Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky A London Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: A London Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. A story of unrequited love set in 1930s London, against the backdrop of grimy streets and public houses. Patrick Hamilton, responsible for both the haunting Gaslight and the atmospheric Hangover Square, published a semi-autobiographical trilogy under the title of Twenty Thousand Streets in 1935. Revolving around The Midnight Bell, a public house off the Euston Road, it follows the painful pursuit of love from three different perspectives. Barman Bob (Bryan Dick), who yearns for penniless street-walker Jenny (Zoe Tapper). Bob's colleague Ella (Sally Hawkins), who is torn between the attentions of an older, wealthier man and her secret desire for her barman workmate. Executive producer Gareth Neame says: ''Patrick Hamilton was one of the truly great British novelists of the 20th Century, but his extraordinary contribution has all too often been overlooked. His famous psychological thrillers such as Rope, Gaslight and Hangover Square influenced many of the celebrated filmmakers of the last century such as Alfred Hitchcock. ''The highly autobiographical Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky doesn't involve murders or darkened streets, but instead the intensely painful subjects of unrequited love, ambition and disappointment. It observes the minutiae of ordinary life and it gives us a unique insight into the emotionally wrecked life that Hamilton himself lived.'' Gaslight: the return of the play that defined toxic masculinity. T he term “gaslighting” – psychological manipulation intended to make the victim question their sanity – has become embedded in our language. This year, accusations of gaslighting were aimed at Love Island housemates Michael and Curtis. In the Netflix series Jessica Jones, David Tennant’s character played mind-control games with his victims (intensified by the fact that he could actually control minds). Taylor Swift even declared that the US public had been gaslighted by Donald Trump’s politics. The term derives from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight, which is itself fittingly deceptive. On the surface it’s a Victorian melodrama, a real potboiler, but it is uncannily insightful and accurate in its depiction of an abusive relationship. The play was the basis for a 1940 film directed by Thorold Dickinson and for George Cukor’s 1944 film starring Ingrid Bergman. Along with his drama Rope, Gaslight made Hamilton wealthy. In the play, Jack Manningham manipulates and undermines his wife, Bella. His temper is constantly fluctuating; he dismisses and belittles her and, by turning the lights on and off, starts to make her think she is going mad. “It’s so acute in its portrayal of psychological domestic abuse and toxic masculinity, but people can lose sight of that,” says Richard Beecham, whose production of Gaslight is at Watford Palace theatre this month. “Patrick Hamilton the commercial playwright could never quite leave behind Hamilton the literary novelist,” says Beecham. “He was a complicated man and, reading his biography, it seems he had some understanding of some of the behaviours he’s writing about.” Hamilton’s tendency to become infatuated with unsuitable women seeped into his fiction. His obsession with Soho sex worker Lily Connolly made its way into Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. The protagonist of the Gorse trilogy is a predator, a superficially charming swindler who takes advantage of women. The Watford production is one of several Gaslights staged this year. There have already been revivals at Perth theatre and the Mill at Sonning; a version starring Martin Shaw is touring the UK and another Gaslight is coming to the Playground theatre in London. Beecham was inspired by Safe at Last, a Channel 4 documentary that allowed cameras behind the doors of a women’s refuge. His production has an all-female cast playing survivors of domestic abuse who are enacting Hamilton’s play as an exercise in drama therapy. To prepare, Beecham worked closely with a women’s refuge. The cast created individual backstories for the modern women they are playing and they remained in character when a care worker took them through a workshop designed for survivors of abuse. The cast are simultaneously playing the women in the refuge as well as Hamilton’s characters, so when Bella delivers an impassioned speech towards the end, it becomes “a sort of exorcism”. This approach also means that, in the context of Beecham’s production, a survivor of abuse is also taking on the role of the abuser, which makes the scene in which Jack attacks Bella more emotionally complex. The character of the police inspector Rough, who is Bella’s rescuer, can be problematic for a director today: he is another dominating male presence. In Kai Fischer’s production for Perth theatre, a woman – Meg Fraser – was cast in the role. Beecham has merged the character with the figure of the drama therapist and has “pruned the text to remove some of the lazy sexism and the patronising attitudes”. Is there not, I ask, also an issue with a man