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Michael Arlen

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1927 Time cover featuring Arlen
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1927 Time cover featuring Arlen

Michael Arlen (November 16, 1895–June 23, 1956) was an Armenian essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer, who had his greatest successes in the 1920s while living and writing in England. As a chronicler of the lives of young, rich and trendy people he has sometimes been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Born Dikran Kouyoumdjian on November 16, 1895, in Rustchuk, Bulgaria, to a Christian Armenian merchant family, Michael Arlen moved to Southport, Lancashire, at the age of five with his parents in 1901, where his father, Sarkis Kouyoumdjian, continued the business that he had started in Bulgaria after fleeing Turkish persecutions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1892. After attending Malvern College and spending a brief time in Switzerland, Arlen enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh University. In 1913, after a few months of university, Arlen decided that he wanted to become a writer and moved to London, where he gradually made friends in modernist literary circles. In 1916, writing under his birth name Dikran Kouyoumdjian, Arlen began to submit essays on Armenians first to a London-based Armenian periodical, , and soon after to The New Age, a British weekly review of politics, literature, and arts. In 1917, Arlen stopped writing for Ararat, not feeling challenged enough, and moved to The New Age instead, where he tried his hand at book reviews, essays, short stories, and even one short play, much of which did not concern Armenians. Arlen began to use his pen-name, Michael Arlen, based on a previous short story, "", with the publication of The London Venture, a semi-autobiographical memoir of his life as a fledging author. The London Venture received some attention, as did his first volume of short stories, The Romantic Lady (1921). In 1922, Dikran Kouyoumdjian legally changed his name to Michael Arlen.

In 1920 Arlen spent some time in France, where he got to know, and spent a lot of time with, Nancy Cunard although she was married to someone else at the time—a relationship which fuelled Aldous Huxley's jealousy. In 1922 Arlen became a naturalized British citizen and on that occasion made Michael Arlen also his legal name.

In 1922, Arlen's successful novel Piracy came out. In the following year, in his short story volume, These Charming People, he for the first time published tales which included elements of fantasy and horror, in particular "The Ancient Sin" and "The Loquacious Lady of Lansdowne Passage". The volume also introduced a gentleman crook reminiscent of Raffles in the story "The Cavalier of the Streets". The title of another story, "When a Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square", was the inspiration for the popular song of the same name.

In 1924 Michael Arlen eventually shot to fame and prosperity with the publication of his novel The Green Hat. He dramatised it himself, and it was shown on the West End stage starring Tallulah Bankhead (128 performances at the Adelphi Theatre). In 1928, a silent movie entitled A Woman of Affairs starring Greta Garbo was also based on The Green Hat.

Over the following years, Arlen wrote both novels and short stories, but none could equal the success he had already achieved. Some storylines, like that of, say, Lily Christine (1929), are very similar to the plot of The Green Hat. He tried to break new ground with his novel Man's Mortality (1933), which, set in the 1980s, is a serious attempt at utopian fiction. Most critics, however, compared it unfavourably with Huxley's Brave New World, which had been published the year before. His last novel, The Flying Dutchman, a political thriller, appeared in 1939. His 1920s novels about trendy people and how they spend their lives soon appeared dated, and were no longer reprinted when the era was over.

His claim to fame in the world of crime fiction rests on one short story, "Gay Falcon" (1940), in which he introduced gentleman sleuth Gay Stanhope Falcon. Renamed Gay Lawrence, the character was taken up by Hollywood in 1941 and expanded into a long-running series of feature films with George Sanders in the title role, later taken over by Sanders's brother Tom Conway, with "The Falcon" again renamed Tom Lawrence. (Cf. Farewell, My Lovely.)

Dust jacket of the first edition of Arlen's 1934 novel Arlen also wrote a number of ghost stories, and a collection actually entitled Ghost Stories was published in London by Collins in 1927. Two of his macabre stories, "The Gentleman from America" and "The Smell in the Library", have been widely anthologized. In 1934 he published a vampire novel, Hell! Said the Duchess: A Bedtime Story, which many critics have found remarkable.

Very much a 1920s society figure resembling the characters he portrayed in his novels, and a man who might be referred to as a dandy, Arlen invariably impressed everyone with his immaculate manners. He was always impeccably dressed and groomed and was seen driving around London in a fashionable yellow Rolls Royce and engaging in all kinds of luxurious activities. However, he was well aware of the latent racism, the contempt for foreigners mixed with envy, with which his success was viewed. Sydney Horler (1888-1954), another popular author of the time, is said to have called Arlen "the only Armenian who never tried to sell me a carpet", while Arlen half-jokingly described himself as "every other inch a gentleman".

In 1928 he married a Greek countess, Atalanta Mercati. He later preferred to live in Cannes on the Cote d'Azur. At the outbreak of the Second World War he moved to the United States, and died of cancer in New York in 1956. His son, Michael J. Arlen, wrote a biography of his father, Exiles (1970), in which his final years, characterized by writer's block, are detailed. In 1975, Arlen Jr. continued his search for his father's biography in A Passage to Ararat, in which he tries to explain why his father tried to suppress his ethnic Armenian identity.

The young Michael Arlen served as a model for Michaelis, the successful Irish playwright with whom Connie starts an affair in D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Bibliography

Novels

Short stories

External links

 

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