My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (32 page)

That was in 1913. A year later the outbreak of war made his position difficult. He had no legal status. Bulgaria had disowned him because he would not serve as a conscript in her army. Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, so he could not become a naturalized British subject during the war, nor could he change his name. As he was not eligible for military service, his lot was cast among those who for reasons of health, age, or political opinions were non-combatants. He was befriended by Orage, the editor of the
New Age
, a paper which rewarded its contributors parsimoniously. He made friends with Aldous Huxley, who was debarred from service by his
eyesight; with D. H. Lawrence, whose German wife was under police surveillance and whose
The Rainbow
had recently been suppressed by the public prosecutor; and with Nancy Cunard, who was then, as she has been so often since, in conflict with her day. He was one of the patrons of the White Tower restaurant in Percy Street, whose proprietor Stulic, a Viennese by birth, was also under police surveillance.

As far as I know none of his friends of this period have written of him in their autobiographies, but there is an illuminating passage in a letter that D. H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell in December 1915:

Kouyoumdjian seems a bit blatant and pushing: you may be put off by him. But this is because he is very foreign, even though he doesn't know it himself. In English life he is in a strange alien medium and he can't adjust himself. But I find the core of him very good. One must be patient with his jarring manner and listen to the sound decency that is in him.

Arlen once remarked to me that self-pity was a useful formula for a best-seller but he never exploited it. Until 1916 he lived in a third-floor flat in 46 Redcliffe Road, a dreary little thoroughfare. Margaret Irwin, later famous as the author of
Toung Bess
, was living on the first floor. They never met, but after he left for the flat in Shepherd Market which he described in the first chapter of
The Green Hat
a curious thing happened. The second-floor flat was taken by a Scot with second sight who was disturbed night after night by ghostly but emphatic pacings of the floor above, which were interrupted by rushings to the window whenever a taxicab stopped below. Margaret Irwin was to learn later from G. B. Stern that Arlen had spent many hours pacing that floor, waiting for a capricious lady. Margaret Irwin made those pacings the theme of a novel
Knock Four Times;
but Arlen never used his own material, except in that one short story. He did not want to write about poor young poets
waiting in their garrets but of the big and brilliant world in which they aspired to shine.

He saw that world, as a foreigner, with dazzled eyes. D. H. Lawrence shrugged when Arlen asked him his advice. ‘I am a realist,' he said, ‘you are a romanticist. You have your own way to make. I cannot guide you.' Orage told him the same thing. Arlen began
The London Venture
as a parody of George Moore. Orage said, ‘This is no parody, this is your best stuff. You've digested what I told you years ago. Don't be realistic. Your strong point is artifice.' Osbert Sitwell wrote of him in a poem-portrait, ‘Alone of all popular writers, he dares to use the art of imagery.'

Arlen wrote vividly but colloquially, with unusual inversions and inflections, with a heightened exotic pitch. ‘The moon made a great fuss of her all the way to a place called Great Neck. They had quite a party the moon and Marilyn. I left out had nothing to do but watch.'

That was what they called ‘Arlenese.' He did not so much tell a story as embroider one. Fascinated by the world of fashion, he conveyed his sense of wonderment to his readers. Before I began to write this essay I re-read
The Green Hat
. It is a period piece, but though it is dated, it is not
démodé
. The magic is still there.

His first novel was called
Piracy
and his capture of the British and American public was an act of piracy that he carried off flamboyantly.

He wrote exclusively of the upper classes—'I decided,' he said, ‘to write about my betters who in England are much easier to approach and understand than labourers'—but he was not in any sense a snob. He was a pirate and his stories are filled with highwaymen. Wilfred Macartney, who served a prison sentence, wrote in
Stone Walls Do Not a Prison Make
that Arlen's books were liked by jailbirds because he had a sympathy for the under-dog.

