Love at the Table d'H

By Le Anne Schreiber

THE LITTLE HOTEL

by CHRISTINA STEAD 191 pages. Holt, Rinehart& Winston.

$6.95.

Ships of fools and modern hostelries continue to do the job that mead halls and pilgrimages did for earlier eras of writers. They provide a place where assorted folk can tell their tales, show their colors and generally present themselves for inspection. In The Little Hotel, Australian Novelist Christina Stead, 74, has assembled a crew as sad, funny and perverse as any ever gathered together in the name of art.

Mme. Bonnard, whose chatty recollections make up most of the novel, is the quizzical young patronne of a marginally respectable pension just after World War II in Switzerland. Her clientele are a score of moneyed drifters whose principal interest is in living comfortably beneath their means. They include the manic Belgian mayor of B., who writes dotty memoirs on the rims of hotel towels and thinks everyone is a German spy; the curmudgeonly "Admiral," a half-deaf, near-blind British dowager who always seems to be bellowing for an elevator that never comes; and the defiantly gay Princess Bili, whose frenzied affection is divided between an absent Italian gigolo and an ever-present Sealyham dog that "sings" D'ye Ken John Peel? Waiting upon this odd lot of aging Everymen is an equally bizarre collection of German, Swiss, French and Italian servants who trade ethnic insults and intrigue against (and occasionally fall in love with) one another.

Thrown together by circumstance, the patrons impinge upon each other's lives, become entangled, but never really make connection. "They are very nice, but I can't go on all my life trying to love people at the table d'hote," complains Mrs. Trollope, a still beautiful Eurasian heiress who dreams of living a settled, grandmotherly life in London. But her movements--like those of all the guests--are charted on another course, often determined by the rates of exchange. Obsessed with money, these inveterate wayfarers remain paying guests not only in the hotel but in one another's lives, never fully possessing anything, particularly themselves.

People Suffer. It is this pattern of self-inflicted frustration that gives The Little Hotel its coherence and links to earlier Stead novels like The House of All Nations (1938), an onslaught on the venal world of high finance, and The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a chronicle of domestic agony that Clifton Fadiman once described as "Little Women rewritten by a demon." The author's tone has mellowed, however. As Mrs. Trollope, the only character who manages to free herself from the bondage of the bankbook, observes, "People suffer and we call them names; but all the time they are suffering. I know I am not clever: it's partly because I cannot believe that life is meant to be ugly."

When last heard of, Mrs. Trollope has set off on a hopeful search for stability. One suspects, though, that the author may have decided that "trying to love people at the table d'hote" is just about as good a deal as anybody ever gets in life. "You are always astonished at how people can muddle their lives," Madame Bonnard concludes. The reader nods in agreement and suddenly realizes that this collection of freaks and trimmers have taken on the unquestionable, tantalizing reality of lives lived within earshot. Put down the book and they will still be there, as muddled as anyone you know.

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