When I joined the Guardian in the late 1980s, Alex Hamilton was an avuncular and distinguished travel editor. It was not until a few years later, when I was using the paper’s archives, that I realised what a tremendous writer he was, retaining the verve and unpredictability of the novelist he had been in his pre-journalistic life. His was the opposite of processed prose; writing rather than typing.
In the 70s and 80s, he produced hundreds of interviews, many of them about literary figures. “He said he’d meant to ask me for an advance list of questions, because he wasn’t a man for ready answers,” Hamilton wrote of a meeting with Alan Bennett in 1974. “I reassured him by saying that we never left gaps in the text to indicate where our subjects dried up. Actually I can’t recall any pauses.”
Hamilton was funny, quirky, observant and eminently readable. And he wrote the most wonderful intros. Take this, from 1972: “When Malcolm Muggeridge offered to meet the train at Robertsbridge I began to supply a self-portrait, whereby he might know me. He cut me short. He had only once made a mistake, he said, and borne home the wrong passenger, a chap of great curiosity in whose company he had spent a pleasant afternoon.”
It’s perfectly paced – the sentence “He cut me short” is the hard-working hinge – and the style is novelistic, rather than journalistic. My guess is that he never stopped thinking novelistically, even when the flow of novels and short stories dried up. He just treated Guardian readers to his literary imagination instead. And what a treat it was.