The apparently confused chronology is no accident, since the Edwardian ethos, for Hamilton, still informs English society in the 1930s and is central to its sickness: hence ‘Moribundia’. During the course of his visit, the narrator experiences most aspects of Moribundian life, continuously expressing his (dis)ingenuous ‘surprise’ at their difference from their English counterparts. Different they may appear — inasmuch as the images, preconceptions and tacit assumptions of the English middle class are here the palpable reality — but the trick is that they are in fact a literal enacting of its ‘mind’. This is ‘the land in which the ideals and ideas of our world, the striving and subconscious wishes of our time, the fictions and fragments of our imagination, are calm, cold actualities’.

Moribundians are so conditioned that they generally think and talk in the clichés of popular and mass cultural forms: hence the incidence of ‘ballooning’ — one of Hamilton’s finest comic inventions — which means that in the middle of a conversation a balloon will automatically appear out of the top of a Moribundian’s head on which are inscribed the words of an advertisement of the ‘Thinks’ variety. These, as the reader will discover, are physically depicted in the text in graphic typographical form. In addition, the citizens are often reified into the images of popular culture: people with colds walk down the road with dripping taps in place of noses, or, if suffering from indigestion, with little devils scrabbling round their waists poking them with forked instruments; husbands and wives out shopping become the amazonian viragos and diminutive hen-pecked males of the comic picture-postcard, just as drunken men are invariably in evening-dress, hiccough, cling to lamp-posts, have bright red noses, pronounce all their ‘s’s’ as ‘sh’s’, and are observed by amiable policemen.

More seriously, the vast mass of the population is composed of two groups which exist exactly in terms of their type image. First, there are the ‘Yenkcoc’ working classes who think and act just as the (English) middle class (through its tory press) believes they think and act:

… the Moribundian working man is utterly happy and contented, and this in spite of the fact that Moribundians admit, in fact insist, that he is ‘always grumbling.’… [But] this ‘grumbling’ is merely a charming affectation on the working man’s part, by which he attempts to screen, but actually reveals his inner feelings. He grumbles in the same way as one might growl at a child one loved, in excess of affection,

In this world, the working classes do indeed buy new grand pianos every week and smash them up for firewood; they do keep their coal in the bath; and they do know their place:

“It’s no good, there’s nothing to be done about us. We’re hopeless. We don’t even try. Things aren’t what they used to be. Why, in my grandfather’s day a man was proud to do a job of work…. You don’t get that nowadays. All we think of to-day is how we can avoid work — how we can scamp a job and get more money for it…. We’re thoroughly spoiled, that’s what the matter is. Look at all these modern luxuries….”

The second group are the ‘little men’, all identically little, bowler-hatted and be-suited, who are the self-appointed guardians of the moral law of society, and whose underlying ‘reality’ is revealed in a frightening scene towards the end of the novel in which a mob of ‘little men’ hounds the narrator out of Moribundia for contravening its small-minded, petit-bourgeois code:

Instead of the harmless, helpful, friendly, tolerant, duty-doing little business-men…. I saw cupidity, ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion called for it, … cruelty and blood-thirstiness. I saw the shrewd and despicable cash basis underlying that idiotic patriotism, and a deathly fear and hatred of innovation….

In addition to such grotesque expressions of the stereotypes of middle-class consciousness are deftly-handled exposures of the Moribundian ideology. The key concept here is ‘Unchange’. Morbundia (and by implication, it should never be forgotten, England in the inter-war period) ‘was ideal because it could not change: it could not change because it was ideal’. Its science, religion, politics and culture all reinforce this idea, and the sections on them are fine parodies of contemporary attitudes and developments. Politically, of course, this means that anything which envisages change is anathema: hence the ‘tsinummoc’ and the ‘tsixram’ are Moribundia’s sworn enemies, and ‘Ehtteivosnoinu’ is its Hell. There is also a mordant section on the Moribundian ability to emasculate its critics and opponents by corrupting then with its own values or by indulging them as spoilt and finally harmless ‘rebels’: ‘tsinummoc’ agitators, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells are variously implicated here. The final cumulative image is that of a society which is literally acting out the world-view of the English middle class, an ideal society in which ‘Unchange’ — mental and physical — is its diagnostic, and in which the narrator feels an ‘insidious sort of despair … the feeling as that of being half-dead’.

Hamilton’s remarks quoted earlier on the self-regarding obsessiveness of the inward-turned art of Modernism suggest that the fable/fantasy of Impromptu in Moribundia presented itself as an outward-turned form through which to explore public issues fictionally rather than as direct polemic. It was a useful strategy because the ostensibly comic and ‘unreal’ modality was a way of controlling and objectifying what otherwise might have come across merely as subjective loathing. Furthermore, the discrete system of the fabular world could synthesise all the essential abuses under attack without the diffusion of effect that situating them in a more obviously realistic location might bring. Here, Hamilton identifies and exposes the enemy by denuding it of its mundane specificities; and in this respect it seems to represent a clearing of the decks for the writing of what is generally held to be his most achieved novel of ‘synthetic realism’, Hangover Square. Nevertheless, in a world now characterised as ‘postmodern’ — where the past is merely recycled images and the future unimaginable, where (a)political apathy and a rampant consumerism driven by ubiquitous advertising and media-imaging seem to be its defining features, and where simulacra displace the reality they deceptively resemble — Hamilton’s vision of Moribundian ‘Unchange’, and of the consumerised reification represented by ‘ballooning’, may not appear so ‘impossibly dated’ after all.

 

I should finally like to acknowledge a number of debts of gratitude, incurred in the process of bringing Impromptu in Moribundia back into the public eye exactly 60 years after it was first published. It is my pleasure to mention them here.