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Urban Space and Representation: Further Papers

Douglas Tallack: "WAITING, WAITING": THE HOTEL LOBBY

Abstract
Paper

Ongoing Discussion

Glyn Marshall - University of Nottingham
           D Tallack response
Richard Haw - University of Leeds
           D Tallack response
Drew Whitelegg - University of Nottingham

Abstract
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The hotel lobby is an overlooked, though ubiquitous, modern space which takes place in narratives. The paper develops a reading of this urban space as emblematic of certain aspects of modernity: broadly speaking, its routine yet kaleidescopic, assembling and dissassembling character.

Although a range of examples are used (Grand Hotel to The Graduate; Sinclair Lewis' Work of Art through Raymond Chandler's The High Window to Stephen Schneck's The Nightclerk), there is a focus upon two particularly acute observers of modern life, Edward Hopper and the German cultural and film critic, Siegfried Kracauer.

Among the ideas explored in the paper are the hotel lobby as

• a semi-public gateway to private places;

• related tangentially to some classic American themes (as Kracauer remarks, "spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of these images can be deciphered, one finds the basis of social reality");

• a space of ambiguous identity; and, in general,

• an uncanny modern space, linked interestingly with the genre of the detective novel and questions of urban visuality.

There is a passing speculation on what a hotel-lobby-theory-of-the-novel might be.

"WAITING, WAITING": THE HOTEL LOBBY

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In the hotel lobbies of American film and literature one can meet (among many others) Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and their accomplices and adversaries; a pair of hapless out-of-towners; Amory Blaine and, a few years later, Monroe Stahr; Lolita and Humbert Humbert; Roger Thornley in pursuit of George Kaplan from New York to Chicago; Emma McChesney; Hurstwood and Carrie; Michael J. Fox as the concierge, Richard Gere's pretty woman, and the Nightclerk in the films and novel with those titles; and, perhaps most memorably, Benjamin Braddock waiting to meet Mrs Robinson.

With his eye for indiscriminate heterogeneity, it was Henry James who was among the first to speculate whether "the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most finding itself."¹ But it was left to Sinclair Lewis, in an obscure and obsessive novel called Work of Art (1934) which pursues a road not taken in his own life, to write the great American hotel-novel. Work of Art is the story of a practical man, Myron Weagle, whose driving ambition is to design and run a hotel as an epic work of art. When in Washington DC he has no time for the White House or the Capitol because he is too busy taking notes in lobbies. And in New York City, working at the Westward Ho!, he marvels at the lobby in words inspired by the trade journal, Hotel Management:

... 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 ... showing the development of New York from the Dutch, through the English, Irish, and Jews, to the Italians.²

This is The Great Gatsby re-set in a hotel lobby, while other classic American themes are re-cast by Lewis as lobby dramas: as Myron goes West; as he returns to redecorate his hometown lobby, where he is briefly tempted by Modernist design; and, on his Great Tour, as he compares European and American hotel interiors, remarking that, on the whole, Bolshevism and Fascism produced a worse regime for the hotel worker than "Capitalistic Democracy". His Jamesian European tour is a "passionate pilgrimage", during which he completes two volumes of his "Hotel Project Notes" and concludes with the insight "Funny how many top-notch European hotels have toothpicks right on the table!"³ The novel ends even more bizarrely, though with no apparent irony, when Myron's son persuades him to turn his attention from hotels to the new "tourist camps", devoted to holiday-makers who had given up on railroad travel and taken to their cars. Although Myron hopes that tourists will not just pass through but will stay a few days at his camp, hotel-history tells us that these motels - as they would become - will not need lobbies. But Work of Art - like Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis - refuses to become a tragedy.

