Described as a ‘glamour girl’, Netta, the femme fatale of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, takes exception. ‘Oh no, a fireside girl,’ she replies. ‘A fireside girl, definitely.’

Eighty years after Hangover Square was published, playwright and novelist Patrick Hamilton is best known for his exponential whisky consumption and masterful depiction of pubs — but his firesides are equally as fascinating. Netta’s fire is not a cosy hearth, but a gas fire emanating ‘sinister, black misery’ from its ‘sighing throat and red, glowing asbestos cells’. She and her friends stand at the fireside, leaning on the mantelpiece as they smoke and glug glasses of gin, ready to leave for the pub at a moment’s notice. A failed actor with a penchant for Blackshirts, Netta’s fantasy fireside is one of domesticated, passive durability — but she has instead been dealt a fate of unemployment, boozing, and seedy men. ‘To those whom God has forsaken,’ Hamilton writes, ‘is given a gas fire in Earl’s Court.’

Hamilton was born in 1904 on England’s south coast to prosperous writer parents who became steadily poorer through his childhood. A short-lived theatrical career ended when the young Patrick was attacked by a homophobic colleague who heard him speak warmly of a gay actor. He moved to an office job in the City, but thanks to his sister’s connections, he had published three novels by the age of 24.

Hamilton came to Marxism after a flirtation with Nietzsche’s theory of superman, which heavily influenced his first play Rope (1929) loosely adapted into Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name. A road accident that left Hamilton disabled and disfigured in January 1931 made him an unlikely critic of drink-driving, and also prompted a less productive period in which he devoured Das Kapital. Later, during the Second World War, after being taken to the Daily Worker offices by the Communist MP Willie Gallacher, Hamilton struck up a firm friendship with Claud Cockburn and even became the Soviet embassy’s unofficial play-reader, picking out scripts suitable for translation into Russian. But he was not a joiner — and though ideologically committed, he maintained a distant, sometimes playful attitude to the Communist Party, renaming his pet parrot Pollitt after its general secretary.

Hangover Square charts the story of protagonist George Harvey Bone’s obsession with Netta. In an apparent misunderstanding of schizophrenia, this veers between unrequited love and, in his dissociative ‘dead moods’, a determination to kill her, go to Maidenhead—which he remembers from childhood—and find happiness. It begins on Christmas Day 1938, in the shadow of Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement three months prior, which has been greeted with delight by everyone bar Bone: ‘They went raving mad, they weren’t sober for a whole week after Munich — it was just in their line. They liked Hitler, really.’ Bone himself feels ‘shame which he couldn’t analyse’. But the fact he voices this only to the reader—and never to his pro-fascist friends—echoes the course of appeasement itself. In his dead moods, Bone takes on ‘the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence’, which Hitler cited in his 1936 speech at Munich. As Cockburn wrote many years later, Hamilton is regularly occupied by the ‘terrible natural naziness existing in all of us’.

Daily Worker editor Bill Rust entertained more literal suspicions of naziness. Rust told Cockburn that ‘the comrades’ believed nobody could depict fascists as accurately as Hamilton had in Hangover Square without close contact with the Blackshirts themselves. He changed his mind after ‘a number of uproarious and deeply sympathetic meetings’, but the episode is testament to Hamilton’s remarkable observational abilities, which Cockburn termed ‘his bat-wing’s ear’.

In Hangover Square, much like in Hamilton’s next novel, The Slaves of Solitude, anti-fascism is an aesthetic as much as a political objection. It is the pictures of Munich that repel Bone the most: ‘all grinning, shaking hands, frock-coats, top-hats, uniforms, car-rides, cheers — it was like a sort of super-fascist wedding or christening.’ Peter, a mutual acquaintance of both Bone and Netta, is said to want to ‘single himself out from the herd and wear a “uniform”‘. But Peter’s aesthetic performance has its origins in being banished ‘from the class of which he had so fanatical a secret desire to be a member’; rather than rejecting the ruling class, which would be ‘an admission of defeat’, Peter ‘sought to glorify it, to buttress it, to romanticise it, to make it more itself than it was already — hoping thereby [to] have some form of leadership in it under the intensified conditions he foresaw for it.’

The success of Hangover Square is in its balance: between thriller and art, between righteousness and despair, between the rival social institutions of the pub and the theatre. At the fireside in Earl’s Court, whose ‘sighing throat’ threatens to suck away any remaining hopes and dreams, there is also the possibility—indeed, the incentive—to escape, if only back to the pub. George Harvey Bone may not be able to escape his fate — but it is class society, and not Providence, which has laid his path. On a train back to London from a disastrous seaside trip, Bone reads a newspaper report of Gracie Fields’s real-life nervous breakdown in 1939. As Bone learns that she will recuperate in Capri, he hears a click in his head, and so begins another dead mood. Unlike that of the wealthy Fields, his own mental illness will remain untreated.