by Alec Waugh
He was not exaggerating. Atalanta, the daughter of Count Mercate, half-Greek, half-American, was like Michael a kind of exile. With their background of Eastern Europe they must have understood many things about each other without needing to explain them; they could feel at home with one another, as they could not completely with the island-based English. They matched each other. They were, they stayed, a team. When they were together in a group, he wove her into his conversation. In their first years of marriage she was very silent, but she was always a person of character. I met her for the first time at a small tea party given in her honour shortly after her marriage. William Gerhardi was there. He was a little patronizing, and asked her if she proposed to criticize her husband’s novels. ‘No,’ she said. It was a most eloquent ‘No’ and made Gerhardi look rather more than foolish.
After his marriage I saw much more of Arlen. We could meet them on equal terms, in a way that we could not when he was unattached and affluent, moving in an atmosphere of yachts and fast cars and fashionable playgrounds.
He bought a villa outside Cannes. The French Riviera was then developing its summer season. Many writers were making their homes along the coast—Maugham, P. G. Wodehouse, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Frankau, Phillips Oppenheim. It was a pleasant world, with its blue skies and blue seas, with its terraced olive groves and flowers, with its healthy, outdoor life of swimming and golf and tennis. Everyone felt well, everyone looked well. The setting for every activity was gracious. A lunch party that might well be ordinary in London becomes idyllic on a balcony shaded by vine leaves, looking over a valley towards a village that is a medieval fortress, with the Mediterranean showing in a gap between the hills, and a liner passing like a toy ship on the horizon.
Arlen was very happy there; happy in his marriage, in his son and daughter, in his way of life. He had many friends; he enjoyed golf and tennis; the climate suited him. In the late autumn he came back to London and was warmly welcomed there. In January he went to Switzerland to ski. He had enough money for his needs. It is very easy in the atmosphere of the Riviera to let days drift into weeks, weeks into months. It is hard to work there unless you are goaded by necessity. Arlen had no such goad. But he went on writing.
In 1931 the serial rights of Men Dislike Women—a delightful comedy of manners—were bought at a high price by Cosmopolitan. Short stories appeared at regular intervals; they were collected under the title The Crooked Coronet and Other Misrepresentations of the Real Facts of Life, and one at least of them, The Golden Arrow, was produced by Hollywood. He published two novels, Man’s Mortality, a story of wars of the future in 1932 and The Flying Dutchman, a political allegory in 1939. Both these novels were highly praised by responsible reviewers. ‘Does mankind improve? At any rate Mr Arlen improves. He gets better and better as he gets more and more serious.’ That was the general tone. J. B. Priestley wrote of Mans Mortality: ‘I did not think him to be a man of this mettle. Bravo.’
The reviewers were no less enthusiastic over The Flying Dutchman. Humbert Wolfe wrote: ‘Michael Arlen runs a serious risk of acclaiming himself on the way to becoming a genius. For many years in point of sheer diabolical talent he has been unapproachable.’ But in spite of its reviews, this book attracted little public interest. Myself I was unaware of its existence, till I found it in a friend’s library several years after the war. The reading of it was a curious experience. It was a good novel, but without the name upon the cover I should never have guessed its authorship.
I realized then that a strange thing had happened during the 1930s. A divorce had taken place between the Michael Arlen whom the world saw and the Michael Arlen who put his name on covers. In 1924 Michael Arlen was a composite production, the writer and the man were one; in 1939 the Michael Arlen who played golf at Cannes and drank martinis in the Carlton Bar was the author of The Green Hat fifteen years farther down the course—but the man who sat at a desk in a study looking out over the Mediterranean had ceased to be that Michael Arlen.
The Flying Dutchman was published six months before the outbreak of the Second World War. That second war, as the first, made Arlen because of his Bulgarian birthplace an odd man out. He was now a British subject but at forty-five he was too old for the armed services. He returned with Atalanta to London in the autumn to look for war work, but it was not easy to find war work during the period of the ‘phoney war’. Atalanta joined the Red Cross but Michael played poker at the Savage Club. Then came the fighting war with an opportunity at last for war work: Lord Dudley appointing him Civil Defence Public Relations officer for the East Midlands. Arlen was in Coventry when it was bombed. But with the end of the phoney war, there was a return of xenophobia. Arlen might be a British subject, but he had been born in Bulgaria. Could he be trusted? Might he not be a Fifth Columnist?