No account could do justice to this variety and, in any case, there is a risk of losing all proportion – in the manner of Sinclair Lewis’ hero – in accumulating examples. However, the surprising oscillation between the comic and the slightly disturbing in and across some of these examples of fictional hotel lobbies is marked enough to prompt an interpretation of this overlooked, though ubiquitous, modern space, beginning with the observation that when examples do come to mind they tend to do so not as specifically memorable spaces but as spaces associated with events and even stories. In James Donald’s formulation of the relationship between the textual and the social, "Space is less the already existing setting for ... stories, than the production of space through that taking place, through the act of narration."⁴ Consequently, a starting definition of the hotel lobby might be that it is a space which takes place in narratives. And, here, Edmund Goulding's 1932 MGM treatment of Vicki Baum's novel Grand Hotel, published in German in 1929, provides a representative example of this "taking place" of the hotel lobby in what can be termed the modern period; that is to say, in the broad period prior to John Portman’s re-modelling of these spaces and Fredric Jameson’s now-canonic theorizing of one of Portman’s hotels. The stories of the five main characters in Goulding’s film criss-cross the lobby in a succession of meetings, collisions, gazes and glances. There is constant foreground and background action as deals are struck, cons perpetrated, and relationships instigated, developed and broken. Narratives are set in motion. A lowly employee of a powerful industrialist intends to spend all his savings on a final immersion in luxury before his terminal illness ends a humdrum life. But he comes unexpectedly into money, recovers his health, and, in the final scene in the lobby, asks for his mail to be forwarded to the Grand Hotel, Paris because he is blithely confident that there will be a Grand Hotel everywhere. He then leaves with the girl on his arm. Known initially as "the stenographer", she enters the hotel lobby through the revolving doors near the beginning of the film to "temp" for the powerful industrialist, but leaves it in the money. And yet all of this often comic activity, including that of the extras who populate this busy lobby, is framed spatially by the revolving doors and the elevators and framed verbally by the prologue intoned by a cynical war-wounded doctor and then repeated as an epigraph: "Grand Hotel. People come and people go. Nothing changes."⁵ In a vaguely troubling way, the film is also regularly punctuated by the doctor asking at the desk whether a telegram, a letter or a message has come for him. And even the industrialist refers to himself as "waiting, waiting" in the hotel lobby. It is this combination of movement and stasis, space and events, which suggests a reading of the hotel lobby as emblematic of certain aspects of modernity: broadly speaking, its routine yet kaleidoscopic, assembling and disassembling, comic and disturbing character. In the heterogeneous crowd of the lobby – as in that of the city – the familiar and unfamiliar, the homely and unhomely, mixture which Freud calls the uncanny is just about discernible, even in scenes in which the comic mode is dominant.

The intriguing architectonics of the hotel lobby have attracted the attention of two acute observers of modern life, working in different media. Some time between 1922 and 1925 the German cultural and film critic, Siegfried Kracauer, wrote an essay entitled "The Hotel Lobby". It was one of a number of short but telling analyses of contemporary German culture published in the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung. The genre of the feuilleton specialised in the quotidian and, in an untheorized but compelling mixture of sociology and phenomenology, reported on arcades, cafes and music halls but also unemployment offices and the routine rather than the thrills of sporting events and syncopated dancing displays. In the manner of his teacher, Georg Simmel, and his better-known contemporary, Walter Benjamin, the philosophical and sociological analyses written by Kracauer map the sphere of the quotidian and mark it out as part of the cultural landscape of modernity. What comes through in these short pieces is Kracauer's insistence that such spaces as the hotel lobby need to be subjected to critique but might also provide the perspective or distance required by critique, a concept which would be adumbrated more fully by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other figures more central to the Frankfurt School than Kracauer.

Such high theory would probably have annoyed the determinedly anti-intellectual American artist, Edward Hopper. But he, like Kracauer, was fascinated by overlooked places: drug stores, automats, diners, and a variety of hotel settings, including, the hotel lobby, the subject of a 1943 painting, entitled Hotel Lobby. This coincidence of interest

centres on the way in which, for Kracauer and Hopper, the hotel lobby was part of the interior visual transformation of the modern city in Germany and the United States, specifically in the cities of New York and Berlin. It is quite fitting that Kracauer should have made for the United States when he was fleeing from Germany in the early 1940s because the hotel lobby is just one of a number of modern spaces which figure often, and in illuminating ways, in American popular culture, notably film and detective fiction. And just as Kracauer's essay is most insightful when he introduces occasional examples to make theoretical points so Hopper's interest in, and painting of, a bit of Americana offers theoretical knowledge, albeit differently presented.

