|
|
John Potter, Chairman of the Arnold Bennett Society, has written this introduction especially for the website:
The fact that one of Arnold Bennett's first novels (Grand Babylon Hotel, 1902) and one of his last (Imperial Palace, 1930) were both based on the Savoy Hotel in London, though he made a half-hearted attempt to deny it in the case of Imperial Palace, illustrates the lifelong interest which he maintained in the intricacies of the organisation of the day-to-day running of large entities such as hotels, stores and even ocean liners. In the case of hotels he also acquired, as soon as he was in a position to afford it, a taste for their expensive luxury. He wrote Grand Babylon Hotel after being taken to tea at the Savoy, and later frequented the hotel regularly for some twenty years, getting to know as friends some of the key figures in its history, including George Reeves Smith, managing director for many years and Richmond Temple, the publicity chief. It was Temple who, in 1927, took AB on an extensive tour of the Savoy, from top to bottom through all the many service departments, and this information did much to assure the authentic atmosphere of Imperial Palace.
The novel is AB's longest. Like Grand Babylon Hotel, a part of the storyline concerns the transfer of control of the business, but the mysterious and nefarious comings and goings which fill the earlier book are replaced by an emphasis on the daily lives and problems of the staff. Once again, Bennett himself and his personal life, though without direct parallel, are mirrored in certain facets of the novel. A case could be made for Evelyn Orcham, Director of the Imperial Palace, being a dream-role for Arnold Bennett. Certainly he has some of the same attributes, including both punctiliousness and punctuality and the 'funny teeth' noted by the housekeeper-to-be, Violet Powler. It is also easy, though not necessarily correct, to compare Gracie Savott with Dorothy Cheston, the mother of AB's daughter, and the steady, reliable housekeeper, Violet, with his secretary for twenty years, Winifred Nerney. From that point it is a short step to a contention since made by several people--that Bennett should have married his secretary.
All that, however, is outside the book itself, which contrives to embrace painlessly a wealth of statistical information and to make organisational detail sound interesting, from the laundry in South London to the huge wine-cellars which extend down towards the Embankment. It is a measure of Bennett's influence that some of the internal feuds and controversies which take place as part of the story were later taken up by the Savoy Hotel itself, where the archives still include a caricature which links actual staff members with counterparts in the book. Bennett's fame, however is better served (literally) by an item which still appears on the Savoy Menu--the Arnold Bennett Omelette.
The last sentence perhaps expresses a philosophy which Bennett may have learned through the great assortment of his lifetime experience, and which accords completely with the cautious, commonplace ethos of the Five Towns. "He said to himself: 'There's a lot of things in this world you'll never get the hang of. And only idiots try to'."
© John Potter, 2002
A sample chapter of Imperial palace is available on this website.
The full text can also be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 314kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option. Link to the full text of Imperial palace.
Page created 25 November 2002 and last
updated 12 March 2002
For your literary enquiries and comments please see the Who to contact page.
Please read the general terms and conditions and about accessibility on this site, including the use of the UK government accesskeys system. Further details on ICRA labelling, visitor counts and EnrichUK may be obtained by following these external links:-
|
|