Near the beginning of Thus Spake Zarathusthra, Nietszche writes that “Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss”. From this concept everyone from Hitler to Jean-Paul Sartre to David Bowie has taken a different meaning and moulded something new. Patrick Hamilton, characteristically, takes the quotation in a more obtuse direction. The rope for him becomes literal – it is the titular Rope of his play that is used to murder an innocent student, thus leading his murderers on a path towards becoming Übermenschen. Or so they think. Sadly for them, the same kind of rope is used to dispense justice upon them immediately following the play’s conclusion. Hamilton does not, it seems, buy into the concept of a Superman. To read his work is to realise that his disdain for other people is matched only by his own self-loathing. No character in the play is described or portrayed with total sympathy. This, perhaps, is one of the reasons that contemporary reviewers who weren’t praising the play (for it was tremendously successful) were objecting to its moral content. It’s fine to present us with darkness and despair, as long as there is a light at the end of the tunnel. This is something that Hamilton, as his career advanced, went to greater and greater pains to deny.    

Born in 1904, Hamilton had published eleven novels and performed seven plays before his death at the age of 58. Of these, the most popular were and still are his so-called ‘London Trilogy’ Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (comprised of three novels, written between 1929 and 1934), Hangover Square (written in 1941, when the Britain’s prospects in the war seemed darkest), and his plays Rope (1929) and Gas Light (1938). The books were admired by Graham Greene and John Betjeman, and the plays were two of the most successful of their times, making Hamilton a rich man and leading to three Hollywood adaptations.

Despite this, Hamilton is a comparatively little known writer. The most obvious (and most common) question to ask, given his successes, is “why is he not more widely celebrated?” This is counter-productive. Because of his predilection for scorn and pessimism, it is more natural to wonder why he is liked at all. Hamilton’s appeal lies in the fact that every aspect of him, from his reputation to his subject matter, is shrouded in solitude and dampened by a cloud of quiet, unassuming introspection. When one truly appreciates Hamilton, it becomes a relationship in which the author speaks directly to the reader, taking her on a minutely detailed tour of inter-war London in all its insalubrious grit – the brush of the working girl’s hand on a Soho backstreet, the smell of gin in a Belgravia pub, and the lilt of an Irving Berlin song wafting from a bedroom window, while inside a barmaid is silently weeping. The difference between reading about Patrick Hamilton’s London and, say, Martin Amis’ is the difference between finding a quiet Thames-side bench and observing your own city, and visiting Big Ben and being crushed by hordes of people, all of whom are sharing their own, identical, experiences. The worst thing that could happen to Hamilton, despite the 2005 TV adaptation and the recent production of Gas Light at the Old Vic, would be a full-blown populist revival.
Hangover Square expresses it best. Its protagonist, George Harvey Bone, is a schizophrenic who has aspirations to murder, when in the mood. He is teased constantly by a young actress – the love of his life – and sits silently in the pub, sipping his beer and eying her flirtatious advances towards Peter, an ex-convict and Nazi supporter (in later life, Hamilton became an ardent Communist). This is set in 1939, in the months before the war. From his position writing in 1941, Hamilton captured the ostensible bliss of peacetime, while portraying the dark clouds of conflict that shadowed everything. People chatter about politics in Earl’s Court pubs, and debate furiously as to whether or not war is the right thing for Britain. For a generation that has grown up thinking that the Second World War was irrefutably courageous and just, Hamilton’s portrayal of the ordinary man’s opposition to war comes as a jolt. Hangover Square captures the zeitgeist of a London of Lyon’s corner houses and forced smiles. That same London is seen in Rope, albeit to a much lesser degree, and it is explored in depth in Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky. It is a cruel, but quite obviously beautiful city which, in his London Trilogy, seems to be on the brink of a cataclysmic event. What this is exactly is never elaborated on but, with the War in full swing when he wrote Hangover Square, Hamilton found his apocalypse, and crafted the ultimate paean to the city he loved. This city is gone. In fact, it was gone before Hamilton drank himself to death in 1962. As his biographer, Sean French, put it, “his world was constricting”.

It is strange to think that Hamilton, this man who represented all that was gristly and rough about the years that preceded the war, was alive in the year that The Beatles’ ‘Love Me Do’ ushered in a new era of hedonism in British culture – one that is still going strong. However, if you’re standing on the right street corner in Paddington or Fitzrovia, on the right kind of autumn evening, then you can still feel an ephemeral tinge of Hamilton’s London. It’s the sound of a drunkard laughing a little too loud, and the sight of a young man, walking briskly, and acting as if all the world is before him, even though he knows that it’s not.

Gas Light will be on at the ADC from October 29 to November 1 at 11.00pm