Leading me by circumlocution

I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, reminds me hugely of my dead cousin Peter. Everything about it. Well, not everything. I mean, it's not the dead body at the beginning of book that reminds me of the deadness of Peter. But Peter's world was academic — and we connected. He was my favourite cousin, my closest — we were just a year apart.

We would talk for hours in theoretical terms about politics and the law, about literature and philosophy, about music and film, about artificial intelligence and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. We talked about how theory could be implemented in practice.

I wonder if he read The Secret History before he died.

It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that "bookish" Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a questions of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible — in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will — and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer.

Peter had that gift too.

His air of being moneyed. His cultivated persona, in how he wore his clothes and his hair, whom he was seen with and where, what he was seen to be reading and studying, what he was seen to be drinking, the drugs he did. How he would deem you with a glance for inclusion or exclusion. Yet he was charming. I wanted to be in his club — when I was 9 and visiting his family's cottage, hen I was 19 and hanging out in downtown Toronto. We all wanted into his club.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated, atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion.

Peter claimed his mother was prone to hysterics. I knew our grandmother had "episodes," but bloody hell, two world wars, a philandering husband, and exile from her homeland... hysterics seems like a perfectly reasonable response. So it seems reasonable too that one of the daughters might've learned that behaviour (my own mother tended toward melancholic). And I never figured out if any of it was true, or if his perception was the product of male entitlement, dismissal of the feminine, mommy issues, or simply drug-addled revisionist personal history. But then, I kind of think he inherited the hysteria gene himself.

I could say that the secret of Julian's charm was that he latched onto young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality of — even in the light of subsequent events — I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.

Julian is a suspicious character. Well, they all are really. But him maybe more so. The professor. Because we don't know anything about him, yet he's an older authority figure — we have the sense he should know better.

This whole book is very Hitchcockian, I find. It's not about the crime; it's about the psychology of the people involved. Specifically Rope. But also Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt and others. In Hitchcock, it's about the idea of a perfect crime. In The Secret History it's that too, but it starts as something purer: simply, putting theory into practice.

The Secret History reminds me of the classes I never took, at the college I never went to, with the people I never knew.

I think I'm a modern mind, Peter was classical.

Ten reasons why we love Donna Tartt's The Secret History

Spotless against the dirty sky

He couldn't go on walking until three in the morning, so he stopped along the way at cafes. A few people would be standing around a horseshoe-shaped counter, their lives suspended. Some dreamed as they drank their coffees. Others, with their elbows on the counter, stood empty-eyed over empty drinks. Nothing but magic, it seemed, would bring them back to life.

As in many Simenon novels, the protagonist antihero of The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, one day walks away from his life, steps out of himself, or possibly into himself for the first time.

Luc Sante in his introduction points out that Kees Popinga, as well as his boss before him, is something of a Flitcraftian character. That Flitcraft phenomenon is the thing that first drew me to the fiction of Paul Auster (City of Glass, but other of his works too), and it is a recurring theme in Simenon's romans durs. My fascination with this phenomenon — that's me fighting the impulse to just walk away, transferring my energy into a curiosity about the sort of people who just walk away. I mean, what kind of people do that? (And I happen to know that people do do that.)

"Just use the sink in the hall to wash up. I hope you don't mind noise, because you're going to hear train whistles all day and all night long. We're right next to a train yard."

She shut the door behind her. Kees went to the window and pressed his face against it; in the dimming light, he could make out train tracks leading to infinity, train cars, whole trains, and at least ten locomotives, from which the smoke rose up spotless against the dirty sky.

He smiled, stretched, and sat down on the bed. Fifteen minutes later, without even bother to undress, he was fast asleep.

"The smoke rose up spotless against the dirty sky" — I love that. It's so... opposite.

The train's a recurring motif; I guess it works kind of like a siren call on Popinga — the draw to leave, to be removed from wherever it is that he is, and with the appeal of the suggestion of something a little untoward happening behind drawn blinds on a train in the night.

A typo in the early pages leads to a great deal of confusion (the date should be the 23rd, not the 28th, of December); but the fact that the novel takes place over the holiday season also works to enhance the sense of loneliness and the sense of being shut out of life — Popinga's own life, but also everybody else's.

This novel performs wonderfully a bunch of things I learned from James Wood about how fiction works. We're asked to sympathize with this character from the start, and page by page he becomes more unlikable. We are as confused as he is when we first hear about Pamela's death.

The violence and other criminal acts happen off-screen, so to speak; but this is consistent with Popinga's self-delusion. It's as if he blacks out certain events, or isn't fully present in them. (I'm reminded of Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square.)

I've eased off my rush through Simenon's material — too much existential grittiness over too short a time is difficult to stomach, psychically speaking — but my fascination with the spirit of his roman dur continues to build.

The nightmare that is life

Just wow! Nightmare Alley (1946, reissued in 2010 by NYRB Classics), by William L Gresham, is hands down the best book I've read in ages, a stay-up-way-past-your-bedtime page-turner kind of book. It had me crying out loud, "Oh, my gawd!" and "No!" and "What are you thinking?!"

Stanton Carlisle is a carny, with ambitions for a better, easier life. He learns a mind-reading system, and eventually sets up a séance scam. He goes from mentalist to spiritualist minister. He has the sometimes unwitting help of Molly, who doesn't approve of Stan's methods but can neither sway him nor break free of him. She wants out, but Stan revels in this life; it's the only way he can see through to the top. Stan's poising himself for the big one, the dream mark.