Questions were asked in the House and once again Michael Arlen found himself, if not a man without a country, a man without a country that would let him help defend it. He shrugged. It was a situation that amused him. With a domicile in France, he was not normally exposed to British income-tax, but since he was a British subject, the British Treasury considered itself entitled to sequester of all of his and his wife’s American possessions with the exception of Michael Arlen Inc., which was registered in South America. He shrugged again. Another Armenian atrocity, he said, and continued to play poker at the Savage.
Early in 1941 his son’s school was moved to Canada and Atalanta went with it. Later in the year her husband followed her.
I often thought of him during the next four years. In 1942 I was posted as an intelligence officer to Baghdad, and one of my duties was to keep watch over the Armenian minorities whose subterranean activities the Germans might endeavour to exploit. I many times wished that Arlen were at my elbow to explain to me who stood for what. He at that time ironically enough was working in Hollywood on the film version of a novel of mine that M.G.M. had bought. The story never reached the screen and my report on the Dashnaks remained a draft. If we could have exchanged desks, if I could have worked on my own story, while he interpreted the national aspirations of his compatriots, practical results might have been obtained.
As soon as the war was over, I hurried back to New York and Arlen was one of the first people that I saw there. I met him on a bright September afternoon strolling down Fifth Avenue, spruce, elegant and debonair. In a week or two he informed me he would be fifty, and, ‘I don’t feel a day under forty-nine,’ he added.
He looked very much as he had quarter of a century earlier in W. L. George’s drawing-room. He was living now in a small furnished apartment in the Volney Hotel on 74th Street between Park and Madison. His son, Michael John,* was at Groton, on his way to Harvard. The Arlens planned to stay over in America till their children were settled in the world. They were anxious to revisit London but once again there were problems of nationality. Arlen had come into America on a period permit which he could renew every six months; he wanted to take up a permanent residence, but though he was a British subject, the American immigration laws rate you by the country of your birth, so that in the eyes of Washington he was a Bulgarian and his wife a Greek; the quotas for those countries were filled till the year 2010. He was afraid that if he once left America, he might find it difficult to return. A typical Arlen situation.
I saw him a lot that autumn. We had many friends in common. His flat was small and he had few meals at home. He lunched either at the Colony or at the ‘21’, usually in masculine company. Most evenings he was at a cocktail party; neat, starched, unobtrusively well dressed, his hands folded over his Malacca cane; the centre of the group around him, yet never monopolizing the conversation, bringing others into the talk, making them feel themselves attractive and important, taking genuine pleasure in any piece of good fortune that befell his friends. Then he would leave on a curtain line to take his wife out to dinner.
She too was little changed: her dark hair was flecked with grey, but she was trim and elegant, with the same a
ir of race: they were a striking couple. It was very pleasant to see them dining together at the Colony. They were so very obviously enjoying each other’s company. They looked a romantic couple on an early date.
He shook his head when I asked him what he was working on. Since his arrival in America he had spent two years in Hollywood, on a contract with M.G.M. but he had written nothing. He had never liked writing, he said. He didn’t need to write. Why should he? He preferred reading; all lazy men like to read, he said, and he indulged in this type of sloth seven or eight hours a day. He read the kinds of book he liked, and he was generous in his praise of other writers. It did not worry him that his name no longer stood at the head of the best-seller list. He was getting what he wanted out of life.
‘Of course I am happy,’ he told an interviewer, ‘any man should be happy who enjoys the patience of his wife, the tolerance of his children, and the loyalty of head waiters.’
