Old hat
FRANCES DONALDSON
The London Venture Michael Arlen with an introduction by Noel Coward (Cassell First Novel Library 6s) The heroine of The London Venture is called Shelmerdine, of The Green Hat, Iris Storm. Both books were written by an Armenian named Dikran Kouyoumdjian, who for the purpose called himself. Michael Arlen. For a short time in the 1920s he spoke to, one might almost say for, the youth of England. But what did he say?
The temptation today is to use all the space available for quotation. Thus:
'The green hat crushed recklessly against the back of the chair, she stared, still and ab- sorbed, at the names that friends of long-ago had written on the ceiling with smoke of candle-flame. Her eyes glowed, glowed like an animal's. The light of the reading-lamp on the littered table by my elbow kissed her lip, and the light kissed the faint, faint down on her lip into a few minutes of existence as a garden of gold dust. A sword lay in my mind, twist- ing and shining among the inner grotesqueries where we keep ourselves, in the real sense, to ourselves. . . . I wondered what she saw, look- ing over my shoulder. She kept strange, in- visible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making mole-hills out of moun- tains.'
Or thus:
`Guy did not think that the hope for England or the world lay in himself or his caste. He was not a clever man; but his contempt for politics was born of a conviction that there was no hope of curing the diseases of life and society by anything that any body of men could do. Men individually must clean them- selves within, questing for and grasping what Cleanness there was in them. There was a frozen storm in Guy's eyes, and they were very clean. But, of course, he was not very clever.' ,..•
• - .
Semi-precious gems of this quality can be picked off any page of The Green Hat and sentence after sentence seems devoid of real meaning. The absence of intellectual or emo- tional content, the suppression of sense and feeling in favour of contrived and brilliant fan- tasy make for vast areas of tedium. The book has, nevertheless, many of the obvious charac- teristics of a best-seller and, when the bloom of the contemporary was on it, it had an appeal which may be difficult to understand today.
In the first chapter the heroine ends in the arms of the narrator, whose flat she has entered as a stranger only a few hours before—in those days a striking and, from the booksellers' point of view, a splendid thing for her to do. This is followed by a tale of three suicides. The first is Boy Fenwick (Iris's first husband) who kills himself on their wedding night, she said after- wards, 'for purity'; by which she was under- stood to mean because he had discovered that she was not chaste. The second is Gerald (Iris's brother), a drunkard, driven to drink by Boy Fenwick's death and his sister's un- chastity, who kills himself because he has been charged with molesting a woman in Hyde Park. The third is Iris herself, who dies in despair because Napier, whom she loves, insists on be- traying the fact that Boy Fenwick killed himself, not because she was unchaste but because he had syphilis—thus bartering gal- lantry and Boy's reputation for other people's good opinion and her reputation. 'Good God, he cared whether we respected her or not. She wasn't good enough for him as she was . . . She'll be in despair.'
In 1924 there was a message in all this for the youth of the day—a rather spurious message but one the young are always grateful for. This message was: the old values are passing and new ones take their place; chastity no longer matters, only honour, recklessness of self and truth. More romanticism and more untruth have been spilled on honour, recklessness of self and truth than on all the other virtues put together.
The spread of education may not have done much for world peace but it has raised the standards of best-sellers. Moreover, times have changed. If one were to make a list of best- selling novels from The Green Hat to Lucky Km, somewhere on the way one would come to Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn Waugh has a reputation as the most savage of satirists but he still gave his characters names such as Sebastian and Cordelia—a far cry from Kings- ley Amis's beer-swilling Jim, any romanticism in whom may not be detected for twenty years or SO.
The strange thing about Michael Arlen's public was that after a very few years it dis- solved as suddenly as it had formed. No one any longer wanted to read a word he wrote. By this time he had made an enormous for- tune and he simply ceased to write. What is interesting today therefore is not his books but himself. A. S. Frere tells us in an intro- duction to this edition of The”Green Hat that he tried time and again to get Michael to agree to a reprinting of his books. 'Stubbornly he refused. He thought nothing of his own work : he had written for and about people and times that were better dead and gone.' One further quotation from The Green Hat becomes irresistible. Iris had been talking about vulgarity in writers which, she says, is con- tagious:
"'You are quite wrong," I said. "The real sticky part seems to come from inside one. And there, you see, is where a writer has a sense of defeat—a writer, I mean, who must earn
his living by writing, and so must always write. For it is more difficult for a second-rate writer not to be vulgar than for a camel to pass through a needle's eye. It uncoils from some- where inside you, like a nasty, sticky snake ... You get used to it later on. Very few people notice it. Most people like it. And, of course, it pays."' One cannot know why Michael Arlen's executors agreed to the reprinting of these two books. Possibly he left permission for it fol- lowing his death. He once said: 'I was born to write, not necessarily to write well, but to write.' It was an extraordinary feat of self- knowledge and self-discipline to refuse publi- cation for twenty years or more. Even so, it is probably the mood left over from reading T'he Green Hut that makes one feel it a pity to spoil the most romantic gesture of this very romantic man.
One thing further, for the record. A. S. Frere says also that, when asked his qualifications to join a London club, Michael replied: 'I am every other inch a gentleman.' I have no doubt he said this. It exactly suited his self-mocking, self-protective humour. But he did not say it first. Edna Ferber said it first: about him.
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