshadowed by the criminal psychosis of George Harvey
Bone during the phony war period of Hangover Sguare.
Nonetheless, the Gorse books lack the kind of painstakingly
assembled sociological detail that make his earlier books so
rewarding.

Part of the perceived weakness of the Gorse novels
results from the heavy rhetoric Hamilton employed. There is

general agreement that Ralph Ernest Gorse is modelled after

285
Neville Heath, a comparison the two surnames suggest. It is
also one of the comparisons sought by the novels themselves.
Early in Mr Stimpsonrend Mr Goree, Gorse is compared to a
long list of notorious criminals:

He had a touch of Burke and Hare of Edinburgh (though

he was never a heavy drinker); he had a touch of Dr

Pritchard of Glasgow; a touch of the multitudinously

poisoning Palmer; of the strangely acquitted Miss

Madeleine Smith; of Neal Creame [sic], the Lambeth

harlot-poisoner; of George Smith, the bath-murderer; of

Frederick Bywaters, Ronald True, Sydney Fox, Frederick

Mahon, Neville Heath and George Haigh. (285)

There is also general agreement that, in spite of all the
doom-laden reference of things to come typical of most true-
crime writing, Gorse actually does very little. To get
Gorse to the gallows as promised, a great deal would have to
have happened in that never-written fourth volume. As the
series stands, the gap between the rhetorical flourishes and
the actual events creates the impression of a spoof of true-
crime writing.

However, it is fitting that Hamilton should turn his
attention to a sociopathic criminal, and his underlying
conception of criminals like Heath being indifferent, empty
people is well ahead of his time. The TLS review of The
West Pier reveals not only how much Hamilton's work was part
of common knowledge, but how appropriate a subject Gorse was

for Hamilton to take up:

286

By the year 1946 Mr. Hamilton had established his claim
to certain areas of the urban wilderness sufficiently
strongly for it to be remarked that the flagellant
murderer George Neville Heath had obviously belonged to
the Hangover Square crowd. It was as if a creature of
Mr. Hamilton's brain had broken from the lines of type
and run amok in the real world, without the constraint

which that author laid upon his meanest villains.10

NOTES

1. (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 54. Subsequent
references cited in text.

2. Miss Roach inherits £500 from her aunt, the same amount
Ella and her mother would have received had Mr. Prosser died
in The Plains of Cement.

3. The first two reports are from FR 1611, the third from
FR 1635, and the final report from FR 1835. These reports
are cited in the text; typographical and other minor errors
have been silently corrected.

4. Draft report, based on June directives. File Report
808, page 3.

5. Mass-Observation used a scale of four lettered classes.
D is working class, C is artisan class (or skilled working
class), B is middle class, and A (found very infrequently)
is upper class. For convenience, I am using the labels
rather than the alphabetic designations.

6. ߤ no. 12, 19 April 1940 (File Report 80), pages 117 and
118.

7. See Munton for a discussion of Hamilton's intertwining
of the personalities of Vicki Kugelmann and Mr. Thwaites

with the political persuasions they embody.

287

288
8. Hamilton, ever kindly towards his characters, has the
doctor make clear to Miss Roach that her push was not
responsible for Mr. Thwaites' death.
9. Jacket blurb on Viking/Penguin edition of The West Pier.

10. "Patrick Hamilton's Novels," TLS 7 September 1951, 564.

CONCLUSION:
A LITERARY SOCIOLOGY OF THE ORDINARY

The fiction of Patrick Hamilton provides an unequalled
opportunity to learn about the world Doris Lessing
characterized as "Britain as its worst." His novels are so
rich a recreation of a particular fictional milieu that the
most natural approach to them is sociological. Curiously,
however, the two predominant approaches before this study
have been biographical and political. All commentators have
noted the detailed and nuanced presentation of Hamilton's
chosen milieu, even the majority who mention it only to put
it aside in pursuit of a different task.

