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Note
on
The Red Hotel
I
needed a high order of engagement when writing notes for this one,
because I had a cold. When for weeks I hadn’t wanted to cast on more than a
bathrobe or read more than a catalogue, it was hard for me to get my
attention. This piece calls
for hard labour.
It’s
a portrait of a lady again, and is all one sentence because she deserves
it and because the technique heightens the tone.
I’ll attempt a paraphrase.
A
single glint of light among her fake jewels makes her think that perhaps
not all her life has been affectation and fraudulence, though much has.
She has wasted her energies in a nervous and selfish languor. She hasn’t lived with any grandeur, but has appeared to be
just waiting for death.
However,
that single glint among her paste brooches represents a touch of the
genuine (in them, in her), the opposite of numbed drowsiness.
She has, for all her languor, and perhaps not all the time, a
brave wakefulness of eye, like a mountain pool gathering light from
distant galaxies. That
gleam in her is a warmth too, recognised especially by strangers who are
as diffident as herself.
She
takes heart from this recognition.
Otherwise the world is overwhelming, too full of unkind
deception. She does not see
a connection between the world’s deceptions and her own.
And indeed there is a difference.
Her dishonesty is an effete defence; the world’s is a device
for winning.
Without
the kind recognition of strangers (I was inspired by Blanche in
Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire), she would gladly
take herself off ‘to a red hotel or cruel asylum’ and commit
suicide.
Why
a red hotel? It’s
interesting that although hotels come in all colours, usually white
stucco or red brick, I do not think of hotels, as I think of birds,
jewels, dresses and so on, as having colours.
A green or blue hotel would have been just as unusual.
I didn’t intend brick, though that wouldn’t dilute the
feeling. This red is not a
colour of the world but of the mind; it is a metaphor, it suggests
danger and blood, it is brutal and uncomfortable.
Alan
Marshfield
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