Joanna Walsh - Hotel

If I lose my symptoms, I may disappear.

They are eggshells of desire.

Cast:

Wilde:

a playwright

English person:

a registrar

New Zealander:

a patient

Leo:

a playwright

Groucho:

an entrepreneur

Repo Man:

a repo man

Margaret Dumont:

a straight woman

Chico:

a Marx Bro.

Hotel Inspector:

a hotel inspector

Woman:

a love interest

Harpo:

a-phonic

When they could no longer stand it, or themselves, Freud’s clients went to a hotel. And when a hotel no longer met their needs, they moved to a spa, then to sanatorium, where, sometimes, they would die.

The first hospitals were little different from almshouses. Hospitals were for the poor, who could not be treated at home, whose ailments excluded them from home. Hotels, whose treats cannot be given at home, are for the rich — both are bound to their clients by cash, or lack of it.

OSACR WILDE

(In a hotel)

I am dying beyond my means.

The first hospitals’ guests also lacked social capital — children, the sick, the elderly, those who could not do home work — and also those who would not, whose refusal made them indecent: prostitutes, unmarried mothers, the homeless, the disabled, the unacceptable, and those whose mental symptoms would now be treated in a clinic. The poor were more likely to be indecent, and the indecent were more likely to be hidden in hospitals. Even the unhomely must find a home somewhere.

Oscar Wilde was arrested at a hotel in London, for “gross indecency.” At his trial he was forced to defend the decency of his writing, which was brought in evidence against him. Sometimes words enact off the page. Sometime later, Wilde died in a hotel in Paris, right across the river from God’s hotel — The Hotel Dieu — which is a hospital. A hospital (in premedical times, when it was also an almshouse) used to be more like a hospice. It was for terminal decline. A cure was not expected. It was an overnight stop between this world and the next, where no one lived for long.

Let’s decline:

To be hospitable.

To be hostile.

To be hospital.

To be hospice.

Now there are even hotels in hospitals, 1so the well can stay alongside the sick, though in different quarters now disease is no longer familiar, but a private matter (common factors: the possibilities of service, cleanliness, ghosts, death, authority, hospitality, and being thrown out). Both guests and patients are given over to the care of strangers. I worked in a hospice for a while. It was white, mostly. Some patients like to decorate their rooms, I was told; others leave them blank: white walls, white sheets. Some people prefer to make an end only in somewhere that looks a hotel.

I have also stayed in the hotel where Oscar Wilde died, but not in his room. The wallpaper in the Wilde Room, which I did not see, is not white, but richly colored and patterned. I stayed in another room that overlooked the back of the hotel.

WILDE

(Dying)

Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

This is a misquote. He really said, “The wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” 2This is not parapraxis but elision. Time’s elided too: I have read that Wilde said this several weeks before he died. Still, it is a joke and, like a hospital, and a hotel, a joke draws attention to the fact that it contains something that also remains hidden.

ENGLISH REGISTRAR

Did you come here to die?

NEW ZEALAND PATIENT

(Perhaps KM)

No, I came here yester-die.

Perhaps it was not a registrar, but a receptionist; perhaps the patient mistook the hospital for a hotel. It’s easy enough: many jokes take place in hotels; most involve a misunderstanding between the server and the served. Well I guess it serves them both right. This joke triangulates on our knowing how British and New Zealand English enact off the page. Most puns depend on a familiarity with the unfamiliar. Many jokes involve strangers. Most jokes deal with anxiety that, Freud said, is the reenactment of the memory of an approaching terror. No one likes to speak of death, especially in a hospital, or a hotel.

I

In Room Service (1938), the Marx Bros. are living at a hotel. They are theater producers. They cannot pay their bill, and they are waiting for a visit from a backer, who will bring a check. They want to continue to stay in the hotel but are afraid of being caught out by the hotel manager, who is being watched by the hotel inspector, who, he says, is being surveyed by his company from which he hopes for promotion. Dora is surveyed severally — by her father, Herr K, and Freud, who recounts their accounts. Dora’s mother and Frau K do not surveil her, or this surveillance is not reported by Freud.

In order to remain in the hotel, the Marx Bros. must appear to be ill or, rather, Leo (Frank Albertson), the writer of their play, must appear to develop symptoms. They paint spots on Leo’s face. He has a tapeworm, they tell the hotel manager, and laryngitis. Like Dora, he cannot speak. Then he really becomes sick. It’s difficult to tell somata from genuine illness.

The symptoms are produced by the producers’ lack of money (in the Marx Bros.’ movies someone is always going bankrupt).

LEO

Say what kind of a hotel is this? You move in and you owe $600 right away.

Someone knocks at the Marx Bros.’ hotel room door:

GROUCHO

Shh. money!

They are expecting their theater backer’s agent, but it is the REPO MAN trying to claim a payment on Leo’s typewriter.

GROUCHO

He tore up all his money.

REPO MAN

He must be out of his mind.

Where did they take him?

GROUCHO

The maternity hospital.

REPO MAN

The maternity hospital? But I thought you said he was crazy.

GROUCHO

Well if he wasn’t crazy, he wouldn’t go to the maternity hospital.

There are no mothers in the plot of Room Service , no Margaret Dumont to chase Groucho, as she does in seven of the other Marx Bros. movies, just two young women, who do not pursue anyone, but who are both love interests.

WILDE

All women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy.

The two women in the play are one-man women, and the men are one-woman men. No one is exchangeable for anyone else and there are not enough women to go around. In Room Service there are no girls for Harpo to chase, as there are in other Marx Bros. movies, though the movie poster shows him chasing a miniskirted chambermaid. Instead he watches the lovers in the park. As he must stay in the hotel, and all the women in the hotel are spoken for, he must watch them through the hotel window, as if they were a silent film.

(Dora avoids watching lovers in the street. They disgust her.)

The theater backer will fund the Marx Bros.’ play, he says, if they will give a part to his girlfriend, but there is no part for her. As in Room Service itself, most of the cast of Leo’s play is male.

GROUCHO

The young lady can play one of the miners.

(Is there a joke about minors here? Dora was fourteen when Herr K first kissed her.)

LEO

But the miners are all men!

GROUCHO

Do me a favour and keep sex out of this conversation.

I’ve never produced anything but clean plays!

GROUCHO claimed his female straight man, Dumont, was his most successful foil because she never understood what was indecent about his jokes.

MARGARET DUMONT:

There is an art to playing the straight role. You must build up your man but never top him, never steal the laughs. 3