Hotels are part of our collective imagination, and literature has drawn on this

“I arrive at the Savoy Hotel at ten in the morning, determined to rest for a few days or a week. I have just returned from three years as a prisoner of war; I lived in a Siberian camp and wandered through Russian villages and towns, working as a labourer, a day labourer, a night watchman, a porter and a baker’s assistant. I’m wearing a red shirt given to me by I don’t know whom, shorts inherited from a fallen comrade, and boots—still wearable—that I myself can no longer remember where they came from. It is the first time, in five years, that I find myself at the gates of Europe.” These are memorable lines, which open one of Joseph Roth’s lesser-known novels. At the Hotel Savoy, amidst dusty corridors and rooms through which one glides in silence, Roth brings to life a bygone era and a diverse array of humanity, comprising war veterans ‘as gaunt as the risen dead’, variety show dancers waiting to ‘go to Paris’, disorganised refugees, sleazy pimps, naive revolutionaries and hopeless outcasts. The hotel featured in the novel is situated in the city of Łódź, which in 1919 – the year in which the story is set – passed to Poland after having belonged to Austria-Hungary. The novel was serialised in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1924 and tells the story of Gabriel Dan, an Austrian officer and the son of Russian Jews, who arrives – filthy and malnourished – at this majestic and austere hotel with 864 rooms spread over seven storeys, where the displaced and fugitives converge. “Red light bulbs glowed in the corridors; shoes, boots and women’s flat shoes lay outside the doors, each as expressive as a human face. But on the seventh floor, no light bulbs were lit; only a faint glow filtered through the opaque glass. A thin, yellow beam shone through a crack – it was room 800: a restless creature must have been staying there.”

Hotel Savoy is a story of unease. Unease that Roth knew all too well; indeed, one need only leaf through "Ombre folli" (Adelphi), his correspondence with Stefan Zweig, to come across phrases along these lines: "I am always on the move; I have no fixed address". And consider the headings of those letters: ever-changing hotels, guesthouses and inns, mapping out the geography of a Europe on the brink of conflagration. Lviv, Warsaw, Marseille, Paris. “I’ve been in Berlin for nine months now,” he lamented in a letter dated April 1930, “and it has been the worst period of my life”. Hotel Savoy, too, is a snapshot of a troubled era, of heart-wrenching collective and private anxieties, and that hotel – a veritable ‘hotel-novel’ – is not only the stage for the story but also its ramshackle dressing room, in whose mirror a generation looks itself in the face only to find itself weary, defeated and without prospects. Every character in the novel, both saved and imprisoned by the Savoy, drifts aimlessly, waiting to make sense of it all. A Fortress Bastiani in Art Nouveau style, whilst they spy on the lives of others and have no idea what to do with their own. “In there, everyone seemed to me to be shrouded in mystery,” Dan says at one point. At the Savoy Hotel, there is only one indisputable truth: the high and mighty on the lower floors, the penniless on the upper floors.

A reversal of hierarchy (as well as of style and narrative) by Roth in another great, yet very different, hotel novel, set a few years later, much like Georges Simenon’s "The Basements of the Majestic": a crime thriller set against the backdrop of a world divided even more sharply into two. Here, the true protagonist is the labyrinth of cellars, small doors and service staircases that swallow up the busy, diligent staff of a luxury hotel. On the top floors, life is opulent and elegant, and proceeds according to rituals very different from those that govern and rule the frantic hive of activity below. “At half past seven in the morning, at least thirty people were already bustling about in the cellars of the Majestic,” Simenon recounts. “The first bell rings could be heard, and the dumbwaiters began to descend, stop, and set off again with their trays. At that hour, the day porter in his blue uniform took charge of the lobby, whilst in a tiny cubicle a clerk sorted the post. The sun must have been shining on the Champs-Élysées, but down in the cellars one could only guess at the passage of buses, which made the partition walls vibrate. (…) Meanwhile, the lobby had come to life, but no one could have suspected the tragedy that had unfolded whilst everyone was asleep.”

In novels, hotels are often the setting for crimes committed within their rooms. Closed doors harbour secrets, enigmatic figures and impenetrable lives. The corridors are places of half-light and conjecture. But why are we so fascinated by hotels? Why has literature depicted them so frequently? Twentieth-century literature in particular, of course, and at least one reason is obvious: grand hotels emerged in the mid-19th century and soon became recognised venues for high society, grand spectacle and vivid dramatisation. An art form, too. But it would be reductive to stop there. For the fruitful relationship between places of hospitality and literature does not rely solely on opulence, but draws, more generally, on the symbolic power of a place that simulates a home yet, in fact, permits only passage. Hotels, guesthouses: intimate and, in a sense, revealing places, yet at the same time capable of concealing and misrepresenting. Places of truth or of lies? Of clarity or of obscurity? Places where rituals are performed. Places where the carpet muffles a nocturnal footstep, whilst the creaking of an old wooden staircase makes it audible (and ominous).