The present study, finding that the novels amply reward
a sociological examination, focuses on that milieu and its
recreation in the novels. In so doing, the novels
themselves are given precendence over biography, literary
theories, and politics. Their value is thus given proper
weight. As Rene Girard, a theorist who understands that
literature deserves to be more than mere corroboration of
someone's theory, describes the relation between text and
theory,

My own work has convinced me that the most

perspicacious texts from the standpoint of human

289

290

relations are the great texts of Western literature.

They do not have to be studied from a Marxist or a

Freudian point of view to yield what they have to

yield; indeed, they must counterattack.1
English fiction of World War II, as noted in the previous
chapter, is a recognized instance of the sociological value
of literary texts. These texts are seen to have
consequences outside the realm of literature and literary
criticism.

Hamilton's novels, taken as a whole, provide that kind
of sociological record for a milieu over time--from the
19208 through the second World War. Mass-Observation makes
an apt counterpart to Hamilton's work, for their record and
Hamilton's reveal similar values and interests. In 1951, a
TLS reviewer made the link explicit:

Long before Mr. Tom Harrisson trained an eye, sharpened

in Malekula, on the natives of Bolton, Mr. Hamilton was

exploring the jungles of Earls Court, Soho and.

Bayswater with the field note-book of an

anthropologist, noting drinking and sexual rituals,

class-courtships and the role of the scapegoat in urban

cliques. Hangever Sguare . . . is a brilliant

anthropological study of the 'lumpenbourgeoisie' on the
eve of the late war.2
The founders of Mass-Observation believed that too little
serious attention was paid to the ordinary; they set out to

remedy that lack. Hamilton, as the TLS reviewer notes, was

291
already on the job. Hamilton's novels create a literary
sociology of the ordinary, much as Mass-Observation, in
their published works and archival materials, constructed a
sociological record of the same subject.

Notable too, considering the specificity of his
fictional world, is that aspects of it are surprisingly
unchanged over the last fifty or sixty years. In most
instances where a contemporary parallel can be drawn, it is
a question of an unchanged basic structure with a dramatic
surface change. Visiting the Courtfield, one of Hamilton's
regular Earl's Court pubs, it is easy to imagine George
Harvey Bone and his drinking circle there--only the clothing
fashions have changed.

Or, as Doris Lessing observes, "Hamilton's people are
still around. We have all known Bob and Ella , and it
wasn't so long ago I met fatally lovely and dishonest Jenny.
She died of an overdose, and that is the difference between
now and then: no drugs here, it is all the Demon Drink"
(23). While the absence of drugs surely dates a work like
Twenterhoueend Streere Under the_§hy, Lessing is right to
note the profounder social truths that remain constant, even
under such a striking surface difference.3

Hamilton's London Te still there, and is ever-liable to
crop up, even in such unlikely venues as an academic e-mail
discussion group. Someone seeking information about housing
in London that is both cheap and "tolerable" received (among

other suggestions) a recommendation for Hamilton's favourite

 

III)”, $1

 

 

III. '7" I "I I

292
Earl's Court residential hotel, the White House. The
Fauconberg, described in such detail in Mondey Morning and
later revisited as Bone's residence in Hangover Sguare, is

4 The White House is recommended

in fact the White House.

in terms that evoke those very qualities that most

distinguish Hamilton's London of the twenties and thirties:
It all depends on your definition of 'tolerable'. My
personal favourite, which would probably be on the low
end of acceptability for anyone over 25, is the White
House Hotel, at 12 Earl's Court Square. 373-5903. As
of last May, for 15 quid a night you get a private room
with sink (shared bath down the hall), linens, closet,
and small TV. The beds are decent if you don't have a
bad back. A pretty minimal continental breakfast is
included. There's a small communal fridge, a pay phone
in the lobby, and laundry in the basement. The
breakfast/communal room is a gorgeous Victorian
ballroom, the hotel is right across the street from a
pretty little park, and you're about 2 blocks from the
Earl's Court Tube stop. The management was also
extremely nice. If you don't like the White House, or
if they don't have a room free, the Earl's Court area
is loaded with cheapie housing of a similar type,
although not quite as nice.5

The precarious balance achieved by the White House between

cheapness and acceptability testifies to Hamilton's unerring

judgment in such matters. Allowance need only be made for

293
inflation and television's new ubiquity. Hamilton's
fictional milieu is a fascinating recreation of a time past,
yet tantalizingly submerged in 19908 London.

