Lowry spent six weeks in Germany learning German in September/October 1928. Many of the German references in Lowry's work stem from this visit. Lowry told Clemens ten Holder in a letter dated 23/4/1951; ".....that was the only class I took with Herr Schmidhus, who mostly dealt with advanced students, but then that was almost the only thing I learned at all in Bonn, outside the bar of the Hotel Rheinischer Hof." (Collected Letters Vol 2 Pg. 373).
Lowry refers to the hotel in his novel Ultramarine when Dana and Popplereuter are talking during their drunken drift around Dairen; " 'Well I know.' Popplereuter took a long breath. 'I think you are very lucky and young. I must tell you that I am trying to forget. I got news here, my little girl, my little love, daughter of the house, of Hotel Rheinischer Hof. She has just got married. Oh. Hans is very unhappy, very, very, very unhappy.' " (Pg. 91). Later Lowry makes reference to the hotel in his filmscript for Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night; "Koln slides down to RHEINISCHER HOF and Rheinischer Hof to WEINLUST, these two having been simply the signs across the front of bars inside which Dick can be seen drinking alone as if one were looking in from the sidewalk." (The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: a scholarly edition of Lowry's "Tender is the Night" Edited by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen Pg. 207)
No comments:
Post a Comment