Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton

by Nigel Jones

This is a biography of Patrick Hamilton, the author of "Rope", "Gas Light" and "Hangover Square", who was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. Born in Sussex in 1904, he moved shortly afterwards with his parents to Hove, where he passed his formative years. His first novel, "Craven House", was published in 1925 and within a few years he had established a wide readership for himself. Two plays, "Rope" (on which Hitchcock based his film) and "Gas Light", brought him commercial success and his high point as a novelist was reached with "The Slaves of Solitude" and "Hangover Square". His reputation seemed assured, but it was overshadowed by personal setbacks and an increasing preoccupation with drink. Yet in spite of these pressures he was able to produce some of his best work, in which an underlying sense of loss and isolation is felt beneath his comic creations. He died in 1962.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, History, British Literature

416 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1991

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

You couldn’t make it up or if you did people would say it was too outre, too ludicrous and frankly, too Freudian. The overbearing father inherited £100,000 (= around £9 million in today’s money) when he turned 21 in 1884. On this auspicious 21st birthday he went out to celebrate and met a prostitute. This is probably not so surprising. But then he married her. That was surprising. And then later she committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. So he married again and had 3 kids. His younger son was Patrick and when he was 23 he met a prostitute and fell in love and would have married her except she finally ditched him.

Patrick had a very intense relationship with his mother :

My darling Mummie – Sweet One - … no woman on earth can come between me and my love and adoration of yourself. My love for you has been going on for 26 years and will never never abate. I shall never wander away, or regard you as any thing but the first and loveliest woman on earth. I mean this, my own.

That is from a letter explaining that he had just got married without inviting her. Haha, how's that for passive aggression.

There are so many eye-goggling things that happened to Patrick – the car accident that nearly severed his nose so that when they repaired it with plastic surgery he thought it looked like a clown’s nose; the wild success as a playwright at the age of 25 with Rope, and then another wild success 9 years later with Gaslight (the play that gave us the term gaslighting); his first marriage which turned immediately into an entirely platonic affair because his wife didn’t want anything to do with his bondage fantasies; and, of course, the total commitment to Marxism! Stalin was his man!

All of which was floated on a gradually increasing alcoholism that by his 30s was up to three bottles of whisky a day. Given the fact that he also was a chain smoker, that he lasted to the age of 58 is a strong testament to the robustness of the human frame.

He wrote three painfully funny novels in his 20s –

• The Midnight Bell (1929)
• The Siege of Pleasure (1932)
• The Plains of Cement (1934)

And later Hangover Square (1941) and The Slaves of Solitude (1947), both great. He was a miniaturist. No sprawling canvases, no ambition at all except to mercilessly pin human haplessness to the page, making the reader squirm uncontrollably as he recognise himself. In Hamilton’s books, love is the drug that smashes and wrecks everything. No one is ever loved by a person who loves them. When love comes, you should run, and not look back.

After WW2 he wrote three short novels about a con-man, nobody liked them at all. When he died in 1962 he was almost forgotten.

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book in June 2012, and then reread it in March 2014 having read all of Patrick Hamilton's novels in the interim (excepting Monday Morning which is out of print but scheduled to be republished soon), and I enjoyed this biography every bit as much second time round, and discovered that being more familiar with the novels made the experience even richer and more rewarding.

This is a splendid biography of a wonderful writer. Nigel Jones manages to critique and contextualise all of Patrick Hamilton's works whilst also providing a well written account of his life. To one degree or another all of Patrick Hamilton's work is based on his tortured life - sometimes to an extraordinary degree. Nigel Jones skilfully weaves all these biographical strands to help explain one of the most complex, interesting and enduring twentieth century English writers.

Essential reading for anyone interested in Patrick Hamilton.

4/5

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating portrait of a talented author, whose reputation and works have been highly regarded but often been neglected when compared to other writers from the same era. It follows Patrick Hamilton’s life from the third child of a braggart and bully of a father and a possessive and adored mother to his decline and descent into alcoholism. Nigel Jones examines the family of Patrick Hamilton in detail, especially the relationship with his beloved mother and his older brother, Bruce. It is a fact that his family, although relatively wealthy and comfortable, were not all that they seemed and it is this discrepancy between the view shown to the world and the reality which highlights Hamilton’s distrustful and cynical nature.

