“The Barman of the Ritz” Is No “Casablanca”
In Philippe Collin’s international best-seller, “The Barman of the Ritz,” no one orders Scotch on the rocks. Or Scotch neat. Or, for that matter, bourbon in any form. Anyone displaying such pedestrian tastes would immediately be expelled from the room. Collin’s novel is set during the German Occupation of Paris, from June, 1940, to August, 1944, and it unfolds almost entirely from within the famous Petit Bar, in whose mahogany-and-leather depths French celebrities and German officers seek warmth and camaraderie. A few order such ordinary things as a dry Martini, but, more frequently, they demand champagne—Roederer or Pol Roger. Or, even better, a cocktail devised by the famed barman Frank Meier, a historical figure who is central to the novel. Meier ran the Ritz Hotel’s bar from 1921 until shortly before his death, in 1947. In the course of “The Barman of the Ritz,” he mixes, for his favorite Nazi, Colonel Hans Speidel, a drink that he calls the Golden Clipper: one-fourth each of orange juice, peach brandy, Bacardi, and gin; shake well.
The details of cocktail-mixing, and of many more consequential matters, are central to “The Barman of the Ritz.” Collin, a fifty-one-year-old radio veteran, is famous in France for the thoroughness of his research. In recent years, he has created eight- and ten-hour podcasts devoted to French history, productions so accurate and evocative that even professional historians have praised them. He’s particularly drawn to episodes that are discomforting for his countrymen—the Dreyfus Affair, and, a recent obsession, French accommodation in Nazi rule during the Occupation, a national embarrassment that was long passed over in silence. Collin is a French liberal, a believer in the celebratory triad of liberté, égalité, fraternité. He has come back to the sorest of subjects as a way of protesting his country’s current shift to the right. In the past, he has written graphic novels. “The Barman of the Ritz” is his first words-only work of fiction—and a way of reminding the French where such drifting might lead.
Peeking at this history through a keyhole is a splendid idea, though Collin’s choice of the Ritz was probably irresistible, even overdetermined. During the war, the Nazis seized such luxury hotels as Le Meurice for use by their officers, but the Ritz, on orders from the Nazi leadership, was kept open as the purported center of Paris high life. The front of the enormous building faces the magnificent Place Vendôme. Regular guests entered and departed from that opening. But at the back of the hotel, on the Rue Cambon, Petit Bar became a kind of jewelled artifice, a sanctified space. In life, and in the novel, the German conquerors in their splendid uniforms make debonair remarks, as the French cultural and social figures who frequent the bar—collaborators—are thrilled to remain close to power. The elaborate cocktails become a sentimental signature, an assertion by French and Germans alike that they are members of an élite fraternity transcending nation and war. It is a fiction both sweet and vicious.
Collin takes off from real events and real people who gather at the bar, and embellishes as he sees fit. Yet, however much he makes up, he wants us to believe in the basic veracity of his scheme. The book begins with lists of principal players (“Staff of the Ritz,” “The Nazi Party”) and ends with photographs of the historical figures most central to the novel, including Colonel Speidel, of the Golden Clipper. Collin needs you to believe he got the factual things right. Apart from a few inventions (there is no tunnel, as he writes, running from the Ritz to the Jeu de Paume), he has, I believe, succeeded.
It’s a great setup for a novel, but is it a great novel—or even a good one? Collin works hard at the contrast between indulgent luxe and everyday misery. Outside the bar, Nazi-occupied Paris is a city of sullen and empty streets in which the Jews are rounded up (by French police, on S.S. orders), and ordinary Parisians, under rationing, struggle to procure eggs and milk. The contrast is there, but Collin is limited in what he can represent by the narrow aperture of his view. He gives us a great deal of Frank’s work, the routines of bartending, and the layout of a grand hotel, with its labyrinthine passageways and its sub-basement filled with vintage bottles, carefully placed out of German sight. The ultimate professional, Frank keeps his feelings to himself as he serves such collaborators as the actor and playwright Sacha Guitry, the artist and director Jean Cocteau, and the designer Coco Chanel, not to mention Nazi officers from Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring on down.