It was now nine years since I had met him on Fifth Avenue and in a certain sense not much had happened to him since the relaxation of currency restrictions had made it possible for him to move into a large and pleasant Park Avenue department. He had sold his house in Cannes and brought over his furniture and books and pictures. His daughter, Venetia, was now a junior editor at Double-day’s. Michael John had been doing military service after graduating from Harvard, where he was one of the editors of the Lampoon and was largely responsible for its very amusing skit on Punch; for a year he was in Paris on the Time-Life staff. The family immigration problem had at last been settled by means no less august than an Act of Congress, and Michael Arlen had contentedly gone on being Michael Arlen.
The Park Avenue apartment contained a study. ‘My wife has taken away my last excuse for not writing novels,’ he complained. But he wrote nothing. Sometimes I felt it was a pity that so considerable a gift should have been allowed to wither, but when I read The Flying Dutchman I understood why he had let it do so. In the 1930s the following quatrain appeared in a fashionable London weekly:
Mr Arlen
Was formerly Mayfair’s darling
But she raised a plucked and supercilious eyebrow
When he went all highbrow.
The side of him that still might have cared to write was no longer Michael Arlen and he had no use for it. He could now be Michael Arlen more effectively by not writing. It was as simple as all that.
He was always a man of gesture, and though the young Armenian who changed his name from Kouyoumdjian could not have foreseen this final chapter of his story, he would have recognized it as being in keeping with the plan of campaign he drew up in the New Age offices. He said then of his future and of the novel that he would write, ‘The quality I shall desire in it will be fastidiousness.’ He showed that quality as consistently in his life as in his writing. He would have been content, while he corrected the proofs of The London Venture in 1919, to have foreseen that in 1949 he would be reading the following description of himself in the New Yorker: ‘Slender of waist, bushy of eyebrow, neatly sideburned, elegantly moustached, poised, urbane, resplendent in a pin-striped blue suit, the flourisher of a gold-banded Malacca cane, possessed by no demon whatever and apparently the world’s best adjusted writer.’
It had been a long road from Dvornok, Bulgaria, to that side table in the King Cole Room: a long and a romantic road. Michael Arlen had fulfilled the destiny he chose.
18
W.S.M.: R.I.P.
I saw Somerset Maugham for the last time in Nice, in January 1965. We were strolling in opposite directions along the Promenade des Anglais. It was a warm, sunny day, freshened by a breeze. We paused for a brief gossip. He said to my companion, ‘The wind in your cape makes you look like a bird.’ He had a quick eye for women’s clothes. He was smiling; he looked brisk and cheerful. It was one of his good days. As I watched him walk away, ‘I said, I wonder if that’s the last time we’ll see him.’ I hoped for his sake it was. His good days were now rare; his faculties were failing; living had become a burden. Yet in his general appearance, he had changed very little from the distant summer when I had begun to know him well.
That was in 1931, when I was spending a couple of quiet months in Villefranche, working upon a novel, and he invited me to lunch at the Villa Mauresque. But I had met him before, once, briefly in the early spring of 1922 at a lunch organized for the contributors to Georgian Stories by its editor Arnold Lunn, the elder brother of Hugh Kingsmill of whom I have written in an earlier chapter. Lunn had no particular qualifications for this self-inflicted chore; when he was knighted in 1952 for his services to British ski-ing, the award made no reference to any services to literature, but he had published in fact in addition to a number of books on mountaineering, a novel about school life The Hanrovians that in its own field was a classic and that in the summer of 1913 was the centre of considerable controversy; while as a Roman Catholic convert he has been for many years ‘a subtle disputant on creeds’. His interest in an anthology that should be complementary to E. M.’s Georgian Poetry, may be attributed to his having written a story called A Scrap of Paper for which he could devise no other means of publication. His editorship was not acknowledged, because I fancy he did not want that story presented as self-selected.
The lunch was held in a private room in the St Pancras Station Hotel—a curious venue but the family offices were conveniently close in Endsleigh Gardens. About a dozen authors accepted Lunn’s invitation.