Another important event in Patrick Hamilton’s world view came through his family and their declining fortunes around the time of the first world war, which led to him moving into a series of boarding houses, cheap hotels and rented rooms, mostly with his mother. This insight into the world of genteel poverty and lonely people marked him as a writer, as did his reliance on alcohol and his time spent with streetwalkers and in public houses.

This book takes us through Hamilton’s life – his marriages, the accident which marked him and, most importantly, his work. This includes his early love of poetry, novels and plays. At times you feel that the author had so much information available from his brother Bruce that the relationship was given possibly more importance than it merited. However, this is a good assessment of his work, life and how his reputation has changed over the years.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyably un-stuffy and intimate (thanks to all those letters to and from Bruce). I like the chapter structure around the novels (which with PH's smallish oevre you can do). Those close references to the characters and places which find themselves in the novels are welcome too (that 'back up your argument with references from the text' thing that gets taught at college and is largely abandoned by anyone who writes seriously about books in the Anglosphere).

Sad story, of course, but that's partly what's great about him - 'a light that burned brightly', etc. Damaged and chaotic, but superbly observant. Bernard: what a brilliantly comic arse. Bruce: a saint. And all leaving me with enough Sites of Hamiltonian Interest to last a year of day trips and pub crawls.

PS One terrible clanger. Bert Longstaff the Brighton and Hove Albion legend - not 'Ernest'!

[Stephen Curran · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the evidence presented here, Patrick Hamilton would have been a hard person to get along with: boastful, xenophobic, misogynistic, unfaithful. But, just like many of his characters, you can’t help but feel sorry for him. For him, and for his long suffering lapdog-loyal brother, Bruce. The rise and fall of his life is close to a Greek tragedy, peaking with the runaway success of his play ROPE and ending in despair and chronic alcoholism. Nigel Jones’ biography is readable and enlightening and provides some astute analysis of the author’s works, the best of which is THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE: an under read masterpiece of compassion and observation.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Described as the greatest chronicler of urban life since Dickens, Hamilton's keen observations of life and its conflicts should be on everyone's must-read list. Nigel Jones' detailed and insightful biography of the man lays bare Hamilton's own weaknesses and flaws. This life story serves to illuminate yet further the background to the tales Hamilton spun of the seething frustration of the drabness of suburban life between the wars. "Holding on in quiet desperation is the English way" wrote Roger Gilmour on Dark Side of the Moon in 1973. This might have summed up the recurring theme in Hamilton's books, and to some extent his own experience of life.

[A gin and orange, a lemon squash, and a scotch and water, please! · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-researched and incisive, this is an in-depth look at the character of one of the most, if not THE most under-rated writer in English. I'm not that into biographies but this held me from start to finish.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough biography of a talented but much troubled author. If only Patrick could have stayed of the booze there may have been more and better material which could have led to him being better known.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb biography. Well researched and written.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book itself is written very well and the author made a colossal research!

[James Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A heavily researched biography which draws on what seems to be a mountain of letters between Patrick and his author brother Bruce, the authors work, and comments from those around him. If there is such a number of letters why doesn't a publisher publish the letters in a volume of their own? I found it frustrating that almost every page contained an excerpt from one of these letters or long excerpts from Hamilton's novels themselves. Having read the novels the excerpts were not needed and I felt the biographer could have based his biography on the letters without actually including extracts - as I say they (the letters) are good enough for a book on their own.

Interesting to see how his brushes with Hollywood were unsatisfying and frustrating. His use of drink could have been examined more carefully as could his (decline?) into the use of London prostitutes to engage in S&M practices. Hamilton seemed to come across as a man both shy and charming, well dressed, rich for the most part, and with an extraordinary talent, writing, as he did, complex and socially-aware novels in his twenties. Most authors chip away at the craft for thirty years before reaching the kind of talent that brought us the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy.

For a fan of Hamilton and even for anyone interested in early to mid 20th century English lit this is an important biography. Sadly Patrick seems to have been overlooked in many ways and it will take books like this to keep the figure alive in our minds.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent literary biography of an author whose time has come for a revival. Hamilton is a chronicler of the frustrations and loneliness of urban life who is also very funny.