What is an art, what is a profession, what is a business, what is a job? Is a man who runs a great grocery store like Park & Tilford, Acker, Charles, or the gr. dept of Macy’s just a business man, while anybody who makes smart pictures of girls is artist, and doc or lawyer who thinks about nothing but making money a professional and cranky old prof who goes on handing out same lectures yr after yr a scholar and not just a white collar job?
These words are written by our protagonist, Myron Weagle, in a notebook he keeps to help him work out the details of his life’s work and vision. It’s a telling entry, since Myron very much views his life and profession -- that of a hotelier -- as every bit a “work of art” as those products of sensuality and indulgence to which his society more commonly applies that term.
Using this as his narrative frame, Lewis digs deep into the world of hotel management, showing both its beauty and its vulgarity in turn.
The Hotel Westward Ho!, to the eyes of Myron Weagle, was a palace. The Westward, as its habitues called it, had six hundred and fifty bedrooms, and in 1905 was one of the six largest hotels in the world. It was new, built in 1900, and had the benefit not only of Byzantine, Moorish, and Gothic architecture, but also of the room telephones, elevators, and telautographs of America.
Before Myron reported to Mark Elphinstone -- the offices of the whole Elphinstone chain were in the Westward -- he stopped to adore the facade of the new cathedral in which he was to serve altar. There were fifteen stories of brown sandstone, pleasingly diversified with balconies, gray marble plaques, and small pink marble pillars, all rising to minarets of corroded green copper and huge Moorish brick turrets shaped like hexagonal pears. The building’s glory was its main entrance: the golden archway above authentic red porphyry pilasters from Syria, shadowed by the carriage awning of glass and gilded iron. The lobby was two stories high, floored with pink marble, wainscoted with yellow marble, supported with pillars of marble pink and yellow and green and black. Above the wainscoting was a frieze (painted by one of the best firms of commercial painters in New York) showing the development of New York from the Dutch, through the English, Irish, and Jews, to the Italians: a fine and lively incitement to American patriotism. The elevator doors were of bronze -- rather like the doors of St. Peter’s in miniature. The cafe and barroom at one side of the lobby was lined with green marble, and full of tapestries, silver medallions, carved oak cabinets, carved ivory chessmen under glass, a carved oak ceiling, onyx-topped tables, teak tables, Flemish oak tables, English oak tables, French iron tables from the boulevards, sporting prints, a gilded harp draped with a silken scarf, a portrait of Mark Elphinstone draped with a Shriner’s sash, a photograph of Oscar of the Waldorf inscribed “To my friend M.E.,” tufted leather chairs, curved oak chairs, gilded bamboo chairs, and lights -- a glory and miracle of lights -- ceiling clusters of lights, lights peeping out of mauve glass lilies, lights in a large horseshoe formation on the wall, lights and lights and lights behind the glass ware that upreared like fairy stalagmites behind the bar,
“Good gracious, what a room! Why it’s like -- it’s like King Edward’s own palace!” said Myron.
That’s the beauty -- the outward face. But behind it, always, is the meager and vulgar commonness that makes the beauty possible.
But Myron had seen, as yet, only what a guest might see. The inner shrine was the world behind the green baize doors at the ends of corridors; the world of the real hotel makers -- the engine room, large enough to heat and light a city, the shops of upholsterers and carpenters and plumbers, thousands of sheets, tablecloths, and sets of silver and glass and china, mounds of stationary and report blanks, detectives, paymasters, tailors, printers, musicians, florists, cooks, girls who did nothing all day save prepare salads, men who did nothing but open oysters and clams, gardes manger who did nothing but prepare cold meat and find use for scraps, assistant storekeepers who received (and save on written order would not issue to the clamorous cooks) everything from five hundredweight of sugar to a single vial of rosewater; and all the office world: bookkeepers, auditors, telephone girls, telautograph operators, and all the other workers rarely seen by the guest, to whom the personnel of a hotel if composed only of clerks, bellboys, elevator operators, waiters, and the affable cigar-stand clerk.
The whole great hotel was to be torn down, as antiquated, by 1929.
It reminds me in some ways of my own fiction in Dragons -- about the colossal waste that must occur behind the scenes to present the wondrous illusion to the hotel guest -- but more than that it is, of course, a reflection of art itself -- or at least the process of making art. To create the thing of beauty there must be a whole lot of sordid messiness, essential, but often scrubbed away and kept out of the pristine halls and corridors of the art museum.
And in that regard we are also given the foil of Myron’s brother Ora. Ora is a writer -- although admittedly a bit of a dilettante -- who, here, cooks up a story to give him an excuse to shack up with a woman he meets and impetuously admires at one of Myron’s hotels.
The day after that Ora saw Tansy Quill.
She was bustling down a corridor, fresh in a new linen uniform, inspecting rooms. The pile of towels on her arm did not seem to belong to a servant, for they were of the shining new linen which Myron had purchased to replace the wormy old towels provided by Fred Barrow.
“Lord, what a picture! Swell-looking dinge. Who is she?” Ora demanded of Myron.
“Assistant housekeeper -- Miss Quill, Miss Tansy Quill.”
“Introduce me!”
