Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was a literary shooting star among the smart
set of the 1920s. Born to Armenian parents as Dikran Kouyoumdjian, he migrated
to London during the First World War, changed his name and reinvented himself
as a dapper man of letters. Determined to be more English than the English – or
‘every other inch a gentleman’, as a joke of the time had it – he became the
self-styled chronicler of the Mayfair set, publishing a string of short story
collections and novels, none more successful than The Green Hat in 1924 (later filmed with Greta Garbo). If you don’t
know the name, this excellent short
piece by Christopher Fowler in The
Independent will give you the facts.
I first encountered him in the pages of Claud Cockburn’s Bestseller (1972), a survey of ‘the
books everyone read 1900-1939’. Cockburn had little time for Arlen or the
celebrity that he so studiously cultivated: ‘[he] was, I believe, the only
novelist to have his trouser-buttons torn off by mobs of fans on the quay at
New York.’ He dismissed the baffling plot of The Green Hat as ‘a hurriedly constructed though highly painted
vehicle in which the reader is to be taken on the conducted tour through an
imaginary England’. And how right he was. The book is a farrago of
improbabilities, of fatuous dialogue and rhythmic, empurpled prose. Let me take
a passage at random, this from the narrator’s first encounter with the
enigmatic, hat-wearing heroine, Iris Storm:
Her eyes were stronger than mine,
even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide
open places. I looked down, and far below, like two pearls in the dust, shone
two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of
her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of
love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was
not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs
of Anaitis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men
would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as the can in their
minds…
Whether two ankles, however comely, could possibly inspire
this stream of quasi-philosophical speculation in an attentive young man is
anyone’s guess. Somehow it didn’t matter, for what Arlen gave his readers was
the illusion of reading about fashionable people leading ‘racy’ lives, all
evoked in a language of baroque ornamentation – a winning formula that made him
a millionaire, at least until taste started to move away from him in the 1930s.
In his own first novel, Burmese Days (1934),
George Orwell conjured up an image of Arlen’s typical reader in typical reading
posture:
Elizabeth lay on the sofa in the
Lackersteens’ drawing-room, with her feet up and a cushion behind her head,
reading Michael Arlen’s These Charming
People. In a general way Michael Arlen was her favourite author…
However unreadable his writings, Arlen interests me because
he had all manner of connections to other people whose reputations have held up
better than his own. A friend of DH Lawrence, he turns up in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) as the
playwright Michaelis. One of the many lovers of Nancy Cunard (she nicknamed him ‘The Baron’), he vied for her affections with
Aldous Huxley, who as early as 1915 was writing in a letter of Lawrence’s plans
to decamp the ‘deserts of Florida’ with an ‘Armenian’. Later, Huxley speared Arlen
in print as a character in Those Barren
Leaves (1925). Lightly disguised as ‘the swarthy Syrian with the blue jowl
and the silver monocle’, he ‘never lost an opportunity of telling people he was
a poet; he was forever discussing the inconveniences and compensating
advantages of possessing an artistic temperament’. (Cunard, I should add, is supposedly
the model for Iris Storm, although the wife of our esteemed Chancellor also
stakes a claim for Idina Sackville in her book The Bolter (2008)).
Arlen influenced the young Scott Fitzgerald, too, an influence that Ernest Hemingway deplored. He bankrolled the first production of Noël Coward’s
play The Vortex (1924). When Anthony
Powell came down from Oxford, he was naturally drawn to lodge in Shepherd
Market because that’s where the seduction scene in The Green Hat was set (yes, those pearly ankles again). Rebecca
West spent General Election Night 1929 in Arlen’s company at an all-night party
at Selfridge’s, although she was later to write sniffily of his work as ‘a
mixture of the genuine article and advertising copy’.
Surprisingly, there is no biography of this once
all-conquering novelist.* A good friend of mine is a relative of his, and with
her help, I nosed around the possibility of attempting one. Arlen’s son (a
rather better writer than his father, if truth be told) is still alive and resident
in New York, where Arlen père moved
after a final snub from the English society he so longed to join. Michael J’s
response to my approaches was to advise that everything he had to say about his
father he had said in his own memoir, Exiles
(1971). A very fair response: it’s a fine book and paints a memorable
picture of the ageing novelist in ‘retirement’, now forgotten by the public and
afflicted by writer’s block:
…from downstairs, just below my
room, from the library I’d hear these footsteps. Footsteps pacing. Back and
forth. It was a small room really, the library. I don’t know how many times he
must have walked around it. The big desk up against the curtains. The paper
laid out for him. The pencils. His favourite pen. The books all around…
Perhaps, instead of a biography, there is an essay in the
history of the taste waiting to be written. How do the ‘books everyone read’
ninety years ago become the books that no one reads?
*Harry Keyishian’s volume in the Twayne’s English Authors
Series (1975) is primarily a work of literary criticism, although it contains much
useful biographical material and remains the only book-length study of this
author.
