The Little Hotel by Christina Stead

When Mrs. Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madam Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise lounge into Mrs. Trollope's room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It's simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there's the logic of equality. If one guest has new linen curtains, the other must have the best of the older curtains; if one guest has a plush new armchair, the other must have a cane lounge; if one has an extra table to write on, the other must have a footstool. I sometimes let Charlie fetch things from the attic or even from my own room to be sure of this equality; but I cannot allow others to make changes; I have a plan of it all in my mind.

Christina Stead's The Little Hotel is narrated by Madame Bonnard, the proprietor of an inexpensive hotel in the Swiss Alps. Her charges are more residents than guests, long term visitors who live the life of exiles. They are eccentrics, like the beautiful but dying Miss Chillard, or the wildly bigoted American Mrs. Powell. One madman claims to be the mayor of a city in Belgium; he sends Madame Bonnard and the other residents cryptic messages that are numbered as official documents for recordkeeping--Document 126 says that the coffee was particularly good this morning, etc., etc. I was a little sad to see the Mayor whisked out of the pages early on, to be replaced with characters whose eccentricities are a little more mtued.

Though narrated by Madame Bonnard, the true protagonist of The Little Hotel is Madame Trollope, an aging woman who is traveling with her "cousin," Mister Wilkins. In reality, the pair are longtime lovers, living more or less as husband and wife; though free of their former marriages, Mister Wilkins refuses to marry Madame Trollope or live openly as partners. He prefers the wink-wink artifice of it all, even though everyone at the hotel knows the deal. He also prefers to sponge off of the wealthier Madame Trollope, who, at the hotel, begins to lurch toward a breaking point. Is it possible for her to shake off Mister Wilkins, who really is a smug little creep, when she knows that the alternative is likely lifelong loneliness? What is the cost, The Little Hotel asks, of love?

The Little Hotel really has its charms. At times it approaches the heights of absurd misbehavior that make Stead's best novels so good, as when Madame Blaise complains about how her doctor husband pesters her with photos of diseased children--by producing a stack of the very same photos at dinner. Such is the world of The Little Hotel, where the residents revenge their own petty hurts and slights upon each other. There's something here about the nature of Europe after World War II; though they are nominally all supposed to get along--especially here in always-neutral Switzerland--the enmities of the American, British, and French residents toward Germans and Italians--form a powerful undercurrent. But the enmity that once sharpened the wits and feelings of Europeans no longer does; in fact, it seems to be an image of Europe slipping into a kind of bored senility, where resentments no longer have any national shape, but turn inward, toward the bedroom and the spirit. Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. More than anything else it seemed like a pleasant look into one of those communities where people are a little too close, and everybody would benefit from a nap or a nice walk. 

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio might be the ur-text of that dreaded contemporary beast: the collection of linked short stories. Set in a town much like the one Anderson grew up in in northern Ohio around the turn of the 20th century, Anderson's stories are linked by the presence of George Willard, a young teenager and the only employer of the local newspaper, who by virtue of his vocation is privy in a way no one else is to the private lives of Winesburgians. Winesburg is a conventional sort of place, an every-town; Anderson emphasizes this--I have no idea if intentionally--by naming every other character Will or Tom or some variation thereof. But the people that populate the stories are anything but unconventional; or, perhaps it would be right to say that they are conventional in that they reveal what eccentricities lie beneath the conventional surface of every small town dweller.

George is a sensitive man, a deep thinker. He is young, and coming into many revelations about himself and his place in the world. (The virtuoso passage above is George, coming to a realization about the role of happenstance in his life, and its brevity.) Like many sensitive men, he feels that he alone is sensitive, and feels more deeply than others. But Winesburg, Ohio suggests that everyone feels this way, as if they are a little too strange for the world around them. Some of the Winesburgians are genuine oddballs, like the savage proto-incel Wash Williams, who insists to George that all women are dead inside, or Doctor Reefy, who keeps a pocket full of balled-up papers and seems to have zero patients. Others are just anxious about being oddballs, as in the story "Queer," about the son of a unpopular shopowner who becomes obsessed with the idea that other people think he's weird. He flirts with a friendship with George, thinking the newspaper man can put his story right, but then pushes him away; convinced--for no reason--that George, too, thinks he's "queer," he rushes him in the night and attacks him--thus becoming the thing he fears.

I loved the stories in Winesburg, Ohio that deal with longing and desire. George pines for a small sequence of girls, each of whom pines for him or someone else; they are all in love with love, as the saying goes, but unable to really love or even see the objects of their affection. One of the most powerful stories is "Adventure," about a woman who believes her boyfriend when he tells her he will come back to marry her. She waits and waits, until she realizes that she has grown old waiting (old in 1910 terms, so, like, thirty) and rushes out naked into a rainstorm as a kind of cathartic release, or collapse. The story "Loneliness" captures a timeless truth when one character tells George, "I wanted her and all the time I didn't want her"--the great ambivalence of human connection.

Winesburg, Ohio sounds like it ought to be one of those dreary 19th century realist works, something on par with Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. (Though I do like those books, I think you have to admit they are a little tedious and unimaginative stylistically.) But it really stands shoulders above those; in places its quite strange and modernist-sounding. In other moments it resembles Willa Cather, who had just published her first novels when Winesburg came out in 1919. Like Cather, Anderson captures a time and a place--a small Midwestern town at the turn of the century--but the truths within feel as true as ever.