There are carnival freaks and gorgeous ladies and some real regular folk, unstable childhoods, unstable minds, crossings and double-crossings, sex and alcohol, mild misgivings and in-too-far-to-turn-back.

It's gritty noir, Jim-Thompson-style (how do I explain the feel?), inside the head of, the more it goes, an increasingly unsympathetic (mostly), really pretty deplorable person. He has it coming.

Nightmare Alley also happens to be a very finely crafted novel. Every chapter is named for a tarot card; taken in sum they map out a reading for Stan. It's clever, but not too clever. And the pacing is brilliant.

Gresham writes some marvellous sentences. When they head to the South: "This was dark and bloody land where hidden war traveled like a million earthworms under the sod." Or about the industrialist with the electricity plant: "The old man's power covered the country like a pair of bat-wings, flapping cold and black."

The mood is relentlessly bleak, and I just ate it all up. The novel seemed particularly fitting for the hot, humid nights we've experienced of late.

Reviews:
Paperclip People (mild spoilers).
Washington Post.

Nightmare Alley was produced as a film (Tyrone Power, 1947) (I'll be looking out for this), and was recently adapted as a musical.

I'm severely disappointed to learn this was Gresham's only novel. But really, a novel like this says everything it has to say. [Edited to add: See comments. He wrote one other novel after all.]

I haven't felt this way since I discovered Patrick Hamilton, and there are some similarities between the two writers: they're of the same generation (indeed, they died within about a week of each other); both had a tortuous relationship with alcohol, and with Marxism (which relationship I know not how tortuous); Hamilton had an affinity for the theatre, Gresham was fascinated by the stage that is the carnival.

And then there are the conmen. Stan Carlisle doesn't start out quite so low, so evil, as I remember Ernest Ralph Gorse to be. But they're both highly ambitious, hardworking in their way, and resourceful. They live by their wits. Everything depends on how well they read people.

So, both writers provide deeply psychological character studies, a close look at the underbelly of the mind. And this kind of character fascinates me. The practical matter of plotting out this kind of an existence and the moral matter of coming to terms with it; living it and living with it; the rationality and the rationalizing.

I'm the sort of person who tries, and I don't think I have to try very hard, to see the best in people. I take things at face value, unless given good reason to suspect it otherwise. I do not think the world is out to get me (though maybe it is, maybe I should). I share my life with someone who suspects the worst of everyone (and to be fair, in his line of work that's a reasonable and effective stance to take). He sees malevolent intent everywhere, and takes it personally. Maybe I'm not very good at reading people but I'm awed by how others do it (whether or not they do it well).

I was conned a few weeks ago, and I knew it even before I handed over my $10, but I handed it over anyway. Why would I be perceived as a mark? (And why did I give her the money?)

[Woman, about 50, reasonably well-dressed, outside the mall entrance to the metro approaches me (and Helena) frantically with, "Do you speak English?" and a story. Her luggage (with purse) was stolen at the train station, she's missed her train now (going back home to Toronto), she's short $8.43 to be able to change her ticket, she came to the mall hoping to catch her friend who works there. She'll send me a cheque, she owns a restaurant. Maybe it's true. If I were conning somebody, I'd try harder for it to make more sense. I gave her $10, which only minutes before I didn't know I had (I found it in a forgotten pocket). Helena and I had an interesting chat about whether we believed her and, regardless whether it was the truth, was it the right thing to give her money. I'm still grappling with why I found it easier to surrender cash to her than I do to most panhandlers.]

According to Stan, fear is the key, the great motivator. So what is the fear that marked me? Fear that I might be seen by my daughter to be cold and unfeeling toward someone's plight? Fear that that plight might actually be true?

Umm, where was I going with this story?

The conman, the con, the con mind — riveting stuff. Nightmare Alley — a bang-up, crackerjack, first rate piece of book.

I♥NYRB

The lovely, eclectic selection of books published by New York Review Books is meant to be read, of course, but the colours, the texture, the look, the feel lead me to believe NYRB books are designed to be fetishized.

 

Maylin of The Dewey Divas and the Dudes recently shared a little NYRB love with me (thanks for the ARCs!), so I thought I'd do my part to spread a little NYRB enthusiasm.

 

First off, check out Maylin's NYRB challenge, to read 50 NYRB Classics within the year. It's this series of posts that made me sit up and take notice of them and learn to focus my book-fetishizing tendencies.

 

Spotlight Series will be featuring NYRB Classics during the week of May 16, 2010, and you can sign up to participate by reviewing an NYRB Classic (maybe I will).

 

I haven't purposely embarked upon an NYRB challenge myself, but it seems I'm amassing quite a collection of them. I'll try not to let the acquisition too far exceed the consumption.

 

Here's a list of those I now own, with links to reviews where applicable:

• The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares (read February 2010).
• The Singapore Grip, JG Farrell.
• Clandestine in Chile, Gabriel García Márquez.
• My Fantoms, Théophile Gautier (read August 2008).
• Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham.
• The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, Elizabeth Hardwick.
• Victorine, Maude Hutchins (the cover of which is one of my favourites).
• Sunflower, Gyula Krúdy (which I'd started just before my copy of Life A User's Manual arrived in the mail, and which I was loathe to set aside).
• Memories of the Future, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. (I almost finished this book — I think I was on the last story — but had to set it aside. I just felt too bogged down and needed to clear my head of all the heavy Russian melancholy. The first story, however, is worth the price of admission. I fully intend to finish this one this month.)
• The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford.
• Letty Fox: Her Luck, Christina Stead (read October 2007; quoted once and again).
• Chess Story, Stefan Zweig (read February 2010).

