years (and less than two years) ago, nobody in America who was anybody
in America (or anywhere else) had heard of Michael Arlen. I will not
conceal the dark fact that two books of his, entitled _A London Venture_
and _The Romantic Lady_, had been published in America.
However, two years ago (as I write) there was published in America a
novel called “_Piracy_.” No reason existed why people should buy it
and read it, apart from the usual totally inadequate one of the book’s
merits. Yet people did buy it and read it. People said: “This is rather
nice!” “_Piracy_” sold. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Spanish
Main. If it took life—and perhaps it did take a life or two, socially
speaking—it did so, in Mrs. Wharton’s words describing the methods of old
New York society, “without effusion of blood.”
And early this year (1924) there was published a book called _These
Charm_—Exactly.
Well, it was so gay, so well-mannered, so witty, so far more than so-so
that women of the most varied taste (and even strong prejudices) raved
over it, and men of the most invariable taste bought as many as six to a
dozen copies to give away to their friends.
The success of Michael Arlen’s new novel, _The Green Hat_, has thus been
rendered a mere matter of dispersing the good news. It will not do to
broadcast it; one must be a little particular in matters of this sort. At
the most, it is permitted casually to mention the fact that a new novel
by Michael Arlen is about. Quite of course, one cannot decently say more
than that _The Green Hat_ is a well-polished affair; for still more of
course, it isn’t the hat but the head beneath it which counts.
The head belongs to Michael Arlen.
(As far as _The Green Hat_ goes, the woman of the green hat was Iris
March, “enchanting, unshakeably true in friendship, incorrigibly loose
in love,” as the disturbed reviewer for the _London Times_ puts it.
“Everything she does has an unnatural elegance and audacity,” he went on.
But what had she done? She had broken a good many hearts before marriage
and one afterward; she had turned a lover into a husband and then into
a cynic; and what she did to Napier Harpenden and his young wife should
have been unpardonable. _Should._ “It is with a sense of having been
cheated that we witness her final whitewashing.” You see how upset he is,
though one cannot say he is outraged, can one, when he talks about a lady
like that?...)
ii
Londoners apparently know him as a dark, handsome, suave person who
circulates in Mayfair. Travellers away from London report his presence at
the correct season in Paris, Monte Carlo, and Biskra (not to mention the
Riviera). He is outwardly one of the gay rout. He is inwardly—— Well, I
don’t know whether he would want me to mention.
Librarians (some librarians) are relentless persons, however charming.
They ferret. They discover things, and then they root them out. Or at any
rate, they make Records. Among other things of which they make Records
are the True Names of Authors. Was Mr. Tarkington, in infancy, Newton
Booth Tarkington? Then it goes on the librarian’s card. Was Joseph Conrad
born Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski? Then no well-trained librarian
ever completely ignores the fact. An author, in the circumstances, cannot
take too much pains to be born and christened aright.
Occasionally the librarians make a grievous mistake—as when they
identified Rebecca West as Regina Miriam Bloch. Caught in this astounding
error, I believe they have now insisted that she is Cecily Fairfield.
Yet they must be aware that both in England and America the law permits
anyone to change his name at will. If he be consistent in the change,
and if he use the new name and induce those who know him to use it, it
becomes his lawful name. The sole purpose of going to court about a
change of name is to make it a matter of public record—important when the
title to property comes up for search. Rebecca West is—simply Rebecca
West.
All this is to a point, for already the librarians have rushed to affix
to Michael Arlen the name Dikran Kuyumjian. Not only do they tack this
name on him, they give it preference. I have before me a clipping from
a periodical which is widely relied upon by librarians in making their
records and buying their books. And this periodical begins a notice of
_These Charming People_ as follows:
KUYUMJIAN, DIKRAN (MICHAEL ARLEN, pseud.)
Where they got it, goodness, or rather badness, only knows. I suppose
they chanced to learn that Michael Arlen is of Armenian blood. I have
nothing to say against Dikran Kuyumjian as an excellent Armenian name.
