Impromptu in Moribundia

by Patrick Hamilton

Genres: Dystopian

Synopsis

'I recommend Hamilton at every opportunity, because he was such a wonderful writer and yet is rather under-read today. All his novels are terrific' Sarah Waters

'If you were looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop, then Hamilton is your man' Nick Hornby


Patrick Hamilton's novels were the inspiration for Matthew Bourne's new dance theatre production, The Midnight Bell.

Impromptu in Moribundia is a satirical fable about one (nameless) man's trespass (through a fantastical machine called the 'Asteradio') into a parallel universe on a far-off planet where the 'miserably dull affairs of England' are mirrored and transformed into an apparent idyll of bourgeois English imagination.

Moribundia is the 'physical enactment of the stereotypes and myths of English middle-class culture and consciousness.' Yet the narrator comes to discover that he has stumbled among a people characterised by 'cupidity, ignorance, complacence, meanness, ugliness, short-sightedness, cowardice, credulity, hysteria and, when the occasion called for it . . . cruelty and blood-thirstiness.

Release date: December 6, 2018

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 208

Sample

It is a mystery that for many years the work of one of the century’s most darkly hilarious and penetrating artists fell into near obscurity. Doris Lessing declared: ‘I am continually amazed that there is a kind of roll call of OK names from the 1930s … Auden, Isherwood etc. But Hamilton is never on them and he is a much better writer than any of them’.

Recently, however, Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude was adapted for the stage, and the films of his taut thrillers, Gaslight and Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Rope are now considered classics. He is regularly championed by contemporary writers such as Sarah Waters, Dan Rhodes and Will Self.

Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. With a father who made an excellent prototype for the bombastic bullies of his later novels and a snobbish mother who alternately neglected and smothered him, Hamilton was born into Edwardian gentility in Hassocks, Sussex, in 1904. He and his parents moved a short while later to Hove, where he spent his early years. He became a keen observer of the English boarding house, the twilit world of pubs and London backstreets and of the quiet desperation of everyday life. But after gaining acclaim and prosperity through his early work, Hamilton’s morale was shattered when a road accident left him disfigured and an already sensitive nature turned towards morbidity.

Hamilton’s personality was plagued by contradictions. He played the West End clubman and the low-life bohemian. He sought, with sometimes menacing zeal, his ‘ideal woman’ and then would indulge with equal intensity his sadomasochistic obsessions among prostitutes. He was an ideological Marxist who in later years reverted to blimpish Toryism. Two successive wives, who catered to contradictory demands, shuttled him back and forth. Through his work run the themes of revenge and punishment, torturer and victim; yet there is also a compassion and humanity which frequently produces high comedy.

In the 1930s and 40s, despite personal setbacks and an increasing problem with drink, Hamilton was able to write some of his best work. His novels include the masterpiece Hangover Square, The Midnight Bell, The Plains of Cement, The Siege of Pleasure, a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and The Gorse Trilogy, made up of The West Pier, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse and Unknown Assailant.

Impromptu in Moribundia is something of an anomaly in Hamilton’s career – and by far his most overtly political novel. Its protagonist John Sadler is transported by a futuristic machine to Moribundia, an uncanny world which partly resembles 1930s London. Viewed from a certain angle, Moribundia is the definitive communist fantasy, free from the tyranny of wage labour. Yet its society is staunchly materialistic: worshipping cleanliness, helpless in the face of illness. A woman buys a new brand of soap and transforms from a gawky spinster into a sought-after beauty. The protagonist catches measles and a doctor declares him near death.

As a critique of consumerism and class, Impromptu places Hamilton within a tradition of English satirists such as Aldous Huxley, who interpreted the hypocrisies around them through allegory and dystopia. But unlike Brave New Word, Moribundia – with its radical reimagining of worker’s pay and leisurely working-class – is not a straightforward dystopia. It is contradictory, and gloriously irresolute.

J. B. Priestley described Hamilton as ‘uniquely individual … he is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil.’ Patrick Hamilton died in 1962.

It is now generally known that, after the general controversy and outburst attendant upon John Sadler’s initial heroic journey to another planet, and later the partially fruitless attempt of the Gosling brothers, it had been decided by Crowmarsh to keep my departure hidden from the press and unknown to the general public. This was as much for Crowmarsh’s own personal safety as for reasons of scientific detachment. Only five weeks ago he had been assaulted savagely in the street by three prejudiced and self-righteous gentlemen, who escaped with nothing worse than a small fine, and it was generally felt that if the actual whereabouts of his Asteradio had been known widely, it would have been smashed to small pieces by his enemies in a few days’ time. Not that that would have seriously damaged Abel Crowmarsh. It is now well known that the wonder and terror of his epoch-making instrument is only equalled by its extreme comparative simplicity of construction. The only expedient left would have been to smash Abel Crowmarsh himself to small pieces along with his machine, and even that would have been of little avail. His assistants and associates, armed with a fanatical zeal greater even than that of their opponents, now have the knowledge, skill and means to gain the day against the destroyers even if they have the whole opinion of the world on their side. The Asteradio is with us now, and that is the end of the matter.

