“Caulfield was constantly alert to the everyday excitements of living in a major city. It is unlikely that he ever read Virginia Woolf (“It seemed to deal with a middle-to-upper-class society that I didn’t know anything about and it meant nothing to me”, he once said of the mid-century English novel), but he shared with Woolf a love of urban experience, seen quite vividly, in a novel such as Mrs Dalloway, for example, in all its hallucinatory particulars: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans … in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London … “
And yet for the 40 years of his career, Caulfield painted places that offered respite from the noise and sheer teeming variety of city life and the jangly rhythms of modern urban existence. These included restaurants, cafes, hotel foyers and other public places, as well as bars. For many years his first call of the day was at his local, a few minutes after the bolts had been drawn in the morning. “Getting drunk: there was no doubt that that was always the quest,” Martin Amis once wrote of his father, Kingsley (who, as it happens, was a fellow-regular and morning tippler at the pub Caulfield used in Primrose Hill in north London). “Being drunk had its points, but getting drunk was the good bit.”
Caulfield liked to breathe in the opening-time cellar smells and observe the shapes the slanting light cut through the fixtures and fittings; he liked to stare into the distance and listen to London. Early paintings such as View of the Rooftops (1965) and Lit Window (1969), and later ones such as Trou Normand (1997), Rust Never Sleeps (1996) and Terrace (2002) are proof that this was time well spent. The arrival of fellow customers he took as a sign that it was time for him to be on his way.”
An uneventful journey to work, and night. Just one more night to get through. Wednesday night is Chelsea v Newcastle in the FA Cup.
“Bob the pub waiter, in Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 novel, The Midnight Bell, establishes a pattern the author would follow until the end of his days: rivers of booze, obsessive pursuit of the wrong woman, rapidly diminishing funds, time killed in afternoon cinemas.Drink and tranquillised sleep were sympathetic conditions. “There was a fog even in the cinema,” reported Bob, Hamilton’s befuddled waiter, when he hid away in the picture palace attached to Madame Tussaud’s in Marylebone Road. Earlier, Bob had enjoyed a double-bill in the company of a friendly barmaid (taking his mind off the prostitute he was pursuing): a Richard Dix feature, followed by 20 minutes of Fritz Lang’s Spione. Like Hitchcock, Hamilton learned how to work those weather metaphors: slush, sodden streets, the yawning parenthesis of the English Channel.
Autobiography, the writing of fiction, the visiting of afternoon cinemas, gradually merge in Hamilton’s addiction, his heroic attempt to drink himself to death (a macho pissing contest with Malcolm Lowry, refereed by their puce-cheeked contemporary, John Davenport). “It’s a shame,” said William Faulkner, “that the only thing a man can do for eight hours is work. He can’t make love. He can’t drink.”
