EXPATRIATE GAMES

From the far comers of his self-imposed exile, James Hamilton-Paterson— whose new book is published in the U.S. this month— is quietly becoming one of England's greatest writers

LUKE JENNINGS

Books

Forget Bruce Chatwin," says the writer Andrew Harvey, fellow of All Souls, Oxford University. "Forget Martin Amis, forget Julian Barnes and the rest of them. Our best writer by far, and I mean by far, is James HamiltonPaterson. If he is all but unknown, it is because in a trashy, sophomorically obsessed generation he has chosen real solitude, real stoicism."

Hamilton-Paterson is a British literary exile, a fifty-year-old authorpoet of almost anchorite privacy. Although he has been writing for a quarter of a century, his small but well-placed constituency of readers agree that the beginning of his significant work was marked by the publication, in 1986, of The View from Mount Dog, a collection of short stories. Since then Hamilton-Paterson has produced the semi-autobiographical Playing with Water and two novels: Gerontius, the winner of the 1989 Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Bell-Boy (published in America as That Time in Malomba).

When Playing with Water was published in America in 1987, it sold a total of 150 copies in hardcover and elicited a single review, in a midwestem newsletter. Only three years later was the book finally dragged into critical daylight, by a laudatory notice from William H. Gass in the paperback section of The New York Times Book Review. "James Hamilton-Paterson," wrote Gass, "is an Englishman, as I said he'd almost have to be, a middle-class university graduate who, by dint of eccentricity, disappointment and some misanthropy, has become a dedicated traveler, diver, writer and fisherman. He can contrive a spear from a length of power cable and a barb from a bent nail."

Playing with Water is an account of several seasons alone on a Philippine island, which the author calls "Tiwarik." It is a place of cool streaming winds and rapturous ultramarine descents, but for HamiltonPaterson it is much more: from its coral shingle he sees, refracted by time, a childhood spent under sadder skies; he draws his readers below the surface, into a less illuminated landscape, a place of mutability, calcified hope, and loss. "I was reminded . .. while I was reading Playing with Water," wrote Gass, "of those intense and aimlessly happy hours spent in the pages of books before I became a professional skimmer and scanner and interpreter of texts, and how immersed my soul was in the superior spirit of another."

Five years after the publication of Playing with Water, James Hamilton-Paterson has produced The Great Deep, an expanded meditation on man's relationship with the sea, which Random House is publishing in America this month. In the course of his research the author undertook a tour of duty aboard a vessel mapping the Pacific floor, trawled with the North Sea fishing fleet, and drifted with pirates and nomads in the "Conrad country" of the Sulu Archipelago.

His search for transcendental order yields beautifully made prose ("transparent," says Harvey, "with opaque, flinty edges") but little comfort. While there are still nights, HamiltonPaterson writes, "when it is hard for a swimmer to resist heading downwards, trailing constellations in a fading dust," for the most part the sea is lost to us. In northern waters, fishing nets drag up sex dolls and drums of toxic sludge; in the tropics, whole islands and undersea architectures have been revised for the consumption of Homo supermercatus, kitted out with the "standard furniture" of "scuba gear, water skis, hang gliders, beach barbecues, rock music, drunks, whores."

Yet Hamilton-Paterson finds no common cause with conservationists. "The present generation is as much contaminated by its own reverential and placatory attitude as the older was by domination," he writes in The Great Deep. "Above all, the self-interest shows through. Luckily, there is a chasm properly and forever fixed between the nonhuman and the Humanist biospheres, between wildness and caring."

£1 'm frankly not interested in publicity," I James Hamilton-Paterson tells me beI fore a pre-publication gathering in London for his new book. "I have the feeling that I'm writing for a total of no more than three thousand people, so why bother?"

Amid the standard furniture of Random Century House, senior booksellers have been convened to meet the author of The Great Deep (published in Great Britain under the title Seven-Tenths). Wine in hand, publishers and booksellers stand in an inward-facing circle; they all know one another. At a table outside this conversational circle, half-concealed, sits the author. Hamilton-Paterson is a quiet, watchful figure, very tanned, and clearly possessed of what the novelist Ronald Blythe, a longtime friend, describes as "the physical confidence of the wellborn."

