Before he was the writer and illustrator of the Madeline books, Ludwig Bemelmans was a down-at-the-heel waiter for the Ritz Carlton in New York City. The stories in Hotel Splendide are clearly based on his time racing to and fro across the hotel serving the guests, honing his eye for caricature. Reading the stories in this collection was like reading a strange cross between Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and the stories of the Russian satirist, Teffi. On the one hand, there is the grit of Bourdain in Bemelmans’s description of life in service to people who really couldn’t give a monkey about him unless he screws up. On the other, there’s the lightness of someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Originally published in 1941, this collection of linked short stories covers some months in the life of an unnamed narrator as he makes his way from busboy to waiter at the Hotel Splendide. As busboy, the narrator begins under the ignominious tutelage of Mespoulets. Mespoulets, we learn, is the waiter of a special section of the dining room where the maîtres d’ exile guests they do not like. Mespoulets teaches him French grammar and how to skirt the edges of the hotel’s regulations—that is, how not to get fired. The staff are underpaid. The hotel’s manager is a dictator. The guests are oblivious to how they appear to the people who deliver their food and drinks, clean their rooms, and hold open the doors as they pass. If they knew how close the staff were to Bolshevism, the post-World War I guests would quiver in their pearls.
Each of the stories shows our narrator working his way up the staff ladder while trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. In one story, he accompanies an old friend (he and the friend were born in Regensburg, Austria) back to the old country to show their old, abusive teacher how much they’ve come up in the world…only to learn that this teacher has fallen so far on hard times that it’s not worth it to rub the old bastard’s face in their pinstripes and largess. (For history nerds like me, there are some really interesting details about hyperinflation that come up when the narrator’s friend tries to cash some of his travelers’ checks.) Status plays a huge role in these stories. The narrator and several other characters he meets along the way have frequent epiphanies about what really matters in a city gone nuts for getting rich, flaunting wealth, and showing off. That sounds a little depressing but Hotel Splendide was a very fun read. I have no idea how Bemelmans managed to pull off such a comical tone while working with such potentially fraught material.
For readers looking to travel back to a glamorous (as long as you don’t look too closely) hotel at the height of 1920s New York, Hotel Splendide is the perfect vehicle.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.