Peter Parker

The long and disgraceful life of Britain’s pre-eminent bounder

A review of The Man Who Was Norris: The life of Gerald Hamilton, by Tom Cullen. The great thing about this book is that Cullen rarely makes the mistake of taking Hamilton (once described as ‘the wickedest man in Europe’) at his own word

Joining the old rogue on his 80th birthday, from left to right, Bevis Hillier, Antonia Fraser, Hamilton, James Pope-Hennessy, James Reeve, and the Spectator’s current book editor, Mark Amory [Getty Images/iStock]

In his time, Gerald Hamilton (1890–1970) was an almost legendary figure, but he is now remembered — if at all — as the model for the genial conman in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935). ‘There are some incidents in my career, as you doubtless know, which are very easily capable of misinterpretation,’ Arthur Norris tells the book’s narrator, and Hamilton affected to be deeply shocked by the assorted vices attributed to his fictional alter ego. He nevertheless exploited the connection throughout his long and disgraceful life.

When Isherwood met him, Hamilton (né Souter) was employed in Berlin by the Times as its German sales representative. He also moonlighted as a fixer for Willi Münzenberg, ‘the notorious communist, who presides in Berlin on behalf of Moscow over the doings of the League Against Imperialism and Friends of Soviet Russia’, as British Intelligence described him. Though it sounds too good to be true, Hamilton was lured into sharing accommodation with ‘the Great Beast’, Aleister Crowley, who took time out from practising the black arts to report back to Special Branch in London on his flatmate’s Comintern activities. The two men were well matched, because Hamilton himself spent much of his time spying on people and selling information, and although he did not quite acquire Crowley’s public reputation as the embodiment of evil, he was at one time described as ‘the wickedest man in Europe’.

Opinions vary as to quite how wicked Hamilton really was. Isherwood portrayed Norris as a lovable rogue, though he would later admit that ‘beneath his amiable surface’, he was ‘an icy cynic’ whose misdeeds were ‘tiresome rather than amusing’. Stephen Spender regarded Hamilton as genuinely evil, responsible for driving to suicide a young man he was blackmailing. John Lehmann was also repelled, complaining that Isherwood didn’t care in the least whether the people he befriended were ‘good or evil, destructive and corrupt or life-enhancing.

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