Re-reads

Hotel Splendide – Ludwig Bemelmans

When Bemelmans immigrated to the United States he got a job at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel as a busboy, and, over the years, worked his way up to the position of assistant banquet manager. In these stories he doesn’t write about himself, but of the other employees, such as (to select a few) Mespoulets, the hopelessly incompetent waiter who is steadily demoted to lower and lower positions; Kalakobe, the only Negro employed at the hotel, one with grandiose ambitions; and, looming over everyone, Monsieur Victor, the tyrannical Maître d’. A few portrayals of the wealthy patrons of the restaurant are also included. Some stories are more entertaining than others, but overall this book has charm, and the capacity to make you feel good. It’s often amusing, and even when it addresses situations that could be seen as tragic, it’s done with a light touch. There’s one story in which a character quotes from a book describing the grotesque gustatory extravagances of decadent Rome, and this can be seen as a critique of the opulence of the Ritz-Carlton. But, really, Bemelmans has no ax to grind. In the attitude toward life displayed, I would think he was happy man (which is what he may have become), so I was surprised to find that his early years in Europe were very grim. He first found success as an illustrator (each chapter in Splendide begins with one of his line drawings); later fame and fortune came to him as the author of the Madeline series of children’s books. I was familiar with some stories because I used them when teaching reading in Junior High decades ago. The final one is “The Murderer of the Splendide.” I remembered exactly how it would end: with a surprise twist, and a mystery which we know the answer to. 4

Laughter in the Dark – Vladimir Nabokov (Russian)

Nabokov had a cruel streak (or, at least, cruelty is a factor in many of his novels, including Lolita). In Laughter he seems to enjoy presenting the exploitation and destruction of Albinus; there’s no trace of pity for the victim. This is mid-career Nabokov; he wrote it when he was in his early thirties. It seems conceived as a book that would bring in some cash. The prose is good, and at times inventive, but not finely honed as much of his other work. And the characters are one-dimensional. The rationale for Albinus’s obsession with sixteen -year-old Margot is not developed; we’re asked to accept that he finds her irresistibly attractive in a sexual way, and he gives up wife and child to have her. He’s merely a dupe. As for Margot, she’s a hard-boiled manipulator; though her feelings for Albinus are aversion and contempt, he’s rich and she wants to get as much as possible from him. She does love (or lust after) a man named Rex, who enters the picture at the halfway point. Rex ups the ante of heartlessness; he’s a full-fledged sadist who derives delight from Albinus’s suffering. What we have here is a lurid and even repellent tale: we watch as poor Albinus is completely destroyed (before his violent death he’s rendered blind). At the end Margot and Rex are the winners. As a potboiler, the book succeeds. It serves up a readable excursion into aberrant emotions. 3

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog – Dylan Thomas

The Welsh writer (primarily a poet) wrote these autobiographical sketches when he was in his twenties. Why he chose to use a title similar to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a mystery. Maybe his aim was to signal his lack of pretention. Or maybe it was an effort to attract readers (which he failed to do). At any rate, I call these sketches rather than stories because they have no plot. Just scenes. The prose is the big thing here – the poet comes out in clusters of impressions. I’m not the ideal audience for this sort of thing (at least, not now; I may have been in the past). That said, I did appreciate it. It’s constructed chronologically; that is, the first sketch – “The Peaches” (my favorite of the lot) – takes place when Dylan is a very young boy, and the last when he’s on the verge of adulthood. The setting is Swansea in South Wales, a place filled with colorful characters who engage in rollicking dialogue. A lot of this comes alive in a swarming way. The last two sketches are drenched in alcohol – which would be the author’s  lifelong nemesis – and they aren’t presented as positive experiences. Pervading them is a sense of loneliness, of an unfulfilled need of a woman’s love. Here’s part of the book’s closing sentence, which encapsulates what Thomas set out to give us in this portrait of the place which formed him: . . . “the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.” 4

