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PARTISAN REVIEW
Christmas tree, his personal Christmas becomes entirely lost. For this
is
a tree which is a depersonalization of the Christmas tree itself. No
ornament upon it can have a personal meaning for anybody. It has no
defective bulbs, no cracked old reindeer or chipped Santa Claus in–
herited from anybody's childhood. It stands in a winter of tinsel, more
tinsel than any single human being could hang on a tree in a lifetime
of Christmases, and the electric star at its top is farther from human
reach than the star that guided the wise men. The tree is not lop-sided;
it has no missing branches, no bare places, no cracked limbs; it does not
shed its needles.
It
did not fall over three times when father and mother
tried to stand it up. No, it was placed there by the Management and
decorated by an I.B.M. machine, and it will disappear the day after
New Year's, as conveniently as it came.
Everybody in the Lobby is as well-dressed as the Christmas tree, or
as the Lobby itself. There is an air of rich sobriety; the predominant
color is a light golden brown, or tan; even the light falling across the
deep rugs is tan. The winter sky outdoors is grey, but the light in the
Hotel normalizes all seasons. Men choose their suits so as not to clash
with these surroundings; there are no outrageous neckties or absurd hair–
cuts, and only the finest footwear sinks in the golden brown rug. The
women harmonize even more subtly with their surroundings. Though
their clothing varies enormously in color and cut, it is all designed to
make them look about the same age, and you see their eyes striving
in varying degrees of despair to match the youth of their dresses or
the vitality of their perfume. The bellboys are of athletic cast and lower–
class speech; but the desk clerks are refined beyond physical desire and
are more superb than any client, just as the tree in the Lobby is more
superb than Christmas.
The Mezzanine exists in the context of the Hotel as the pre-eon–
sci'Jus exists in the context of the conscious, portraying in dream-alle–
gories the racial (or at least the professorial) unconscious. I am fond of
telling my students that the Ancient Mariner is present at every wedding–
feast; he is likewise present at every birth and every death and every
convention. I used to look with contempt on people who attended con–
ventions and wore square white tags with their names in large type. I
used to think that this could only have meaning for people whose lives
lacked meaning, that they were participating in an artificial ritual be–
cause family life, church life, intellectual life, life in the woods, any
other kind of life, had ceased to exist in America. This is not so.
A
man's profession is not a mere appendage to life, and ought not to be.
It ought to be just as full of meaning and have just as much connection
with eternity as any of his other activities. The convention is the ritual
