A Bestiary of the Lunatic Right
MATHEWSON, RUTH MURRAY
A Bestiary of the Lunatic Right The Little Hotel By Christina Stead Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 191 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Ruth Murray Mathewson Instructor of English, Barnard...
...Document 112...
...One is Mrs...
...Bonnard is learning English, and a few of her locutions are translated German: "There was Clara . . . talking something into Henry...
...but we of the good families are too few...
...yet she did not know what to do with it...
...Trollope, a pretty, convent-bred woman of 50, sits opposite Mr...
...Wilkins, but it is sounded lightly in the "cousin-German" of the mad Mayor's word salad quoted earlier, and in the response of Princess Bili to her fiance's request that she pay the traveling expenses of a cousin of his, a young lady of 22...
...She takes a special interest in race: "Now that was one argument I had with Mr...
...If there is little about Mrs...
...Separated from her three grown daughters, lonely and unable to sleep because she has nothing to do, Mrs...
...Blaise to move his practice to South America, where they have so many skin diseases: "I met a doctor in New York, a very rich man . . . who said nine-tenths of the babies in South America should be gassed...
...Wilkins, who refuses to marry her and is trying to get his hands on her extensive properties in England...
...Yet just as we begin to feel we are at a performance of Separate Tables, with Sir Ralph Richardson aging pathetically over the table d'hote, we are rescued from our sense of central casting-from what the narrator herself calls "the old, old story of the unhappy hotel-dwellers"-by some unpredictable complications of character and circumstance...
...Bonnard does not discriminate among her "children," and she presides over an antic menage where scissors disappear, money is stolen, servants are imps of disorder...
...They are remittance men and women, Flying Dutchmen doomed to roam the world...
...Still, in the end it's successful...
...in return...
...he said that the atom bomb wouldn't do them the least harm...
...Although she is abused by the other guests because her mother was Javanese, half-castes are not strangers to these international gatherings...
...She does not realize that the "Mayor of B," who has come from Belgium for shock treatments at a nearby clinic, is insane, despite the postcards he sends her...
...Blaise may seem "a large, fat goose," but is "very cunning, very clever, very rich...
...Its guests include at least one certifiable madman and a bizarre company of the alienated and the lost...
...She strikes a different chime, delicately, with the term "cousin...
...We are not told what happens next, yet we hear the excruciating pitch of their fateful consanguinity long after we have closed the book, and know they are not strangers after all...
...Bonnard, the German-Swiss hotelier, tells the story-or begins to tell it, before the unruly cast takes over...
...I know these cousins,'' cries the Princess, and sets off for Paris to have her face lifted, (In House of All Nations, the term is used more rhetorically: "We live in a dream world...
...Whose cousins, whose employers...
...We are one flesh,' she had said to him, with deep emotion...
...Who are we...
...What is unconventional about her is that she is "a lightning calculator and had great business sense...
...Listen to her advising the sinister Dr...
...It is difficult to convey Christina Stead's special style without quoting her, and difficult to quote without, as in the observations just cited, suggesting that she is compiling a postwar bestiary of the lunatic Right...
...Mme...
...Mrs...
...She sets the scene with such detail that at first we are oppressed and perhaps a bit bored...
...One stranger shouts "Goodbye, Madman...
...Roosevelt, but he was such an egoist...
...Trollope says she thinks the comment cruel...
...Powell, who married a Washington official at 19 and has been a widow for 39 years...
...It rings most often, of course, for the "cousins" Mrs...
...This small house of all nations is deeply divided...
...a question of generations...
...And Stead commands more languages than these quotations suggest...
...A Catholic, always wondering what we were made for (her observation about pigs eating from a trough is typical), she has lived for 27 years with Mr...
...The English among them are afraid that Clement Attlee's postwar Labor government, then in power, will confiscate then-money or actually set them to work on the roads...
...Mrs...
...The secret is simple...
...Trollope must warn her that the Mayor might jump on the guests in the dark...
...In this world of madmen, thieves, profiteers and ex-collaborators, two American women are the quintessential fascists...
...What service do we give...
...They have come to expect abundance, even to put up with the "mechanical superabundance" which Randall Jarrell, one of her most perceptive critics, acknowledged while celebrating her gift for concentration and swift conclusiveness...
...Through this sweet, rather sentimental woman, Christina Stead returns to her longstanding preoccupation with the connections between people and production, between labor and its product...
...I would have a better appetite, Mrs...
