Hangover Square
BookishMall.com
Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his
generation. Born in Hassocks, Sussex, in 1904, he and his parents moved a short while
later to Hove, where he spent his early years. He published his first novel, Monday
Morning, in 1925 and within a few years had established a wide readership for
himself. Despite personal setbacks and an increasing problem with drink, he was able to
write some of his best work. His plays include the thrillers Rope (1929), on
which Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope was based, and Gas Light
(1939), also successfully adapted for the screen (1939), and a historical drama, The
Duke in Darkness (1943). Among his novels are Craven House (1926);
The Midnight Bell (1929), The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and
ThePlains of Cement (1934) which form a trilogy entitled Twenty
Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935); Hangover Square (1941); and
The Slaves of Solitude (1947). The Gorse Trilogy is made up of
The West Pier, MrSampson and Mr Gorse and Unknown Assailant, which
were first published during the 1950s. J. B. Priestley described Patrick Hamilton as
‘uniquely individual… He is the novelist of innocence, appallingly
vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of
evil.’ Patrick Hamilton died in 1962.
PATRICK HAMILTON
Hangover Square
A story of darkest Earl’s Court
with an Introduction by J. B. Priestley
BookishMall.com
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,
Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V
3B2
Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi
– 110 017, India
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland,
New Zealand
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196,
South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,
England
www.penguin.com
First published by Constable 1941
Published in Penguin Books 1956
Reprinted with an Introduction 1974
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2001
15
Copyright 1941 by Patrick Hamilton
Introduction copyright© J. B. Priestley, 1972
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,
or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-195640-4
Contents
The First Part –
CHRISTMAS TRAVEL
The Second Part –
PHONING
The Third Part –
PERRIER’S
The Fourth Part – JOHN
LITTLEJOHN
The Fifth Part –
PETER
The Sixth Part –
BRIGHTON
The Seventh Part – END
OF SUMMER
The Eighth Part – MR
BONE
The Ninth Part –
‘FLU
The Tenth Part –
BRIGHTON
The Last Part –
MAIDENHEAD
NOTE
The quotations from Roget’s Thesaurus are made by
permission of Messrs Longmans, Green & Co., to whom the author and publishers
make grateful acknowledgement.
SCHIZOPHRENIA:
…a cleavage of the mental functions, associated with assumption by the
affected person of a second personality.
Black’s Medical Dictionary
Introduction
It is now half a lifetime ago that I wrote an Introduction to Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. (This was a genuine trilogy of London novels, which had been published separately but were then brought out in one volume.) And now here I am, back again. But everything is different. Then, in 1935, Patrick Hamilton (b. 1904) was still a young novelist of immense promise. Now I have to remember that he died ten years ago, and that there must be a whole generation of readers who know nothing about him and his fiction, who have never opened his Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude. It is just possible that some of them may have heard of his two successful plays, Rope and Gaslight, but while these are not without theatrical merit – on any level Hamilton was a good craftsman – they are not in the same original and memorable class as novels like Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude, which indeed are among the minor masterpieces of English fiction.
The first was written in his later thirties; the second in his earlier forties, being published in 1947. Three more novels were to come, between 1951 and 1955: The West Tier, Mr Stimpsonand Mr Gorse, and Unknown Assailant, three independent stories but linked together because they all describe the mean villainies of one Ernest Ralph Gorse. This was a bad idea anyhow, and Hamilton no longer had the creative energy to bamboozle us into believing it was a good idea. There was a reason for this rapid decline from his best work to his worst. He spent too many of his later years in an alcoholic haze, no longer a social drinker but an unhappy man who needed whisky as a car needs petrol. There may have been some inherited tendency here, but I feel strongly that an increasing desire to blur reality arose from the depths of a profoundly disturbed unconscious. We have to accept this, I believe, fully to understand the man and his work, both the wonderful best of it and the forgivable worst of it. Otherwise I would never have referred to his later alcoholism, for I prefer to remember him as the delightful young writer I first knew well over forty years ago.
Even in 1935, six years before he gave us Hangover Square, I could write in my Introduction: ‘Here is a drama, The London Pub, presented by a tragic comedian, for that, I think, is no bad description of this author. The comedian cannot be missed; and now and again he returns to an early fault and is too determinedly facetious, too lavish with what we might refer to as his Komic Kapitals. But his humour is real, and has a fine Dickensian thrust and flourish. Behind the run is a deepening sense of tragedy…’ Here we can find the clue, the pattern, the secret.
1 comment