LONDON LETTER
The first warm Sunday at the end of March is the unofficial
beginning of Spring. The park smells of new grass, the noise of the
mower is heard, the crocus carpets are on display, the boats are set free
on the lake, huge crowds saunter up and down in the sunshine, as night
falls other cries mingle with those of the waterfowl, contraceptives
reappear in the gutters, a body (making the third unsolved murder of
Regent's Park) is found in the thirteen-acre garden of Barbara Hutton's
featureless house where once the dresses of the ballerinas invited by
Lord Hertford, the "Pasha" of the region, moving among the trees all
night would be glimpsed by the respectable guests arriving for breakfast.
Soon the leaves will be on the trees and the first American writers, on
their way to Paris and a summer in Italy, will settle here for a day or
two. These early migrants play an important role, for they reawaken the
comatose winterbound group of hibernators who have not been able to
get away to the sunshine by reminding them that they still have repu–
tations, that although their corporeal selves are bound by drudgery and
currency-restrictions to their native soil, their books are free to wander
where they will. Let us suppose that a young novelist, we will call him
Harold Bisbee, whose first novel so perfectly shaded off the social boun–
dary between the Far and the Middle West, has collected enough prize–
money to visit his London and Paris publishers on his way to the island
of Procida, goal of so many Near-Far Western friends. What is he going
to find here? His first disappointment will be his hotel, for there no
longer exists
in
London a single hotel in which it is a pleasure for an
artist to stay. That particular vision of the literary life which was con–
jured up by Garland's Hotel in Suffolk Place (till a bomb removed it)
by the old Royal York at Brighton, or by the Royal Bath at Bourne–
mouth with its memories of Henry James and Gosse, the hotel with its
aroma of the nineties, its gilt and plush, its red or green flock walls
and mahoganied private sitting rooms where discreet and elderly waiters