...Trollope sneaks into the kitchen to help the maids polish the silver, or shops with Mme...
...Blaise for new watchmovements-what else is there for these time-servers to do...
...Stead's direction is clear, her vision all of a piece...
...We know almost too well that old Mme...
...American science could do nothing for them...
...Alone among the guests, she senses that things could be different, and acts with a subdued, homely heroism toward that end...
...She is devoted to her son, having sent him to the States to be corrupted by homosexuals on ranches, or possibly killed in an accident-anything to avoid losing him to another woman...
...She and her confidante Mme...
...Blaise, who has fled her home in Basle, makes service awkward by sitting at the table with layers of coats and bags and shawls hung round the chair...
...Reviewed by Ruth Murray Mathewson Instructor of English, Barnard College Readers of Christina Stead will find her ninth novel, The Little Hotel, a refinement of the riches that delighted them in her House of All Nations and The Man Who Loved Children...
...Linen is in short supply because the laundress is terrified that the Russians will come in and take her business...
...Others are evading taxes or living on funds entrusted to them by the Nazis...
...This daring shift produces a slight clotting that results in some unnecessary confusion...
...She is caricaturing, in a way, but the constant criss-crossing of relations, influenced less by ideology than by small social snubs, stinginess and generosity, boredom and amusement, affection and hatred, cuts across political lines, and keeps these grotesques from being the mere cartoons they might have become in other hands...
...Mme...
...Trollope and Mr...
...Bonnard "has never seen a madman,' and Mrs...
...I asked him friend-lily...
...And one fortune,' he said quickly, embarrassed...
...She believes her husband, a physician who visits the hotel on weekends to bring her drugs, is planning to kill her for her money, and as we grow to know him, we think it likely...
...Bonnard, for all her shrewdness, can be naive...
...Trollope, too, is more surprising than "the old, old story" would suggest...
...Trollope that is liberated, she nevertheless knows she must make a life for herself...
...English, French, Italian, Belgian, Dutch, American, German, German-Swiss and French-Swiss- guests and servants-quarrel bitterly, agreeing only in hating and fearing the Russians...
...The hotel-owner's flat, even-handed delivery is relieved by the different tones of the conversations she hears and overhears, until finally she all but disappears, and the characters take off on their own, entering worlds she cannot enter, speaking private languages she cannot speak...
...I like all the Germans [this hotel] contains, down with Germans, why do you have Germans in your not-hell...
...The two have registered at the hotel as cousins, and are taken for man and wife...
...Bonnard provide the only mercy and charity to be found in this company...
...Madame Bonarr is a very good German, abcdf, ach German, boo-German, cousin German, down with German, eat with German, fooey German, germ-german...
...She is too subtle, however, to stress the obvious continuity between House of All Nations and The Little Hotel, and too original to exploit the foregone, sententious "ship-of-fools" convention...
...It's...
...No one would approve of Hitler, but he understood the danger...
...at another, who screams "Smuggler, smuggler...
...We are not made to eat like pigs from a trough...
...They will not be disappointed now, for in spite of this book's much smaller frame she does not stint...
...The bank in House of All Nations was seen as unreal, "a Katzenjammer Castle...
...Darwin showed that God has arranged it so that blood will tell...
...Yet neither is there excess, although not until we finish The Little Hotel do we realize the significance of the information so casually given- almost thrown away-in the course of a brief, crowded narrative...
...The other is Princess Bili, the rich old widow of an Italian nobleman...
...Yes, people have seen it, Darwin saw it, he was of a fine old family...
...that he wanted to realize everything in his lifetime...
...But Mme...
...She is the ordering principle, in the novel and in the hotel: "Here I am, only 26, and I am running men and women of 40, 50, 60, and 70, like schoolchildren...
...and that Mrs...
...Mme...
...The Princess replies: "Oh, science is cruel, and this is a cruel age...
...You must have your own rules...
...The play with the word throughout gives a special significance to this exchange between the two common-law "cousins...
...Wilkins, a retired businessman from a small, middle-class Yorkshire family...
...He pointed it out, but few people took any notice...
...Trollope says, "if you paid attention to me at meals...
...The Little Hotel concludes with a violent confrontation between two new guests (as it had begun with a murder or suicide never explained...
...The little hotel, a fourth-rate establishment on Lake Geneva, is a Katzenjammer Hotel...
...He is a splendid husband and father and he has 7 children and knows what he is talking about...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 19