In concentrating on the milieu, and on what the novels
themselves present, I have deliberately eschewed those
approaches which belittle Hamilton's work by casually
pigeonholing it or faulting it for inconsistent adherence to
a principle esteemed by the critic. His subject is ordinary
yet unfamiliar; as the TLS reviewer notes, the contexts in
which Hamilton's characters act out their dismal lives are

built up in exactly the same way, with careful

elaboration and repetition of detail so that the reader
becomes as familiar with the sights, smells and routine
of the place as if he himself was an inmate. There is
the same technique of initiation as into a primitive
secret society, the same involvement of the reader in

the niceties of tribal etiquettes. (564)

While Hamilton's chosen settings--pubs, boarding houses,
cheap residential hotels, Lyons' and ABCs--may seem too
mundane and everyday to merit the attention he lavishes upon
them, their very ordinariness is what precludes our full
understanding of them. Hamilton recognized that a
superficial familiarity masked a deeper ignorance of these
common institutions; that is why he had to create readers'
full familiarity with these venues, "initiate" us into their
mores and rituals.

Hamilton's novels ought to be read by anyone interested

294
in twentieth-century English literature. While many writers
avowed their interest in the documentary form, as I
discussed in Chapter One, few achieved the creation of a
lasting record as successfully as did Hamilton. His novels,
Mass-Observation's sociological reports, and the photographs
of Bill Brandt provide a detailed picture of life in England

during the 19308 and 19408 not to be found elsewhere.

NOTES

1. "Theory and Its Terrors." The Limits of Theory, ed.
Thomas M. Kavanagh (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1989), 253.

2. "Patrick Hamilton's Novels," review of The_fleer_gier,
TLS 7 September 1951, 564.

3. This is reminiscent of Woody Allen's film Hannah and Her
Sisters, when the mother, recovering from a hangover and
musing on the characters of her children, identifies herself
as a clear precursor for her daughter Holly, a reformed
cocaine addict. " 'I would have made a great dope addict,‘
" she proclaims, thinking of her long, difficult, and still-
ongoing relationship with alcohol. Her alcohol problems and
Holly's cocaine addiction are seen in the film as
generational differences which lie over the barely-concealed
basic similarities.

4. Jones, 104. Jones is uninterested in the material
element of this, however, contenting himself with a footnote
identification of the Fauconberg as the White House that
reads in its entirety: "The hotel is still in existence"
(388, note 10).

5. Ruth Feingold, VICTORIA: The Electronic Conference for
Victorien Studies lOnlinel, July 5-6, 1994. I would like to

295

296
thank Ms. Feingold for her permission to cite this post on

the White House Hotel.

WORKS CONSULTED

WORKS CONSULTED

1. WORKS BY HAMILTON

A. FICTION, in chronological order

Mondey Morning. London: Constable, 1925.

Craven House. London: Constable, 1926; revised edition
1943; Cardinal, 1991.

Tyepehee_geiehred. London: Constable, 1928; revised ed.
1943.

Tyenty_Thoueehd Streere Under the Sky: A London Trilegy.
London: Constable, 1935; Hogarth Press, 1987. Trilogy
contains The Midnight Beii (f.p. Constable, 1929), The
Seige of Pleasure (f.p. Constable, 1932), and The
Plains of Cement (f.p. Constable, 1934).

Impromptu in Moribundia. London: Constable, 1939.

Hangover Sguare. London: Constable, 1941; Harmondsworth:
.Penguin, 1974.