The hotel lobby is a semi-public gateway to private places. There is a gatekeeper - the reception clerk; a route - typically, entry through a revolving door to the lobby; and - as often as not - a conspicuous crossing of the lobby to a reception desk and from there to the elevator. This ritual involves signing one's name and providing a minimum of personal history and even a rudimentary recent narrative of sorts. At this stage there is sometimes an element of fiction or storytelling, as in the excruciatingly embarrassing arrival of Nabokov’s Humbert and Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters or Benjamin’s prolonged efforts to book a room for himself and Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. This semi-public ritual, however honest or dishonest in parts, gives access to the bedrooms, the site of exaggeratedly private acts. The whole of Stephen Schneck's 1965 novel, The Nightclerk, is posited upon this ritual of access to the esoterically and even dangerous private realm of "upstairs":

The pseudonymous and transient tribes of Smith, Jones, Johns, Brown, White and Gray have left veracity no room on the page. Reality has been crowded off the register. Names are regularly changed to protect the guilty.⁶

And in smarter hotels than the Nightclerk's Travelers Hotel in downtown San Francisco, the lower one's class and income the harder it is to get upstairs. On the other hand, the revolving door introduces an element of chance into one's entry into the lobby: would one spin to success or spin right on out of the hotel again?

In terms of a negotiation between the private and public spheres, hotel lobbies have regularly had a gender and class dimension to them. It was during the Gilded Age - when middle-class women moved more significantly into the public sphere - that the hotel lobby functioned as part of the discourse on the spatial boundaries of public and private; and began to rival the drawing-rooms and private libraries and gardens of Victorian fiction. William Dean Howells' novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1899), charts an intermediary stage in this social and fictional process. When Howells' characters Mr and Mrs March are contemplating a move from genteel Boston to cosmopolitan New York, they stay in "a quiet hotel far down-town." The clerk asks Mr March if Mrs March is with him "and said then he supposed they would want their usual quarters; and in a moment they were domesticated in a far interior that seemed to have been waiting for them."⁷ While it acts as a refuge during their trying and challenging ventures into the city when apartment-hunting, even this half-way house momentarily tempts the Marches with the idea that they could also cut loose from their children and their familiar but staid past. A few years later, in Edna Ferba's Emma McChesney stories (for instance, Roast Beef, Medium of 1913), the lead character, a travelling saleswoman in the petticoat trade, goes from hotel to hotel. The way is prepared for the stenographer in Grand Hotel to make her way up the social ladder from the moment she enters the revolving doors of the lobby to the moment she leaves it on the nouveau-riche arm of the former lowly employee. The meeting places of characters such as these are the spatial analogues of the element of luck in the narratives of Horatio Alger; while in Hollywood’s substitute for nineteenth-century popular fiction the lobby is transformed from a purposeless place into one which locks in to the purposive narrative of success without any need to draw on the resources of the work ethic. Work, when it takes place in the lobby, has an intangible feel to it and is barely distinguishable from not working. Significantly, Grand Hotel was released at the height of the Depression and the hotel loses both the decorum of Baum’s hotel and also its sense of instability:

In the corridor an electrician was kneeling on the floor, busied over some repair to the wires. Ever since they had had those powerful lights to illuminate the hotel frontage there had always been something going wrong with the overworked installation of the hotel.⁸

It was in the late 1920s and early 1930s that the great hotels in New York were built: the new Waldorf-Astoria, the Barbizon and the Carlyle. And built, it appeared, to survive the Depression. As Siegfried Kracauer remarks, from his not dissimilar Weimar perspective, "spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of these images can be deciphered, one finds the basis of social reality."⁹

The hotel lobby, then, is one of those revealing sites where the larger picture (a society's often static image of itself) and the local narrative come uneasily or (same difference) all-too-easily together. For while narrative might be needed for the hotel lobby to be memorable, the lobby, in its turn, spatialises narrative. And this is one way in which ideology functions. Put more mundanely, change becomes merely the movement of a revolving door. When, in the early twenties, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were already suggesting that they might soon become frozen into their own image of frenetic immobility, they actually spun themselves into a state of dizziness - as children sometimes do - but, in their case, in the revolving doors of the Commodore on 42nd Street.¹⁰