Immensely fat and pasty-faced, pullulating and oozing from his morphine addiction, Göring requires his beloved Pink Lady: gin, grenadine, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and egg whites, shaken well. He also takes three baths a day to sweat out his habit, which considerably challenges the hotel’s wartime supply of hot water. The Reichsmarshall speaks of the pleasures of revenge; his principal reason to visit Paris is to steal or buy, often from Jews, as much classic and modern French art as possible, store it in the Jeu de Paume, and spirit it away to Germany. Early in the Occupation, he frequently shows up at the Ritz, but when he goes back to Berlin intellectual menace disappears from the novel, and we miss him. Instead, Collin makes much of Prussian military aristocrats who feel more disdain than love for Hitler, especially General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commandant of Paris from 1942 to 1944. Stülpnagel drops in, makes vague, benevolent pronouncements, and asks Frank to hide little notes for fellow anti-Hitler plotters. The messages are coded in Goethe’s poetry. Everything at the bar is swank, even the conspiracies.
Frank is a minor conspirator himself: for a fee, he obtains forged papers that allow wealthy French Jews to escape the city. Much of the time, however, he understands only parts of the intrigues swirling around him. Born an Austrian Jew, he hides his own identity while protecting two other Jews under the hotel’s roof: the American former film actress Blanche Auzello (née Rubenstein), who is married to the manager of the hotel, and an Italian teen-ager, Luciano, who works as Frank’s apprentice at the bar. Frank haplessly worships Blanche and turns Luciano into a surrogate son.
Frank experiences nothing terrible himself, but he hears atrocious tales of the city from people who come in for a drink. He’s a rather forlorn fellow, stateless, cut off from his family. Collin tries to turn him into an emblematic twentieth-century figure, an absurd hero out of, say, Camus, who can find himself (and also lose himself) only through selfless service. But Frank Meier, as Collin presents him, is not a very interesting protagonist for a novel. He says and thinks the same things over and over—his voluminous personal “diary” is boring. He longs after the beautiful and defiant Blanche, who keeps getting beaten up by the Gestapo, but he never has a sexual thought about her; his love is schoolboyish and distant. He drinks, but he never makes a joke. His self-suppression is a struggle too minor to approach either comedy or tragedy. The only vivid thing about Frank is his anxiety.
Collin’s literary problem is that he needs to stretch a limited range of material over four years of occupation. At times, one feels that he is just keeping the ball in play. People show up, order a drink, say something that may or may not be significant, and then the chapter ends. The celebrity appearances can be so minimal (Cocteau’s, for instance) that they amount to mere name-dropping. Other cultural figures make repeated appearances without Collin bothering to signify why they matter—the brilliant Wehrmacht captain Ernst Jünger, for instance, a literary aristocrat who, when young, celebrated blood-and-soil nationalism but wound up hating the Nazis. Collin makes him a wistful, dull man. Running out of French notables, Collin flashes back to the bar’s glory days in the twenties and thirties, creating a drunken-party scene in which Frank carries F. Scott Fitzgerald to bed, while Ernest Hemingway, obsessed with Frank’s cocktails, stands around and says Hemingwayesque things. Some of this material is just a cut above cliché, a way of providing readers with a smattering of cultural reference.
In the end, Collin’s keyhole strategy produces a rather mild narrative: Until the S.S. walks in (only to disappear) late in the story, danger is always somewhere else. It’s very much a non-heroic book, a Right Bank book. (The Resistance will not show up for cocktails.) All this acquiescence is quite intentional. Collin wanted to produce a guilty text. As he repeatedly makes clear, the hyper-privileged hotel, including its servant Frank Meier, is a product of the Paris haute bourgeoisie that collapsed into collaboration—or worse—during the war. Frank may have become a lacklustre character because Collin created him to serve a didactic purpose: to provide an example of those who succumb to the temptation of going along to get along.
If we lose patience with Frank, there is always the electrifying Marie-Louise Ritz, the widow of the hotel owner César Ritz. Marie-Louise is enraged one minute, subservient the next, bullying the staff while throwing banquets for Nazi officials. She’s extraordinarily unpleasant, and yet, in her own way, a pure being: she cares for nothing but the preservation of her hotel’s status. As Collin presents the French side of the Occupation, the Parisians are either victims, black-market opportunists, or accomplices of one sort or another. His point of view toward the French is split between sympathy and condemnation.