directing a cast of women in a play about emotional control and power imbalance? It’s something they’ve discussed. Watford Palace’s artistic director Brigid Larmour stipulated that if he was to direct it there would need to be an otherwise all-female creative team. Emotionally complex . Jasmine Jones and Hannah Hutch in Gaslight at the Watford Palace theatre. Photograph: The Other Richard. Imy Wyatt Corner’s forthcoming production for the Playground theatre in London will stick more closely to Hamilton’s original. Her version will retain the Victorian setting and look to horror for inspiration. She wants to “push the audience to feel uneasy – even scared”. Inevitably, lighting will play a large part in this; she cites the film Midsommar as an inspiration. Having first read the play 10 years ago, Corner was inspired to direct it because “its depiction of abusive relationships has not dated and remains alarmingly relevant”. The Crown Prosecution Service recorded 960 offences of coercive and controlling behaviour between 2017 and 2018, a three-fold increase from the previous year. Ninety-seven per cent of defendants prosecuted in these cases were male. But Corner is concerned about the prevalence of the term in the media. It has become a buzzword, she says, “but also in some ways lost any attachment to the actual gravity of this type of abuse and the sensitivity this topic can require”. “Now is a very good time to revisit the play,” she says, and “consider what – if anything – has changed.” Richard Beecham’s production of Gaslight is at Watford Palace theatre until 26 October. Imy Wyatt Corner’s production is at the Playground theatre, London, from 21 October until 10 November. Press Releases. Patrick Hamilton's classic trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky adapted for BBC FOUR. In the year of acclaimed author Patrick Hamilton 's centenary, his classic trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky , is brought to life in a new three-part adaptation by Kevin Elyot for BBC FOUR . In a story of unrequited love set against the backdrop of the grimy streets and public houses of Thirties London, the drama stars a talented young cast including Bryan Dick (Blackpool) as Bob, Zoë Tapper (Pepys, Stage Beauty) as Jenny and Sally Hawkins (Layer Cake and BBC ONE's forthcoming Fingersmith) as Ella. Phil Davis (Vera Drake, Rose And Maloney) also features as Mr Eccles. Hamilton, responsible for both the haunting Gaslight and the atmospheric Hangover Square, published the semi-autobiographical trilogy under the title of Twenty Thousand Streets in 1935. Revolving around The Midnight Bell, a public house off the Euston Road, it follows the painful pursuit of love from three different perspectives: barman Bob, who yearns for penniless street-walker Jenny; his colleague Ella, torn between the attentions of an older, wealthier man and her secret desire for Bob; and Jenny, forced onto the streets through circumstances and now struggling to keep her head above water. Executive producer Gareth Neame says: "Patrick Hamilton was one of the truly great British novelists of the 20th Century, but his extraordinary contribution has all too often been overlooked. "His famous psychological thrillers such as Rope, Gaslight and Hangover Square influenced many of the celebrated filmmakers of the last century such as Alfred Hitchcock. "The highly autobiographical Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky doesn't involve murders or darkened streets, but instead the intensely painful subjects of unrequited love, ambition and disappointment. "It observes the minutiae of ordinary life and it gives us a unique insight into the emotionally wrecked life that Hamilton himself lived." Kevin Elyot, who has adapted the trilogy for the BBC, is best known for his multi-award-winning play, My Night With Reg and recently adapted Death On The Nile for television. Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is produced by Kate Harwood (Charles II, Daniel Deronda) and directed by Simon Curtis (Man and Boy, David Copperfield). The executive producers are Gareth Neame and Richard Fell . Filming has begun on location in London and the drama will be transmitted on BBC FOUR next year. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky A London Trilogy. by Patrick Hamilton, introduction by Susanna Moore. Patrick Hamilton may be best known now for the plays Rope and Gaslight and for the classic Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor movies they inspired, but in his heyday he was no less famous for his brooding tales of London life. Featuring a Dickensian cast of pubcrawlers, prostitutes, lowlifes, and just plain losers who are looking for love—or just an ear to bend—Hamilton’s novels are a triumph of deft characterization, offbeat humor, unlikely compassion, and raw suspense. In recent years, Hamilton has undergone a remarkable revival, with his champions including Doris Lessing, David Lodge, Nick Hornby, and Sarah Waters. Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky is a tale of obsession and betrayal that centers on a seedy pub in a run-down part of London. Bob the waiter skimps and saves and fantasizes about writing a novel, until he falls for the pretty prostitute Jenny and blows it all. Kindly Ella, Bob’s co- worker, adores Bob, but is condemned to enjoy nothing more than the attentions of the insufferable Mr. Eccles; Jenny, out on the street, is out of love, hope, and money. We watch with pity and horror as these three vulnerable and yet compellingly ordinary people meet and play out bitter comedies of longing and frustration. Patrick Hamilton, introduction by Susanna Moore. Praise. The rediscovery of English writer Hamilton ( Hangover Square , The Slaves of Solitude ) continues with this tale of obsessive love in the low-rent pubs of 1930s London—so evocatively rendered you almost smell the smoke and spilt ale. — Newsday. No other English writer has written so acutely about sexual infatuation, embarrassment and self-delusion. — Time Out. Hamilton. loves his ominous narratives. He's a sort of urban Hardy: everyone is doomed, right from the first page. It's sad, but Hamilton's laconic narrative voice is always a joy to read, and as a social historian, Hamilton is unbeatable. — Nick Hornby. The wonderful 1935 trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky , is set in a pub off the Euston Road. Every detail is spot on; Hamilton's remorseless eye weaves an atmosphere as thick as bar smoke. — The Independent [UK] A writer I love is Patrick Hamilton. I am reading his trilogy, which is called Twenty-Thousand Streets Under the Sky . His world is a world of thwarted dreams in the 1920s and '30s. His writing is phenomenally good. —Wesley Stace, The Newark Star-Ledger. Unhappy hour. The magnificent fourth novel, by Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell (1929), opens with the worst literary device in the world - a dream sequence. Bob, barman of the eponymous pub, is asleep in the afternoon and dreaming that he's leaving the coast of Spain aboard a ship embarking on a momentous voyage. Fortunately it's only a couple of paragraphs before he jolts awake to find that the swishing of the water is no more than his own breath, and the thundering wind is nothing but the rumble of traffic from the nearby Euston Road. He is fully clothed and feeling wretched, and it's here that the novel really begins: "Then he cursed himself, softly and vindictively. He faced facts. He had got drunk at lunch again." Poor Bob is to spend much of the next 200 pages charging around London in various states of alcohol-fuelled degradation, and from this point on Hamilton's fiction would rarely venture more than a few pages away from the pub. Boozing is the defining feature of Hamilton's life and work. Most writers enjoy the occasional tipple, and I certainly like to fancy myself as something of a semi-professional dipsomaniac, but he puts all but the most dedicated of us to shame. His brother Bruce calculated that in the 1940s, Hamilton would drink his way through three bottles of black market whisky a day, costing about £2,000 a year - enough to buy a fancy house. Inevitably, such heroic drinking was to be his downfall - in his final years his writing became increasingly lifeless and his innards finally packed up for good in his late 50s. But, for more than two decades, he wrote some of the best fiction, and far and away the best pub fiction, I've come across. I've spent far too many hours of my life idiotically scouring the streets of London in search of the real Midnight Bell, as if it's possible to find a make-believe pub from more than 70 years ago. The Prince of Wales Feathers on Warren Street, a known haunt of Hamilton's, is as geographically close as you're likely to get, but with its fruit machine, malevolent talking billboard in the gents and special offers on selected spirits, it's hard to make the leap - sadly it's better just to stay at home, pour yourself an octuple whisky and read the book. The novel's portrait of a London pub, its staff and its patrons in the 1920s is wonderfully rich, and captures the strangeness of life on both sides of the bar. Among the regulars are the appallingly hirsute freeloader Mister Sounder, who has the audacity to write letters to the papers bemoaning the short crop of "the would-be modern young Miss", even though he has "rather more hair coming in two exact little sprouts from his nostrils than modern fashion allows or nicety dictates", and Mister Wall, who really, truly thinks it's funny to call the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse "The Four Horsemen of the Eucalyptus". Like John Keats, Anthony Burgess, Melvyn Bragg and either Ant or Dec (I can never remember which), my family had a pub for many years, and from an early age I came face to face with the horrors of the habitué. There are few things more soul-destroying than being locked into an early- evening conversation with a barfly who thinks they are funny or clever or, worst of all, "a character". My strategy would be to hide around the corner and not emerge until I heard the clink of change calling me to my post. This was because I was a bad barman - sullen, superior and resentful. Bob, however, is a good barman - partly because he's angling for tips in the hope of topping up his wages by a pound a week (by the time I came into the business that particular