Let me mention also a couple favourites, even though I don't own the NYRB editions (my reading predated their release):

• The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton (read October 2006).
• Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, Patrick Hamilton (read March 2007).

And a couple more I'm dying to own:

• The Dud Avocado, Elaine Dundy.
• Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter.

The New York Review Children's Collection also has its charms:

• Uncle, JP Martin (read September 2007).
• Uncle Cleans Up, JP Martin (read July 2008).
• The Wonderful O, James Thurber (haven't been able to engage Helena in this one yet).

The NYRB Classics blog: A Different Stripe.
And follow @nyrbclassics on Twitter.

 

Is there a particular NYRB title that you have your eye on? Or one that you especially recommend?

Summer reading issue

I've never really planned my summer reading before, but then, my child has never finished a school year before, so it happens that we're all of us going to take off some time together, and much of that time will be spent simply hanging out, some of it in town, and some of it at the cottage, and "hanging out" means I should have a couple books on hand, particularly since "hanging out" to J-F means fishing, and we all know I'm happier with a book in my hand not catching any fish than having a fishing rod in my hand and not catching any fish, and I just bought a chair for my "garden" (where "garden" means stone courtyard with a couple pots, a couple baskets) that has armrests large enough to sit a drink on, and a footrest, all of which adds up to it being a perfect chair to while away the summer in, reading. I really am unreasonably excited about this chair, and the prospect of reading in it, but oh well, and notice how I've barely mentioned the kid; I guess I expect her to occupy herself.

The Angel's Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I've essentially finished reading this ARC already, and will write more about it in a couple days. I fully expected this to drift into my "summer" reading, but I couldn't put it down, and, well, now it's done. (I thought Shadow of the Wind was grossly overrated. This novel, on the other hand, I enjoyed immensely.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño. I'm trying to pace myself. I loved part 1, but I couldn't stop there. This put me ahead of the schedule for the reading group I'd happened upon. But while I subsequently ate up parts 2 and 3, I want also to consider them thoughtfully. I started on part 4, but as fate would have it, I was in no mood to read about gruesome murder details that day in the métro. So I've set it aside until I find a clearer mental space and the time to be able to write about it as I go.

The Sun over Breda, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The further swashbuckling adventures of Captain Alatriste! I let out an involuntary exclamation of joy when I came across this at the bookstore last week. Obviously it was meant to be, meant for me, and meant for me now.

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Being that everything I know about Brighton I learned form Patrick Hamilton, I thought I should broaden my education. Not that I'm particularly interested in learning more about Brighton. But I read an excerpt a while back, and was thoroughly wowed.

The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie. Which remarkably I'd never read — I read dozens of Christie novels during my adolescence, but evidently not all — and I've been wanting to read ever since I saw that Doctor Who episode. Plus, I love the packaging.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. Everyone who's read it, raves about it, including a coworker for whom I'll be using this as a test book, to gauge whether her taste in books is reliably compatible with mine or not. I had a hard time figuring out what trilogy exactly she was so crazy for, as the title of the first book in French is Les hommes qui n'aimaient pas les femmes (nothing about a tattoo there).

(I ordered these last three — Greene, Christie, Larsson — from Amazon. It's tough economic times: Gone are the days when "ship when entire order is ready" meant they'd probably send you the bulk of your order straight away anyway. This makes me nervous, as the order is awaiting the release of the Larsson in paperback, and estimated package delivery is a day into my vacation time, and I kind of have to convince the family that we really ought to stick around town for a day or two before we trek off into the wilderness, to ensure that I have books with which to trek off.)

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. Because it's the Infinite Summer! Which sounds way more promising than that infinite winter when I didn't manage to finish it! And! I'll be covering the same geographic territory while I revisit the same literary territory! Like it's fated!

(Interesting reading related to DFW: About designing the inside of a DFW book.)

There's not a chance (is there?) that I'll get through this list before I have to show my face at work again; but I'm racing through pages lately, and set to cross titles off the list before even my vacation officially begins. I am prepared to steal back the copy of Spook Country (William Gibson) I picked up for J-F if I have to. And provided I'm on home ground when the pile runs out, there's the Nelson Algren I've been meaning to get to...

There's a good list of paperbacks in time for summer in this weekend's Montreal Gazette, a couple of which I vouch for (Petite Anglaise, by Catherine Sanderson, and The Painter of Battles, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, although this one isn't exactly light reading), and a couple more which greatly interest me.

I also like the list in The Telegraph. (You'll find 2666 and A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I can't recommend highly enough, therein.)

What are you reading this summer?

A brief discussion on why I love them

They are Roberto Bolaño and Patrick Hamilton, and they more so than any other author have been the objects of my obsession, or something like it.

There are writers whom I've admired, followed. It's only natural, I think, if you like a book to look to other books by that same author, and so I have done. In this way, various authors over the years have been curiosities, projects, familiar territory, intellectual challenges, bad habits, and, yes, guilty pleasures.

But: obsession!

Only Bolaño and Hamilton fit this category. A kind of deep-down necessity, like air. It produces something in my head that is undeniably addictive. And I'm not sure it's altogether good for me.

I've just finished reading Bolaño's Amulet (all quotations here are taken from this novella):

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

Perhaps it's a function of age. Why is it that suddenly, on the eve of my 38th year I should encounter literary obsession, something profoundly visceral, the likes of which I've never known? It's a midlife literary awakening. Perhaps I'd brushed up against obsession when I was younger and didn't recognize it for what it was, let alone let myself react to it.

