[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: August 10,2007]
On July 30, the New York Observer ran a story about the firing of Stanley Bard, for half a century the managing agent of The Chelsea Hotel. According the the article, Mr Bard's presence persists nonetheless: "(he) still shows up for work every day. By 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, he was already making the rounds, coffee cup in hand, mingling with people in the lobby."
In his new book, Hotel Theory, Wayne Koestenbaum writes: "A street, with its cars and pedestrians, is not a closed set. Its participants change every moment. A hotel's cast changes, buy less frequently, and with greater ceremony" (p12).
When this article is published in the collected works of Wilfrid (Volume 5, The Dancing Years), it will appear as two columns of print, italicised to the left of the page, regular to the right. Those averse to critical thought should concentrate on the latter. Meantime, just imagine...
For Liberace you would make an exception
I mentioned Wayne Koestenbaum's book Hotel Theory back in June, optimistically implying it was about to be published, but Soft Skull - a small press - missed a few dates, and I have only just put it down. The book is split into two columns of text: on the left, Hotel Theory itself, a series of critical fragments musing on the existential and cultural implications of hotel life; on the right Hotel Women, a fictional fantasia about a hotel of that name, the main guests being Lana Turner and a relentlessly nude and priapic Liberace.
That was New York
It wasn't easy getting into the Chelsea. My first attempt, I rolled into the unkempt, art-festooned lobby late at night, straight off the flight from London, blearied my way to the hatch which served as a reception desk and - no, there was no record of the reservation made weeks in advance. And no, there were no vacant rooms. And no, they didn't care what I was going to do.
Fumbling with the public payphone, I somehow tracked down a berth at some ghastly chain, and left the Chelsea resentfully. But I didn't give up. On a subsequent visit, they found my name in the book, and I was deposited in a room for which the term "American Gothic" seemed to have been invented.
Oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Koestenbaum's main theme has remained consistent since his exceptional 1993 book The Queen's Throat. The theme is the collapse - very much what Fiztgerald called the "crack up". First reference here, Frank O'Hara's supremely camp sonnet, "Lana Turner has collapsed!".
The Queen's Throat (Opera, Homonsexuality and the Mystery of Desire) took "collapse" as a defining condition of The Diva. Not merely the nervous collapse - the fluttering , boderline hysterical impossibility of going on; but actual vocal collapse: "The tendency of a diva's voice to break down makes queer people feel at home..." (p126). And The Diva has so many extreme possibilities for breaking down. Judy Garland, Edith Piaf: their lives are guides to the varieties of the collapse. The collapse of The Diva, a shock which is also a source of strength: "Experiencing the camp glow is a way of reversing one's abjection, and, by witnessing the depletion of cultural monuments, experiencing one's own power to fill degraded artifacts to the brim with meanings" (emphasis added, p117).
Digression: To what extent is the degradation of the Non-Diva - Hilton, Lohan - a recuperation by the hegemonic culture of this underground power?
The figures of beauty
It was not a pretty room. High ceilinged, large for Manhattan, but grey and gloomy. The windows gave out onto - nothing, not the street certainly. A vast mirror, filmed with dust, stretched from the floor up into the darkness. Each time I dressed to go out, in the unforgiving light, I was compelled to contemplate my full length image in this glass, which would have made a a shadowy grey frump of Lana Turner at her most lovely.
I made some tentative explorations of the hotel (this was back in the early '90s), being amazed by the rows of mail-boxes in a corridor near the lobby. I had known this was once a residential hotel, but hadn't expected so many of the rooms still to be allocated to people who lived there. What Charles Addams-ish life could be lived in this cobwebby ambience?
Did James Schuyler, the fine poet of the New York School, still live there. He died in 1991; I might have passed him, or his shade, in the lobby. I hadn't then heard of him, hadn't yet read O'Hara, perhaps a few poems by Ashbery. I was out for rock stars, Warhol stars, and their traces. Beyond the plaques at the hotel's entrace, none were to be found. It was already twelve, thirteen years since Sid Vicious had stayed here with Nancy Spungen.
You just turned your back on the crowd
The hotel is a setting for the collapse. It affords us all the opportunity to be The Diva. It is also the setting for solitude, another of Koestenbaum's key categories. A hotel is "where you go to escape" (p25). Hotel life is ritualistic: "wine on tick, a hotel room, and sleep" (p144). Jean Rhys's Goodnight Midnight is a key text. It consoles: "I check into that hotel room because I want nothing to happen, and because I want to experience the exaltation - no other word will do - that arrives dialectically when a life pretends to shut down" (p145). For Koestenbaum, hotel consciousness seeds hotel prose - a way of writing which encodes the collapse, the solitude, the shutting down. Fragmentary, interrupted writing, which is - again - also a source of strength.
Hotel Theory obsessively lists the writers, books - and artists, composers, film makers - adrift in hotel consciousness. Jean Rhys, Cornell Woolrich, Joseph Cornell, Edith Wharton, Jane Bowles, Chopin. I heard Koestenbaum discuss the book at Poet's House earlier this year. I asked him whether hotel consciousness wasn't also the consciousness of any closed, silent room. I named arists whose solitude had in fact been domestic - Gerhardi, Debord. One might even think of the reporter Joseph Mitchell, mysteriously shutting down, year after year, in his New Yorker office, writing nothing...
I think Koestenbaum agreed. The consciousness at stake is, after all, camp consciousness - contingently rather than necessarily instantiated in hotel life.
We were running
I spent maybe fifteen years of my life moving in and out of hotels. Usually alone, at least on checking in. There was always a home base - for many years, one or other small studio in central London - but work and restlessness led me to sleep as much as a third of each year away from home.
The stay of a few days at The Chelsea, for all its legendary past, was unmemorable. I couldn't even find the famous bar. Poking around the crannies of the public areas revealed nothing; I eventually asked at the unhelpful front desk. I was told that the bar was in the rear of the Mexican restaurant next door, accessible only from the street. I didn't know whether to believe it. The El Quijote. It's still there. I stepped through the door, but soon turned and left. Paella. Stuffed shrimp. What did I expect to find? Eugene O'Neill nursing a margarita?
Clenching your fist for the ones like us
Susan Sontag's achievement was to recognize camp as a distinctive and important category in critical and cultural theory. The Queen's Throat superseded "Notes on Camp", directing attention much more vigorously than Sontag to the sensibility's roots in gay (or queer) experience, and relocating the occasion of camp from the artwork to its reception by the audience. Koestenbaum's privileging of his own mode of cultural consumption - very much privatised, behind closed doors, listening to countless opera recordings alone at home - now seems dated. By the 1980s, Madonna was camp, and was consumed by a mass audience.
Hotel Theory is in some ways a disappointment. Not so much an advance on the 1993 work, it is a fragmentary analysis of some of that book's implications. A bad start to the book: for all the author emphasizes that he is using Heidegger in an unscholarly fashion as a stimulus to reflection, philosophers' teeth will grind at the poor use of that material. But Koestenbaum is a vital analyst of a sensibility the implications of which have yet to be exhaustively understood.
Talking so brave and so sweet
The Chelsea, which opened in 1884, will doubtless be with us some time yet, whatever the fall-out of the current management struggles. It even has a most un-Munsterish web site. Me, I moved on to The Four Seasons.
Koestenbaum, W. Hotel Theory (Soft Skull, 2007) - right here.