It is a confidence, though, that on occasions such as these is deliberately muted, effaced. Inquiries are met by the distracted passing of a hand through sparse, untidy hair and by a pale gaze which is briefly attentive but soon slides into more general focus. His clothes are worn like a repertory costume: the jacket has clearly been taken from storage; the tie is the tie of a man who owns only one. "James," says Blythe, "travels lighter than anyone you've ever met."

Yet Hamilton-Paterson is not completely unknowing in these outsider attitudes. His voice, when it comes, has a startling, almost actorish projection, and although he would clearly rather be elsewhere, one senses in his mild courtesies a definite enjoyment of the "honorable schoolboy" identity he has assumed for the occasion.

He is signing copies, and making the job last as long as possible. Eventually he stands, surprising those booksellers who, until this moment, have been under the impression that / am James Hamilton-Paterson. The Great Deep, the author is told, is proving hard to classify. After some disagreement, it has been decided that it will be displayed on the Travel shelves. Hamilton-Paterson nods courteously, loosens the tie, and is gone. Like Bruce Chatwin before him, he is unhappy with the travel-writer label, but can't be bothered to argue. To argue is to invite further involvement, to sacrifice invisibility. And for all that his work has not escaped notice, Hamilton-Paterson has so far succeeded in maneuvering himself into a series of literary blind spots which have utterly confounded publicists. He could climb the stairs of London's Groucho Club, in the inconceivable event of his wishing to, completely unrecognized. "Even twenty years ago, when he lived here, one never saw that much of him," remembers the writer John Cornwell, a former colleague, "and then came a point at which he just seemed to disappear altogether."

"He was one of the cleverer and funnier people I came across at that time," says Martin Amis, who knew HamiltonPaterson in Oxford. "But I certainly got the impression he wasn't going to hang around. He was one of those Englishmen, like Isherwood, who couldn't bear England. I think that he came from that tradition of wellborn boys who felt so oppressed by their families—and, by extension, by England—that they could only survive by putting hundreds or even thousands of miles between it and them. ' '

Hamilton-Paterson remembers Amis's asking him for advice on becoming a novelist. " 'It's difficult, you see,' Martin said to me, 'because I have this father...'" Hamilton-Paterson encouraged Amis to brave the comparisons, to go ahead and write novels. Today he finds Amis's work "brilliant but chilly," and is dismissive of the "shallow, fashionable" nature of most contemporary fiction.

"The problem lies, as much as anywhere else, in the awards systems. In my opinion it is not enough that the winners are seen to win; the losers must be seen to lose. If the Booker Prize runners-up, for example, were stripped naked in the Guildhall and thrashed with nettles.

Hamilton-Paterson does find praise for a handful of authors. Don DeLillo's White Noise is "a wonderfully written book," and Gilbert Adair's Love and Death in Long Island is "extremely accomplished, extremely moving." For the most part, though, he feels that he is missing little in his nonassociation with the British literary establishment. This is hardly surprising, as Martin Amis remarks, "given James's disenchantment with all things British, and all things establishment."

"What you have to understand," says another writer, "is that there was a point at Oxford when James was so politically correct one hardly dared speak."

Hamilton-Paterson does not feel it part of his business to be critically supportive of the writers he left behind in London and Oxford. He is suspicious of the business of "mutual reviewing," which he sees as "a leg-up process for the second-rate." The success of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, for example, he finds "incomprehensible. The idea's a good one, but the book's simply not well enough written."

"A lot of modem novels," he says, "seem to be entirely two-dimensional: they have an accomplished, even glittering surface, but no resonance; their authors appear to be paying no attention to their own psyches. As a result they aren't writing out of themselves but simply onto a screen. It ought to be creative, but it never is. It's actually utterly Thatcherite, the literary equivalent of that heartless postmodern architecture which could be by absolutely anybody. And it's all written with an eye cocked for prizes, as if for some putative literary jury.. . . It's knowing, in short, but it's not knowledgeable."