“I will not! You keep away from Tansy!”
But that night Myron saw his brother ambling through the grounds with Tansy, and heard from him, from a distance, wailing “---yes, a hard-working poet, just an impractical poet---” and “---agree with you; old Myron, the finest, keenest mind I’ve ever---”
Worry about Ora’s intentions towards Tansy quenched half Myron’s pleasure in receiving from Mark Elphinstone, early in April, the letter for which he had prayed:
“Dear Weagle: When you close up the Tippecanoe, come see me in New York. I’ll have something for you to do, don’t know just what yet, depends on our talk, come see me as soon as you arrive.”
He tried to get Ora to go north with him, but Ora announced, “No, I think I’ll stay here awhile -- maybe till June. I’ve found a cabin on the Island that I can rent for ten dollars a month. Swell place to write. I have an idea for a long story about the big swamp here -- it’s full of atmosphere -- thousands of square miles of gloomy cypresses and wild orange trees, and secret waterways and moccasins and panthers and a hidden refuge for niggers escaped from the chain gang, and their Queen -- a marvelous colored wench. By golly, I’ll give the world the first real psychology of the Negro in love and in trouble! To say nothing of the grand atmosphere. And of course right here is the place to get all the dope!”
“But there isn’t any thousand miles of swamp here! The biggest one within fifteen miles is about four acres. And I doubt if there’s a panther within two hundred miles. And you don’t know a thing about the psychology of Negroes.”
“Oh, hell, that just goes to show you don’t understand! If you’ve got a trained eye for observation, you can see all you want in four acres -- or half an acre. And Tansy Quill has promised to help me with the psychology. She’s quite a bright girl, for a chambermaid. Now don’t go scowling. You’ve got a dirty mind! Typical Puritan, you are -- always seeing wrong where there ain’t any! Tansy and I are just friends. Oh, say, could you possibly let me have a hundred dollars to see me through till I finish my big story? Send it back the minute I get my check. You know how I am: I always pay my debts.”
This leads us into the novel’s Chapter 14, which I’m going to transcribe here in its entirety, both because it struck me powerfully when I read it and because it is ultimately about what it actually is like to write something -- not on a lark, like Ora at first intends, but as a compulsive matter to determines either one’s madness or one’s sanity.
When Myron left for New York and Ora had moved to his little cracker cottage, with its scant table, bed, and two chairs, the theory was that Tansy was merely coming in to cook for him. She was an orphan, living with an indifferent uncle who let her drift as she would, and one night of relaxed indolence, it was too much trouble to go home, and she rested content beside him on the corn-husk bed, and was glad in the morning when he (for he did have that genius) was neither ashamed nor irritable.
She worshipped him, then, and Myron in him.
And he was happy in her, till he felt that he had explored her soul and come out on the other side, through the jungle to a shore facing new lands which he must enter. No staid settler was he, he meditated, but an explorer always.
Despair was sickening him, for he could not write, nor could Tansy give him wherewith to write.
The story of swamp and crouching Negroes among the rotting cypresses which he had seen, definite as rock, when he had boasted of it to Myron, had crumbled day by day. He had nothing there, he realized, save one flaring chromo in his mind -- no fable, no people, no truth.
Tansy gave him nothing new for his story. She knew no more about the voodoo or the slavery of the dark quarter of her ancestors than Ora knew about the history of Jonathan Edwards and Israel Putnam of Connecticut; she knew no more about swamps and poisonous moccasins and fevers and hidden cabins of refuge than he did about tobacco-curing in the Connecticut Valley. Both of them, the white hackwriter and the part-white chambermaid, had about the same hash of American public-school knowledge: a little memory of Longfellow and Whittier and Poe; the opinion that Lee and Grant had, in vague forgotten ways, shown themselves to be excellent generals; the facts that the square root of four was two, that the chemical symbol of water was H2O, that Beethoven was a widely esteemed musician, and that the United States was (1) the greatest nation in the world and (2) as a residence for sensitive souls like theirs, the most inferior nation in the world.
Out of this knowledge she picked items for the cultured chatter for which, all her life, while she had made beds and scrubbed out toilets and washed dishes, she had longed. She said excitedly, “Boy, dear, don’t you think that Justice is the most important thing we all have to work for -- even more than Beauty?” and “Doesn’t it just frighten you, how real Stephen Crane makes things when he writes?”
And he was bored. Her talk was just near enough to that of the more nearly literate of the Happy Hearts group to make him lonely for them. Had he been quite alone, he might have survived and been content, listening uninterrupted to the voices of his own self-praise, but she only tantalized him with memories.
He was so lonely for his fellow hack writers. And a familiar, dependable saloon around the corner! And a jolly burlekew show on the Bowery!
Here, in the evening, you could stay home, or go watch the Holy Rollers, shouting in their tabernacle roofed with palm leaves, and that was all you could do.
He hated the view from his cabin door, though it had been utter enchantment, at first: fishing-boats on the pewter surface of Pontevedra Inlet, poinsettias seen through the veil of Spanish moss, a log cabin set in arching cypresses.
It was so still -- and the stillness was insulted by Tansy’s loquacity as she stirred a hateful pot of beans.
