My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles

by Alec Waugh

  When I left for the Middle East in September 1941 I felt I knew Vyvyan Holland as well as I have ever known any human being. I knew him in terms not only of what he had told me about himself, but of what a number of his friends had told me; nothing would have surprised me more then than to have been told that fourteen years later one of the best-selling books of the 1954 autumn season would be Son of Oscar Wilde.

  I had scarcely heard him mention his father’s name, and was surprised when going over an old guestbook of the Odde Volumes, to have him pause as he turned a page and point without comment to his father’s signature. He had a passion for anonymity, which anyone who has read his autobiography will readily understand. He detested notoriety as much as his father had delighted in it. On the title-page of his translations he sometimes reversed his own initials—appearing as H.B.V. He hated having to be explained. He declined the presidency of the Odde Volumes because he did not want to have guests saying, ‘Who on earth is that fellow sitting up in that big chair?’ He was erudite and witty. The paper that he read to the Odde Volumes on The Mediaeval Courts of Love is one of the very best in its archives, but when his friends urged him to attempt a larger task he would shrug, and mumble something inaudible out of the corner of his mouth. It is natural for the son of a highly successful writer to be diffident about following in the same profession and inviting comparisons. But he carried his love of anonymity to an extreme point. His friends carefully avoided a mention of his father.

  Part of his reluctance was a form of self-defence. No one could be more completely normal and he resented being pestered by homosexuals, foreigners for the most part, who wanted to pay their respects to the sacred memory of ‘Oscar, the martyr’. There was another point too. He had adored his mother, he had seen the misery which the case had brought on her. He resented his father’s having inflicted this misery upon her. Yet loyalty would not allow him to speak a word against his father. Better remain silent. Perhaps, we would think, he would have liked to talk about him. He seemed the least inhibited person in the world, but this refusal to discuss a subject that must have been constantly on his mind may have created barriers inside himself. But it was not for us, we felt, to bring up the subject.

  When I returned to London in the summer of 1945 after very nearly four years in the Middle East, I found changes in many of my friends, but nothing surprised me more than to find Vyvyan talking freely about his father, without embarrassment, with affection, with wit, treating the sudden vogue in Wilde as a piece of comedy that would have made his father chuckle.

  During the war he had married Thelma Besant, a very attractive Australian woman who is one of the chief figures in Cyclax. Thelma, who is several years younger, had grown up when the scandal of the ‘nineties was half forgotten; to her the name of Oscar Wilde was one to be acknowledged proudly. Gradually and with great tact she broke down the barrier.

  If that barrier had not been broken down, Son of Oscar Wilde would not have been written and the world would have been the poorer. The Wilde saga would have lacked its coping stone.

  17

  Michael Arlen in Retirement1

  The King Cole Room in the St Regis Hotel, New York, is open at lunchtime to men only. On most days of the week during the early 1950s the table on the left of the desk was occupied by a small thin man in his later fifties, with a short clipped moustache and closely cut hair that was turning grey. He wore a dark suit that had been cut for him in Savile Row, a stiff white collar with a plain silk or satin tie and a pearl pin. He had a Continental air.

  He arrived at a quarter to one, alone. He would order a dry martini and light a cigarette which he smoked through a long holder; four places were laid at his table, and by the time he was half-way through his martini, one or two of those places would have been filled. His table was a club where each man paid for his own drinks and food, and his friends rang up a day or so before to ask if their presence would be convenient. If no one had rung up by ten o’clock he would take steps to assure that he would not lunch alone. He did not need to often; he had a large acquaintance and was excellent company. There was constant laughter at his table. He was a good listener, who could appreciate good talk, but the loudest laughter came when he himself was talking.

  A few years earlier as a result of a motor accident he had been forced to carry a walking stick and as he told a story, he would lean forward on it. When he was a very young man, the first Lord Birkenhead gave him this advice on public speaking: ‘If your hands are right, everything will be all right. Get a chair or table in front of you and hold on to it.’ He now used his walking stick as a lectern and gesticulated with his cigarette holder. You were reminded of those oriental tale-tellers of the marketplace, whose hands were as eloquent as their voices.