The Slaves of Solitude. London: Constable, 1947; Cardinal,
1991.

The Goree_Trilogy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Trilogy
contains The West Pier (f.p. London: Constable, 1951),
Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (f.p. London: Constable,
1953), and Unknown Assailant (f.p. London: Constable,
1955).

297

298

B. PLAYS, stage and radio, in chronological order.

hep_. London: Constable, 1929.

Gaslight. London: Constable, 1939.

Money With Menaces & To therPublic Dehger. (radio plays)
London: Constable, 1939.

This is Impossible. (stage and radio play) New York:
Samuel French, 1942.

The Dnhedin Derkneee. London: Constable, 1943.

The Man Upstairs. London: Constable, 1954.

2. FICTION, MEMOIRS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY OTHER AUTHORS

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Heat of the Day. London: Jonathan
Cape, 1949.

---. The Hotel. 1927. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943.

Brittain, Vera. Testament of a Generation: The Journalism

 

of Vera Brittein and Winifred Holtby. Ed. Paul Berry
and Alan Bishop. London: Virago, 1985.

Calder-Marshall, Arthur. The Magic of My Youth. London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1951.

Cronin, Anthony. Dead as Doornails. Dublin: Dolmen, 1976.

Jameson, Storm. Journey Froh,the North. London: Collins &
Harvill Press, 1969-70. 2 vols.

Maclaren-Ross, Julian. heeoire of the Fortiee. 1965.
London: Cardinal, 1988.

---. The Nine Men of Soho. London: Wingate, 1946.

Orwell, George. Keep the Aspidistra Flying. 1936. London:
Secker & Warburg, 1954.

---. The Roed to Wigen Pier. London: Gollancz, 1937.

299
Talbot, Laura. Barcelone Roed. London: Macmillan, 1953.

---. The Gentlewomen. 1952. Introduction by Polly Devlin.

 

London: Virago, 1985.

Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Lettere of Dylen Thomas. Ed.

 

Paul Ferris. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985.

3. REVIEWS OF WORKS BY HAMILTON

Allen, Trevor. Review of 1972 reprints of The Slaves of
Solitude and Hangover Sguare. heehe_ehd_heehheh 17 (Aug
72): 66-67.

Bayley, John. Review of Hogarth edition of Tyenty Thoueehd
Streets Under the Sky. London Review of Booke 1
October 1987: 6.

Brophy, Brigid. "Biberon." Review of TherLight Went Out,
by B. Hamilton, and 1972 reprints of The Slaves of
Solitude and Hangover Sguare. The Listener 13 July
1972: 54-55.

Bullett, Gerald. Review of The Siege of Pleasure. hey
Statesman 20 February 1932: 233.

Coady, Matthew. "Sorry Tale." Review of The Light Wehr
9hr, by B. Hamilton, and 1972 reprints of The Slaves of
Solitude and Hangover Sguare. New Statesman 23 June
1972: 877-78.

Fadiman, Clifton. Review of Hangover Sguare. New Yerker 14
Feb 1942: 67.

Review of The gorse Trilogy. The Illustrated London Here
280 (Summer 1992): 90.

300

Greenwell, Nick. Review of The Weet Pier. hey_SrereSheh
20/27 December 1985: 60.

---. "Snake and Ladder." Review of TherWeet Pier. hey
Statesman 16 August 1985: 26.

Kimberley, Nick. "One Man in His Time." Review of Hogarth
edition of Tyenty Thoueehd Streere Under the Sky. hey
Statesman 17 July 1987: 29.

Laski, Marghanita. Review of ThedWeerdPier. Speererer 31
August 1951: 280.

Lessing, Doris. "A Blank Look?" Review of Hogarth edition
of Tyenty Thoueend StreererUnder the Sk . The Listener
17 September 1987: 23.

Maclaren-Ross, Julian. "Mr Hamilton and Mr Gorse." Review
of the three Gorse books. The London Magazine 3.1
(1956): 58-63.