His enthusiasm for certain nonfiction styles is equally restrained. "There is a kind of political journalism," writes Hamilton-Paterson in the notes to Playing with Water, "which, incredibly, tries to sell the author. It relies not on an intimate knowledge of a country but on the imagined purity of the literary eye." ("Sounds like James writing about South America in The New Statesman," says one critic and contemporary.) "When this kind of journalist," continues Hamilton-Paterson, "turns his attention to a country the reader happens to know and love his writing produces anguish and anger, not least among the politically literate and serious natives of that country who actually go through the nasty business of poverty and persecution and dying young so that the writer may bear off his holiday snaps in triumph. In the case of the Philippines such a writer has recently been demolished by Benedict Anderson in his savage and funny essay 'James Fenton's Slideshow.' "

"He was one of those Englishmen, like Isherwood, who couldn't bear England," says Martin Amis.

Remarks of this sort have made him anything but popular. ' 'James HamiltonPaterson," reports a senior member of the British literary establishment, "was, and is, a poisonous toad."

For the last decade Hamilton-Paterson has divided his time between a hut in the Philippine hinterland and a remote Apennine-mountain farmhouse. It is to Italy that he flies the morning after being passed under the noses of the booksellers, and it is here, a week later, that I climb from his Land Rover after a lurching sixmile ascent from the nearest village.

The house stands on a shelf of rock among pines, and here on his own turf, a belting north wind flattening his faded blue overalls to his body, Hamilton-Paterson is a different man. He is proprietary, congenial, visibly happy in his solitary command of the mountain and the misted plain below. He bought the near-derelict farmhouse eleven years ago; he has since restored it himself, using the building's original mountainstone blocks and red clay roofing tiles.

The result is an almost ecclesiastical mixture of the austere and the expansive. There is no electricity, no decoration other than that provided by the rough dressing of the stone walls and the timbers ("I'm not one of those Tuscan house queens!"), but there is a record player driven by a small generator, a heated-rainwater shower, and a well-stocked library, where Hamilton-Paterson plans to situate a Stein way grand piano.

Despite the ruthless absence of any feminine element, the house's comfort is absolute. A wood-burning stove provides heat in winter, while outside, in summer, a vine trellis provides shade. In the evenings we eat by the light of an oil lamp; Hamilton-Paterson produces several liters of local wine and proves, unsurprisingly, a skillful dismemberer of mountain rabbits.

As he explains, this is very much the unfashionable side of Tuscany, a long way from literary London's summer annexes to the west. Here the farmers have left the mountains, and in the villages the bar owners are worried by the incursions of the Mafia. The nearest property is a looted shell half a mile's brambly walk away, abandoned by its tenant when poverty forced him to the edge of suicide.

"The mountain's inaccessibility," says Hamilton-Paterson, "should be good for a few decades yet, at least until my own death." He shares the slopes with wild boar, for the most part invisible, and with a cat that visits the farmhouse for a few minutes each day in order to share his supper. "We enjoy, ' ' says the author, delivering himself of a shaded smile, "a near-perfect relationship."

On a June day in 1953, James Hamilton-Paterson, then aged twelve, sat in an English classroom and, from his imagination, drew a map in an exercise book. In 1986, thirty-three years later, the book was returned to him by his mother. To his amazement he recognized in the map drawn on the penultimate page the exact contours of Tiwarik, the tiny and otherwise uninhabited Philippine island on which he had lived for much of the previous two years. The discovery of this arc, this bow, hooped over his life provoked a "silent concussion" in Hamilton-Paterson, and seemed to give coherence to a life which, until then, had appeared unreadable. Mark Cousins, the writer and lecturer in psychoanalysis, has been a close friend of

Hamilton-Paterson's for twenty-three years. He finds rational meaning and confirmation in the incident.

