Hunting for happiness

Patrick Hamilton is honoured with a blue plaque.

The novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton, who died in 1962 aged 58, was commemorated by an English Heritage blue plaque last Saturday, installed at his birthplace in Chiswick. Best known for Hangover Square and the play Rope, later adapted for the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock, Hamilton is nevertheless largely overlooked, for many years shoved to the margins of the established literary canon.

Yet Hamilton wrote masterfully about London’s “shabby genteel” in the inter-war years – depicting the quietly desperate, doomed lives of alcoholics and whores in grimy corners of the city, where greed and manipulation are masked by a drink-soaked camaraderie.

Hamilton had an ambiguous view of the city he so often depicted, a complicated mixture of fascination and repulsion. Late in life, he observed in his unfinished novel The Happy Hunting Ground that “London’s a place where you’re forever hunting for happiness – and even if you find it it’s soon taken away from you”.

The plaque at least offers a permanent memorial for a writer so preoccupied with unnoticed lives slipping away into a kind of terminal misery and whose own life, before his early death, was somewhat shambolic.