The Mayflower Hotel is the setting for the professional climax of Thelonious Ellison’s brief return to Washington: the conference session where he presents a paper to the Nouveau Roman Society. The hotel links a reluctant family visit to a public encounter with a literary organization whose members already seem to know his reputation.

Place in the Washington Visit

Ellison comes to Washington to present a paper for which he has only moderate enthusiasm. His decision to attend the Nouveau Roman Society meeting has little to do with affection for its mission or members; his mother and sister still live in the city, and three years have passed since his last visit. The Mayflower therefore becomes the site where the trip’s family and professional purposes converge, even as Ellison doubts the value of both.

The hotel where Ellison is staying is not identified as the Mayflower. After his sister drops him there following dinner, he finds a note slipped under his room door asking him to return a call to Linda Mallory at the Mayflower. He goes to his lodging’s lobby to telephone her. The distinction between the two hotels matters to the sequence: the Mayflower is the conference destination and Mallory’s location, while Ellison’s own hotel is his starting point that evening and the next morning.

The Call from Linda Mallory

Mallory tells Ellison that she had hoped he would attend the conference and explains that his department secretary provided his hotel information. The call comes on the eve of his scheduled nine o’clock presentation, interrupting his intention to go to bed early and perhaps sleep through the event. The Mayflower thus enters the visit first as the place from which a professional contact reaches him, drawing him toward an appearance he has privately treated as nearly inconsequential.

Conference and Presentation

The next morning, Ellison eats breakfast alone in his hotel’s dining room and walks down Connecticut Avenue to the Mayflower. The chilly, gray weather matches his unsettled mood; he feels lost and questions why he made the trip. More people attend his session than he expected, and their clearing throats and near-muttering make him suspect that his reputation has arrived before, or alongside, him.

The session opens with a paper on Beckett, framed as a discussion of what the writer might have produced had he lived longer and encountered a different kind of acceptance. Ellison then reads his own paper, titled “F/V: PLACING THE EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL.” He expects it to offend some listeners, though he thinks their irritation may take time to surface. At the Mayflower, his professed lack of stakes gives way to visible tension: he is serious about the argument and enters a room whose response suggests that his standing precedes his words.