Featured Reading Guide
Patrick Hamilton
The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid s secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.
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Born in Hassocks, Sussex in 1904, Patrick Hamilton was the youngest of three children. His parents, Ellen and Bernard Hamilton were published authors. At the age of seventeen he began to work as an actor and assistant stage manager for Andrew Melville. He then changed his career and worked as a stenographer. He published his first novel Craven House in 1926 and within a few years established a wide readership for himself. His first theatrical success was Rope (1929) on which Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name was based. Many novels followed, including Hangover Square , his trilogy of novels Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and Slaves of Solitude , as well as radio dramas and plays, several of which were filmed, including Gaslight , starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. A celebrated ‘bright young’ novelist of the Twenties and Thirties, Hamilton was in tune with the times. He died on 23 September, 1962
topAbout the Book
The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid s secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars a world of twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos, wasted dreams and lost desires.
topPatrick Hamilton interview/review
Statements from Patrick Hamilton Taken from Patrick Hamilton: A Life by Sean French, Faber and Faber, (1993)
On Childhood
‘I was born in Hassocks, Sussex, and eternally grew up much as all boys do, taking my surroundings for granted, but I always had a more or less vague notion that I wanted something that my surroundings did not quite supply. While I lived the life of an ordinary boy, a poetic yearning developed by degrees until, all unconsciously as to how I reached that state of mind, I was sure that some day I was going to be a great poet.’ (Interview in Boston Evening Transcript, 21 June 1930)
After School
‘I did all sorts of things, anything I could get hold of; working for the army and at the law. Had a sister who was on the stage and that led me into that sort of life. Took perfectly rotten jobs in the theatre, nothing that amounted to anything more than giving me barely enough money to live, but it did give me a pretty clear knowledge of that class of people. Finally I decided there wasn’t anything in it for me. I must have more money, so I learned stenography and typewriting by correspondence and got a job in the city. This would keep me from starving while I was getting to be that great poet.’ (Interview in Boston Evening Transcript, 21 June 1930)
On Writing
‘You know I have an idea that it’s this writing business that is so tough. I suspect that it’s something requiring infinitely more labour and pain than what the average person thinks of as ‘work’. ‘Work’ to so many people is a question of sitting in an office, phoning, making contacts, getting ideas, chatting, overcoming difficulties, meeting new people, above all being stimulated by the presence and activities of others. There is no reason why work of this kind should not be pleasurable to anyone with a reasonably active mind. But working at writing it seems to me in comparison, is like hard labour in solitary – something to which even illness is preferable.’
On Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
‘Lately I’ve been making the most extraordinary expeditions into Soho – mixing a great deal with the courtesans therein, and also the low life. I think I’ve got an idea for an extraordinary and really valuable novel. I daresay you know it’s always been one of my leading ambitions to write about the life of servants – particularly female ones – and their oppressed hideous condition.
And it’s also been my ambition to write about harlots. I have two first rate novels with either of these subjects. Now my latest adventures have led me into remarkable social observations and enlightenments, and it’s suddenly occurred to me that to write a novel which is both about servants and harlots (possibly the slow transformation of one into the other) would not only be ferociously good as a novel, but really sound work.’
‘My present book is I think, streets ahead of what I’ve done before…there is only one theme of the HardycumConrad great novel – that is, that this is a bloody awful life, that we are none of us responsible for our own lives and actions, but merely in the hands of the gods, that Nature don’t care a damn, but looks rather picturesque in not doing so, and that whether you’re making love, being hanged or getting drunk, it’s all a futile way of passing the time in the brief period allotted to us preceding death.
It is the poet’s business to put into words the universal wail of humanity at not being able to get everything it wants exactly when it wants it.’
On His Writing Style in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
‘I have developed a lot of new theories about writing and style, the latter having acquired a weird penchant for short sentences. Also I never now try to get effects, except in comic writing. My maxim is to see, relate what you see, and your effects will come. Vision and imagination are the things, and they arise from stored observation. I work a good deal with the dash and colon, and am not afraid of awkward rhythms. If your vision and feeling are clear, they will transcend mere prose. Also I work with short chapters of about five pages each, one after another – no sections.’
topStarting Points for Discussion
- The three different volumes of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky go over the same story from different points of view revealing the inner lives of the characters. Discuss this method of storytelling and how it adds to our enjoyment and understanding of each of the characters.
- Hamilton’s novels end without any redemptive vision. He refuses to allow his characters to have unrealistically happy endings. Discuss.
- The most distinctive feature of Hamilton’s fiction are the Dickensian narrative voice and dialogue. Discuss (you may wish to look at specific characters such as Bob, Ella, Jenny and Mr Eccles).
- Hamilton’s portrait of Jenny is not a sympathetic one, though it is not moralising or judgemental either. Ella, however, is an attractive character. She keeps her feet on the ground and shows herself to have moral integrity. Compare and contrast the two women and Hamilton’s moral standpoint towards each.
- ‘She had never seen so many desperate buses and blocked cars, and swarming people, in all her life. In all the teeming, roaring, grinding, belching, hooting, anxious-faced world of cement and wheels around her it really seemed as though things had gone too far. It seemed as though some climax
had just been reached, that civilization was riding for a fall, that these were certainly the last days of London’ The characters Hamilton portrays are lost amidst a civilization riding out of control. Look at each individual story as a quest for Ella, Bob and Jenny to attempt to find something that will give their life a sense of inner meaning and purpose against the solitude and anonymity of the increasingly industrialised city in which they live.
- Look at Hamilton’s portrayal of Bob’s slide into despair and obsession. Is this a convincing depiction of someone falling in love? Could this have worked as well had Hamilton not told the story from Bob’s inner viewpoint?
Suggested Further Reading
- Patrick Hamilton ~ Sean French (1993)
- Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton ~ Nigel Jones (1992)
- Twentieth Century Mystery and Crime Writers, ed ~ J.M. Reilly (1985)
- The Light Went Out ~ B. Hamilton (1972)