And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love.

I've been trying to determine what these two have in common. (Help? Anyone?) The best I can come up with is, in a word, the breathlessness. These gorgeous sentences that swim circles round my heart and plummet to melancholy depths, leaving me gasping.

Saramago shares this quality of breathlessness to a degree, but his is intellectual, a matter of syntax, a hypnotic rhythm of a thought process. What Bolaño and Hamilton have, that Saramago does not (at least not in his fiction), are passion and desperation, Hamilton's fuelled by alcohol, Bolaño's by poetry.

To look for commonalities of theme? I don't think I can do that. Love, of a sort, yes. A romantic vision of something that doesn't quite exist, not quite. And the question of art; Hamilton consorted with London's theatre people, Bolaño with Mexico's poets. But truly, their greatest connection is the effect they have on me. Both dead, and soon I will run out of books of theirs to read for the first time.

And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spin, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.

This is not news, of course, that the cosmos and poetry are one and the same.

Where does this leave me? Finding the universe in a grain of sand. At last.

Links

...to reviews, in which other people have more interesting things to say than I do, and that should:
1. Convince me at long last to start reading Dumas's long-lost masterpiece,
2. Convince you to read Patrick Hamilton, and
3. Convince some doubters that Doris lessing is fully deserving of the Nobel Prize.

Dumas
A review of The Last Cavalier, by Alexandre Dumas, which is ready and waiting for me (What am I waiting for? — it's Dumas! Hurrah!):

Dumas, as Tolstoy said, was a 'novelising historian' rather than a historical novelist. He knew that fiction flourished in the margins of history, which is confined to obtuse and incorrigible facts; the novel specialises in the scrutiny of private lives, not public affairs.

Hamilton
Francine Prose gives a rundown of the intense and squalid Patrick Hamilton:

His ambivalence about his characters is frequently extreme; it's hard to think of another writer who so thoroughly despises the weaknesses of the very same men and women he so desperately and compassionately longs to save from themselves.

At times his view of humanity seems positively Manichaean. Half his characters are consumed by shame and regret while the other half feed on the tender, foolish emotions of the first half. He allows his characters to descend to a level of degradation so low that you might assume they'd hit bottom unless you'd read enough of Hamilton's work to expect them to sink further as they anguish over every major slight and minor decision.

Lessing
One review of Alfred and Emily, by Doris Lessing:

Alfred Tayler and Emily McVeagh are the writer's parents and this is a book of two halves — the first section is a novelist's game of might-have-beens: Lessing removes all the frustrations that circumscribed her growing up in Rhodesia, and gives Alfred and Emily the lives they wanted for themselves. The second section is another honest excavation of the lives they were all actually dealt. The gap is the one in which the writer has always lived.

And another:

But whenever she drifts too far from the subject, she returns to her two main themes: the eternal war between mothers and daughters, and the vital importance of women going out to work rather than suffocating at home.

Click!

"Finding Patrick Hamilton feels somewhat like joining a secret society."

(Thanks, Tom.)

A trick of the light

In the evening we went to see "Angel Street," which I recommend to anyone who wants to be absorbed and taken out of his daily round of interests. You sit on the edge of your chair most of the time and it is really a grand mystery story. Every member of the cast is excellent.

The handsome villain is so well played that the audience hisses him, and the old detective is a joy. But the part which seems to me incredibly hard to play, night after night, is that of the wife, who is slowly being driven insane by her husband — a very fine piece of acting.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton. Or Gaslight as it is perhaps better known (in large part thanks to the 1944 film adaptation starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten, and introducing Angela Lansbury).

Earlier this summer, I watched the movie, and the British film that came before it. While thoroughly enjoyable, and with more similarities than differences, apart from telling a great, thrilling, suspenseful mystery story, they didn't wow me. I'd seen the Hollywood movie years ago, so I knew the basic plot. I dozed off a few times during the British movie, so I'm not sure I'm not lying when I say I've watched this one too. I watched them dutifully, as a completist, to find the Patrick Hamilton in them. I found a little: mostly in the maid, her aspiring beyond her station. There wasn't the drink and thoughtless cruelty I've come to associate with Hamilton, though there was cruelty, deliberate and purposeful — Hamilton does seem to have an interest in the mechanisms of cruelty of all kinds. And madness — certainly madness is central to Hangover Square, but most of Hamilton's characters are one way or another driven out of their minds (in a much looser sense), usually through a fog of drink, by desperate circumstances (does tedium count?).

So, what of the play? How much liberty had been taken with the films? How much Hamilton was in them really? I hunted, pinpointed, and purchased a copy of the play, in a charming shop.

I've mentioned before that I'm not one much for reading plays — they're meant to be seen, after all — but this was a wholly engrossing reading experience. (Maybe I should read more plays.)

It speaks to Ingrid Bergman's screen presence, if not her performance (for which she received an Oscar), that I couldn't help but picture her as I began reading the first act. It speaks to the strength of Hamilton's writing that by the end of that act that picture had entirely vanished.

The play is — as plays ought to be, I guess — tighter, without superfluous backstory or unnecessary complications. Hollywood added a layer of coincidences, which I now see for the distractions they are. Here, every word — and, I imagine, every look — counts. Here, everything cuts to the chase.

Mrs Manningham. But I'm married to him. You must go. I must think this out. You must go. I must cling to the man I married. Mustn't I?

