The Hotel – Elizabeth Bowen (1927) 175 pages

The Hotel ticks a lot of boxes for me: interwar setting, repressed Brits abroad, characters thrown together through transient living arrangements, and of course novella length. My concern was that it’s Elizabeth Bowen’s debut novel and her prose can be pretty impenetrable at the best of times, let alone when she’s still honing her craft. However that proved unfounded as I found this an easier read by Bowen standards – I really enjoyed it.

The titular institution is located on the Italian riviera and is filled with genteel Brits, mainly women. The novel opens with the fallout from a row between two perfect examples of such: the companions Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald. The former ends up walking to tennis courts with Mrs Kerr, quite a coup as Mrs Kerr holds all the power among the hotel residents. The reasons for her occupying this elevated position are never quite clear, but her absolute self-assurance and manipulativeness surely contribute.

Mrs Kerr is looking for Sydney Warren, a beautiful, studious young woman whose family are worried about her. Sydney has come away with her cousin Tessa Bellamy, who has a vague malady:  

“She was distressed by any suggestion of impermanence; she was a lonely woman. One had to have Something in one’s life. She lay on a velvet sofa in her bedroom with the head pulled round away from the window and wished that she were religious woman and that it would be time for lunch and that Sydney would soon come in.”

The start of the novel is full of these pithy sketches of the residents. I especially enjoyed the elderly sisters-in-law Mrs and Miss Pinkerton:

“They were more closely allied to one another in the memory of Edward’s than they had either of them been to Edward himself…. Cherished little animosities reinforced their ties to one another; Rosina maintained to herself implacably that if she had been Edward’s wife she would have borne him children; Louisa was aware enough of this to be a little markedly generous to Rosina, who was not in a position to refuse anything that might be offered.”

They are hugely affronted by the arrival of an Anglican clergyman, James Milton, who unwittingly uses their reserved bathroom. Bowen is a brilliant observer of the manners and social customs of the hotel, treating it all with a wry affection:

“Beyond, down the long perspective to the foot of the stairs, one could see visitors take form with blank faces, then compose themselves for an entrance. Some who thought punctuality rather suburban would gaze into the unfilled immensity of the room for a moment, then vanish repelled. Others would advance swimmingly and talk from table to table across the emptiness, familiarly, like a party of pioneers. Men came in without their wives and did not always look up when these entered. Women appearing before their husbands remained alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully, and ate with an air of temporising off the tips of their forks.”

Romantic relationships are treated with a great deal of scepticism in the novel: the pretty Lawrence sisters look to make pragmatic marriages; Mrs Lee-Mitterson panders to her ridiculous self-centred husband; it’s mentioned more than once how incompatible men and women are. It wouldn’t be a stretch at all to take a queer theory reading to many of the relationships in The Hotel, and it could also be read as demonstrating the value and endurance of platonic friendship.

The early character sketches and scene setting of The Hotel were completely wonderful, but for me the novella didn’t quite live up to this initial promise.  I was drawn into the various relationships and shifting allegiances, and the disarray caused by the arrival of Mrs Kerr’s much anticipated, determinedly aloof son Ronald was very enjoyable.  I think what stopped me unreservedly loving this was that I did find the characters ultimately quite distancing – Sydney Warren is meant to be reserved and a bit cold but I felt this distance as a reader too.

But still there was so much to enjoy and I found it a real treat.

“Notwithstanding the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon she had been enjoying Jude the Obscure.”