But I imagine Mr. Arlen may have something to say to the founders,
editors and reporters of this periodical. I can only hope that, as his
English is polite and polished, and as they appear to be versed in a
foreign tongue, he will say it in Armenian.
iii
Of course, the fact that he _is_ an Armenian lends a joyous piquancy to
one of the tales in _These Charming People_. You remember the one where
Mr. Michael Wagstaffe impersonated greatly? It is called “The Man With
the Broken Nose,” and as your copy of the book has been borrowed and
never returned, I will quote it for you:
“The dark stranger walked silently but firmly. He was a tall young man
of slight but powerful build; his nose, which was of the patrician sort,
would have been shapely had it not once been broken in such a way that
forever after it must noticeably incline to one side; and, though his
appearance was that of a gentleman, he carried himself with an air of
determination and assurance which would, I thought, make any conversation
with him rather a business. There was any amount of back-chat in his dark
eyes. His hat, which was soft and had the elegance of the well-worn, he
wore cavalierly. Shoes by Lobb.
“At last a picture rose before our eyes, a large picture, very blue. Now
who shall describe that picture which was so blue, blue even to the grass
under the soldiers’ feet, the complexions of the soldiers’ faces and the
rifles in the soldiers’ hands? Over against a blue tree stood a man, and
miserably blue was his face, while the soldiers stood very stiffly with
their backs to us, holding their rifles in a position which gave one no
room to doubt but that they were about to shoot the solitary man for some
misdemeanor. He was the loneliest looking man I have ever seen.
“‘Manet,’ said Tarlyon.
“The dark young stranger was absorbed; he pulled his hat a little lower
over his left eye, so that the light should not obtrude on his vision....
“‘Come on,’ I whispered to Tarlyon, for we seemed to be intruding—so that
I was quite startled when the stranger suddenly turned from the picture
to me.
“‘You see, sir,’ he said gravely, ‘I know all about killing. I have
killed many men....’
“‘Army Service Corps?’ inquired Tarlyon.
“‘No, sir,’ snapped the stranger. ‘I know nothing of your Corps. I am a
Zeytounli.’
“‘Please have patience with me,’ I begged the stranger. ‘What is a
Zeytounli?’
“He regarded me with those smoldering dark eyes; and I realized vividly
that his nose had been broken in some argument which had cost the other
man more than a broken nose.
“‘Zeytoun,’ he said, ‘is a fortress in Armenia. For five hundred years
Zeytoun has not laid down her arms, but now she is burnt stones on
the ground. The Zeytounlis, sir, are the hill-men of Armenia. I am an
Armenian.’
“‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Tarlyon murmured.
“‘Why?’ snarled the Armenian.
“‘Well, you’ve been treated pretty badly, haven’t you?’ said Tarlyon.
‘All these massacres and things....’
“The stranger glared at him, and then he laughed at him. I shall remember
that laugh. So will Tarlyon. Then the stranger raised a finger and, very
gently, he tapped Tarlyon’s shoulder.
“‘Listen,’ said he. ‘Your manner of speaking bores me. Turks have slain
many Armenians. Wherefore Armenians have slain many Turks. You may take
it from me that, by sticking to it year in and year out for five hundred
years, Armenians have in a tactful way slain more Turks than Turks have
slain Armenians. That is why I am proud of being an Armenian. And you
would oblige me, gentlemen, by informing your countrymen that we have
no use for their discarded trousers, which are anyway not so good in
quality as they were, but would be grateful for some guns.’
“He left us.
“‘I didn’t know,’ I murmured, ‘that Armenians were like that. I have been
misled about Armenians. And he speaks English very well....’
“‘Hum,’ said Tarlyon thoughtfully. ‘But no one would say he was Armenian
if he wasn’t, would he?’”
iv
One of the six most famous American men novelists wrote about Michael
Arlen a year or so ago, as follows:
“He is one of the phenomena of our time. You may or may not like
phenomena”—this seems a little gratuitous. “But anyway, you probably like
an original story, so in Michael Arlen’s case you can compromise on that.
