Those silly 'twenties

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

In my late teens and in my twenties, I was a committed reader of novels. I was also a reader of a good many other things, as indeed I still am, although I suppose I do not read more than one or two novels a year in my present broken-down old age. It is, therefore, add that I never read The Green Flat when it was at the very height of its fame. I did see the play, of which I have the vaguest memory. I went to see it with a doctor friend of mine, a dogmatic young man who commented ad- versely on the aetiology of syphilis as repre- sented in the play, but that is all I remember about it.

In fact, I knew Michael Arlen slightly, having met him by accident at Wolverhamp- ton—one of the most odd conjunctions of the war—and, later, I met him several times in the Saint Regis Bar in New York. The only work of his I ever read was a short story about a young American woman getting into trouble in Rome. She was a little younger, I think, than Mrs Strong and the other victims of the amorous atmosphere of the Eternal City, but I don't remember what happened to her. What I do remember is the opening of the story. It described an extremely expensive ruby on a chain that 'swung between the tender breasts of Carmelita Docherty.' This was so obviously a form of verse that I tried, in vain, to com- plete it, but there are no rhymes to Docherty in the English language.

It was not any snobbery, intellectual or otherwise, that kept me off The Green Hat. I read Tell England, If Winter Comes, Simon called Peter, Galsworthy, whom I despised then and would despise again if I could bring my- self to re-read him. I was an admirer, an ex- cessive admirer, of the early Aldous Huxley until he was wiped out as a comic writer by the genius of Evelyn Waugh. As a serious writer, he was wiped out for me by the pretentiousness of Point Counter Point which, among other defects, from my point of view, would hardly impress anyone who had read Les Faux Mon- nayeurs. Nor was I very snooty in my foreign reading. I read and enjoyed La Madonna des Sleepings. I was in Paris when the great scandal of La Garconne broke. But I missed The Green Hat.

I must say I have been both startled and disappointed by reading this once best seller of best sellers. The editor of the new edition tells us that Michael Arlen told him that he had made £120,000 out of The Green Hat, of which he had invested £70,003 in South America. The editor, Mr A. S. Frere, also tells us that Michael Arlen refused to have The Green Hat reprinted. I think he was well advised. For at the very best it is a curiosity, and a curiosity which has not the great comic merit of Amanda Ros. The language is paralysingly odd. I don't think that Armenians can't write- English well: one of my best friends is an Armenian and he can write it well. But this is a very odd personal language indeed. I have noted, I think, among the influences operating on Michael Arlen's very idiosyncratic style, J. M. Synge (a great deal of bogus Aran Islands idiom); H. G. Wells in his conditional mood; a great deal of what could be called Timestyle, although that great journal did not then exist, but, as Wolcott Gibbs wrote, backward reels the mind in reading either early Timestyle—or The Green Hat. Readers of The Napoleon of Notting Hill will remember that the eminent critic, King Auberon Quin, if he could not get good books, preferred 'a rich badness,' and certainly there is badness here: The most beautiful woman in Ireland (Ulster) had hair as black as a raven's wing and two aquamarines for eyes, while the sym- metry of her features appalled the epithet.' This is pure Robert Montgomery, if it is any- thing. The curious will find several more aquamarine treasures.

When we turn to the story itself, we are in an equally odd world. The names of the charac- ters are dazzling. The heroine is Iris Storm. Her husband, murdered by Sinn Feiners, was Hugo Storm, vc. 'The other woman' has Venice as a Christian name. And, indeed, a thing I regret to have to say, for [liked Michael Arlen on the few occasions that I met him, the French is not very good either. I suggest that there is no such French word as aristocracie.