  He ordinarily took three martinis before he ordered lunch. Half past one became half past two. The room was now almost empty. Quite often at about quarter to three, a waiter would whisper, ‘Your wife’s outside, sir.’ She was small, neat, and dark, with a short, pointed aristocratic nose. She too had a foreign air. She had looked in on her way to her hairdresser to ask if anything had happened during lunch to change the plans that they had made that morning. He would talk to her for a couple of minutes then return to his table. A newcomer to the King Cole Room would think, ‘That must be somebody.’

  The newcomer would be right. It was Michael Arlen. And the story of the long journey that had brought him to that corner table in the King Cole Room is as romantic as any of those which brought him fame and fortune in the 1920s.

  I met him for the first time in 1920. Heinemann was then advertising a book by an unknown writer with a quote from the Daily Express: ‘All reading London is guessing at the authorship of a slim book entitled The London Venture. Some clever people think that Mr George Moore has recovered his dead youth in this extraordinary little volume, half essay, half novel, wholly delightful.’ Reviewing it in John O’London’s Weekly I gave my reasons for not believing that it was by George Moore. A few days later W. L. George, at an afternoon party, brought up to me a quietly but exceptionally well-dressed young man. ‘It’s as well,’ George said, ‘that you didn’t try to pretend there was no such person as Michael Arlen because here he is.’ George amplified his introduction. Arlen, he said, was an Armenian born in Bulgaria and christened Dikran Kouyoumdjian who had prudently rid himself of a name no bookseller could pronounce.

  Of that first meeting I can recall one thing only, but it was symptomatic. George showed me a copy of The London Venture that Arlen had inscribed on the title-page ‘Per ardua ad astrakhan’. From the start Arlen knew whither he was bound.

  Four years later The Green Hat was a top best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Subtitled ‘A Romance for a Few People,’ written in a highly mannered, almost precious style, peppered with allusions that the general reader could scarcely catch, it was presented to the public as belles-lettres rather than a novel in the genre of Max Beerbohm and George Moore; yet it caught the public fancy like a dance tune.

  Today, forty years later, it is easy to see why it did. It was set in the post-war London of fast cars and expensive night clubs, and its heroine, Iris Storm—a woman with ‘a pagan body with a Chislehurst mind’ (perhaps ‘Boston’ is the nearest American equivalent for that), star-crossed in her first love by a parent’s intervention—stayed faithful to that love ‘in her fashion’.

  ‘What I said at eighteen is true now at thirty. I have never said I loved him to any man but Napier for it hasn’t been true. I have given myself in disdain, in desire, with disgust, with delight, but I have kept to that silly childish boast of mine.’

  In The Green Hat Michael Arlen was the spokesman of a new type of woman who was demanding a man’s right to live her life in the way she chose. Several recent books—The Far Side of Paradise, for example—have accepted Iris Storm as a symbol of the 1920s. And in telling her story Arlen was also the spokesman of a disenchanted generation that after four years of the trenches was ea
ger to welcome extravagance, frivolity, and display.

  The story is told in the first person, with the narrator constantly in the centre of the stage, so that the personality of the author was an essential ingredient in the book’s success. Every discussion of The Green Hat became a discussion of Michael Arlen.

  His Armenian birth gave him an air of mystery. He rarely lifted the curtain on that foreign background, even to interviewers. Only once, in Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman, which appeared in his collection of short stories Babes in the Wood, was he autobiographical. In that story he told how he was brought to England at the age of five, and spent his boyhood in Southport, where there is a large Armenian colony. For three years he was ‘instructed in team work and pulling together at Malvern College in Worcestershire’, a school that is famous for its cricketers. At the age of seventeen he came to London on a weekly allowance of £2.

  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 pro
paganda 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.