It was, then, only Crowmarsh himself, a few of his assistants, and one or two personal friends of my own, who knew of my departure at all, and so I was deprived of any of the glory and embarrassment of a public ‘send-off.’ A little dinner was given to me the night before by those few friends, and that was all. Offers were indeed made to come round and accompany me to what was facetiously called my ‘execution’ in the morning, but I firmly declined them. I never could stand anything in the nature of ‘seeing-off’ – a prejudice originally acquired from hideous experiences on Victoria Station in the war of 1914.

I returned that night to my rooms in New Cavendish Street, a little drunk, I think, and with a well-nourished sense of high adventure just holding its own against a lurking feeling of sheer panic which urged me to back out gracefully, or, if that was impossible, to run away. I slept well. When I awoke, at half-past seven, I need hardly say that all that sense of high adventure had departed. On the other hand, the feeling of sheer panic had not, as yet at any rate, seized the territory evacuated by the other emotion. I should say my sensations were those of fright, certainly – but of a sort of numbed fright, not of panic. A beastly feeling enough, for all that.

My early morning cup of tea was brought me, and I smoked a cigarette. My blinds had not been pulled up, but I could see that it was a fine warm day outside. For some reason that fact in itself seemed strangely to disquiet me – to this day I hardly know why. Perhaps it was the thought of the blue sky – the clear, pellucid nakedness of the infinite space into which I was to be hurled! I got up quickly, drew the blinds, looked squarely and defiantly into the cloudless sky, went and had my bath, and shaved. I cut myself slightly while shaving, but this was not because my hand was trembling. It was quite firm. I remember I had a feeling of dreadful unreality as I looked at myself closely in the mirror.

I can only describe my sensations up to this time as similar to those of a man about to undergo a major operation in a few hours’ time – a man, that is, walking about and feeling perfectly well at the moment, and therefore deprived of the motive and stimulus of physical pain in throwing himself upon his fate. But when my breakfast came matters grew speedily worse. What was all this? Baths, shavings, breakfasts! – and in a few hours’ time I was to be on another planet! I looked at the clock with terror and appeal in my eyes. Good God. I had exactly an hour and a half! I tried to eat my breakfast, but, of course, the first mouthful stuck in my mouth, and, finding myself, after laborious chewing, absolutely incapable of performing the act of swallowing, I had to spit it out. Instead I managed to gulp down some coffee, and greedily lit another cigarette. I spent the next half-hour pacing up and down my room and smoking, and I shall never forget the smell and the taste of the coffee, the filthy spectacle of the uneaten breakfast, and the slow-curling wreaths and great banks of blue smoke in the blinding sunshine coming through the window.

It had been my intention to take a taxi round to Crowmarsh, which would have only taken me ten minutes at the most; but I was so wrought up that I decided to walk.

If any one of my readers has ever gone through the experience of fainting, or of thinking he was about to faint, in a public place, he will be able more readily to appreciate the sort of feeling I had as I got out in the air that morning and started walking. I do not mean that I was fainting, or even that I thought I was going to faint, but the whole world bore the demeanour it bears to the fainting man – that is to say it seemed to be, simultaneously, both far away and near, at once confused and remote, yet agonizingly real and urgent, terribly quiet, yet terribly noisy, floating away, and yet coming in upon him and filling his ears with an awful hubbub. Above all, the things and people moving about in this world assume a character of cold indifference to his plight which he can hardly bear; he for a moment loses any sort of conception that they are ignorant of his sufferings, and their brutal health and uncomprehending normality have an air of deliberate disinterest in himself. He envies and bitterly resents their ability to behave as ordinary human-beings: he is temporarily, indeed, a complete outcast from the universe itself, from the whole of life as it is known and lived. That is what I felt as I walked down New Cavendish Street that warm, brilliantly sunny September morning. Taxis swished by me, people passed me laughing on the pavements, the shops were open and lazily starting the morning’s routine, errand boys sped by whistling on their bicycles, everything and everybody was going forward in a perfectly orderly and peaceful way and yet in less than an hour’s time I, I out of all these happy absorbed people, would be millions upon millions of miles up and away in that sky! How could they remain so aloof, how could they refrain so coolly and obstinately as they did from looking at me, speaking to me, crowding round and wondering at me, morally supporting me in some way in my awful undertaking?