For me, Arlen had at that time the fascination of a Balzac character. ‘What do you want of life?' Vautrin asked Rubempré. ‘To be famous and to be loved,' Rubempré answered. Arlen would have given the same reply. Though we did not really become friends till a good deal later, I was constantly running into him during those early years. He was short, he dressed quietly, he never wore loud checks or startling ties, yet he was a prominent figure in any gathering. There was a gloss about him. Years later he was to say in an interview to Geoffrey Hellman, ‘My mother taught me to think a distressed area should make the best of itself.' Even when he was poor he never looked poor.

Cocktail parties were not yet in vogue. There were tea parties and after-dinner parties. At evening parties he usually appeared in a white tie. His evening shirts looked as though they were being worn for the first time. He nearly always came alone—an affable, appreciative guest. He would talk a good deal about himself. People would be saying the next day, ‘I met Arlen last night at the——s…' and he liked to give them something worth repeating.

But at the same time he was always interested in the other man, what he was doing, what he thought. He always managed to make one feel happier about oneself. Which is a rare thing to do. It springs from a generosity of heart. He never seemed in a hurry. He never abruptly broke off a conversation. He never looked at his watch. Yet he gave the impression always that he was on his way somewhere else, that in the background, somewhere, an exotic woman was awaiting him.

He was the constant object of conjecture. The gossip columns were dotted with references to the table that was reserved for him in the Embassy Club each night; to
his yellow Rolls-Royce, which he had had registered in Manchester so that its number plates would carry the letters MA: to the money he had invested in Noel Coward's
The Vortex
. He is the Michaelis of
Lady Chatterlefs Lover
and report credited him with a dramatic succession of romances.

He was always laughing, always on his way from something exciting, about to take off for something glamorous. Life seemed to have poured all its treasures into his lap, yet was he happy? Did not his restlessness conceal a loneliness of heart? Had he not once, at the bidding of caprice, driven through the night to Southampton, caught the
Aquitania
for New York, and then on arrival at New York changed his mind and returned in the same cabin? Were not all these love affairs the sign of a central dissatisfaction? His stories contained cryptic clues. ‘What is success but solitude made perfect.' ‘Freedom is a very lonely thing. It means that no one can be troubled to enslave you.' ‘The plotter shall be caught in his own plots'. Was he unhappy in himself? There was a dark secret at his core. It made him the more romantic.

There were those who resented his success. The English are not particularly xenophobic, but certain hidebound tories grumbled against ‘this damned foreigner who's persuaded a lot of silly women that he's marvellous'. A jealous fellow novelist labelled him as Turkish propaganda sent over to justify the Armenian massacres. But Arlen had the last word always. He anticipated criticism. He described himself as a case of pernicious aenemia. He said that his success was not a fashion, but an international disease. A quarter of a century later he was to say, ‘I was a flash in the pan in my twenties. I had a hell of a lot of fun being flashy and there was by the grace of God a good deal of gold dust in the pan.'

Anything they could say, he could say quicker. I have
seen many kinds of literary success over half a century, but never one that was quite like Arlen's, that was attended with such a flourish, one in which the author and the books were so identified. That is why his consequent story is fascinating. The plotter was caught in his own plot. He could never retire. He had to be Michael Arlen to the chapter's close.

During the period that ‘the disease' was infectious, he made a great deal of money at a time when American income-tax was low. He dramatized
The Green Hat
and
These Charming People;
both had long runs and both were filmed. Editors bid against each other for his short stories. For
Lily Christine
he received $50,000 from
Cosmopolitan
for the serial rights, $20,000 advance from Hutchinson on account of the British Empire sales, and $15,000 from Doubleday Doran on account of the American book sales.

Only Arlen himself knows exactly how much he made between 1924 and 1931. He was extremely prudent with it. He turned himself into a limited company which he had registered in South America, where his elder brother lived, with that brother as chairman of the board. When Arlen visited New York he travelled as the company's representative on an expense account. The capital earned during his boom years survived the depreciation of currency to which English writers generally have been exposed.