"There are certain shapes, certain forms, certain objects, that go on calmly and persistently repeating themselves throughout a person's life. Even in childhood, I think, they relate to loss, to something that has always been lost. So I think that it must have been a particular satisfaction for James to stumble on one of these lost objects on the other side of the world." In 1984, Hamilton-Paterson had agreed, not without a wry glance in the mirror, to write a "Book of Exiles" for the Oxford University Press. One morning, however, sitting at his typewriter in the Philippines, he quite simply abandoned the idea.

"Bugger this, I thought. And started there and then on the first of a series of short stories."

The collection was published in 1986 as The View from Mount Dog. With the exception of a trio of children's tales, it was the first fiction Hamilton-Paterson had ever written. Its stories explored the elements which had variously ordered and disordered his life. Principal among these was that acute consciousness of vestigial loss often sentimentally characterized as "Englishness."

Loss. The word, the idea, is returned to time and again by Hamilton-Paterson. We are standing at the top of the mountain above his house, a place of winds and pines and rusting shotgun cartridges. Far below are the pylons and arteries of the Valle di Chiana, and to the south of us, shadowed by cloud, is the darker plain of Lake Trasimene. In retrospect, says Hamilton-Paterson, it may seem peculiar that a man of forty-five who had spent a quarter of a century writing commercially in order to escape should have failed, until that moment, to see that fulfillment lay in the simple reverse—escaping in order to write—but that, he says with a shrug, is how our lives are made. "I see my late start as a privilege; I have half of a life to draw on."

James Hamilton-Paterson was four when the war ended and his father, a neurologist, entered his life. ("Quite suddenly, this demobbed stranger came into the house claiming to be my mother's husband. What intelligent child could believe a tale like that?") At seven Hamilton-Paterson was dispatched, miserable, to a South Coast preparatory school near Worthing. "There was, at that time, a kind of unintimacy amongst British middle-class professional people—parents almost withdrawing in advance so that the sending away of children at that age shouldn't be too damaging to either side."

The headmaster of the school was dying, and had lost control of the boys. There was ritualized bullying, and Hamilton-Paterson begged to be removed. His mother, an anesthetist, took his side, but his father was unimpressed. There were unspoken accusations of cowardice. "I definitely grew up feeling that I was not the son that my father wanted," remembers Hamilton-Paterson. "The yellow streak and so on. But then, my father was himself rather damaged goods, having been packed off alone from China to Southeast London. The whole of his school days had been spent living out of a suitcase with elderly relatives in the suburbs."

"The mountain's inaccessibility," says Hamilton-Paterson of his home in Tuscany, "should be good for a few decades yet, at least until my death."

Hamilton-Paterson went on to Kings College, Canterbury, where he became the fag, or unofficial valet, of an aesthetically inclined senior. ''He was suspected of being deeply perverted, although he never did anything sexual to me. It was, though, an intimate relationship; I put hot-water bottles in his bed, which was thought unspeakable. But he seemed very sophisticated amongst all those dim middle-class people. He had potpourri in his study, talked about Rimbaud, and so on. I inherited his somehow untouchable position, and was encouraged to write some dreadful and highly derivative poetry."

For a year after Canterbury, HamiltonPaterson taught at ''a completely mad prep school full of boys too thick to get into any other school. Some were fifteen!" He wondered vaguely about his future. As an accomplished musician who had taught himself to play the piano at the age of seven, he considered becoming a composer, but finally accepted a place to read modem languages at Oxford. During Hamilton-Paterson's first year at the university, his father died. After that, Hamilton-Paterson switched courses to English, began to write poetry in something approaching earnest, and came to the attention of Jonathan Wordsworth, the fellow in English at Exeter College.

"There was a set, centered around Jonathan and his wife Ann's house at Warborough. I have memories of a morass of small children, Bob Dylan records melting on the stove, people lying in the bath for hours marking examination papers, springer spaniels ambling about in a melancholy way and occasionally lapping from the lavatories." Hamilton-Paterson thought he had found a family in the Wordsworths, and he was very possessive of them. "I think it was a great distress to my mother," he says.