Hotels are part of our collective imagination, and literature has made the most of this. In 2007, the Touriseum in Munich hosted an exhibition of various literary works set against the backdrop of a grand hotel. But it is not only literary history that has told the story of hotels. To a large extent, literature has also been created within hotels. Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was, of course, short of money, wrote delirious letters to his wife in May 1867 from squalid rooms in cheap guesthouses in Saxon-les-Bains, which would later inspire his novels. At the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, you can visit room 511, where Ernest Hemingway stayed for seven years and in which he wrote letters and memoirs. Tennessee Williams lived for years at the Hotel Elysée in New York. Oscar Wilde died whilst staying at a hotel. The Montreux Palace hosted Vladimir Nabokov and his wife for years. Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe were regulars at the Chelsea Hotel. Truman Capote claimed to have been born at the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans, and at the Plaza on 28 November 1966, to celebrate the publication of "In Cold Blood" and the two million dollars it earned him from sales, royalties and translations, he organised the Black and White Ball, a magnificent masked ball. Agatha Christie wrote "Assassinio sull’Orient Express" at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, whilst the Sofitel Legend Old Cataract in Aswan inspired "Assassinio sul Nilo". Marcel Proust was a frequent guest, taking part in numerous receptions and even attending the opening ceremony on 1 June 1898 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

Luxury hotels or seedy taverns, dream rooms or stinking hovels, top-floor suites or squalid corners in filthy brothels: whatever the quality or reputation of the establishment in which the protagonist of a story stays, survives or locks themselves away, the hotel transforms every tale into an emblematic situation, the ideal form of allusion. “Harry and Duke and a bottle. The bottle in the middle. We’re in a shabby hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. It’s Saturday night, in one of the cruelest cities in the world” is the splendid opening line of “Fica a stufo”, a short story by Charles Bukowski found in “Stories of Ordinary Madness”, a place only slightly less squalid than another literary hotel, the one described by Leonard Gardner in “Fat City”, a great novel about boxing and failure.

“He was staying at the Coma Hotel – which had perhaps been named after some founder of the city, some Californian explorer or some Italian immigrant who’d died who knows when and who’d simply founded the hotel, and that was that. Whoever it was dedicated to, it was still a rubbish hotel, and Billy Tully had no intention of staying there. Since his wife had left him, he’d changed hotels five times in a year and a half. From his window, he looked out over the shabby skyline of Stockton – a city of eighty thousand souls surrounded by marshes, rivers and the fertile fields of the San Joaquin Delta. Along the pavements beneath his window, men wandered between bars and off-licences, second-hand shops and love hotels. His room was tall and narrow. Grease stains darkened the wallpaper between the wooden slats of the bed. The curtain was torn, the light bulb dim, and all his neighbours seemed to have lung problems.”

A hotel is a point in space. What lies outside the window is also part of it. What does it show us? It is a view, a perspective. Stephen King knows a thing or two about this, as does Stanley Kubrick: it is impossible to forget the opening scenes of "The Shining", when we travel along the road to reach our destination. Of the hotel which, par excellence, will become a source of claustrophobic horror, King emphasises precisely the view. “The Overlook comprises one hundred and ten rooms, thirty of which – all suites – are on the third floor. Ten in the west wing, including the presidential suite; ten in the main block; and ten in the east wing. And every one of them offers a spectacular view.” The tone soon changes; the trouble lies within: “Top floor,” said Ullman curtly. ‘It’s the attic. There’s absolutely nothing up there, apart from a bit of junk. The Overlook has changed hands several times since the end of the Second World War, and it seems that the various managers who have come and gone have shoved everything they didn’t like up into the attic. I want mousetraps and poisoned bait set out there. The maids on the third floor claim to have heard rustling noises up there. Needless to say, he will not allow his son to go up into the attic under any circumstances.”

A great noir novel from 1959 that features the hotel as a symbolic setting is André Héléna’s “The Guests of the Central Hôtel”, set in the days leading up to the Normandy landings. “Everything here was temporary,” writes Héléna. “It was as though those men and women had boarded the same ship. For the time being, they were all heading to the same place. They shared the same existence, the same fate, for a few days and a few hours; then their paths would part and they would never hear from one another again. They would forget each other. They would also have forgotten the Central Hôtel, a small hotel in the centre of Perpignan, whose two doors opened onto narrow, deserted streets.” Michele Mari wrote of the hotel’s narrative function in the preface: “The hotel is nothing more than a theatrical stage where characters take turns, combining in various ways: and what happens outside, as in classical theatre, is merely recounted.”

Different writers, vastly different genres: whether it be the winter hotel in the entry for “Hotel” in Parise’s Sillabari, the ramshackle headquarters of the Liberty Hotel where Evelyn Waugh set A Special Envoy, the Occidental Hotel in Kafka’s America where Karl Rossmann agrees to work only to be subsequently thrown out, the thoroughly bourgeois holiday hotel in Arthur Schnitzler’s “Miss Else”, the Hotel Metropol in Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow”, the Hotel des Bains on the Lido in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, or the Grand Hotel in Balbec so dear to Proust (and which, modelled on the one in Cabourg, becomes a vantage point from which to observe the world: the protagonist will meet the painter Elstin and Albertine there, a ‘young cyclist with rosy cheeks’), for any writer, the hotel is a narrative opportunity to be exploited to the full. The Viennese author Wicki Baum will devote a trilogy to hotels: "Grand Hotel" (also a film starring Garbo in 1932), "Hotel Shanghai" and "Hotel Berlin".

Perhaps the cynical Dr Otternschlag, a regular guest at the Grand Hotel and a jaded observer of the human condition, really did sum it up perfectly. His famous line was: “Grand Hotel: people come, people go, and everything always stays the same”. This is the charm of the hotel: life can get along perfectly well without us.