'Fire and wings'

Writers and booze pt 2

Brace yourselves.

After university I wrote and performed a solo show about Jean Rhys.

I took it to Edinburgh, performing to audiences of, oh, I don’t know, up to six people. I did it at the Gate theatre in Notting Hill, in front of friends, a prospect that now sends me into contortions of retrospective self-consciousness. Having failed at ballet I firmly intended to act, and overrode my terrible desire to laugh onstage by eliminating all other people from the arena. To be honest I rather enjoyed myself. Nevertheless it became apparent, by degrees, that the show was better written than it was performed… and here I am.

This week - having previously considered the pub as literary landscape - I wanted to write about the darker side, the underside, of writers and booze, which takes me quite naturally to Jean Rhys, and in particular to her novel Good Morning, Midnight. Her masterpiece, in my view. Published in 1939, the year in which Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square - arguably his masterpiece - is set (although it was published two years later). Hamilton references the oncoming war, Jean does not, but both books are similarly enclosed in darkness. Both, too, are steeped in alcohol and in literary genius, the two being quite indecipherable; and they are at the heart of the second part of this essay.

There is of course a huge essay to be written about writers and booze, indeed there are books on the subject (notably Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring). But this, like part one a couple of weeks ago, is just about the writers whom I especially love.

My copy of Hangover Square begins with a short essay by J. B. Priestley, originally written in 1972, by which time Hamilton was ten years dead, killed by drink at the age of fifty-eight.

I have never been overly keen on Priestley and his stompingly obvious dramas (Inspector Goole, indeed), especially after I read a damning little anecdote in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir, Slipstream, describing a wartime lunch in which an associate told Priestley all about the play that she was writing, and a couple of years later a Priestley play appeared containing that very idea.

But his Hamilton introduction is positively enraging. Priestley had known his subject as a ‘gifted youth’, as he puts it, ie the author of six novels and the hit play Rope by the age of thirty. By 1972 Hamilton had fallen into the shallow abyss of the unfashionable, and Priestley (shaking his head sadly) seems rather to relish the fact. Hamilton’s reputation is iced with a layer of faint praise, decorated with patronizing little rosettes of faux-understanding, then scattered with poisonous hundreds and thousands. ‘He is no great major novelist…’ ‘It is possible that this new generation of readers… may at first be bewildered or rather bored by his very individual humour…’ The Gorse trilogy ‘was a bad idea anyhow, and Hamilton no longer had the creative energy to bamboozle us into believing it was a good idea’.

Hamilton fans, are you enraged yet?