As is apparent, even from these few instances, the hotel lobby's small contribution to the redefinition of class and gender was largely social and economic, rather than political. Because the lobby is semi-private and semi-public it does constitute - in Hannah Arendt's phase - a "space... of appearance" but it lacks the political or civic significance which Arendt had in mind when using that phrase.¹¹ Indeed, the private/public amalgam of the commercially-owned hotel lobby might be less political than the private spaces of home or hotel bedroom for which feminism has at least given us a political language. And certainly it was not a place of politics for Victorian women. Instead, a common experience for a woman was to wait for a man in a lobby, rather than always wait for him at home. Or to make the hotel - as a semi-private transition to the fully public place of the street - a place of work, though in the emerging service sphere. At one end of the social scale there is a connection between hotels and prostitution. Mid-way, Emma McChesney strikes commercial deals in petticoats. While, at the other end of the scale, Lucius Boomer (who owned the Waldorf-Astoria) employed women as managers in his hotels because they brought a touch of home to his business.¹² Whether or not it decoratively draws upon the outside world for its designs, the lobby can be a haven, an upholstered substitute for the reality of the street. Henry James quite approved of the entrance to the Waldorf-Astoria because he thought it had a female quality to it - in contrast to the skyscraper.

Although the hotel lobby is a conduit and takes on its meanings in relation to the spheres which it links, it is also a place which some people do not pass through or immediately pass through. Instead, it becomes a place of waiting, even for those in a hurry. The lobby in Grand Hotel is very much a space filled with events, though sometimes the anticipated events do not happen or happen as part of a repeated pattern or are spatialised in the image of the revolving door. It is this peculiar limbo quality, rather than the notion of the lobby as a place of activity and social change which interests the lobby-watchers, Siegfried Kracauer and Edward Hopper. Kracauer founds his analysis of the hotel lobby upon a contrast between the lobby as an impersonal space, where strangers gather without knowing the host, and the community of the church:

The typical characteristics of the hotel lobby, which appears repeatedly in detective novels, indicate that it is conceived as the inverted image of the house of God. It is a negative church ... . It is the setting for those who neither seek nor find the one who is always sought, and who are therefore guests in space as such - a space that encompasses them and has no function other than to encompass them.¹³

In contrast to the traditional community of the church and its participation in a drama of "higher meaning" those who congregate in the hotel lobby are (in the title of another Kracauer essay) merely "Those Who Wait". In this interior space there is a peculiar way of being or - less portentously than Kracauer has it - of behaving. Figures in the street outside the lobby might be difficult to pin down in terms of definable pursuits simply because they cannot be tracked to their destinations or their destinations become enigmatic, as in Poe's parable of modernity, "The Man of the Crowd." Admittedly, the figures in a hotel lobby might also be difficult to define but this is more because they do not really inhabit a purposive space. For while the hotel lobby is a modern space which only fully came into existence after a travel and transportation revolution in the nineteenth-century, it lacks the purpose of other modern interiors such as - and it is Kracauer's example – "the conference room of a corporation."¹⁴ Of course, one can just wait in a boardroom or cafe or the foyer of a department store but the context makes all the difference.

Kracauer's "The Hotel Lobby" is part of a study of the detective novel and, impressionistically at least, the hotel lobby does seem to appear "repeatedly in detective novels". Possibly, the very form of the novel changes when hotel lobbies appear. If pushed too far this could come out as an overblown hotel-lobby-theory-of-fiction but there is something in the notion that (as Kracauer remarks of the detective novel) "It is not the force of the event [the crime, however violent] which takes one's breath away but the opacity of the causal chain which determines the fact."¹⁵ Hotel lobbies are needed as sites of coincidence but also multiply those sites. For the post-domestic or post-communal novel (the kind of novel which supersedes Mansfield Park or Middlemarch, for instance), the hotel lobby is one kind of solution to the challenge posed in a society of travel when characters have to arrive someplace on their own or perhaps with just one other person; and that someplace should not necessarily - or at least not in a modern world - immediately assign them to a family or community structure. The hotel lobby exemplifies this problem, to which the detective novel with its gradually revealed emplotment of apparently anonymous characters is an exaggerated reaction. Moreover, the coincidences which occur in detective stories and in hotel lobbies are not "psychological" but, as Kracauer claims, "the distortion of a determination which operates as reality."¹⁶ Put a bit more glibly, if hotel lobbies did not exist they would have to be invented because sooner or later the coincidence will occur. That is to say, there is a logic to be revealed, a by-product of that quality of the fortuitous and the ephemeral which Baudelaire thought characterized urban modernity.