Review of TherMidnight BeTT. Spectator 24 August 1929: 257.

Review of Mondey Morning. TLS 6 Aug 1925: 520.

"Nothing to do but torture each other." Review of The Light
Went Out, by B. Hamilton, and 1972 reprints of The
Slaves of Solitude and Hangover Sguare. TLS 14 July
1972: 795.

"Passing Strange." Review of Unknown Assailant. TLS 16
December 1955: 757.

Quigly, Isabel. Review of Unknown Assailant. Spectator 18
November 1955: 692-94.

Raymond, John. Review of Unknown Assailant. New Statesman

29 October 1955: [ ].

301

Rees, Richard. Review of Unknown Assailant. Twentieth
Century 159 (1956): 412.

Review of Riverside. New Yorker 12 July 1947: 65-66.

Review of Oxford edition of Slaves. TLS 8 April 1983: 360.

Wade, Rosalind. "Quarterly Fiction Review." Review of 1972
reprint of Hangover Sguare. Contemporary Review 221
(Oct 1972): 213-15.

West, A. P. Review of Hangover Sguare. New Statesman 23
August 1941: 186.

Review of The West Pier. TLS 7 Sept 1951: 564.

Woddis, Carole. "Decadent Distortions." Review of 1993
production of hgpe. New Statesman 15 April 1994:
34-35.

4. SECONDARY SOURCES

Allen, Trevor. Review of The Light Went Out, by B.
Hamilton. Books and Bookmen 17 (Aug 1972): 74.

Allen, Walter. Tredition end Dream: The English and

Americen Noyel from the Twentiee to Our Tire. 1964.

 

London: Hogarth, 1986.

Bayley, John. "Just off Lexham Gardens." Review of Through
a Glass Darkly, by Nigel Jones. London Reviey of Booke
9 Jan 1992: 16-17.

Bergonzi, Bernard. Reading the Thirtiee: Texts and
Contexts. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1978.

Betjeman, John. "City and Suburban: Moustache or Clean-

Shaven?" Spectator 28 December 1956: 930.

 

 

302

Burchill, Julie. "Give a Man Enough Rope." Review of
Patrick Hamilton, by Sean French. The Spectator 20 Nov
1993: 43.

Carpenter, Humphrey. "A Paler Shade of Greene." Review of
Patrick Hamilton, by Sean French. The Sundey Tihee 28
November 1993: (6) 11.

Cockburn, Alexander. "Beat the Devil." The Nation 19
December 1994: 752-53.

Cockburn, Claud. Introduction to The Slaves of Solitude.
Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1982.

Croft, Andy. Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 19308.
London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

David, Hugh. TherFitrroviehe: A Portreit of Bohehieh
Society 1900-1955. London: Michael Joseph, 1988.

---. HeroeerrMavericks and Bounderer The English Gentleman
froh Lord Cureon to James Bond. London: Michael
Joseph, 1991.

Durgnat, Raymond. The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock: The
Plain Man's Hitchcoch. London: Faber & Faber, 1974.

Eagleton, Terry. "First-Class Fellow Traveler." Review of
Patrick Hamilton: A Life, by Sean French. London
heview of Booke 2 December 1993: 12.

French, Sean. retrick Hehilton: A Life. London: Faber &
Faber, 1993.

Gielgud, Val. Letter. The Times (London) 25 September
1962: 17.

---. Years inre Mirror. London: Bodley Head, 1965.

303

Hall, Angus. "After the Hangover." Books and Bookmen 13
(July 1968): 11-12.

Hamilton, Bruce. The Light Went Out: A Biogrephy of Petrick
Hamilton. London: Constable, 1972.

Hewison, Robert. Under Seige: Literery Life in London 1939-
dS. New York: Oxford U Press, 1977.

Holroyd, Michael. "Patrick Hamilton." Shreeeived Opinione.
NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. 149-152.