He did not hear her. He was in despair. He could not write. The hundred dollars from Myron would be gone. He was in disgrace with that old devil, the editor of ‘Yankee Doodle,’ jumping his neck for just doing a little plagiarism like everybody else. He was marooned ‘way off here,’ a million miles from New York. And he could not write. What the devil would he do?
“Boy dear, do you like Frank Norris’s ‘The Octopus?’ Such a time I had borrowing it. I was just dreadfully broken then -- I was washing dishes at an orphanage! Did you like it?”
Ora drawled evenly, quite clearly, “Like hell! I only like decent Northern beefsteak -- and a little silence. Even you might occasionally note that I’m trying to plan a story, and keep your mouth shut!”
She stood so helplessly hurt, a hurt child, with idiotic quivering mouth and beseeching eyes, that he hated her. He stamped out and did not return for the lunch she had been cooking. She was gone, when he came back at five, after a wretched afternoon of planless crawling through the heat, and he was a little distressed. But that evening she crept back again, crawling to him like a bewildered dog which does not know why it has been beaten, and he hated her for her meekness. He was a man who merited tall proud women!
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t act like a slave -- like your damn ancestors!” he snarled, assuring himself that he didn’t really mean it, that he was much kinder than he sounded. “Or if you have got to show up the nigger in you, why the hell don’t you go out and get me some dope for my escaped slave in the swamp story, like I’ve asked you?”
He could scarcely hear her wail as she fled from the cabin. It was less a sound than a vibration in air.
He was ashamed -- also hungry. He would apologize handsomely when she came back. Nobody could ever say that he failed to own up when he had been in the wrong, even just a little in the wrong!
She did not come back, all night, nor all the next day. Toward evening he was slightly anxious and skulked about the log quarters where she lived with her uncle. He would have seen her if she had been there, easily enough, her uncle’s dwelling had but two shallow rooms.
He was worried now, and bilious with his own cooking. He could not sleep, and he flung up from his pallet when, after midnight, he heard a long moaning outside.
He huddled in his doorway to watch a procession of Negroes, lighted by pitch-pine torches and kerosene lanterns that threw maniac shadows on the writhing moss hanging from the live-oaks, on cypress trunks and the metallic leaves of scrub palmettos. They were bearing an old pine door, sticky with dry manure, on which, draped in the earthy jacket of a field hand, was the body of a woman whose long black hair dripped water.
He burst out, to demand, “My God, what is it?”
The foremost Negro, powerful as Hercules and humble as a slave, his molded black muscles shining greasily in the torchlight, muttered, “It’s dat culled gal, Tansy, dat cook for you, boss. She’s done got drowned. Reckon she must of caught her ankle in a cypress root and fell in de swamp. Get you another cook, boss? Ah got a smart sister.”
It was dreadful that none of them blamed him, none of them were interested enough in him to consider that he might be to blame. He must go unshriven, ignored or despised by these primitive people whom he had made his brothers.
He tramped the floor in horror. He stopped. His eyes bulged. “Saints above!” he whispered, in awe at the wings of inspiration. He charged on his typewriter, and banged it from one in the morning till dawn, when he arose, staggering, to make coffee.
Thus he began his novel ‘Black Slumber.’
He finished it in two and a half weeks, in first draft. He was so absorbed that no life existed beyond the edge of his vision. He wrote all afternoon, all night, living on coffee, bread on a smeary plate, cigarettes, and white mule; unbathed, unshaven, his shirt collar gray-black. He roused from his frenzy only to telegraph Myron, in New York: “For heaven’s sake send me hundred fifty dollars at once really writing nearly finished novel been lazy before but not come across gloriously bless you old brother.”
He got the money. He finished the tale.
It was the story of Tansy Quill -- told from the side of Tansy, and relentlessly punishing her swine of a white lover. Ora gave her the grandeur of an ocean wave. He wept real tears, the while his ceaseless clattering fingers brought to life her sitting amid hog-slop, longing for the simple culture that was the birthright of any white girl, the cowardly sneering of her lover, and the torchlight among the live-oaks as they bore her home dead.
“How wonderfully impersonal a real genius can be!” he breathed.
He shaved, got very drunk, and took the manuscript to New York, revising it all the way up in a day coach.
It was published and had enormous critical success and no sale. He became a hackwriter again, and never again did he write anything so honest, or financially so unnecessary, as ‘Black Slumber.’
Within six months he had almost forgotten there was such a place as Tippecanoe, such a person as Tansy, and he was more or less contentedly ghostwriting the memoirs of a rich dowager, and mocking at Myron for his simple-hearted glee in being on the staff of that gaudy New York hotel, the Westward Ho! Only when he was drunk, and his friend, Wilson Ketch, the author of Westerns, had left him to himself, did he again rise to such impersonality as to mutter something about dogs and their vomit.
Black Slumber is Ora’s Work of Art, painfully birthed out of meanness and desperation, the way all such works of art must ever be. The story of its creation reveals a deep and disturbing truth about the nature of inspiration and genius, and provides a stark contrast to the Work of Art that is Myron’s life and its dedicated sense of sublime success.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
