IT is an entertaining coincidence that two contemporary writers, one English and one German, should have hit simultaneously upon the same theme for their novels—to wit, the life that circulates in a metropolitan hotel of to-day. The Englishman, Arnold Bennett, devotes to it what is physically — some say in other respects as well — his biggest novel, Imperial Palace. Whereas, in Grand Hotel, Frau Vicki Baum has set down a story which in its dramatized version is the most sought-after play in New York.
IN Imperial Palace (Doubleday, Doran, $2,50), Arnold Bennett’s gift of comedy shows at its very best. Seven hundred and sixty-nine pages is a count that might well dismay the greediest devourer of fiction; but the bouncing vitality of this novel never flags. I can think of no book by Air. Bennett richer in the peculiar gusto that is his. And this gusto is equally vigorous whether he is recounting how embattled Titans of the hotel world come to grips, or how that determined girl Gracie Savott seduces the mighty Evelyn Orcham, Director of the Imperial Palace, or how Miss Violet Powler, the head housekeeper, conjures out of nothingness the day bed that the visiting Rajah must have, and that at once, in his imperial suite.
In this novel Mr. Bennett’s passionate love of detail comes to a very apotheosis. The Imperial Palace itself is the real protagonist of the story, and its vast organism is depicted to the last minutiæ; but the author is so heartily enamored of his subject that even readers chronically rebellious at the circumstantial must be swept along with him, must share his zest for iced-water jugs and gravity tubes, must feel surprise and indignation when the new head housekeeper is at once transferred— arbitrarily, it seems — from Eighth to Third and back to Eighth again, must feel relief when Mr. Ceria, the wistful young manager of the grillroom, is reinstated after his disastrous attack of temperament. Mr. Bennett has always been good at revealing the sensitive and unreasonable child hidden in the heart of a man, but never better than in his portrait of that imperturbable executive Evelyn Orcham. Driving the multiple activities of the Imperial Palace, the brain of Mr. Orcham spins quietly, powerfully, and unfailingly.
Once again one must admire the skill with words that gives the simplicity of Mr. Bennett’s style its elusive impishness.
There could hardly be a stronger contrast to the protracted light-heartedness of Imperial Palace than the compressed power of Grand Hold, by Vicki Baum (Doubleday, Doran, $2.50). Within the compass of a few days, moments of crisis in several lives are shown, and so shown as to haunt the memory. To one of the greatest dancers of her time, growing old now and seeing too clearly the end of everything, comes the first ecstasy of love that she has ever known; to a well-born young crook, handsome and magnetic, good-natured, insensitive, not quite wholly unscrupulous, comes his first experience of tenderness, and on its heels a violent death. A sober and self-respecting man of affairs and head of a family finds himself a cheat, a homicide, and, because he is also convicted of amorous adventure, an outcast from the home that he loves. And a timid little overworked bookkeeper from the provinces, who comes to the Grand Hotel under medical sentence of death, and full of a piteous determination to live a little before he dies, finds miraculous release from his shames arid miseries, and from the terror that hangs over him.
I can remember no one in fiction since the simple Sergeant Grischa who tears at the heart as does little Kringelein the bookkeeper. ‘It is not. very nice,’ he writes to his friend, ‘to go to one’s grave at forty-six without having lived at all and only been harassed and starved and bullied by Herr P. at the works and the wife at home. It seems all wrong that this should be the end of it all when one has never had a single pleasure.’ But at the Grand Hotel Kringelein’s path to release lies through an ordeal of mortifications. One can hardly bear the scene at the large tailor’s shop to which he is taken, panic-stricken, by the good-natured Baron Gaigern, and where three elegant gentlemen with expressionless faces uncover the pitiful secrets of his shabby and outlandish underclothing. ‘“I have never troubled myself much about being in the fashion. I’m one of the old school,” he said, imploring the forgiveness of these icily professional gentlemen. No one made any reply to this.’ But Kringelein’s spirit is not all compact of shames and resentments; it has delicacy and sweetness and valor.
Frau Vicki Baum is a superb narrator, and a true creator of character. Her stern art is rooted in compassion.
ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS