Reading

 I've been reading Patrick Hamilton and Harold Pinter. I read Through a Glass Darkly, Hamilton's biography (he was an alcoholic so you can see what they were going for with the title...but its not great, is it?) and it was predictably miserable reading. A regular criticism of autobiographies is that they're interesting at the beginning but become dull as the subject overcomes their obstacles and achieves success. This is rarely the case with biography. Hamilton came from money, was a prodigy, received gushing reviews for every novel he ever wrote (barring the last one), earned a ton of money writing about London's boozy demimonde, started drinking three bottles of whiskey a day and tapered off into drunken uselessness. The desperation is palpable: the hopeless attempts at managing his drinking, the pathetically cheerful letters to his brother, Bruce. The waning of his powers and the friendships eroded bit by bit. The self-righteousness, the learned helplessness and eventual actual helplessness. Its not much fun, but it feels inevitable. It is a sobering reminder not to drink three bottles of whiskey a day, should such a reminder be necessary. 

I'm now reading Hangover Square which is extremely good. Its beautifully written, he utterly inhabits this seamy London bohemianism and the long cold shadow of the coming war. The war is like a character we never quite meet but who is a constant presence - a cosh boy waiting in the shadows. There's an interesting central conceit and some beautifully modeled alternative perspectives. And its a right fucking page turner too - I'm racing through it. Its both very old fashioned and oddly modish as it concerns a sympathetic schizophrenic who is obsessed with murdering the beautiful and profoundly unlikable woman he thinks he is in love with. The narrative is pure incel/manosphere, and if those people could read, there would be a very real danger that George Harvey Bone would be a poster boy for them. 

I've just done that thing where I call people I don't agree with stupid. The "left" always do this and its utterly self-defeating. They can read. They're not stupid. They're just wrong. 

Geraldine Fitzgerald*

The book becomes quite difficult when you discover that Netta, the callous cat in the book, is a bitter portrait of a real person. Hamilton was obsessed with an actress called Geraldine Fitzgerald, but she married someone else and moved to America, and Patrick was not pleased. Its an ugly portrait. Netta is seedy, grasping, petulant and, while stunningly beautiful, rotten to the core. The depiction is not a gallant one. There appears to be no relation between Netta and Geraldine beyond Hamilton's poisonous calumny. That said Hangover Square is a fantastic read and I'm halfway through it after plucking it off the bookshelf yesterday. 

Pinter I'd never read and never seen. I never studied drama and never went to the theatre growing up - our sort didn't. So I knew Pinter chiefly from John Sessions' impressions of his oeuvre on the smug improv show "Whose Line is it Anyway?" What a bloody awful name for a show, by the way. Bloody hell. "Will This Do?" would have been better. So I thought his work was chiefly pauses, grunts and people saying "what?" a lot in cockney accents. There is a bit of that. But there is so much thick-cut, gorgeous language and layers of oddness and density. The spareness, the cruelty and, yes, "The Comedy of Menace". Pinter is really funny. And manic and brutal. There's a lot of Beckett - the books more than the plays - and a lot from Noir films. And quite a lot of Hancock, strangely. Their worlds are contemporaneous, the settings: bare, impoverished, austere are identical. Even Hancock's homburg and astrakhan coat look right. The Economy Drive or The Two Murderers are Pinter played for laughs. Even the titles are like Pinter plays. 

Misery, penury, silence and laughs: still the daddy. 

I've been really enjoying Pinter. Even the slighter plays like "A Slight Ache" are wonderful: dense, energetic, slathered in words, strange and uncomfortable. They still feel fresh and unkind though they were written a decade before I was born. And that was a long time ago. 

*She's the great aunt of the actress Tara Fitzgerald whom I met in London over twenty years ago. STUNNINGLY beautiful. Wow.