524
PARTISAN REVIEW
serve pints of claret to literary gentlemen, the hotel we have imagined
from so many memoirs, where Thackeray called on Turgenev or Conrad
on Hardy or Maugham on Max, whose letter-heading plucks our heart
in James's letters: Hotel de Russie, Rome; Grand Hotel, Pau; Hotel
de l'Europe, Avignonj Hotel de l'Ecu, Geneve; when we come to Lon–
don-ah, Bisbee-it doesn't exist. The best hotels of London are large
and anonymous, the smaller ones have all been renovated. The Russell
in Russell Square is central for visits to publishers and the place has
some Pompeian Art Nouveau and a period flavor, but it is essentially
the hotel for Midland business men. The other hotels round the British
Museum have had to be completely done over since the Gibraltar refu–
gees or Ministry of Information were there. Of the fashionable hotels,
the Connaught has the most atmosphere, but it is rather too chic for a
serious young writer.
If
Bisbee stays at too expensive a hotel he will
frighten off the elusive men of letters whom he is here to study, and
only the publishers will call. The southern rooms of the Savoy and the
northern rooms of the Hyde Park are the nicest rooms in London in
summer, or else high up in the Dorchester, but all are expensive and
somehow unsuitable. I think that the only place where Bisbee could
stay without being disillusioned on his first day would be in one of those
bachelor chambers round Clarges or Half Moon Street or Curzon Street,
kept by retired butlers. J ames, I see, lived at 3 Bolton Street when he
first came to London in the 'eighties. I expect Bisbee could live there
too. Having arrived and unpacked, laid out the cartons of "Luckies"
which are to cut his swathe through European society and, alas, taken a
pull at the bottle of Bourbon he is bringing over to his publisher, London
loneliness will descend on poor Harold. He looks up at the waving
maples, the long sad spring sunset, he rings up one or two people who
are out and sallies forth to dine alone and collect first impressions.
Critical moment. Where will he eat? I can't say I envy him. He should,
of course, for that first evening, go to an oyster bar: Cunningham's in
Curzon Street (round the corner from his rooms), Wilson's in King
Street, St. James's, Driver's or Bentley's or Wheelers and then look in
at some "pub"-such as the Red Lion in Duke of York Street-whose
interior is a delight. Then it is time to wander sadly home through the
asphalt evening, looking at St. James's, the Park, the buses, the prostitutes
with their fur scarves and little dogs and back to the inevitable Henry
James companion-volume ("When the warm weather comes I find Lon–
don evenings very detestable") and so to bed. In the morning the
telephone at 3 Bolton Street gets busy, his publisher takes him out to
luncheon at the Etoile, literary London is at his feet.