incentive had gone the way of Lyons' Corner Houses), but also because he's simply a Good Bloke who is prepared to tolerate and occasionally even humour these hopeless misfits. Just as Thomas Hardy effortlessly obliges us to root for Tess from the start by giving her great big eyes, Hamilton gives us no choice but to feel for Bob by making him plainly good-natured, affable and, at 25 (not entirely coincidentally the same age as the author when the book was published), all alone in the world - he has no recollection of his father, and his mother had died when he was 16 and at sea. And of course, because all good novelists are bad people, things go very wrong for Bob. At 9.20pm of the first day we meet him, the door creaks open and a murderously pretty girl walks into the bar. By closing time he's given her 10 shillings to pay her rent, and has begun his transformation into the Young Werther of Warren Street. The girl, Jenny Maple, has an explosive smile, a well-practised line in sob stories and is very obviously, even to the bedazzled Bob, a prostitute. That doesn't put him off - in fact his act of charity, meant to keep her off the streets for a night, makes him feel "dreadfully conceited. He was so innocent as to believe the transaction was almost unique. He was in love with himself." Although from a markedly different background to the "common" Bob - Hamilton's family were beleaguered toffs - the character is, emotionally, a self-portrait. The author had, like Bob, become embroiled in a maddening non-romance with a Soho courtesan, Lily Connolly (she had thought it was spelt Conerlly). She had reminded him of one of his and Bruce's favourite film stars, Esther Ralston, and he carries this likeness over to the gloriously blonde Jenny. While being enfeebled and enslaved by the girl's beauty, Hamilton's intentions were pathologically pure. Like Bob, he idolised and indulged her and was thrown nothing but empty scraps of hope in return. Dates were broken, debts left unpaid and assurances that she would look for legitimate work abandoned, but everything would be forgiven and forgotten at the next illusory glimmer of affection. Extraordinarily, when Hamilton started work on The Midnight Bell, he was still in thrall to Lily. He would, like Bob, walk the streets of the West End in the desperate hope of "accidentally" running into her in between clients. Bob's delusions and humiliations are Hamilton's too. Without even the benefit of hindsight the author understood his predicament entirely - he knew just how much of a fool he was making of himself and was able to write about the lunacy of the situation with detachment and humour, yet he was addicted to her. At the outset of this one-sided affair, he had written to Bruce that she was ". Perfect. She is the summit of the human race. Her parents ought to be given a gold cup. She's without blemish." By the time he signed off The Midnight Bell, although still in occasional contact with Lily, he was able to dismiss her as "the mad harlot from Ipswich". A profound difference between the two hapless suitors is that during his madness Patrick had a family to fall back on, a selection of confidantes and a blossoming career as a writer, whereas Bob has nobody and nothing. Nothing, that is, except his beloved £80, thoughts of which give him "more pleasure than anything else in the world". From the first mention of this lump sum, carefully harvested away in the Midland Bank on the Tottenham Court Road, it's agonisingly apparent that by the end of his adventures with Jenny it will all be gone. And, gradually, he hands it over. She takes it with elaborate but empty protests, knowing full well that no matter how much she begs him not to be so kind, the notes will end up in her clutches. She instinctively senses exactly what she can get out of him for how little outlay, and sets to work with terrible efficiency. Bit by bit Bob's safety net falls in her lap and is squandered on drink, and what he doesn't give to her or lavish on her he invests in a blue suit with which to impress her. Underneath this leeching of cash is the nagging knowledge that had he been a different man, for 80 quid he could have had an awful lot of sex with her. Absolutely tons of the stuff. But it never happened. It wasn't squeamishness or the fear of the uninitiated - after all, ". Bob had been to sea, and his behaviour had been neither eccentric nor snobbish in foreign ports". He couldn't bear the thought of sharing this cruel beauty's white body with strangers, and pathetically he thinks it's better not to have it at all. Unlike Bob, Hamilton did finally go to bed with his girl. This was some time after his initial obsession had fizzled out. We don't know the gory details, but according to Bruce it wasn't a resounding success. The man infatuated to the point of insanity will always be a staple of fiction (my own writing is infested with them), and indeed much of Bob's story can almost be read as a cover version of the central doomed romance in W Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, published the previous decade. As long as there are men left on earth, legions of us will be falling in love with women who don't even particularly like