Impromptu in Moribundia

IMPROMPTU IN MORIBUNDIA

PATRICK HAMILTON

Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Peter Widdowson

Contents

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

Epigraph

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Copyright

Introduction

Introduction1

‘From the perspective of the 1990s’, writes Patrick Hamilton’s principal biographer to date, ‘[Impromptu in Moribundia] looks impossibly dated’.2 Well, we shall see. Published by Constable in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War — a commercial failure never reprinted until now — the novel does indeed seem to ‘belong’ to the late-1930s. Nevertheless, it is at once a fascinating relic of that period, an innovative piece of thirties fiction-writing — typographically, if in no other ways — and a novel which may well entertain and strike a chord with contemporary readers in these postmodern times. At the very least, then, the present reprinting allows those unfamiliar with Hamilton’s work — or familiar with only that part of it which has surfaced through the swirling mists of oblivion which otherwise surround this now undeservedly little-known writer — to make up their own minds.

Patrick Hamilton was born into a ‘good’ but profoundly troubled Edwardian family in 1904, and became a professional writer in the mid-1920s. By the end of that decade, he was already established as a successful novelist and playwright, but a severe injury caused by being knocked down by a car early in 1932 seriously compounded his already disturbed psychological condition — the symptoms of which he attempted to dispel by heavy drinking. However, he remained extremely productive and highly-regarded throughout the 1930s, during which period he became a convinced Marxist, like so many other intellectuals, although he never actually joined the Communist Party. Hamilton’s writing career continued into the post-war period, but by now his alchoholism was worsening and effectively caused his premature death in 1962. His last finished novel was published in 1955, and his work was rapidly lost sight of in the following decades. It is a cautionary tale of how, in the unpredictable realm of literary evaluation, a talented and once very successful writer can disappear from view almost overnight.

Hamilton is best known for his theatrical thrillers, Rope (1929) and Gaslight (or Angel Street, 1939) — both grossly adapted as Hollywood films3 — and for his mordant novel about the raddled English bourgeois culture preceding World War II, Hangover Square (1941).4 But he wrote many other works both before and after the war: Craven House (1926), Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, A London Trilogy (1935),5 The Slaves of Solitude (1947), and the ‘Mr. Gorse’ novels of the early 1950s (The West Pier [1951], Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse [1953] and Unknown Assailant [1955] — adapted as a television series, ‘The Charmer’, in 1987).6 In addition, he wrote a number of successful radio plays, such as To the Public Danger and Money with Menaces (both 1939).

All these works, as with those of so many others of his generation, locate what they see as the inner stagnation and decay of the English middle class between the wars, and its responsibility for the condition of contemporary society, in the personal crises of individuals and marginal groups of ostensibly trivial people. Just as the airless and corrupt orthodoxy of bourgeois families and attitudes, the sickening stench of the decaying genteel, incubates private neurosis, so cumulatively it seems to engender public crisis. Such a metaphorical correlation informs the early poems of W.H. Auden, the thirties fiction of Edward Upward, the seedy world of (Graham) ‘Greeneland’, George Orwell’s obsessive late-thirties novels, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939), Christopher Isherwood’s earlier ‘English’ novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932), and his famous ‘Berlin’ ones, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). A kind of ‘synthetic’ realism — in which the enormities of contemporary history (what Isherwood called the ‘fantastic realities’ of ‘the everyday world’)7 are ‘tea-tabled’8 by peripheral and irresponsible goings-on within individual hells — allows the physical and mental landscape of an ugly and neurotic world, private and public, to be depicted. Unlike Hamilton’s other work, however, Impromptu in Moribundia, whilst still concerned to excoriate English middle-class ideology, belongs to a different mode of 1930s fictional experimentation in its attempt, too, to convey ‘a world of realities so preposterous that [the] human brain could not cope with them’.