Picture by Lillian Ross

The sun had gone down and the light coming into the suite, high in the Tower, was beginning to dull. Huston looked as though he might be waiting--having set up a Huston scene--for the cameras to roll. But, as I gradually grew to realize, life was not imitating art, Huston was not imitating himself, when he set up such a scene; on the contrary, the style of Huston pictures, Huston being one of the few Hollywood directors who manage to leave their personal mark on the films they make, was the style of the man. In appearance, in gestures, in manner of speech, in the selection of the people and objects he surrounded himself with, and in the way he composed them into individual 'shots' (the abrupt close-up of the thumbnail scraping the head of a kitchen match) and then arranged his shots into dramatic sequence, he was simply the raw material of his own art; that is, the man whose personality left its imprint, unmistakably, on what had come to be known as a Huston picture.

In 1950, director John Huston set out to make a film adaptation of Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. He was followed in his attempt by Lillian Ross, a veteran journalist from The New Yorker who wanted to see the process of making a picture from start to finish. If she had only waited a little bit (and had an expense account that would take her to Africa) she might have seen Huston filming the critical and commercial hit The African Queen, but The Red Badge of Courage turned out to be a flop, just as MGM chief L. B. Mayer expected it to be. But it wasn't a disaster, either--although it failed to make back its budget, it received good notices in the press, among a few detractors. It wasn't some big Fitzcarraldo-style fiasco, where the cast and crew were tortured by the grand delusions of an auteur. Though that might have made a salacious and readable novel, what Ross captures here is something much more subtle and enduring: the steady grind of the studio system, and the way that vision sometimes fails when transferred to celluloid.

The star of Ross' novel is Huston, the legendary director. Her Huston is determined and imaginative, but also practical and collaborative; he believes firmly in the movie he's making, even as he takes in the critiques of his entourage, including producer Gottfried Reinhardt and studio liaison Dore Schary. Huston is an artist, but he can speak in dollars and centers. Studio head Mayer is Huston's foil, a inveterate bottom-liner who extols the virtues of sentimental entertainment like Mickey Rooney movies. You want to hate Mayer, because he's so anti-art, but it's hard to come away from Picture unimpressed by his discernment; he knows that Red Badge will struggle with viewers in a way that Huston and his entourage can only admit when it's too late. Ross captures the voice of both characters in a way that makes them feel magnetic and real; she manages, too, to cut through the backlot lingo and give us a sense of the deeper motivations animating these men.

It's an open question, perhaps, whether Red Badge would have done better if Mayer and the studio had supported it or promoted it more. Reinhardt makes a number of last minute moves to "save" the picture from its middling early screeners, deleting some of the scenes cherished by Huston and adding a cheesy voiceover narration from Crane's novel. (Huston, swallowed up by The African Queen, has washed his hands of the whole thing.) I think, in the end, that Mayer was right, that the shapelessness of Crane's novel just wouldn't play for audiences of the time, but the last-minute editing process makes a double tragedy of the film, turning it into something that is both not a moneymaker and not the artwork that Huston had imagined. That's the story of Picture: not a failure, not an underappreciated masterpiece--just a hash and a disappointment.

Otter Country by Miriam Darlington

We are eye to wild eye; its face is armed with a startling array of walrus bristles. Its ears are larger than I expected, almost like a cat's, and its nostrils are visibly measuring my scent. There is nothing shy about this animal. I have got close enough to see five different sets of whisker around its face and under its chin. In its eyes I can see shock at what on earth I am, and at what I could be doing in its hunting ground. The live current in both of us prickles. When I do not move, it comes a little closer, huffs, then melts bodily into the water surface, leaving the shadow of a ripple and nothing else.

As a child, Miriam Darlington was obsessed with otters: otters in aquarium, otter skeletons in the natural history museum, and so forth. And who wouldn't? Few animals seem to combine the wildness and precociousness, the sheer charisma of an otter. But Darlington's obsession was confined to aquaria and museums because it's very hard to see a river otter in the wild; unlike their sea cousins who float happily in the harbors of northern America, river otters are secretive creatures whose sensitive powers of perception are rivaled only by their power to slip away and not be perceived. Otter Country is the story of a year in Darlington's life in which she vows to seek out the otter in the wild and learn its ways, a journey that takes her from Scotland to Wales to Cornwall and elsewhere in the British Isles.

Otter Country, it must be said, contains mostly scenes of Darlington not finding otters. Like I said, they seem to be quite elusive. They leave behind certain signs of their existence, like the feces, called spraint, they use to mark the paths of their territory, but by the time you see them, the otter has already disappeared again. It's all right, because Darlington is a talented writer of landscapes and a patient noticer of the natural world. Though she never makes this quite explicit, I got the sense that one of the great rewards of Darlington's otter search is that it forces her to pay closer attention to the world around her, to take in what one might not ordinarily notice. The otters are rare visitors, but there always trees and birds and things. When the otters do appear, the encounters are transformative: Darlington describes coming face-to-face with an otter while disguised as something like a hunk of tree branches. And of course these encounters last only seconds--small fare when compared with the months and months that Darlington spends searching.

Otter Country reminded me quite a bit of H is for Hawk, perhaps pointedly so. Darlington makes a push at the kind of intertextual literary quality that book possesses when she brings in a pair of otter books: Gavin Maxwell's accounts of raising African otters at his Scotland home (haven't read it), and Henry Williamson's imagining of an otter's life, Tarka the Otter (read it, liked it). Later, the book takes a more scientific-personal-essayish mold, as Darlington meets with otter experts about the significant ecological dangers that the river otter faces in the England of the 21st century. (Like the stories of many of the world's endangered species, it's one of great improvement and still-great risk.)

I'm not sure if I learned much about otters, and the book is quite intentionally very slow. But I did find it pleasant and purposeful, and like Darlington, I felt the enchantment of providence when the otters finally do show up.