us, let alone love us, and we will thoroughly disgrace ourselves in front of them. Every once in a while one of us will break ranks and decide to share our ignominy with the world by writing thinly veiled autobiographical fiction about it, but what really sets The Midnight Bell apart from its innumerable likenesses is the incredible humour leaping from every page. The overwhelming majority of Miserable Man writing takes itself far too seriously but, for all its horrors, in Hamilton's novel the gags come thick and fast - it could even be the bashful Fitzrovian cousin of John Fante's excruciating Italian- American comic masterpiece Ask The Dust. And, of course, there's the booze. Even now, it's rare to find a book as sodden with the wonderful, nasty stuff as this. "And what an opportunity for my own particular brand of fun!" Hamilton wrote to Bruce, outlining his ideas for the novel in 1928. "Drunkenness. I should be able to write a rollicking little masterpiece." After his final, cataclysmic mistreatment at the hands of Jenny, Bob orders a double whisky from the buffet at Victoria station. It is to be his first of many that night. "Bob conceived it his duty to get wildly drunk and do mad things. He had no authentic craving to do so: he merely objectivised himself as an abused and terrible character, and surrendered to the explicit demands of drama. 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." The next day he concludes his adventure by waking up in a doss house, fleeced of what little remained of his £80, when all he had wanted was "one human and comprehending organism" of his own. On finishing The Midnight Bell, Hamilton entered his imperial phase. His play Rope (1929) (which Alfred Hitchcock subsequently turned into an only partially successful piece of experimental cinema - dismissed by Hamilton as "sordid and practically meaningless balls") became an instant West End hit, and toured the world for years. It was this and the comparable triumph of his next play, Gaslight (1938), that kept him in obscenely expensive whisky but, quite rightly, it was his fiction that he considered his important work. The Midnight Bell, which received glowing reviews and healthy sales, was to be the opening volume of a trilogy. The Siege of Pleasure (1932) came next, following Jenny's journey from downtrodden serving girl to her life on street corners. Naturally the catalyst is drink, and Hamilton's dissection of her first experience of drunkenness is impeccable: "She felt the port trickling down inside, and it seemed that a kind of light fell upon her." He even allows us to feel some compassion towards her. She's just as ignorant, selfish, shallow, grasping, vain and vulgar as in The Midnight Bell, but she's more human too, and more hopeless. Finally, The Plains Of Cement (1934) runs parallel to The Midnight Bell, and follows the travails of the pub's good, straightforward barmaid Ella as she is pursued by Mister Ernest Eccles - a man with a new hat, a horribly mesmerising tooth and "a little something put by". Michael Holroyd describes the timelessly grotesque Mister Eccles as "one of the most dreadful admirers in English literature", and the courtship - although little more than a series of misunderstandings, incomprehensible mutterings and pressings-up-against-railings - has a rare tension to it. They were finally published together as Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (the only realistic and affordable way to find The Midnight Bell is under this title), and with its dimly-lit garrets and fog-filled London streets so reminiscent of George Gissing, the book could almost be the belated final gasp of the Victorian three-volume novel. Hamilton weaned himself off the women of Wardour Street, settled into married life and went on to write further great books, notably Hangover Square (1941) and The Slaves Of Solitude (1947), but his readership eventually slowed to a trickle. In the preface to The Light Went Out, Bruce's 1972 biography of his brother, he laments that "[Hamilton's] name is not now one instantly remembered by the wider reading public". In 1993, his biographer Sean French described him as "an eerie non-presence in modern British literary history", and if anything, his profile has slipped even lower since then. His penultimate book, Mister Stimpson and Mister Gorse (1953), a sound but unexceptional novel, which suffers for the lack of a single likeable character, was turned into a TV series called The Charmer in 1986. The novel was reissued with, sadly, its new title and, sadder still, a photograph of Nigel Havers on the cover. That was the last time Hamilton had any kind of significant readership. Patrick Hamilton was born on March 17 1904, and he approaches his centenary in undeserved obscurity. Hs publisher, Vintage, has marked his 100th birthday by allowing Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky, and with it The Midnight Bell, to quietly fall out of print. Tatty copies occasionally surface on the internet though, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's bleak and brilliant, and an authentic lost classic. · Dan Rhodes's novel Timoleon Vieta Come Home is published in paperback by Canongate at £7.99.