John Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford from 1974 to 1992.
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Vol. 14 No. 1 · 9 January 1992
pages 16-17 | 2316 words
Just off Lexham Gardens
John Bayley
- Through a Glass Darkly: The life of Patrick Hamilton by Nigel Jones
Scribner, 408 pp, £18.95, December 1991, ISBN 0 356 19701 8
Towards the end of his life (he died aged 58) Patrick Hamilton was taking the cure in some Metroland establishment while Malcolm Lowry was being dried out in another not far off. That was around l960, and the two writers never met; but both had become something of a cult. Hamilton died two years later in more than averagely gloomy circumstances, back on the bottle again; and most of his reputation went with him; but there were always the faithful who remembered and read him, and a few years ago his young man’s trilogy from the early Thirties, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, was republished.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 3 · 13 February 1992
From Michael Hofmann
‘That was around 1960, and the two writers never met; but both had become something of a cult,’ writes John Bayley (LRB, 9 January). In I960, Malcolm Lowry had been dead for three years, and, far from having become ‘something of a cult’, at the time of his death none of his work was in print in English. I can’t help thinking that the operation of a cult is more interesting than John Bayley says it is; that such rough – inaccurate – treatment is its downside; and that Malcolm Lowry is in a different class from the ‘cult’ authors he lists.
Michael Hofmann
London NW6
From John Black
John Bayley (LRB, 9 January) tells us he has read Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky twice, but he shows a rather uncertain grasp of it. Volume Two is summarised as ‘Jenny … pursued by Bob’: in fact, Bob does not appear at all. The pub where Bob and Ella work, which forms the centrepiece of Volumes Two and Three, is not in Mayfair. It is set on the seedier fringes of Fitzrovia, somewhere around the Euston Road end of Cleveland Street.
John Black
London NW5
Vol. 14 No. 5 · 12 March 1992
From John Black
You have published my letter (13 February) under the heading ‘Wrong Address’ but have made it nonsensical by getting a word wrong. The pub is the centrepiece of Volumes One and Three, not Two and Three, of Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. Anyone reading the letter will wonder how Bob can be entirely absent from Volume Two when the pub where he works is said to form the centrepiece of that volume.
John Black
London NW5