Rough. Indeed, cling to him by all means, but do not imagine you are the only piece of ivy, on the garden wall. You can cling to him if you desire, as his fancy women in the low resorts of the town cling to him. This is the sort of wall you have to cling to, Ma'am.

*****

Gaslight has returned to the stage this past summer. The director of the London production makes the point that it is quite a modern play, and a good play.

"It actually calls for stylish and truthful acting. There's no way you could play it with your hand on your chest. There's no requirement to be histrionic. The tone of it is too well-written and in that sense it's a 1930s play, not a pastiche 1880s play. In actual Victorian melodrama, the situations were much more extreme and bloody than they are here."

...

"It's difficult to talk about it, because it doesn't pretend to be anything other than a thriller in the Victorian manner, but it's a thriller written by someone who can really write. He pitches you into the situation between the husband and wife within three lines of the opening. You don't know how you get into the terror — it just happens after about three sentences."

Far from being passé, the play, he believes, was ahead of its time. "Without wishing to sound too portentous about it, you can see the hint of a play that, in a different world, in a different theatre, he might have written — about sex."

The flirtatious relationship that Manningham has with his maid-servant, one of the many means by which he sadistically undermines his wife, is telling: "The maid is very important in creating the atmosphere of the play, suggesting the kind of middle-class marriage where the wife is neurotic and not available to her husband. Gaslight is not a feminist play but it's a marvellous portrait of a desolate marriage. It's hetero-hell."

The play as written on the page turned out to be a good deal steamier than either film version, the innuendo more blatant.

*****

A little history of Hamilton translated to film:

Putting aside the novels and coming back to the films, I saw them with fresh eyes. The key Hamilton terms are missing: cement, plains, pleasure. Those three words recur endlessly, as he describes the slate and limestone city of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Hard, unyielding surfaces. Snot-grey grass. Miserable hotels. Crowded bars. But Hollywood doesn't do cement or pleasure (as Hamilton understood it). It specialises in fake surfaces, overblack shadows that follow actors across trembling walls.

(I'm not sure I agree. Hamilton is full of fake surfaces, though they be not the facades of buildings but the manners of people.)

*****

Sean French, Hamilton's biographer, on what went wrong on Hamilton's path to success and on the recent revival of his work.

Sometimes I think the only answer is to forget literary criticism — just push a book into people's hands and say: "You'll enjoy this. Now go away and read it."

In the time it's taken you to read this far, you might've already read, or viewed, or enacted in your head — experienced — Act One.

Angel and W 40th

I had the sense to do a little research before I headed to New York for the day, to confirm the address of the office, to check what was to be had, beheld, within a few blocks' radius of it if I had a few spare minutes before meetings, or if I could sneak away at lunch, or before making haste for the airport again at day's end. Sadly, I had none of those opportunities; but I did have a 15-minute coffeebreak, a break I stretched to 20 (which, fortunately, amused my coworkers, rather than brought their disdain).

The Drama Book Shop, a mere 5 blocks away, was known (by me, what with my careful and indepth investigation techniques) to house 5 copies of Patrick Hamilton's Angel Street, otherwise known as Gaslight, though I'm confused now as to which was the original title. (Oh, right there on the copyright page, originally "under the title 'Gas Light'.") I'm delighted to say that the Drama Book Shop now has one copy less.

On my coffeebreak. I ran. I found the shop. Confused by why some plays would be shelved alphabetically by author and others by title, and against my natural impulse to 1. browse and 2. figure things out for myself, I asked at the information desk. Filed by title, this one — well, one of its titles. There it was. I grabbed a copy, and paid — just a little more than the price of a fancy coffee. Then I ran back.

Within the front matter, a copy of the program of the first performance of the play in New York announces the role of our villain is played by Vincent Price.

I'm not much for reading plays (Shakespeare included), as I feel they're meant more to be seen, experienced, rather than read. But for Patrick Hamilton I will make an exception.

Why you should read Patrick Hamilton

The Patrick Hamilton revival, in the Boston Globe:

Hamilton's novels are filled with drinking, murder, madness, unrequited passion, loneliness, casual cruelty, the anomie of modern society, dismal, drenching weather, and humor — the words "black comedy" spring to mind. The two I've read are imbued with a decidedly noirish sensibility. Still, Hamilton has been compared with both Charles Dickens and Jane Austen — strange bedfellows, if I may put it so indelicately, and neither exactly the first name in noir. But there is truth there: Hamilton's characters, like Dickens's, are almost surreal products of the distorting forces of their society: They are the peculiar spawn of the modern age, sometimes predators, sometimes unhardy shoots of humanity deprived of sun, their promise stifled. And both writers see kindness as the highest virtue. As for his similarity to Austen: His portrayal of how manners and social relationships are integral to identity are akin to hers, as is the wickedness with which he dissects social situations. And, while we're at it, I, personally, would like to compare him with Barbara Pym in his bleak, biting wit and interest in the rotten deal given to quietly decent people of reduced means.

Katherine A Powers takes a particular look at 2 relatively recent reissues (that I myself read not so long ago): Hangover Square — "It makes personal an atmosphere of deluded, cheap relief, of irresolution; and conveys all the crumminess of the sense of escape bought by a couple of stiff ones at mid day." — and The Slaves of Solitude — "I enjoyed every page of this novel, and have never had the pleasure of seeing the panoply of loneliness and depression employed to such brilliant comic effect."