---. "Out of Print." UnreceivedOpinione. ibid. 102-118.

---. "Why is There No Shouting?" The Times (London) 16
November 1968. rpt. in Unreceived Opinione.

Jones, Nigel. Through a Glass Darkly: TherLifedef Petrick
Hamilton. London: Scribners, 1991; Abacus, 1993.

Kermode, Frank. History and Value. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989.

Lucas, John, ed. The 1930e: A Challenge to Orthodory.
London and New York: Harvester/Barnes & Noble, 1978.

McKenna, Brian M. "Confessions of a Heavy-Drinking Marxist:
Addiction in the Work of Patrick Hamilton." In Vice,
Beyond therPleasure Dome: 231-44.

---. "Gender Representation, Sexuality and Politics in the
Writings of Patrick Hamilton." Dissertation.
University of Oxford, 1991.

Morley, Christopher. Introduction to Murder With e

Difference: Three Unusual Crime Novels [includes

Hangover Sguare]. New York: Random House, 1946.

304

"Mr. Patrick Hamilton: Novelist and Playwright." Obituary.
The Times (London) 25 September 1962: 15.

Munton, Alan. English Fiction of the Second World Wer.
London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

Priestley, J.B. Introduction to Hangover Sguare and The
Slaves of Solitude. London: Constable, 1972.

Rattenbury, Arnold. "Literature, Lying and Sober Truth:
Attitudes to the Work of Patrick Hamilton and Sylvia
Townsend Warner." Writing and Radicalism, ed. John
Lucas. London & New York: Longman, 1996): 201-243.

---. "Total Attainder and the Helots." Renaiseance and
Medern Studiee 20 (1976): 103-119. Reprinted in Lucas,
Challenge to Orthodory: 138-60.

Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years gf
hie Motion Picturee. New York: Hopkinson and Blake,
1976.

---. The Dark Side of Geniue: The Life of Alfred Hitchcoch.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.

Stow, Randolph. Letter. TLS 19 Nov 1993: 17.

Symons, Julian. "Foiled Caresses." Review of Patrick
Hamilton, by Sean French. TLS 21 Nov 1993: 3-4.

Taylor, D. J. "Dangerous Liaisons." Rev. of Through a
Glass Darkly, by Nigel Jones. The Sundey Tihee
(London) 8 December 1991: (7) 10.

Taylor, John Russell. "Patrick Hamilton." London Magazine
6.2 (1966): 53-60.

 

 

 

305
Thomas, Donald. "The Dangerous Edge of Things: The Novels
of Patrick Hamilton." Encounter 69.2 (1987): 32-40.
Vice, Sue, Matthew Campbell and Tim Armstrong, editors.

_eyond therPleasure Dohe: Writing and Addiction frem

 

the Rodentice. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1994. A

Waterhouse, Keith. "And This Little Pig Had Too Much to
Drink." Review of Through a Glass Darkly, by Nigel
Jones. The Spectator 7 Dec 1991: 38-39.

Widdowson, P. J. "The Saloon Bar Society: Patrick
Hamilton's Fiction in the 19308." Renaissance and
Modern Studiee 20 (1976): 81-101. Reprinted in Lucas,
Challenge to Orthodory: 117-137.

Wyndham, Francis. "Explaining Away the Ogres." Review of
Throu h a Gla s Darkl , by Nigel Jones. TLS 13 Dec
1991: 8.

---. "Twenty-five Years of the Novel." The Creft of
Letters in England: A Syppoeium. Ed. John Lehmann.
London: Cresset Press, 1956. 44-59.

Young, Elizabeth. "A Wilderness of Pain." Review of
Through a Glass Darkly, by Nigel Jones. New Stateeman
& Society 29 Nov 1991: 29.

5. GENERAL REFERENCES

"Arthur Calder-Marshall." Obituary. The Times (London) 22
April 1992: 1.13.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Ruleerof Art: Geneeis and Structure

of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel.

306
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
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