In the life of the hotel lobby, Kracauer continues, there is "purposiveness" unaccompanied by "any representation of a purpose"¹⁷ and this insight supplies the most interesting, if oblique, link with the detective story. The lack of purposeful activity in the hotel lobby where the conventions of behaviour produce a fairly small number of possible scenarios is comparable with the formulaic quality in detective fiction. Yet there is a dynamic to be derived from "waiting, waiting" because repetition can stimulate over-interpretation and the constructing of narratives out of seemingly static scenes. Hotel lobbies are spaces waiting to be given meaning by purposeful narratives and minimal signs of activity, the checking of a watch or a brief exchange of glances, stimulate a hermeneutics of suspicion, a preoccupation with the visual signs or clues which will turn banality into intrigue, routine into a plot. These visual clues are given off by a transient population who might well be here for a purpose yet seem, often, to be doing nothing but waiting. That is to say, the sense of just waiting - particularly if the lobby is windowless - stimulates an habitual just looking, albeit a looking which pretends to be disinterested, and a being-looked-at, which, again, involves some degree of dissimulation. When Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade is planning a surveillance in the lobby of the St Mark hotel he says to Miss Wonderly: "It'll help some if you either meet Thursby downstairs or let yourself be seen with him at some time."¹⁸

As an interior, the lobby is differently spaced and paced from the street, in which flux and the rapid sequence of impressions create a certain kind of modern personality type: for Baudelaire the flâneur and for Georg Simmel the blasé metropolitan inhabitant. However, in spite of its challenges to identity, the street can accord a welcome anonymity, whereas the hotel lobby's anonymous population is subject to observation, if not exactly surveillance. Kracauer’s metaphysics of the lobby bears upon the themes of surveillance but also loss and alienation played out in the downtown settings of the American tough detective story from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler onwards, a tradition with which there seems to have been cross-fertilization with Edward Hopper’s work. But, to recall an earlier observation, the peculiar space of looking of the hotel lobby also lends itself to comedy and in the most self-conscious of detective stories, there is a knowingness about the use of this location. Sometimes the private eye who has come to the lobby to observe can become the target, as in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon when Sam Spade exposes the inexperienced gumshoe, Wilmer, who is on a stake-out, to the attention of the house-detective in the lobby of the Hotel Belvedere:

Sauntering, he crossed the lobby to the divan from which the elevators could be seen and sat down beside – not more than a foot from – the young man who was apparently reading a newspaper. ¼

Spade lighted his cigarette, leaned back comfortably on the divan, and spoke with good-natured carelessness: "You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny – some of you will – and you can tell G. I said so."

The boy put his paper down quickly and faced Spade, staring at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. ¼ "Keep asking for it and you’re going to get it," he said, "plenty". ¼

Spade caught the attention of [Luke, the house-detective] ¼ .

"What do you let these cheap gunmen hang out in your lobby for, with their tools bulging their clothes?" ¼ .
The boy looked like a schoolboy standing in front of them.
Luke said: "Well, if you don’t want anything, beat it, and don’t come back."
The boy said, "I won’t forget you guys," and went out.¹⁹

In Chandler's 1943 novel, The High Window, the lobby of the Hotel Metropole in downtown Los Angeles is the secret yet exposed meeting place for Marlowe, who is also the narrator, and another amateur:

A blond man in a brown suit, dark glasses and the now familiar hat came into the lobby and moved unobtrusively among the potted palms and the stucco arches to the cigar counter. He bought a package of cigarettes and broke it open standing there, using the time to lean his back against the counter and give the lobby the benefit of his eagle eye.

He picked up his change and went over and sat down with his back to a pillar. He tipped his hat down over his dark glasses and seemed to go to sleep with an unlighted cigarette between his lips.

I got up and wandered over and dropped into the chair beside him. I looked at him sideways. He didn't move.

I struck a match and held the flame to his cigarette. "Light?"
"Oh - thanks," he said, very surprised. ... "Haven't I seen you somewhere
before?"

"Over on Dresden Avenue in Pasadena. This morning."
I could see his cheeks get pinker than they had been. He sighed.
"I must be lousy," he said.
"Boy, you stink," I agreed.
"Maybe it's the hat," he said.²⁰

While the hotel lobby is an interior and sometimes windowless space, it can, it would seem, produce a form of visual agoraphobia. The related motifs of visibility and observing are cinematically signalled in Grand Hotel by the startling view from above of concentric circles of balconies and, in the centre, the circular reception desk. As a response to this agoraphobic sensation, there are defences against being looked at. "Faces disappear behind newspapers",²¹ stoically so in the scene in the Belvedere in The Maltese Falcon. The hotel lobby is a place to meet others but also to avoid the look of others; a place of seeing and being seen - but also of reserve and, as such, lounging in a lobby qualifies as a paradigmatic urban experience as this has been defined by Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer.

