|
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Penguin Modern Classics
0141185899
£9.99
Repetition in writing is a very difficult thing to get right. If you get it wrong, readers soon become infuriated. And they become infuriated, usually, because they are becoming bored. This happens when the repeated thing isn't interesting enough, in itself, to keep them interested. Like all things in writing, the repeated thing, though apparently static, has to advance all the time. If readers feel that repetition is happening for repetition's sake, and that their time is therefore being wasted, they will immediately disengage. But if you get it right, the repetition, there is a rhythm to it, and that rhythm works to create a trance, and within that trance almost anything can happen.
The great recent do-er of repetition to the point of infuriation, and beyond, is the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (Wittgenstein's Nephew, Gargoyles, Extinction). Although I doubt Thomas Bernhard ever read Patrick Hamilton's work, there are moments of surprising co-incidence. For an accessible British take on Thomas Bernhard's technique, see Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage.
Patrick Hamilton's prose works, at every level from sentence to oeuvre, by heavy repetition with slight variation. This is very hard to demonstrate in a short quotation, so here are a couple of solid paragraphs:
He could see through them, and, of course, he hated them. He even hated Netta too – he had known that for a long time. He hated Netta, perhaps, most of all. The fact that he was crazy about her physically, that he worshipped the ground she trod on and the air she breathed, that he could think of nothing else in the world all day long, had nothing to do with the underlying stream of scorn he bore towards her as a character. You might say he wasn't really 'in love' with her: he was 'in hate' with her. It was the same thing – just looking at his obsession from the other side. He was netted in hate just as he was netted in love. Netta: Netta: Netta!... God – how he loved her!
He hated himself, too. He didn't pretend to be any better. He hated himself for the life he led – the life in common with them. Drunken, lazy, impecunious, neurotic, arrogant, pub-crawling cheap lot of swine – that was what they all were. Including him and Netta. She was an awful little drunk, though she had a marvellous head. She never got up till half-past twelve: just chain-smoked in bed till it was time to drop over and into the nearest pub (only she had to have a man to take her over, because she didn't want to be taken for a prostitute). And she was the daughter of a clergyman in Somerset. Now deceased!?
There is too much repetition here to be briefly picked apart. But look at the use of rhyme (Netta/better, head/bed), of cliche (worshipped the ground; all day long), and of deliberately unambitious, un-elegantly varied verbs (hated; she had to have a man to take her over, because she didn't want to be taken for...)
The thinker is George Harvey Bone, a punchy character in the way of heavy drinkers and ex-boxers. Not unintelligent, just more at home with the plod of step-by-step logic than anything leapful – a wounded man; wounded by life, wounded by love.
Hangover Square is set during the ignominious months of Munich, prior to the outbreak of World War II. George Harvey Bone, motivated equally by love and hate, is in stumbling pursuit of Netta Longdon.
It took me a while, maybe a hundred pages, to come round to this novel – and to do so I had to be convinced of a couple of things. First, that the repetition wasn't inept. Second, that the psychology of the novel wasn't overcrude. The two things went together.
George Harvey Bone, although he doesn't diagnose it in medical terms, is bipolar. The way he puts it is that 'all his life he had had "dead" moods'. The first word of the novel is 'Click!...' This is the way Bone understands the moment when he flips from one state to another, from alive to dead. After a while I realised that it (Click!) was a necessarily crude way of understanding schizophrenia because George Harvey Bone is a crude thinker. He thinks by repeating things, until the changes in them begin to appear, largely by attrition, and the fabric of his thoughts is worn through, so whatever lies behind them can be seen.
Once I realised this, I realised that Hangover Square itself wasn't in any way crude. Far from it. It is, as the subtitle suggests, one of the strongest emanation-novels – beaming a pure shot of long-dead London SW5 straight into the reader's soul.
Note: Hangover Square had been suggested to me a couple of times, as a good cult book to choose. But it was an article by Cathi Unsworth in issue 7 of NUDE magazine ("Journey to the End of the Night: A personal Travel Through Noir Writing" at www.nudemagazine.co.uk) that persuaded me to look at Hamilton straight away. She described him thus: 'an alcoholic who struggled with the legacy of his cruel and distant father, and set out his stall under the comforting glow of the optics; where better to observe the theatre of lowlife. He had an eye for the minutiae of the murderous mind; the crushing callousness of the pub bore.' I'm hoping to get round to one of the other writers Unsworth mentions, Derek Raymond, fairly soon. Cathi Unsworth's first novel, The Not Knowing, is published by Serpent's Tail.
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton is now out in Penguin paperback
Visit Toby Litt's website
|