One of the best and most enduringly popular American movies is based on a play called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” an apparently terrible work in which assorted people gather at a café in Morocco in unoccupied Vichy France. Aided by a few stars and an extraordinary roster of refugee actors, Warner Bros. turned the play into “Casablanca,” whose wartime café-society mix of refugees, Nazis, collaborators, and cynical freelancers has held audiences in a state of indescribable pleasure for more than three-quarters of a century. “The Barman of the Ritz” is “Casablanca” without the insolent wit, the irresistible flow, the breathtaking charm of temperament.
Readers looking for more entertaining fictions about the Occupation can turn to “The World at Night” (1996) and “Red Gold” (1999), Alan Furst’s popular novels devoted to the languorous, pleasure-loving French film producer Jean Casson, who seeks accommodation with the Nazis but slowly gets pulled into perilous resistance activity. Furst, a Jewish American from New York, writes thrillers—he’s a moment-by-moment guy, sensual, alert to threats everywhere. Patrick Modiano’s “La Place de l’Étoile,” the first of his three Occupation novels (he was twenty-two when it was published), is a haughty spoof recounting the attitudes of an aristocratic Jewish Nazi during the Occupation, a text jumbling past and present, festooned with attempted outrages: “As a last resort I buy a yacht, The Sanhedrin, which I convert into a high-class brothel.” (The Sanhedrin is a mass convocation of Orthodox rabbis.) Modiano, who later sobered up and wrote fiction that won him a Nobel Prize, is too thrilled by his own daring to write a comprehensible book, but “La Place de l’Étoile” is certainly not conventional or slow-moving, as Collin’s novel is.
The best fiction about the Occupation is by Irène Némirovsky, the daughter of a wealthy Russian Jewish banking family. Némirovsky moved to Paris in 1919, attended the Sorbonne, and wrote a group of successful novels in French in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. After the Germans entered Paris, in 1940, she and her husband, a Russian Jewish banker named Michel Epstein, moved to join their young daughters to the village of Issy-l’Évêque, in Burgundy. In 1942, she was arrested, sent to an internment camp, and then taken to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus. Her husband died in Auschwitz the same year. Their daughters were protected and raised by their nanny. Decades later, Denise Epstein opened a leather case of her mother’s and discovered a manuscript set forth in tiny handwriting. It contained the first two volumes of a projected five-volume novel about the Occupation. They were published as “Suite Française,” in 2006.
Némirovsky devotes the first volume, “Storm in June,” to the comic-pathetic struggles and confusions of a set of families fleeing from Paris. Exquisitely reported detail is leavened by idiosyncratic absurdity—an upper-middle-class bourgeoise who delays her family’s escape to await heirloom linen from the laundry; an employer so petty that he fires a faithful couple working for him because they can’t make their way through chaos to a remote city in two days. The second volume, “Dolce,” is set in a town like Issy-l’Évêque. The Germans have been billeted there for eleven months. Everything in the country breathes; nature and even furnishings are alive, vivid under the stress of uncertainty.
In the sluggishness and repetitiousness of Collin’s podcast book, there is nothing to rival Némirovsky’s novels, which take enormous chances without leaving everyday reality. “Barman” is so earnest, obvious, and slow that I was reminded of Matt Damon’s complaint, while promoting his Netflix film “The Rip,” that executives were instructing writers to restate plot points three or four times in dialogue, to hold the attention of distracted home viewers. Collin, a citizenly Frenchman, seems to have similarly concluded that his audience can’t be expected to attend to anything without constant reinforcement. His mode of reiteration and attenuation is an ominous portent for the future of fiction.
Out of respect for Collin’s factual persistence, I need to assure readers that the Ritz is still, reportedly, a great hotel. The London Telegraph, discriminating in these matters, rates it the best luxury digs in Paris. The Coco Chanel suite, equipped with a steam room and coromandel screens, begins at thirty-six thousand euros, or about forty-two thousand dollars, a night. At the Bar Hemingway, as Frank Meier’s redoubt is now known, a “Paris is a moveable feast” cocktail (Champagne, cognac, Grand Marnier, orange blossom water) costs forty-four euros, or fifty dollars. It seems that Marie-Louise Ritz won her war. ♦