Ominously second-rate

The introduction by DJ Taylor to a single-volume reprint of Patrick Hamilton's Gorse trilogy to be published by Black Spring next month (oh! I'm so excited!) is available online:

Unquestionably, Hamilton originally conceived Gorse as a villain of the deepest dye, a walking encapsulation of the great criminal names of English folklore. This impression is reinforced by the eagerness with which Hamilton constantly mythologizes him, compares him to other criminals (he apparently has a touch of Burke and Hare, not to mention resemblances to Palmer the poisoner and Neville Heath, who mutilated a series of young women), offers scornful summaries of what journalists have said about him and, in Unknown Assailant, even manufactures a couple of biographers, "G. Hadlow Browne" and "Miss Elizabeth Boote", who have written full-length books about him.

The problem about these exalted standards is that Gorse can never live up to them. While it is perfectly possible that Hamilton intended to develop him into a figure of Heath-like depravity in later books, his early career is trivial in the extreme. Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, with her snaffled £500, rests at the top of a very small range: Esther’s savings amount to a paltry £68.15s, while the fleecing of Ivy Barton realizes a bare £50 (although to do Gorse justice he does manage to relieve her father of an additional £200). A really competent performer, you feel, would already be helping himself to thousands, hoodwinking Lloyds syndicates with insurance scams, issuing false prospectuses and retiring to the Riviera on the proceeds. But Gorse, as confidence tricksters go, is ominously second-rate, betraying his social origins from one phrase to the next — speaking French to Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce at one point he pronounces et as "eight" — bragging about his prospects and trusting to the extreme stupidity of his victims to see him through. Such is the number of people who have their doubts about him — these range from his prep-school headmaster to a theatre director met for a few moments in the pub — that the reader wonders why the procession of female dupes can't see through him as well. But while this may undermine Gorse as a character — commonplace when he should be exceptional, conceited when he should be discreet — from the point of view of the trilogy as a whole it works to Hamilton’s advantage. What starts off as the analysis of a particular "type" ends up as a series of psychological case studies and, more important still, an exposure of the milieu that gives them life.

The return of Gorse

The Guardian books blog toasts Patrick Hamilton. Hamilton is coming back into favour, and his books are coming back into print.

The Gorse Trilogy, as I previously noted, is set to be published in June by Black Spring Press. Finally I can read the third book and know how it all ends.

While the Gorse trilogy is not exactly Hamilton's magnum opus (especially the drink-soaked Unknown Assailant), it does demonstrate his handy knack for both literature and drama and we can all raise a glass to its reissue, something I fear the man "who needed whisky like a car needed petrol" and died of multiple organ failure would approve no doubt.

(I know, you've all seen the piece already and thought of me — I'm touched. Have a drink.)

Short books, with a side of Hamilton, please

Dan Rhodes lists his top 10 short novels, all under 200 pages. "All killer, no filler." (I've read, and loved, half of them.) Perhaps the novella is due for a comeback.

On the list: The Plains of Cement, by Patrick Hamilton. "The Plains of Cement is brilliantly excruciating — Hamilton tortures his characters, the reader and, I expect, himself. He's the best pub writer I know."

The Plains of Cement is the last book, and my favourite, in the trilogy published as Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. I've quoted from it here, and then discussed it a bit further.

As for short books, I like them. Long is good too. Both have their time and their place. Short has the advantage of slipping into my bag easily. For this reason this morning in my travels across the city I started reading Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm — I'm loving it already and can see it claiming a position on my own list of best short books.

What short novels are your favourites?

The hangover

I should've paced myself better. Since first tasting temptation in October, I dabbled — a bit here, a bit there, mostly according to availability. I showed some resolve even, around Christmas, so as it wouldn't interfere with various commitments.

But over the last couple weeks, I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.

Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton, has a decidedly more modern feel than any other of his work that I've read. Shorter sentences. Gone are the florid phrases, the Dickensian descriptions. (Hamilton stills pays homage though: our protagonist finds some healing power in the reading of David Copperfield.) The scenery is unimportant; it's what goes on inside his head that colours his world.

While all Hamilton's stories are bleak with unsavory characters, this novel feels downright sinister. I see for the first time in his novels the creepy, Hitchcockian quality of a psychological thriller, such as seen in Rope and Gaslight (of which I'm familiar with only the popular film adaptations), on which Hamilton's reputation was made. (Actually Hamilton did not approve of the film treatment of his works. I mean here only to underscore the presence of a dark and criminal element not fully evident in the other Hamilton novels I've read.)

It's 1939. Something's not right. Europe is on the brink of war. George Harvey Bone is on the brink of war within himself, about to be fully invaded by his other, murderous self.

George Harvey Bone is a large man, aimless, but kindly, a bit of a sap. He's smitten with a relatively unsuccessful film actress — he's a hanger-on, and a purveyor of whiskey. Her gang — his "friends" — makes fun of his "dumb moods." The thing is, George Harvey Bone has episodes — the blackouts are getting longer, more frequent. Drink is in great part responsible, and Netta's in great part responsible for all the drink.

Click! . . .

Here it was again! He was in London, in a taxi at night and it had happened again!

"Click..." That was the way to describe it. It was like the click of a camera shutter. Shutter! That was the word. A shutter had come down over his brain: he had shut down: he was shut out from the world he had been in a moment before.

The world he was in now was the same in shape, the same to look at, but "dead," silent, mysterious, as though its scenes and activities were all taking place in the tank of an aquarium or even at the bottom of the ocean — a noiseless, intense, gliding, fishy world.

It was as though he had suddenly gone deaf — mentally deaf.