He himself does not compromise on anything, though he did once say that
‘discretion is the better part of literature.’ Since then, however, his
novel, ‘_Piracy_,’ in which half London society figures, has run into
many editions. The other half is no doubt wondering what he will say next.
“Michael Arlen is 25 years old; and, having served the usual terms at
an English public school and University he is, so he says, entirely
self-educated. There was also a war. And yet, though no human eye has
ever seen him at work, he has written four successful books.
“The first, which he published at the age of twenty, was his memoirs
and confessions, for he thought that he would be done with them at the
beginning. Many people thought that the book, _A London Venture_, was
by George Moore under a pseudonym; some papers stated the fact with
authority. Since then he has been more frequently compared to Guy de
Maupassant.
[Illustration: MICHAEL ARLEN
_Photograph by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor, London._]
“Michael Arlen believes in working hard and living hard. He lives in
Mayfair. Most of the summer he spends between Deauville and Biarritz, and
most of the winter he may be found on the Riviera. The spring he spends
in Venice. He also likes dancing and baccarat, and is a tournament tennis
player.
“It is his considered opinion that if one had no enemies one would have
no time to do any writing at all. So he has collected quite a number,
whom he embitters by the amount of good work he does, while he amuses
himself and his friends by never appearing to do any at all. That is, of
course, a pose; but it is not a pose that everyone has the ability to
wear. Try it and see.
“The New Statesman has called him ‘the romantic comedian of our time’;
adding that he has no present equal in ‘the _dandysme_ of the soul.’
While the Daily Telegraph has said of him: ‘He concerns himself with
people who are bored to death unless they are in some sort of mischief.
The ladies carry their frailty as the gentlemen carry their drink—like
gentlemen. Michael Arlen writes with the truculence of a Mohawk and the
suavity of a Beau Nash....’
“This young man is among the last of those who believe that manners are
worth while as manners. The chivalry of daily life is to him the king of
indoor sports. And he has written that ‘a gentleman is a man who is never
_unintentionally_ rude to anyone.’”[81]
Now who is the famous American novelist who could have written thus and
thus of Mr. Arlen? Tell it not in Gath; publish it not in Main Street,
Ascalon. We are not allowed to reveal his chaste identity. If he had an
Armenian name, perhaps....
As a matter of fact, Michael Arlen was born in a Bulgarian village on
the Danube. When he was five years old his parents decided to move to
England. After he had been at an English public school the usual term of
years he went to Switzerland to learn English. He was then seventeen.
After he had been seventeen for some months, his parents called him back
to Manchester, where they lived. He got as far as London. His parents
then abandoned him with rather less than the customary shilling. He
started to write. His first book, _A London Venture_, was a book of
confessions, as at eighteen he had nothing else to write about. His
confessions confessed little except poverty and loneliness.
He was foreign, young, careless of literary cliques, stayed up dancing
all night and worked all day. London got to hear about him. He got a
name in Fleet Street by never going to see an editor in his office.
Michael Arlen always asked the editor to come outside and face him over a
cocktail.
_The Romantic Lady_ arrived, greatly disappointing the publishers, as she
was a book of short stories. Arlen said she would get on and she did, in
moderation.
“_Piracy_” was perhaps the book of a young man who had lived hard and
fought hard, with his tailors. It enabled him to pay them; but it was
Arlen’s opinion that he had not yet begun to write. In an interview he
said that so far he had been playing scales in public. _These Charming
People_ came on, but the author was writing his big novel, _The Dark
Angel_, and gave little heed to anything else. _The Dark Angel_ took him
a year. He destroyed it. He realized that it was not the advance on
“_Piracy_” which he and the most intelligent part of his public expected.
