Seeing the World Through Books

“Snap!…Click!–Just like that…It was as though his head were a five-shilling Kodak camera, and someone had switched over the little trigger which makes the exposure…But instead of an exposure having been made, the opposite had happened–an enclosure–a shutting down, a locking in…There was no sensation, but there was something to be done…Then he remembered:  he had to kill Netta Longdon.”

Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Patrick Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s, along with the famous dramas of Rope and Gaslight, and though he earned the admiration of a host of famous authors, from Graham Greene and Doris Lessing to Nick Hornby, he never achieved the popular success he deserved, either in his own time or throughout the twentieth century.  In this decade, however, virtually all his novels have been reprinted in both Europe and in the US, and he is finally beginning to be recognized for his astute observations about his times and for his insights into the minds of his characters.  Many of his novels contain autobiographical elements, and Hangover Square (1941), often considered his best novel, is no exception.   Seriously disfigured in an automobile accident when he was in his twenties, Hamilton became an alcoholic at an early age, and drinking to excess is a constant motif in his novels. A man who apparently wore his heart on his sleeve, he also developed passionate but unrequited attachments to beautiful women, in this case using actress Geraldine Fitzgerald as his model for Netta.

Indicating in the subtitle that this is “A story of darkest Earl’s Court,” Hangover Square is set in what was then a  seamy, low-rent district of London, a place in which those who were down on their luck, out of work, or homeless could manage to scrounge through life.  Bars and cheap entertainment venues provided evening activities for people who often did not get up before noon.  George Harvey Bone, the main character here, is out of work, his partner and best friend Bob Barton having closed the business to move to Philadelphia.  Like the other unemployed and under-employed people he associates with, he lives on the fringes of the entertainment business–part-time actors and actresses, managers, producers, and movie makers who party long and hard, their gaiety fueled by massive quantities of alcohol.  Each morning-after is spent in “Hangover Square.”   As one of George’s friends remarks, “If only you could have your morning-after first, and your night-before afterwards, the whole problem of drinking, and indeed of excess and sin in life generally, would be simplified or solved.”

George has an additional problem, however, one which has drawn the attention of the people he associates with.  His “blackouts,” which might, in some cases have been attributed to repeated over-indulgence, appear also to be psychotic episodes of schizophrenia.  More or less accepted and glossed over by all of George’s associates as “dead moods,” these episodes have become more frequent and more serious in the past year.  Though George says he has had them all his life, they “had not been so frequent, so sudden, so dead, so completely dividing him from his other life.  They did not arrive with this extraordinary ‘snap.’”  Nor did they demand that he kill anyone.

Netta Longdon, a woman with whom George is obsessed, is a failed actress, a beautiful, spoiled, and manipulative woman who ignores George except when she wants money (not unlike Jenny Maples in his 1935 novel Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky).   She sleeps around with his friends (though not with him) and uses him whenever she thinks she can get something.  To George, she “wore her attractiveness…as a murderous utensil with which she might wound indiscriminately, right and left.”  He is so desperate for her attentions, however, that he allows himself to be degraded, always hoping that she will see him for the person he really is.  His other self recognizes how merciless Netta is and has begun to demand, during George’s increasingly frequent “dead moods,” that he kill her in order to protect himself.

Though Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) is a broad sociological study of four people in the 1930s who interact at a bar called “The Midnight Bell,” Hangover Square is more intensely psychological, telling the story from the inside out, using George to channel the action and interpret it for us.  As he is driven closer to the edge and as his “dead moods” get closer together, the suspense grows.  “Getting killed would serve her jolly well right,” he rationalizes.  “All her life she has had things too much her own way.”  Netta and her lover have subjected George to an emotional “death by a thousand cuts,” and his alterego has had enough.

The narrative line, which takes place inside George’s head, is strong and emotionally affecting, and though many contemporary readers will be frustrated at George’s passivity in the face of Netta’s abuse, few will fail to empathize.  Because the action is internal and does not lend itself easily to visual recording, however, the film of this novel, starring Laird Cregar and Linda Darnell bears virtually no resemblance to the novel.  In the film, George’s “dead moods” are an excuse to show close-ups of Cregar in almost Frankenstinian transformations, while the atmospheric and foggy townscapes bear little resemblance to the internal landscapes Hamilton has so carefully constructed in the novel.  The climax of the film bears no resemblance to the book at all, leading Hamilton himself to disown the film.  Hangover Square (the novel) is tight and intensely personal, psychologically astute for the period, and suspensefully developed.  The film is a horror show.

Notes: The photo of the flats in Earl’s Court (now gentrified) shows the density of this area and the number of residents possible in this relatively small neighborhood.  http://wapedia.mobi/en/Earls_Court

The pub photo is from www.yorkhouselondon.com

The last photo is of Laird Cregar, as George Harvey Bone in the film version of Hangover Square. Here’s a video clip.  Don’t worry about the “spoiler warning.”  (Nothing about this part of the film, which concerns itself with the similarities to Frankenstein, bears any resemblance to the novel!)   www.youtube.com Cregar, who starred here with Linda Darnell, died shortly after this film at the age of 31.

Actress Geraldine Fitzgerald’s obituary in the Guardian UK is here:  www.guardian.co.uk, citing the obsession of Patrick Hamilton with her.

Also by Patrick Hamilton:  TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY and    SLAVES OF SOLITUDE