Many of the novelists of that decade show a significant irresolution about their fictional form, oscillating between a more or less realistic portrayal of the social world around them and the contrivance of ‘parallel’ worlds through fable, allegory, satire and dystopia. There seems to have been a pressure to expand the novel form, not as the Modernists had done in order to penetrate and express the shifting inner realms of individual consciousness as a way of comprehending the world, but to find a strategy for representing and commenting directly upon the large forces and movements of society that determine and control the lives of the individuals within it.9 If ‘History’, to borrow Stephen Dedalus’s phrase in Joyce’s Ulysses, was the ‘nightmare’ from which the Modernists had been ‘trying to awake’, novelists in the nineteen-thirties sought to engage it head on. Examples from the period of writers exploiting the boldly simplified, cartoon-like methods of fabulation would include: Aldous Huxley’s shift from his earlier Modernist fictional mode to the dystopia, Brave New World (1932); Edward Upward’s surrealistic fables, The Railway Accident (written 1928) and Journey to the Border (1938); Rex Warner’s satirical allegories, The Wild Goose Chase (1937), The Professor (1938) and The Aerodrome (1941); and, a little later, Orwell’s ‘solving’ of his late-1930s formal dilemma in the fabular mode of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) — not to mention many examples of the rapidly developing genre of Science Fiction. Such novels, however obliquely, represent an attempt to engage with the crucial public issues of their time: with its new sciences and technologies, with its political, military and economic movements, with contemporary historical realities. In a telling passage in Impromptu, Hamilton comments on the Modernist literary writers of ‘Moribundia’ (or England, as we shall see). Using a simple but effective comic device almost certainly derived from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon novels (1871, 1901) — which also offer a satirical ‘reverse’ image, in the fabular country of their title, of (Victorian) bourgeois culture — he refers here to ‘Toile, S.T.’, ‘Ecyoj’, ‘Yelxuh’ and ‘Ecnerwal’, amongst others:

… they are for the most part hopelessly and morbidly turned in upon themselves, and sterile in consequence. But where else are they to turn save upon themselves? In a world which is unchangeable and inexpandable, where is there to gaze save inwards? … Obviously, in doing so, they must become self-conscious to an ever more tormented degree, and paralysed for effective action accordingly. Finally, a stage must be reached when the mind can only look at ever-receding reaches of the mind, and an art on the border line of madness or idiocy must be reached….

For these reasons art, literature, and poetry in Moribundia take on a more and more painfully subjective aspect, more and more the character of meaningless masturbation, there being no future which they can fertilize,

‘Effective action’ towards a less moribund ‘future’ are goals which the innovative fabular novels of the 1930s sought to promote, and the satirical caricature of Impromptu places it amongst them. In it, Hamilton writes more than usually openly from a Marxist position, and his assault here on the dominant ideology of Anglo-American literary Modernism may help to explain his absence from a contemporary critical history still implicitly governed by it. Equally, the non-Modernist polemical form of the novel may be one of the reasons for its all but total disappearance from view.

Impromptu in Moribundia begins — admittedly rather slowly — as a rough pastiche of the ‘Time Traveller’ type of fiction made popular by H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and Elmer Rice’s later satirical science-fiction novel, A Voyage to Purilia (1931), which, Nigel Jones tells us, ‘Patrick had read and admired… [taking] from it the central situation of a man catapulted through space to a world that was a distorting mirror of the society he had left behind’.10 But this only takes up the first chapter, and the ‘Asteradio’ business is no more than an opening device to get the unnamed narrator onto the planet of ‘Moribundia’. Once there, Hamilton can proceed to expose the central, and often devastatingly portrayed, butt of his satire: the stagnancy and stupidity of the English middle-class way of life as fundamentally responsible for the sickness of contemporary society.

Hamilton’s main strategy is simply to make his fictive Moribundia a physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middle-class culture and consciousness. Thus the visitor from ‘Earth’, on his arrival in Moribundia, finds himself actually watching the cricket-match from Henry Newbolt’s Edwardian poem, ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (1908).