After a few minutes these feelings passed away, or rather were absorbed again in a general numbness, and I walked ahead at a steady pace. As is now well known Crowmarsh at that time worked his miracles in Chandos Street, W.1, and so my route lay all the way through the stately land of Nursing Homes – New Cavendish Street, Wimpole Street, Welbeck Street, Harley Street, Bentinck Street, Devonshire Street and the rest. How few people realize, strolling in this district in the ordinary way, that under the aegis of these impressive titles and behind those graceful prosperous façades, lie hidden consulting rooms, sick-rooms, X-ray rooms, operating theatres, doctors, sisters, nurses, anaesthetists, disinfectants, stretchers, and all the starched hell and paraphernalia of the medical world! The thought came in upon me with great force that morning and gave me a minute measure of comfort. I thought of all those undergoing critical operations, all those to whom, as to me, this morning was a morning of terror and strangeness, of ghastly isolation from the normal world, and who lay in clean (oh, so clean!) white-sheeted suspense for the sound of the trolley in the corridor, the trolley which for all they knew might indeed be wheeling them away from everybody for ever. I told myself that my case was no worse than theirs, that I was merely undergoing a kind of serious operation, and I reminded myself for the thousandth time that the Asteradio had succeeded in actually annihilating no one as yet – though I had no desire to share the fate of the younger Gosling brother.

Encouraged by these thoughts I took heart again to look up into the blue sky above, but it would not do, I had to take my eyes away. If only it had been at night, if only the stars were shining and I had been able to see where I was going, to perceive my destination as an actuality, a solid orb, however tiny, occupying its own position in space, I believe I could have faced matters with greater calm – but the horror of being shot up at ten o’clock in the morning into that glaring blue utter nothingness to nowhere visible! One unforgettable night Crowmarsh had actually shown me my destination through the telescope, and I had felt very grand, and audacious, and noble, and unutterably large; but where was it now, and why was I feeling so unutterably small? Had it not vanished altogether, along with my fatuous complacency, and had it indeed any existence save in Crowmarsh’s brain? From that moment I had to keep my eyes glued on the pavement in order to get where I was going.

When I reached Chandos Street I saw by my wrist-watch that I was exactly twelve minutes too early. My desire to wander about and delay the moment, my desire to run madly away anywhere and never come back, held a brief combat with my desire to get in anywhere away from that awful blue sky, and the latter prevailed. I went straight up to the house and rang the bell. It differed in no respect from any dentist’s or specialist’s bell in that district. To go round at ten o’clock in the morning and ring a bell to be sent, please, to a planet nobody could see! Even at that moment I was struck by the staggering irony and absurdity of my situation.

The door was opened by the famous and incongruous Albert Fry, that curious Cockney figure so devoted to Crowmarsh, and bustling always so buoyantly, naïvely, and possessively about the outer fringe of his master’s mysteries; and I was shown at once into Crowmarsh’s room, where there was at present no sign of Crowmarsh.

A great deal has been written, and a great deal of nonsense has been talked, about Crowmarsh’s methods and habits of life. A large portion of the public, in fact, still thinks of him as a sort of mad scientist in a childish German film, a creature garbed in something akin to a white Ku-Klux-Klan costume, surrounded by unholy retorts, crucibles, etc., and making mystic gestures and generating sparks and lightning from the abracadabraish machinery at his disposal. Anything less like the matter-of-fact Crowmarsh could, of course, not be imagined.

In fact, this tall, slightly sarcastic man always seemed to me to resemble a Harley Street specialist more than anything else, and all his surroundings and methods reinforced the notion of him as such. The room into which I was now shown was for all the world the image of any consulting-room of any well-to-do medical man – you felt three guineas out of pocket just to sit down in his arm-chair and look around. There was the large high window, the dingy outlook upon the brownish brick backs of other houses, the soft carpet, the mediocre pictures, the massive desk with telephone and engagement-book, the beautiful fountain-pen and the wonderful little chromium-plated calendar which you worked by twisting things at the side. There was even the silver-framed photograph of a pretty girl which you nearly always see in rooms of this kind, and which I always suspect is put there by its occupant to warn his women patients not to make love to him. This was the kind of room into which I was now put and left, and the crowning absurdity was reached when Fry, as an afterthought, came in and smilingly offered me a copy of Punch to read while I waited!

I was left waiting at least ten minutes, during which I heard vague noises a. . .