A year after the death of his father, Hamilton-Paterson recorded the event in a poem titled "Disease," which won him the Newdigate prize, 1964. At the awards ceremony, which he describes as a day of paralyzing tedium, he was seated between Robert Graves and Agatha Christie. "Of the two," he remembers, "Christie was by far the more interesting, although I've never been able to bear her writing." When, twenty-six years later, he was given the Whitbread First Novel Award for Gerontius, he found the experience no less irksome. "The do, the fuss, the shaking hands with Sam Whitbread, were all absolutely awful."

"Disease" was published in the Exeter College magazine along with work by Craig Raine, a student two years his junior. Raine, now probably England's most celebrated poet, was also a regular at Warborough, and remembers Hamilton-Paterson's writing well. "It was extraordinary, for undergraduate poetry. Much, much more sophisticated than the work the rest of us were doing."

"Of the two of us," allows HamiltonPaterson, "Craig was by far the finer squash player." Their friendship has not endured.

Hamilton-Paterson applied himself to his academic studies as vigorously as was necessary to avoid actual expulsion, and continued to toy with a career in music. Eventually, feeling that he was more pasticheur than composer, he let the idea drop. "I'd decided that I didn't want to spend my life in organ lofts playing for services I didn't believe a word of."

In his last year at Oxford, in a typically career-destructive gesture, HamiltonPaterson decided to leave and sign on as a cabin boy in the merchant navy, "as pathetic as that sounds. Jonathan talked me out of it. I stayed."

"James is like Byron," explains Jonathan Wordsworth, "m the importance he attaches to physical accomplishment." Wordsworth remembers that curiosity led Hamilton-Paterson to live on a diet of water for twenty-four days as part of a low-paid medical experiment. "I became weak," the author remembers, "and hungry. I was an unrewarding dinner guest. Otherwise nothing."

Later, in the Philippines, HamiltonPaterson would "ride the rock"—jump overboard from a dinghy with a boulder in order to discover how deep he could be carried before being forced to let go. "I do not believe I ever went further than about 160 feet. There was something disagreeably inexorable about the downward tug." "His courage," says Mark Cousins, "terrifies me."

Dissuaded from the merchant navy, uninterested in parlaying his Newdigate prize into a career, HamiltonPaterson decided to attend a teachertraining course at London University. "Disastrous, of course. I bailed out."

In 1965 he went to Libya for a year and taught English. He quickly began to live apart from the other British workers, learned kitchen Arabic, and stayed with the families of his students in the desert. It was a dangerous time, though. Nasser's broadcasts were inflaming the Arab world, and hostility toward Westerners was growing. Shortly before leaving the country, Hamilton-Paterson drove into the desert in his ten-year-old Ford Fairlane. Lying beneath some palm trees, reading, he looked up to find himself surrounded by six tribesmen. While one of their number sat with a rock poised over Hamilton-Paterson's head, the others took turns raping him. "It was extremely painful, and when they'd finished they spat on me, which I thought was a bit much. I took myself to an appalling, jovial Yugoslav doctor. 'No,' he said, 'you haff not been shplit!' ''

It was time to leave. The next three years were spent at St. Stephen's Hospital in London, as a porter and operatingroom technician. It was an attempt, suggests Hamilton-Paterson, to discover something of his parents' world.

"James," says Jonathan Wordsworth, "likes the violence of medicine."

"But it was the unkindness of the place which was a revelation," says HamiltonPaterson. "Finally, though, I slipped in the snow while carrying a stomach over to the pathology lab. I suddenly had this vision of myself lying in London on the ground in snow and ice covered with somebody's stomach, thinking, This is very, very odd. What am I doing here?"

The answer, he now admits, was that he was temporizing. His life had become a series of starts and abandonments.

"James is not only fearful of becoming bored," explains Mark Cousins, "but he's also rather interested in ideas of leaving—of leaving places, leaving people. He has an ambivalence towards the idea of home. Which is not to say that he doesn't take pleasure in being welcomed into the bosom of a family— he does. Because if, as is the case with James, the act of leaving is the home of your perception, there does have to remain an image of what you're leaving."