_The Green Hat_ more nearly satisfies him.
v
But already there is a word minted. “_These Charming People_,” observes
Mr. Philip Page, in some nondescript London newspaper cutting, “is very
Arlenesque.” Mr. Page preferred it to “_Piracy_”—and it is indeed better
work—although he missed the fun which “_Piracy_” afforded “of celebrity
spotting, and the satisfaction of being able to say to myself, with a
glowing feeling of being in the swim: ‘Here is Lady Diana Cooper!’ or
‘Here is Mr. Eddie Marsh!’” It is to be feared that most Americans cannot
have Mr. Page’s warm sensation of culture, but in our uncultured way it
is quite possible for us to enjoy such a portrait as the following, from
“_Piracy_”—for we have him in America, too:
“The poetry Pretty Leyton discovered was often good, for his was a
delicate and conservative taste; but it would have been easier to
appreciate the good if one could only have discovered it among the bad,
for his was also a delicate and kindly nature. While as for the young
poets, of whom many called and all were chosen, he was continually
begging his women friends, particularly Lois and Virginia, not to be
‘_too_ cruel’ to them, for they were so sensitive and worthwhile. To see
and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room was really very comforting,
sometimes—which was just as well, since he was always in every room that
happened to be crowded, saying: ‘Isn’t it a marvellous party?’ He gave
all his women friends beautifully bound copies of _Tristram Shandy_,
which he said was _the only_ book.”
And now—what shall I say? I could quote the processional of admiring,
envious and rapturous adjectives applied to Mr. Arlen’s work. I could
quote other notes of his fashionable progress as a person as well as a
writer; but it would be repetitious. Besides, you will prefer to form
your own adjectives and perfect your own legend; which is right and
proper, and ever so charming of you. Kindly note that the correct name
and address is Mr. Michael Arlen, 14, Queen Street, Mayfair, London, W.
1. Ask to be put through to Grosvenor 2275. But only in the Season, only
in the Season.
BOOKS BY MICHAEL ARLEN
1920 _A London Venture_
1921 _The Romantic Lady_
1923 _“Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days_
1924 _These Charming People_
1924 _The Green Hat: A Romance for a Few People_
SOURCES ON MICHAEL ARLEN
Review of _These Charming People_ by Arthur Waugh in the Daily Telegraph,
London, for 6 July 1923.
Curtis Brown, Curtis Brown Ltd., 6, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden,
London, W. C. 2.
17. Palettes and Patterns in Prose and Poetry
i
Was it Emerson who said of the poems by Emily Dickinson that they were
“poetry pulled up by the roots, with the earth and dew clinging to them”?
I can’t be sure, for someone has culpably made off with my copy of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich’s _Ponkapog Papers_, in which there is a pleasant essay
on Emily Dickinson. Aldrich, of course, said in his meticulous way that
poetry should not be pulled up by the roots; but modern feeling does
not agree with him, holding the bit of earth and the sparkle of dewy
freshness evidence incontrovertible that the flower is authentic and not
mere paper or wax. Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, a recluse who
in her lifetime wrote over 600 poems, hardly any of which were published
until after her death. And then?
Ah, but the estimation in which she is held, and a sequence of fame,
steadily grows. Almost forty years after her death, she is more read
and more delighted in than ever. “A mystic akin only to Emerson,” W. P.
Dawson, the English critic, says in his own anthology. “Among American
poets I have named two—Poe and Emily Dickinson.” And a reviewer for the
London Spectator said not long ago: “Mr. Conrad Aiken in his recent
anthology of American poets calls Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘perhaps the
finest by a woman in the English language.’ I quarrel only with his
‘perhaps.’”
Splendid news, therefore, that we now have a new one-volume edition of
her work! _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ contains all the verse
which appeared in _Poems, First Series_, in _Poems, Second Series_, and
in _Poems, Third Series_, and also those in the book brought out as
recently as 1914, _The Single Hound_. The total body of Emily Dickinson’s
work is therefore presented, and all in a new and proper arrangement,
making the edition definitive. Emily Dickinson’s niece and biographer,
Martha Dickinson Bianchi, has written an introduction for the work.