The plot has some resemblance to that of Bonjour Tristesse. Of course, Mlle Sagan at the age of eighteen wrote French a great deal better than Mr Arlen wrote English, but both books end up in the same way with the suicide of the lady whose love had betrayed her. A female friend of mine, who knows French- women, love, and other related topics extremely well, says these are illusions of married men who look forward to women killing themselves for love of them, and of young men, probably bachelors, who also look forward to this phenomenon. She has asserted that it never happens, in this contradicting Balzac who asserted that in 'Lancashire women kill them- selves for love.' (Any evidence of this will be welcomed.) Iris Storm was 'fell' (what this means in this connection I have not the slightest idea, but the word obviously appealed to Michael Arlen). On her marriage night, her husband 'Boy' Fen- wick killed himself 'for purity.' This is the clue. Todu, alas, such is the decline of public morals that the announcement itself would be good for a horse laugh. For it turns out much later that 'Boy' Fenwick had killed himself because he had syphilis, an almost unmentionable disease in those days (it was, of course, often mentioned as the pox), though probably more common then than it is today. The widow Fenwick then married Hugo Storm and be- came a widow again. (Perhaps this is the mean- ing of Tell'?) But she had the reputation, Arlen • is very delicate about this, of being a ruthless nymphomaniac (the word is not used), a wrecker of homes, a wrecker of lives, a belle dame sans nterci.

- Of course, the book has some interest. It was written at a time when people were discovering

that the First Great War had not purified life, morals, character, as great wars are always supposed to do at the beginning and have never done at the end. In the early Arlen period, people were easily shocked. A young actress called Billy Carleton committed suicide by

taking 'white snow' after a Victory Ball in the Albert Hall. 'White snow' was cocaine, a novelty then, not the standard food of so many

people as I am told it is today. Women were smoking openly : contraception was being hinted at (it was being discussed even in the

SPECTATOR); clothes were very daring. It was a sign of Mrs Storm's boldness that she told the narrator that she didn't wear a chemise;

but when she and her friends went bathing in

the Thames on the last night of this conte fantastique, they were very careful to bathe only in the dark and to bathe in their slips. (American girls at the same time were bathing in their 'teddies.) The very mention of syphilis was itself daring : look what had happened to the production of Ghosts!

At this time in my native city, the city fathers, alarmed by the increase of VD, arranged

a series of lectures to educate the innocent boys

and girls of Glasgow which resulted in a very eminent botanist, F. 0. Bower, FRS, lecturing

the population of Brighton on sexual reproduc- tion in plants. This may well have been news to the boys and girls of Brighton who already knew, in theory and often in practice, all any- one needs to know about reproduction, or indeed non-reproduction, in human beings. It was a very odd world indeed.

That it was a very odd world was revealed by the prosecution of The Well of Loneliness.

I had read The Well of Loneliness a long time ago, and I have just bought and dashed through

the paperback. It is much longer than I re-

membered, and also basically sillier than I remembered. But then, even to my innocent mind, lesbianism was not such a novelty as it was to Jix (otherwise Johnson-Hicks, first Viscount Brentford, then Home Secretary), and people were not quite as cowed by the dis- covery of it as Miss Radclyffe Hall suggests. But, of course, it vas the subject of Compton Mackenzie's admirable book, Extraordinary Women, and perhaps I did not take the whole subject seriously enough.

The Green Hat, alas, is not as good for a laugh as many popular best sellers have been.

It reminded me not only of Bonjour Tristesse, but of that much funnier book The Young Visiters (Mr Salteena is exactly the same age as the hero, if that is what he should be called, of Bonjour Tristes.se), and I think The Green flat is less serious as social criticism and very inferior in style to The Young Visiters.

With, I think, an innocent arrogance Michael Arlen gave The Green Hat the sub-title, 'A Romance for a Few People.' This would have delighted Stendhal with its parody of his dedi- cation, `To the Happy Few.' Mr Frere tells us that Michael Arlen wrote better books later on. But he didn't get the credit after he had had the cash. Perhaps he deserved the credit, but I think few things explained the silliness of the 'twenties better than this fantastic fairy tale of a world seen from the outside, a world which could never have existed even in the most fan. tastic Ouida-like dreams of a native.