It was as though one had blown one's nose too hard, and the outer world had become dim and dead. It was as though one gone into a sound-proof telephone booth and shut the door tightly on oneself.

There were a hundred and one ways of describing it. When it happened to him he always tried to describe it to himself — to analyse it — because it was such a funny feeling. He was not frightened by it, because he was used to it by now. But it was happening a good deal too often nowadays, and he wished it wouldn't.

It was such a weird feeling: it was always novel, and, in a way, interesting to him. It was though the people around him, although they moved about, were not really alive: as though their existence had no motive or meaning, as though they were shadows — rabbits or butterflies or kangaroos thrown on the wall by an amateur conjurer with a candle. And although they talked, and although he could understand what they said, it was not as though they had spoken in the ordinary way, and it was an effort to understand and to answer.

Take Netta, for instance, who was rather oddly and inexplicably sitting beside him in this taxi. He knew it was Netta well enough — but it was a different Netta. Although he could see her she was remote, almost impalpable, miles away — like a voice over the telephone, or the mental construction of the owner of a voice one might make while phoning — a ghost, if you liked.

He could hear and understand the words, but for the moment he couldn't gather what they meant. They seemed divorced from any context; or at any rate he didn't know what the context was. So he didn't answer. For the moment anyway, he was too interested in what had happened in his head.

Then, gradually, and as usual, and without his being aware of it, the feeling of novelty and strangeness, his conscious knowledge of the transition, of the falling of the shutter, faded away. And the world he was in now, the world under the sea, was his proper world, the only one he knew.

Some automaton takes over, operates on a simpler, baser level.

We are treated to a few of these episodes; in fact the novel opens with one, and within those first few pages we know this "other" George means to do away with Netta.

The episodes are punctuated with "clicks" and "snaps" and "cracks." Hamilton uses these verbs a great deal: they ease the reader between George's two worlds, but used "normally" with heels and tongues they also serve to create anticipation for the next episode.

George finally is quite sympathetic. He reestablishes contact with an old school friend. He's adopted the rooming house cat for his own. While most of the novel follows George's perspective, 2 short chapters give outside views: one from a young pub patron who observes Netta's group and meets George, one from George's landlady. I was rooting for George to get away from it all — a change of scene, a new crowd would do him so much good — read a little more Dickens, go see a doctor.

But part of me was rooting for the other George too, to do those nogoodniks in (Fascists they were!), they deserve it.

Aurgh! The suspense! Will he? won't he? do I really want him to? wait a minute, exactly how trustworthy is any of either of George's perspectives anyway? and what about the cat?

This book is unsettling in so many ways, not least its eerily credible view of mental illness as seen from the inside.

Considerable liberties were taken with the 1945 film version of Hangover Square, starring Laird Cregar.

An audio CD recording of Hangover Square is scheduled to be released in September 2007 and is available for preorder.

There's something delicious in discovering a "new" author with a whole catalogue of worlds to drown oneself in. There's something infinitely sad in having drunk them all with the knowledge that he can issue no new masterworks from beyond the grave. There's something tragic in knowing they keep the good stuff in a locked cupboard. Well, maybe not the good stuff, but an extra stash. For just in case. For a rainy day. And I don't think the cupboard's actually locked, just inaccessible, highly inconvenient. I mean: there's something tragic in knowing that there's more, somewhere, but it's out of print.

Very sadly, I have no more Patrick Hamilton on my shelf to read, nor is there much more available to read, barring serendipitous finds in used bookshops and/or extravagant expenditures. I'm crossing my fingers that next time my sister is in London she will manage to hunt down a copy of Impromptu in Moribundia. I plan to re-view both Rope and Gaslight in the not-too-distant future, this time with the eyes of a Hamilton expert (ahem). I plan to spill here everything I know about Patrick Hamilton, with a comprehensive index of everything I've posted on his works, a list of editions of his work, and links to other resources (including this fine report). Not that you care. But you should. He's really good.

Twenty thousand reasons

But I need give you only one: it's painfully beautiful.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton, contains 3 volumes — The Midnight Bell (Bob's story), The Siege of Pleasure (Jenny's story), and The Plains of Cement (Ella's Story). They were originally published separately (in 1929, 1932, and 1934) before being collected (in 1935), and each is self-contained.

The Midnight Bell is a pub where Bob is waiter and Ella is barmaid. (Much of the first volume is autobiographical:) Bob falls in love — rather, develops an obsession — with Jenny, a prostitute (the middle book tells how Jenny came to live the life she lives). Ella, meanwhile, is courted by a regular.

The pub is peopled by authentic "characters" — take Mr Sounder, whose first beer is in the nature of an investment as he relies on other patrons to pay his expenses.

These people's lives are replete with authentic non-events — the difficulties of umbrella-sharing, for example.

I've quoted from each of the volumes as I made my way through them (1, 2, 3, 4). I don't know what Hamilton's appeal is to me. There's a directness about very complicated thought processes. His dialogue is simple, neatly captured. But he can be verbose too. It's all very dark, but there's a clever wit. A tragic trueness. It's best, I guess, to let those excerpts speak for themselves.

Dan Rhodes in the Guardian says, "It's bleak and brilliant, and an authentic lost classic."

Ella's story is my favourite. She's the sensible one; she knows her weaknesses, but even she can't help but give in to them (making her most tragic of all, perhaps). Ella is ordinary, and her story, like that of most ordinary people everywhere, involves a lot of nothing in particular.