Edward Hopper's Hotel Lobby has an exposed feel to it, as though there is no respite from seeing and being seen. And yet it is an enclosed, windowless place. Defences, such as reading, are needed in case one becomes the object of looking; perhaps defences are needed as much in a busy lobby, such as that in Grand Hotel, as in Hopper's austere example, suggesting that there is not that much difference between the "revolving" quality of the busy lobby in Grand Hotel and Hopper's sparsely populated lobby. It is as though Hopper's painting extracts the minimal but essential elements of the lobby: a few people who wait and who, in the main, do not communicate. Kracauer's words - which were not written with Hopper or Grand Hotel in mind - come close to expressing the outcome for those who inhabit these spaces. "What is presented in the hotel lobby is the formal similarity of the figures, an equivalence that signifies not fulfilment but evacuation."²²

In one of the sketches which Hopper made for his painting and which - it seems reasonable to assume - was closer to the actual scene observed, there is an extra person to the left of the couple. The couple are talking or at least looking at each other and the man on the right is not reading, though he is not necessarily looking at the couple. But in the painting, Hopper edits out signs of communication and the people are separated in their chairs. As Kracauer archly remarks, in words which anticipate the damning tone of the opening of Adorno and Horkheimer's 1944 essay, "The Culture Industry", "in tasteful lounge chairs a civilization intent on rationalization comes to an end."²³ In identifying the lobby's combination of boredom, distraction, alienation, displacement, and the quality of someone looking, and in linking this modern space with the detective novel Kracauer - but also Hopper in a different way - asserts a generalized knowledge which arises out of a specific site:

The fact that the structure of the life presented in the detective novel is so typical indicates that the consciousness producing it is not an individual, coincidental one; at the same time, it shows that what has been singled out are the seemingly metaphysical characteristics. ... The composition of the detective novel transforms an ungraspable life into a translatable analogue of actual reality.

And:

In the detective novel, proponents of that society and their functions give an account of themselves and divulge their hidden significance. ... the detective novel really thinks through to the end the society dominated by autonomous Ratio.²⁴

In the way that Kracauer and Hopper present the hotel lobby it, like a church, is a space separated from the modern crowd in the street. Yet it is the inertness of the hotel lobby and the detective novel and not the higher community of "the House of God" which holds Kracauer's attention and he goes so far as to theorize the relationship in question:

Without being an artwork, the detective novel still shows civilized society its own face in a purer way than society is usually accustomed to seeing it. In the detective novel, proponents of that society and their function give an account of themselves and divulge their hidden significance.²⁵

That is to say, the detective novel presents a pared-down reading of the structure and typology of modern society. Composition, even the formulaic composition of a detective story, gives the life experienced in such places as the hotel lobby a form of articulation. By the consistency with which he painted these modern places, Hopper, too, indicates that in them a peculiarly representative kind of life could be discerned. These are still Kracauer's words:

The more life is submerged, the more it needs the artwork, which unseals its withdrawnness and puts its pieces back in place … . The unity of the aesthetic construct, the manner in which it distributes the emphases and consolidates the event, gives a voice to the inexpressive world, gives meaning to the themes broached within it.²⁶

It is the indeterminate character of the hotel lobby, neither fully public nor fully private, and both exposed and enclosed, which provokes comic and disturbing representations alike. The hotel lobby scene in The Graduate is a wonderful comedy of the visually exposed in which the open spaces of the lobby press upon Benjamin. He becomes the centre of attention – or so he feels. Conversely, in Grand Hotel the openness and activity of the lobby are circumscribed by the sense of nothing happening and of a compulsion to repeat this lack of activity. Hence "waiting, waiting". At such moments, what Freud memorably defines as "the uncanny" can be experienced, that combination of the homely and the unhomely, the familiar and the unfamiliar.²⁷ The hotel in Stephen Schneck’s The Nightclerk is just about recognizable as in the tradition of the Waldorf and the hotel in Grand Hotel but now falling into misuse and disuse:

Down at the end of town, at the bottom of Market Street, the monstrous Travelers Hotel occupies a full city block… .