Maugham who was represented in the anthology by Rain was one of the first arrivals. Lunn’s welcoming of him was not too happy. ‘I can’t say I know your short stories well, but I greatly enjoyed Of Human Bondage’ Maugham made no reply; a wintry smile flickered beneath his moustache. At lunch he sat next to Violet Hunt—whom he may have had in mind when he drew the character of Rose Sparlight in The Moon and Sixpence. They were seated on the same side of the table as myself, three places away and I had no chance of hearing their conversation.
He and Violet Hunt left early. The contributors were paying for their own lunches. As the waiter bustled forward with their bills, Maugham picked up the two slips of paper. ‘I think I can stand you a lunch, Violet,’ he said. Violet Hunt was in low waters at the moment. Her private troubles, and they were many, had been widely publicized. Her soi-disant husband Ford Madox Hueffer had left her for a very much younger woman and become the father of a child, and though Violet still entertained amply at Campden Hill she had ceased to be a writer of whom anything in particular was expected. Maugham’s gesture re-established her as regards that gathering. He seemed to be saying to us all that she was not only an old friend, but the one person in the room of any consequence to himself. As he was leaving the room, Lunn, from the head of the table, said, ‘We don’t seem to have decided what is a Georgian story.’ Maugham’s answer came back pat, ‘A story written since George V’s accession that we want to re-read today,’ The tart retort, the wintry smile, the generous gesture to an old friend made that first meeting symptomatic.
It may seem surprising that Maugham should have bothered to attend the lunch, but that too was in character and keeping. He was always inquisitive about the literary scene, detached though he was from it. He wanted to be in the movement; he was sensitive to criticism. And he was no doubt conscious that his reputation as a novelist did not stand high just then. He was not mentioned once in W. L. George’s A Novelist on Novels and though it was as a novelist that he began his career, at the turn of the century, it was as a dramatist, a writer of social comedies, that eight years later he achieved his first spectacular success.
His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, was a brutal story of low life in Bermondsey for which his experiences as a doctor had given him first-hand information, ‘his little black bag protecting him in the foul courts that the police hesitated to enter’. It earned him in royalties during the first year only £20 but it impressed the critics and its reception encouraged him to abandon medicine. He had been left a small sum of money and he decided to invest i
t in himself. He went abroad and set himself to become a writer. He was then twenty-three.
During the next few years he published several novels including Mrs Craddock. They did not earn much money but they were reviewed respectfully. He was also working upon plays, one of which, A Man of Honour, was produced by the Stage Society. It was subsequently published in the Fortnightly Review, but it was too sombre and realistic to attract the commercial theatre. It contained, however, a scene of comedy, whose reception made Maugham suspect that he would be wise to exploit this line. He wrote Lady Frederick. In its big scene a woman in her thirties reveals herself to a young admirer without her make-up. Managers shook their heads. No leading actress, they assured him, would display herself at such a disadvantage. Maugham wrote another comedy, Mrs Dot. This time, managers told him that he was too cynical. But he persisted and at last had a lucky break. A play at the Court had to be taken off earlier than had been expected, and its successor was not yet ready. Lady Frederick was put on as a stop-gap for a six-weeks’ run. The scene in which the leading actress revealed the intimacies of her toilet ‘brought down the house’ and the play ran a year.
Managers now decided that after all he was not too cynical and sought his wares. He had a number of plays in the drawer—Mrs Dot, Jack Straw, The Explorer. Within a few weeks his name was on the boards of four simultaneous successes, and Punch had a cartoon showing Shakespeare looking enviously at the playbills. That was in 1908.
Few writers have enjoyed a more sensational success. But it was not the kind of success to impress the avant-garde criticism of the day. Popularity is always an object of distrust and 1908 marked the peak of a period that was in violent reaction against the languid eccentricities of the ‘nineties. Art, it was then held, should have a purpose: and it was to the plays of Shaw and Galsworthy and the novels of H. G. Wells that the young turned for authority and guidance. Maugham, in their eyes, had no message. He did not want to improve people or to expose abuses. It was held that ‘he stood for nothing’ and that he was merely ‘an entertainer’. His stock in 1910 stood lower with the intelligentsia than it had in 1900, and for quite a while nothing happened to make the intelligentsia reconsider its verdict.