Hotel BemelmansLudwig BemelmansThe Overlook Press: 302 pp.,...

Hotel Bemelmans

Ludwig Bemelmans

The Overlook Press: 302 pp., $24.95

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Remember the old house in Paris, all covered with vines? And the 12 little girls in two straight lines? “Hotel Bemelmans” contains 24 published pieces (many in the New Yorker) by the author of the celebrated Madeline books, Ludwig Bemelmans, as well as two previously unpublished pieces and several drawings. Bemelmans was banished to New York from his home in the Austrian Tyrol in 1914, when he was just 16, after being kicked out of several schools and shooting a waiter while apprenticing in one of his Uncle Hans’ hotels. Armed with several letters of introduction and two pistols for fighting Indians, he finally landed a job at the Ritz as a commis de rang, or waiter’s assistant.

In these pieces, Bemelmans describes the characters and rituals of life in a grand hotel, which he calls the Hotel Splendide, “a European Island in New York.” This is the world of Wodehouse and Eloise, of Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London” (Orwell’s memoirs of his life as a dishwasher). There is Monsieur Victor, maitre d’hotel, who assesses the guests and assigns tables in one of the hotel’s chic restaurants, a man “with the detachment of a bullfighter who has done his routine work and waits until the horses have dragged the animal out, ready to start on the next.” Another maitre, Beau Maxime, whose “ugliness was decorative,” is “a hoppy Frenchman whose body was forever bending into the shape of compliments. He walked mostly backward, like a crab, pulling customers from the door to his station.” There’s Mr. Sigsag, who started his hotel career as a piccolo in Austria -- a young boy whose parents sign him over to a hotel, who grows up sleeping and working in kitchens and waiting on tables. Piccolos, writes Bemelmans, are easily recognized in later life by their “lightless eyes” and “flat crippled feet, on which he has dragged almost to the end of his useless life his dead childhood.”

Bemelmans notices gestures and clothing and the little things that matter to the immigrants who work in the grand hotels. In “The New Suit,” he returns to the town he grew up in with a fellow employee from the Hotel Splendide. He brings his fancy new car (an open Hispano); his friend wears a new suit. They take a former professor out to a fine restaurant for lunch, but revenge is bittersweet. Champagne, good shirts and fine cigars; stolen cheeses, debutantes and orphans, scrubwomen who “stick into their hair flowers that have fallen off young dresses, and sing Irish melodies while they start to scrub the marble” in the small hours -- welcome to the Hotel Bemelmans.

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Visa for Avalon

A Novel

Bryher

Paris Press: 164 pp., $15 paper

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Poet, novelist, patron of the arts and one of the original supporters of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris with Sylvia Beach, Bryher (the pen name of Annie Winnifred Ellerman) is perhaps best known as the writer H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) longtime partner (from 1919 to 1961). It is not uncommon for talented writers to put aside their own work and its promotion for the sake of others, and Bryher, who died in 1983 at 88, was one such literary figure.

This novel tells the story of a small group of regular citizens in a seaside town called Trelawney who decide to emigrate when it becomes clear that “the Movement” is about to make a brave new world out of their beloved village. First there are the young revolutionaries in green uniforms, then the little gray men who come to inform Lilian Blunt that she must leave the cottage she has lived in her whole life so a road can be built. Mrs. Blunt and her lodger, Mr. Robinson, apply for visas to live in Avalon, a vague country a plane flight away. The revolution rolls into town, roads are blocked, glass breaks, rivers of green uniforms fill the village as Mrs. Blunt and company struggle to get on the last plane out. It’s a split-level novel: small dialogue and small movements on one level and huge, historic, anti-human forces lumbering on the other. Its dementia is familiar -- political apathy with dire consequences. Bryher’s writing is frustratingly plain at times, in the way that the chimes of a large bell can be annoying because they ring so clear and so true.