And, indeed, what had taken place in those dull months? Nothing, really, whatever — nothing out of the common lot of any girl in London, if you came to think about it. She had had an elderly admirer, (what girl has not been in such a dilemma at some time or another?) about whom she had not been able fully to make up her mind. Nothing in that. A connection of hers had been ill — a stepfather whom she disliked, and there had been domestic troubles. Nothing in that. She had been depressed by the fogs and the cold — who had not? She had looked for another job, but it hadn't come to anything — an ordinary enough occurrence. She had had what the gentlemen in the bar would have called a slight 'crush' on the waiter. But that was not the first time a girl had 'crush' on a man she worked with. You soon get over that. No — seen from an outsider's point of view she was lucky if she had nothing more to grumble about, and the gentlemen committed no error in tact in joking with her and teasing her just as usual.

This summation occurs in the final pages, and after all that had transpired it brought tears to my eyes. On top of everything, Ella's story has the very saddest closing sentence I've ever read.

Twenty Thousand Streets is published as a Vintage Classic. (A reading guide is available, but the first discussion point is a bit wrong-headed. The 3 volumes are not the same story from different points of view; they are the stories of 3 different characters that intersect and intertwine in the months up to Christmas. In fact, the bulk of Jenny's story, which starts just after Christmas, is a flashback to events taking place at least a year beforehand.)

The Random House UK website has a great deal of supplemental information, including Hamilton's own thoughts on this book in particular and on writing in general.

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.

I urge you to pick up a copy of Twenty Thousand Streets before it's again allowed to fall out of print. Help ensure that doesn't happen.

The wonders of love

Poor Ella!

'It's wonderful, isn't it,' said Mr Eccles. 'Just to be strolling arm-in-arm like this.'

They were walking briskly now by the lake in the direction of Clarence Gate, whence they were to emerge for their supper into London, whose lights were now seen glittering, and whose buses and trains could be heard roaring, an entirely furious and disparaging welcome to the surface to divers in its dark parks.

So soon as they had started walking Mr Eccles had become a different creature — experiencing an influx of all that cheerful sense of manhood and resilience known to overtake gentlemen who have just been kissing young ladies a great deal and for the first time, and holding her arm and becoming loquacious. Ella, having got cold sitting out all that time, was also glad to be moving, and inclined for this reason to reflect his mood in some measure, however doubtful her inner frame of mind.

'Yes — it is,' she said, not finding it in her heart to damp his spirits, but her heart sank. It sank firstly because his remark, together with some which had preceded it, were all manifesting a growing air of jubilant proprietorship which, in spite of her late tacit agreement, frightened her more and more every moment; and secondly because, if she did sincerely consent, and if walking thus with him was 'wonderful,' as he had assured her it was, then she must have a blind spot about wonder in general, and would never know the wonders of love. For all she felt was a feeling of being no more and no less puzzled and ordinary than she was at any other moment of the day.

'It changes everything, doesn't it,' said Mr Eccles. 'Love.'

— from The Plains of Cement, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

Woman's work

We know how Jenny ends up: a prostitute. The tension in her story — her backstory — The Siege of Pleasure, the second volume in the threesome that makes up Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is in watching her fall and not being able to stop her.

It mattered not to Jenny, who had weighty work on hand — that is not to say weighty in the figurative sense of the term — but work which involved hauling out mighty bedsteads so as to get round and make the bed, dragging out monstrous furniture so as to dust behind it, emptying vast Edwardian basins of their brimming soap-grey lakes, lifting enormous and replenished jugs and lowering them at arm's length slowly lest they smashed the massive crockery, transporting wabbling pails, as heavy as children but not so tractable, down stairs and along passages, and carrying piled trays about in a world wherein practically everything was breakable, and only terrific muscular exertion and an agonized striving after balance could avert the impending crash — in brief, 'woman's work.'

— from The Siege of Pleasure, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

"The susceptibility of mankind to poetic precedents"

There are few motives so dangerous as theatricality and no wildness is so futile as deliberate wildness. Bob conceived it his duty to get wildly drunk and do mad things. He had no authentic craving to do so: he merely objectivized himself as an abused and terrible character, and surrendered to the explicit demands of drama. The motivation of popular fiction in behaviour — the susceptibility of mankind to poetic precedents — are subjects which will one day be treated with the gravity they deserve. In deciding to get wildly drunk and do mad things, Bob believed he was achieving something of vague magnificence and import, redeeming and magnifying himself — cutting a figure before himself and the world. The fact that, in deliberately attempting to get wildly drunk and do mad things, he might actually get wildly drunk, and actually do mad things, completely eluded him.

— from The Midnight Bell, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.

Drunk with Patrick Hamilton

Men! They thrust their hats back on their heads; they put their feet firmly on the rail; they looked you straight in the eye; they beat their palms with their fists, and they swilled largely and cried for more. Their arguments were top-heavy with the swagger of altruism. They appealed passionately to the laws of logic and honesty. Life, just for to-night, was miraculously clarified into simple and dramatic issues. It was the last five minutes of the evening, and they were drunk.

And they were in every phase of drunkenness conceivable. They were talking drunk, and confidential drunk, and laughing drunk, and beautifully drunk, and leering drunk, and secretive drunk, and dignified drunk, and admittedly drunk, and fighting drunk, and even rolling drunk. One gentleman, Bob observed, was patently blind drunk. Only one stage off dead drunk, that is — in which event he would not be able to leave the place unassisted.

And over all this ranting scene Ella, bright and pert and neat and industrious, held her barmaid's sway.

— from The Midnight Bell, in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, by Patrick Hamilton.