Having begun, in spontaneity and pleasure, with poetry, let us stick to
it a while. Here are three more volumes by women poets, sisters, the
Brontës, no less. Clement K. Shorter has edited them and C. W. Hatfield
has provided the bibliographies and notes. They are _The Complete
Poems—of Charlotte Brontë, of Anne Brontë, of Emily Jane Brontë_,
respectively. Each is a first complete collection, and each contains a
large percentage of poems never before published. I need not say anything
of the romance investing the lives of these three women. Shut in a lonely
parsonage in bleak moorland country, haunted by ill health and destined
to die young, they made their lives one of the most extraordinary
adventures in the history of the literary spirit. Their verse, of course,
shows the Byronic influence.
The indefatigable J. C. Squire has been busy compiling an _A Book of
American Verse_ with ingratiating results. Himself a poet, an editor who
selects new verse and a critic, Mr. Squire has ranged over the whole
field of American literature from its beginnings and has been at once
personal and catholic in his inclusions. His most recent collection of
his own work, _Essays on Poetry_, includes short papers on Matthew
Arnold, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and some others.
_Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study_, by R. L. Mégroz,
is the first book devoted to the life and writings of this poet and prose
writer of such marked distinction. Mr. Mégroz says that the purpose of
his volume is “to show the poet of dream in a human light and in relation
to the rest of society.” It is difficult to think of a living writer
of more interest for such a study than the author of the _Memoirs of a
Midget_, the close friend of Rupert Brooke, and the poet of happiest
childhood as well as of soberly reflective and tranquil age. Mr. Mégroz’s
book has the charm of its subject, and more.
One need not be a professor or scholar in the technical sense to write a
good book on English literature, and the proof of it, if a fresh one be
needed, is T. Earle Welby’s _A Popular History of English Poetry_. Mr.
Welby is an amateur, unless his amateur standing may have been impaired
by his articles in the London Saturday Review and his other book, a
critical study of Swinburne. _A Popular History of English Poetry_ is
said to be the only one-volume book of its sort, but whether it is or
not, it is remarkably welcome. Its survey runs from Chaucer (there is
even a prefatory chapter on pre-Chaucer) to Meredith and Hardy and
Masefield and de la Mare. And it deserves the adjective in front of the
word “History” in its title. Anyone who knows or cares about poetry
at all can read with delighted ease and will learn something in every
chapter. Mr. Welby has both a fertile knowledge and a light touch.
His judgments are neither vague characterizations nor conventional
utterances; he has taste and he has an opinion, and he gives you each.
ii
To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an
exquisite color and form: _Echo de Paris_, by Laurence Housman, is a bit
of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when now I
think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own brief perfection
as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is not a negligible
thing in a contemporary literature which embraces Cabell, Hergesheimer,
Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others, both American and English,
who value words somewhat as James Huneker valued them, for their sound,
shape, smell and taste. I take from the London Times a description of
_Echo de Paris_:
“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café
near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon, and
from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is expected.
Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs holds his
audience with that marvelous conversation which long before had made him
legendary. It is substantially the record of an actual conversation,
Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on this occasion. Apart from
the actuality of the setting, he has imagined a dramatic incident which
he believes, though symbolical, will represent the existing emotional
situation. As Wilde talks, with an apparent indifference to his personal
disaster, another man is seen coming along the street. He advances toward
the group, all of whom he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended
him before his imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes
on without a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he
has been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a luncheon
which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have been more than
even he could bear.
“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s
conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes feel
that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in his
comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold intellectual
paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something of the reality on
which his reputation was built.”
Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Carl
Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor Wylie’s
_Jennifer Lorn_. I don’t know of a recent work before which one feels an
equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an eighteenth
century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as the period it
deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have perhaps stood long
before some Eastern carpet with old rose, cream, ivory and dark blue in
enigmatical patterns, your eye delighting in its intricacy. Have you
tried afterward to tell someone about it? Then, precisely, you know the
difficulty of reporting _Jennifer Lorn_. It is worth noting, though, that
the novel does not merely purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to
purvey it, with delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner.
The adroit printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century
format was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it
should be so delightfully well-done.