Steeped in the heartbroken tradition of the thirties, the splendid, ruined lobby of the Travelers is hung with wreaths of stale cigar smoke. This lobby, a stage set that was meant to dazzle for a season, has been expecting the wrecker for ages.²⁸

We meet the Nightclerk sitting "at the edge of that dim wasteland of a lobby and, once adjusted to his perspective are introduced not simply to the uncanny quality which has surfaced in other fictional lobbies but explicitly to a modern space which has taken on distinctively modernist dimensions:

There are even some few person who have gone so far as to suspect that this hotel, confined neither to space nor time, has entrances and exits on every dimension. They would have it that there exist five, six, seven hotels, all called the Travelers … .

If it were true, then no man could ever be certain that he had entered the correct hotel.²⁹

But it is the Nightclerk’s lobby which is truly unsettling, in the manner of Hopper’s lobby and Freud’s uncanny:

... the entire lobby of the Travelers Hotel, from unseen ceiling to the vague horizons that one assumes are walls of the lobby, the entire area was a matter of conjecture. Say that it was intuitively perceived, rather than visually defined. The sort of lobby where one found exactly what one thought he would find. And if those shapes were not built into the walls, well then, perhaps they weren't. Perhaps they were something else.³⁰

In Hopper’s Hotel Lobby it is less the surprise of discerning a fourth figure in the painting, a desk clerk in the right middleground, which creates unease than a gradual awareness of the odd angle from which the space is painted and from which we see it and, in seeing it, are drawn into the hotel lobby. Hopper’s hotel lobby, like Siegfried Kracauer’s, is "the space does not refer beyond itself."³¹

END NOTES

1 Henry James,The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 102.

2 Sinclair Lewis, Work of Art: A Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), 177.

3 Lewis, Work of Art, 318 and 316.

4 James Donald, "This, Here, Now: Imagining the Modern City," in Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory, edited by Sallie Westwood and John Williams (London, Routledge, 1997), 183.

5 Grand Hotel, directed by Edmund Goulding (USA, MGM, 1932).

6 Stephen Schneck, The Nightclerk: Being his Perfectly True Confession (London, Panther Books, 1986), 12.

7 William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (New York, Bantam Books, 1960), 30.

8 Vicki Baum, Grand Hotel, translated by Basil Creighton (London, Geoffrey Bles,1930), 2.

9 Quoted in Anthony Vidler, "Agoraphobia: Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer," New German Critique, 54 (Fall 1991), 33.

10 See Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York, Oxford University Press, 1984), 188.

11 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199.

12 See William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, Vintage Books, 1994), 132-33.

13 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995), 175-76.

14 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 176-77.

15 Quoted in David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985), 130-1.

16 Quoted in Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, 132.

17 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 177.

18 Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1963), 11.

19 Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 87 and 88.

20 The Raymond Chandler Omnibus (London, Book Club Associates, 1975), 350.

21 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 183.

22 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 179.

23 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 178.

24 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 175 and 174.

25 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 174.

26 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament,173.

27 Sigmund Freud, "The `Uncanny’" in The Pelican Freud Library, volume 14, translated under the general editorship of James Strachey, edited by Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1985, 335-76. See, also, Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass., MIT, 1992).

28 Schneck, The Nightclerk, 12 and 15.

29 Schneck, The Nightclerk, 13 and 14.

30 Schneck, The Nightclerk, 15-16.

31 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 177.

