Horizon

Michael Arlen

c/o the Oxford DNB:

"Arlen, Michael [formerly Dikran Kouyoumdjian] (1895-1956), novelist, was born on 16 November 1895 at Rustchuk, Bulgaria, the son of Sarkis Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian merchant ... in 1922 he was naturalized in the UK, and changed his name by deed poll to Michael Arlen, the name under which he had begun to publish novels and short stories. His writing was soon to achieve considerable, if temporary, fame. His first novel, The London Venture, was published in 1920 on the recommendation of Edmund Gosse. Three more books in the next three years established him on the literary scene, and in 1924 came The Green Hat, which was acclaimed, attacked, parodied, and read, to the most fabulous degree of best-sellerdom; and made him a comfortable small fortune. It was a romance suited to its decade—cynical, sophisticated, yet sentimental, highly coloured, and glittering. If the colours later faded, and the glitter became mostly tarnished tinsel, the book certainly cast a spell in its day and influenced many young writers. The character of the heroine, Iris Storm, set a new fashion in fatal charmers; and Arlen's pictures of London café society were as exact as glossy photographs. ‘The Loyalty’—recognizable as the Embassy Club, at which the smartest people, including young princes, then danced to the blues—was depicted almost table by table, with a mixture of mockery and romanticism which delighted those who read of themselves.

Perhaps because he was a foreigner, who while mingling among them viewed them from outside, Michael Arlen had free licence to satirize these people. Rather as English society had petted the young Disraeli, it forgave Arlen his cleverness and his exuberant elegance. Even when poor and struggling, this young man had contrived to be elegant; and in prosperity, it was said that his white waistcoat always seemed to be whiter than anybody else's; but Arlen himself was forestallingly ready to disarm criticism—describing himself as ‘Every other inch a gentleman’, ‘The one the Turks forgot’, or ‘A case of pernicious Armenia’. His wit not being above the heads of his fashionable hearers, they found him the best of company; moreover, he was a man of whom his friends spoke with lasting regard ... he never believed himself an important writer, and in later years steadily declined to have his ‘rubbishy’ best-sellers reprinted ... his collection of essays, Living-Room War (1969), originally published in the New Yorker, was referred to by one critic as a ‘glib masterpiece’. Eventually he settled in New York at 23 East 74th Street, where he died on 23 June 1956 after a long illness."