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.