Ongoing Discussion

Glyn Marshall - University of Nottingham
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September 1998: I agree with your point about the hotel lobby being a revealing site where a broader cultural picture (`a society's often static image of itself') and the local narrative come together. This is a good way of looking at Edward Hopper's Hotel Lobby painting and at Sinclair Lewis in the novel Work of Art. Both commentators generally keep larger aspects of cultural change in mind while focusing in detail upon a small site, which is often an architectural interior. Sinclair Lewis gives sharp, telescopically-focused reports on the fashions and cultural artefacts of change inside some early grand hotels. The term `static image' is similarly revealing for Hopper because it conveys the essence of the artist's microcosmic-macrocosmic way of seeing. Hopper represents the hotel lobby as a type of border area, it is a zonal interior through which people come and go, pass in and out and sometimes loiter between the public world of the city street and the private world of the hotel rooms upstairs. As you say also, Hopper spatializes narrative in the Hotel Lobby painting. What Hopper does most successfully is to implement boundary lines and isolate spatial areas to create possible narrative leads. The four human figures in the painting appear to be isolated and anonymous; and yet Hopper is able to depend upon our acquired generalised knowledge of hotel lobbies to the extent that we will still make preconceived statements about these figures. So it is the assumptions one makes about the seemingly lifeless, mannequin-like people in Hopper's painting that provide us with possible narrative leads. Even though it informs the momentary static image captured by Hopper, one knows that the waiting is really only a temporary state. Furthermore, one realises that the people must have come from somewhere, and so they have an identity and a story behind them, and that they will be going back to the city outside, back to another place, or will enter the private world of the hotel rooms. The narrative leads Hopper instigates, therefore, are suggestive without being fully constructive. In this sense, Hopper's impression of the hotel lobby departs from someone like Siegfried Kracauer, the Weimar commentator you mention, in that it does not fit into a critical programme about modern society but can simply illuminate, in a Situationist-like manner, aspects of cultural change.

My second comment concerns your point about the hotel lobby's small contribution to the redefinition of class as being largely social and economic (p.5). In Hopper and Kracauer a possible interpretation of the hotel lobby is that it represents a neutral space, or gap, within the economic structure of the modern city which has no definite functional purpose within that world. From the sources used I think it fair to say that you define the hotel lobby as representing a somewhat indeterminate space between the public business world of the city, which includes the street outside, and the private realm of the hotel rooms (p.4). Nevertheless, I'm sure that it is not quite that straightforward. I do take your point that the hotel lobby is essentially a modern space which comes fully into existence after the travel and transportation revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. However, in accepting this claim one can overlook the fact that the hotel lobby is therefore created and defined by a strategic economic system designed with the consumer at its centre. In terms of class, then, one can see that the hotel lobby is not really a neutral space at all. Only people with the money to spend on expensive accommodation, and excessive luxury, or those conducting some form of pecuniary transaction, such as in a business meeting, are found in hotel lobbies. And such people are paying or being paid for the privilege. Even the detectives in Marlow's novels are hired men, there for the reason of catching criminals and thus making money. Any slightly grubby-looking lower-class individual (usually these are the crooks) immediately arouses suspicion and is ejected. There are few, if any, people from the lumpen proletariat end of the economic scale found in hotel lobbies and certainly no homeless individuals finding a short-lived refuge in the warmth and among the plush seats. Rather than being a democratised neutral space, therefore, the hotel lobby was always, and remains today, very much a fully functioning class-centred area.

Edward Hopper's hotel lobby interior is clearly designed along the guidelines of modernist consumerism. In the painting one finds a revolving door and an elevator, both of which functioned first in the nineteenth-century department stores. In Hopper's picture a prominent green line on the floor directs our viewing from the revolving door on the left and up to the reception desk, the centre of financial transaction, and the elevator slightly in the shade behind it. One should bear in mind that in the great early department stores of Wanamaker and Siegel-Cooper doorsteps were removed and revolving doors installed for easier access for customers. Also aisles were widened and elevators, and eventually escalators, arrived to maintain a more effective circulatory flow of consumers who could `recover equilibrium, relax and look around (Leach, p.73).' In other words, elevators and revolving doors are instrumental within the early modern era and its evolving consumer system. In the department stores they helped create more vital time and space in which to entice customers to desire and buy. Meanwhile, bargain bazaars for the masses were found in the basements of these buildings while the upper floors catered for (what William Leach terms) the "classes." Just like the hotel lobby, these shop floors were ostensibly "free" to everyone, but in reality they were not. In theory all could visit them, and yet store detectives keenly eyed-up any undesirable poor folk. Only the higher economic classes could afford the luxury of serious purchased lingering, which can be said also of the hotel lobby.

Douglas Tallack's response:
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September 1998: These are astute comments on Hopper which go beyond the use which I make of his painting in my paper. I especially like the idea of narrative leads and it fits well with the painting Hotel Lobby. If there is a difference between us it is simply that I would see both Hopper and Kracauer as offering an ideological critique, of sorts; that is to say, my comment on the spatialising of narrative refers to what I think Hopper and Kracauer criticise in the hotel lobby. To that extent, I would maintain the view that paintings do offer theoretical knowledge (not least about the concept of space) but do so in different ways from texts.