The Connoisseur – Evan S. Connell

Prior to starting this review, I looked up as much as I could find on the enigmatic Mr. Connell. One thing I already knew was that he was a collector of pre-Columbian art, which is what his character in this novel becomes. Muhlbach is on a business trip in New Mexico (his home is New York), and happens to come across a terra cotta statuette in a Taos shop. The opening sentence: “Unspeakable dignity isolates the diminutive nobleman.” Thus begins what amounts to an obsession. Though Muhlbach has two children (his wife is deceased) they are given almost no attention. They could easily not exist, and Muhlbach could be, like the author, a lifelong bachelor without children. I think Connell included them to show how insignificant he considered them to be. What matters to Muhlbach (and to Connell) are the objects he’s obsessed with. We get long scenes – at a university’s anthropology department, at a motel auction, at a high-scale Greenwich Village shop, at a knick-knack store called Charlotte’s Curiosity Corner. Though Muhlbach remains somewhat monochromatic, the characters he meets are lively creations. A lot of technical territory is covered as Muhlbach learns the intricacies of collecting authentic pieces – for much is fake, expertly done. Muhlbach finds it peculiar that when he discovers that a piece is not truly pre-Columbian, no matter how much he was first attracted to it, it immediately becomes of little worth in his eyes. Does all this sound boring to you? Odd? Yes, it’s an odd novel, but, for me, in Connell’s hands, fascinating. The scenes are done with expertise. The prose is lovely in its flowing simplicity. It’s an artfully rendered work. 5

A Mirror for Witches - Esther Forbes
This is a case study of a witch. Doll Bilby believes in witches, as did people of her time (the 17th century). Her choice to side with the forces of evil evolves, in large part, because she’s an outsider, lonely and abused; she turns to a fantasy world for her needs. The narrator of Doll’s tale isn’t sympathetic toward her; the point of view is condemnatory. Yet we see how lacking in humanity this narrator is. Doll, the witch, is kinder and more compassionate than the good Christians who want her to burn. Forbes succeeds in capturing the mind-set of another time. Yet it wasn’t that long ago when this sort of ignorance and cruelty reigned; I wonder what forms the human propensity to condemn takes now.

The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor
Taylor’s stories are long and leisurely. He often constructs his plots in an unusual way; in this sense he’s an innovative writer. The problem with too many of the twenty-one stories is that they amount to a lot of words about nothing much; this collection’s wide variance in quality is due entirely to subject matter, not craftsmanship. I can’t fathom why Taylor so often chose a weak basis for a story. When he got subjects worthy of his skills – something with substance, complexity, depth – the results rank with the best in American fiction: “A Spinster’s Tale,” “Their Losses,” “A Wife of Nashville,” and “Miss Lenora When Last Seen.” Only the last one was humorous. Taylor wasn’t a writer of tragedies, but he knew that life mostly doesn’t work out as we would have wished.

The Towers of Trebizond - Rose Macaulay
In this novel I got a taste of the rich culture and history of the region around the Black Sea, an area I formerly knew nothing about. Amy, the narrator, stays mostly in the background, but she’s a useful guide. She divulges little about herself, though we do learn that she’s having an adulterous affair back in England. She’s tagging along with her Aunt Dot and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Aunt Dot rides a white camel everywhere, Father Pigg is consumed by the superiority of the Anglican Church. No character is developed in depth. I accepted the book as eccentric and mildly comic. However, the author botched the ending. Amy adopts a chimp and takes it back to England, where she trains it to be as human as possible; I thought this was pushing the oddity angle too far. Then Amy, while driving with her lover, Vere, has a fit of impulsive anger at the traffic (she’s never shown anger or an impulsive nature anywhere else in the book) and causes an accident that kills Vere. Dark brooding follows. For the mood to turn so serious doesn’t work – not when all that preceded it had been superficial.

The Donkey Inside - Ludwig Bemelmans
I was hoping for another Hotel Splendide. In that book Bemelmans concentrated on people, both patrons of the hotel and the staff of the restaurant. But in this one – a travelogue about Equador – he mostly gives us descriptions of the landscape and the architecture. He does it well, but I don’t care much about those things. People are largely absent, and when they appear they seem insubstantial. In an Author’s Note at the end (not that I read to the end – I stopped halfway through) Bemelmans reveals that the characters are composites – aspects of various people he pasted together. The book was first serialized in magazines. I hope Bemelmans made some money from this venture; I can’t figure out any other compelling reason for him to have written it. Four of his paintings are included, and they’re the only real treats.