Lily Christine
was published in 1928. In the spring of that year Arlen married. In a recent interview in the
Sunday Times
with Cyril Ray, he said, ‘I married and lived happily ever after.' ‘Is that really true?' his interviewer asked. Yes, he said, it was.

He was not exaggerating. Atalanta, the daughter of Count Mercate, half-Greek, half-American, was like
Michael a kind of exile. With their background of Eastern Europe they must have understood many things about each other without needing to explain them; they could feel at home with one another, as they could not completely with the island-based English. They matched each other. They were, they stayed, a team. When they were together in a group, he wove her into his conversation. In their first years of marriage she was very silent, but she was always a person of character. I met her for the first time at a small tea party given in her honour shortly after her marriage. William Gerhardi was there. He was a little patronizing, and asked her if she proposed to criticize her husband's novels. ‘No,' she said. It was a most eloquent ‘No' and made Gerhardi look rather more than foolish.

After his marriage I saw much more of Arlen. We could meet them on equal terms, in a way that we could not when he was unattached and affluent, moving in an atmosphere of yachts and fast cars and fashionable playgrounds.

He bought a villa outside Cannes. The French Riviera was then developing its summer season. Many writers were making their homes along the coast—Maugham, P. G. Wodehouse, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Frankau, Phillips Oppenheim. It was a pleasant world, with its blue skies and blue seas, with its terraced olive groves and flowers, with its healthy, outdoor life of swimming and golf and tennis. Everyone felt well, everyone looked well. The setting for every activity was gracious. A lunch party that might well be ordinary in London becomes idyllic on a balcony shaded by vine leaves, looking over a valley towards a village that is a medieval fortress, with the Mediterranean showing in a gap between the hills, and a liner passing like a toy ship on the horizon.

Arlen was very happy there; happy in his marriage, in his son and daughter, in his way of life. He had many
friends; he enjoyed golf and tennis; the climate suited him. In the late autumn he came back to London and was warmly welcomed there. In January he went to Switzerland to ski. He had enough money for his needs. It is very easy in the atmosphere of the Riviera to let days drift into weeks, weeks into months. It is hard to work there unless you are goaded by necessity. Arlen had no such goad. But he went on writing.

In 1931 the serial rights of
Men Dislike Women
—a delightful comedy of manners—were bought at a high price by
Cosmopolitan
. Short stories appeared at regular intervals; they were collected under the title
The Crooked Coronet and Other Misrepresentations of the Real Facts of Life
, and one at least of them,
The Golden Arrow
, was produced by Hollywood. He published two novels,
Man's Mortality
, a story of wars of the future in 1932 and
The Flying Dutchman
, a political allegory in 1939. Both these novels were highly praised by responsible reviewers. ‘Does mankind improve? At any rate Mr Arlen improves. He gets better and better as he gets more and more serious.' That was the general tone. J. B. Priestley wrote of
Mans Mortality
: ‘I did not think him to be a man of this mettle. Bravo.'

The reviewers were no less enthusiastic over
The Flying Dutchman
. Humbert Wolfe wrote: ‘Michael Arlen runs a serious risk of acclaiming himself on the way to becoming a genius. For many years in point of sheer diabolical talent he has been unapproachable.' But in spite of its reviews, this book attracted little public interest. Myself I was unaware of its existence, till I found it in a friend's library several years after the war. The reading of it was a curious experience. It was a good novel, but without the name upon the cover I should never have guessed its authorship.

I realized then that a strange thing had happened
during the 1930s. A divorce had taken place between the Michael Arlen whom the world saw and the Michael Arlen who put his name on covers. In 1924 Michael Arlen was a composite production, the writer and the man were one; in 1939 the Michael Arlen who played golf at Cannes and drank martinis in the Carlton Bar was the author of
The Green Hat
fifteen years farther down the course—but the man who sat at a desk in a study looking out over the Mediterranean had ceased to be that Michael Arlen.