On leaving St. Stephen's Hospital, Hamilton-Paterson became a journalist, traveling extensively in South America and Southeast Asia for The New Statesman Society and The Sunday Times. "As an investigative writer," remembers Tom Baistow, The New Statesman's deputy editor at the time, "he was first-rate." In 1971, Hamilton-Paterson published A Very Personal War, an account of the attempts of Cornelius Hawkridge, an American security agent, to expose the financial corruption underpinning the Vietnam War. Although the book was not ignored, it was disbelieved, and in Hamilton-Paterson's later work for The New Statesman there is evidence of a certain weariness.

"It is a naive bourgeois faith," he wrote in a review of Body Count: Lieutenant Calley's Story as told to John Sack, "that once a wrong has been exposed in the press it will automatically be righted and not allowed to recur; thus society improves. It is a lie, of course. Public knowledge is almost never enough because decisions are taken privately by an elite."

Hamilton-Paterson's last full-time association with journalism was in 1975, as features editor of Nova, a magazine, as he describes it, "for women with a perfectly decent second-class degree from Reading University."

Hamilton-Paterson has published two collections of poetry, Option Three in 1974 and Dutch Alps ten years later. Both were briefly praised; neither remains in print, although it is as a poet, Jonathan Wordsworth believes, that Hamilton-Paterson will eventually be remembered. Hamilton-Paterson still writes poetry. "The prose is for publication, the verse is for me."

Gerontius, published in 1989, is the fictional enlargement of a fact that Hamilton-Paterson had carried in his head for twenty years: in 1923, at the age of sixty-six, the composer Sir Edward Elgar traveled by steamship up the Amazon to Manaus. Hamilton-Paterson, in his journalist days, had also made the journey (he had also played the piano in Manaus's rose-painted opera house and occupied the city's jail as a seditionary). Gerontius is more an exploration of the themes of age, solitude, and creative power than a biographical fragment. The form of the book, as Andrew Harvey indicates, is that of the Elgarian symphony, but the book itself is not about Elgar.

There were often no tunes, only this clamourous framework into which marvellous music might be fitted: an immanence of rhythm, a sense of paragraphs, blocks of feeling and a glimpse of a shape two blank pages ahead unmistakably in his hand but as yet unreadable. And ever since he could remember, a flow of water could also create this ache and expectancy, this melancholy engagement with everything of him which mattered. Here were no human faces, no loved voices, no thoughts.

It was in search of things "which mattered" that James Hamilton-Paterson first visited the Philippines, in 1979. Since then he has continued to spend a third of each year in the remote village he calls Kansulay. He speaks serviceable Tagalog, and although the hut where he lives and works stands some distance from the others, he has many friends. He lives simply, spears his own fish, and leaves little sign of his presence; termites and the weather ensure that the hut has to be renewed each season. Tiwarik is no more, or at least is no longer recognizable. The island of streaming grasses is now "the Fantasy Elephant Club," a Japanese middlemanagement bordello. The lost object, found, is lost again.

While one of the six tribesmen sat with a rock poised over Hamilton-Paterson's head, the others took turns raping him.

Hamilton-Paterson will continue to divide his time between Italy and the Philippines. He is cured, he says, of newer, wilder horizons; by way of oblique explanation, he refers me to the work of the Victorian watercolorist Marianne North, who traveled the world recording tropical flora and exotic landscape. Is there not some curious way, asks Hamilton-Paterson, in which all of North's stereotypical vistas, from Java to Jamaica, have ended up looking like the South Downs of East Sussex? It is the anthropologist, he explains, who finds something new on every voyage. What the traveler finds is always the same.

We are standing with our backs to the house and the mountain. In the small stone room behind us is a rectangular table salvaged from a bar, and on the table are a typewriter and the handwritten manuscript of a third novel, as yet unnamed. The light from the window is directed onto the table by an arrangement of mirrors; in five minutes the light will strike the keys of the typewriter and Hamilton-Paterson will begin the work of transcribing the novel. For the moment, though, he sets his face to the wind.