Part 19

“At last a picture rose before our eyes, a large picture, very blue. Now who shall describe that picture which was so blue, blue even to the grass under the soldiers’ feet, the complexions of the soldiers’ faces and the rifles in the soldiers’ hands? Over against a blue tree stood a man, and miserably blue was his face, while the soldiers stood very stiffly with their backs to us, holding their rifles in a position which gave one no room to doubt but that they were about to shoot the solitary man for some misdemeanor. He was the loneliest looking man I have ever seen.

“‘Manet,’ said Tarlyon.

“The dark young stranger was absorbed; he pulled his hat a little lower over his left eye, so that the light should not obtrude on his vision....

“‘Come on,’ I whispered to Tarlyon, for we seemed to be intruding—so that I was quite startled when the stranger suddenly turned from the picture to me.

“‘You see, sir,’ he said gravely, ‘I know all about killing. I have killed many men....’

“‘Army Service Corps?’ inquired Tarlyon.

“‘No, sir,’ snapped the stranger. ‘I know nothing of your Corps. I am a Zeytounli.’

“‘Please have patience with me,’ I begged the stranger. ‘What is a Zeytounli?’

“He regarded me with those smoldering dark eyes; and I realized vividly that his nose had been broken in some argument which had cost the other man more than a broken nose.

“‘Zeytoun,’ he said, ‘is a fortress in Armenia. For five hundred years Zeytoun has not laid down her arms, but now she is burnt stones on the ground. The Zeytounlis, sir, are the hill-men of Armenia. I am an Armenian.’

“‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Tarlyon murmured.

“‘Why?’ snarled the Armenian.

“‘Well, you’ve been treated pretty badly, haven’t you?’ said Tarlyon. ‘All these massacres and things....’

“The stranger glared at him, and then he laughed at him. I shall remember that laugh. So will Tarlyon. Then the stranger raised a finger and, very gently, he tapped Tarlyon’s shoulder.

“‘Listen,’ said he. ‘Your manner of speaking bores me. Turks have slain many Armenians. Wherefore Armenians have slain many Turks. You may take it from me that, by sticking to it year in and year out for five hundred years, Armenians have in a tactful way slain more Turks than Turks have slain Armenians. That is why I am proud of being an Armenian. And you would oblige me, gentlemen, by informing your countrymen that we have no use for their discarded trousers, which are anyway not so good in quality as they were, but would be grateful for some guns.’

“He left us.

“‘I didn’t know,’ I murmured, ‘that Armenians were like that. I have been misled about Armenians. And he speaks English very well....’

“‘Hum,’ said Tarlyon thoughtfully. ‘But no one would say he was Armenian if he wasn’t, would he?’”

iv

One of the six most famous American men novelists wrote about Michael Arlen a year or so ago, as follows:

“He is one of the phenomena of our time. You may or may not like phenomena”—this seems a little gratuitous. “But anyway, you probably like an original story, so in Michael Arlen’s case you can compromise on that. He himself does not compromise on anything, though he did once say that ‘discretion is the better part of literature.’ Since then, however, his novel, ‘_Piracy_,’ in which half London society figures, has run into many editions. The other half is no doubt wondering what he will say next.

“Michael Arlen is 25 years old; and, having served the usual terms at an English public school and University he is, so he says, entirely self-educated. There was also a war. And yet, though no human eye has ever seen him at work, he has written four successful books.

“The first, which he published at the age of twenty, was his memoirs and confessions, for he thought that he would be done with them at the beginning. Many people thought that the book, _A London Venture_, was by George Moore under a pseudonym; some papers stated the fact with authority. Since then he has been more frequently compared to Guy de Maupassant.

“Michael Arlen believes in working hard and living hard. He lives in Mayfair. Most of the summer he spends between Deauville and Biarritz, and most of the winter he may be found on the Riviera. The spring he spends in Venice. He also likes dancing and baccarat, and is a tournament tennis player.

“It is his considered opinion that if one had no enemies one would have no time to do any writing at all. So he has collected quite a number, whom he embitters by the amount of good work he does, while he amuses himself and his friends by never appearing to do any at all. That is, of course, a pose; but it is not a pose that everyone has the ability to wear. Try it and see.

“The New Statesman has called him ‘the romantic comedian of our time’; adding that he has no present equal in ‘the _dandysme_ of the soul.’ While the Daily Telegraph has said of him: ‘He concerns himself with people who are bored to death unless they are in some sort of mischief. The ladies carry their frailty as the gentlemen carry their drink—like gentlemen. Michael Arlen writes with the truculence of a Mohawk and the suavity of a Beau Nash....’

“This young man is among the last of those who believe that manners are worth while as manners. The chivalry of daily life is to him the king of indoor sports. And he has written that ‘a gentleman is a man who is never _unintentionally_ rude to anyone.’”[81]

Now who is the famous American novelist who could have written thus and thus of Mr. Arlen? Tell it not in Gath; publish it not in Main Street, Ascalon. We are not allowed to reveal his chaste identity. If he had an Armenian name, perhaps....

As a matter of fact, Michael Arlen was born in a Bulgarian village on the Danube. When he was five years old his parents decided to move to England. After he had been at an English public school the usual term of years he went to Switzerland to learn English. He was then seventeen. After he had been seventeen for some months, his parents called him back to Manchester, where they lived. He got as far as London. His parents then abandoned him with rather less than the customary shilling. He started to write. His first book, _A London Venture_, was a book of confessions, as at eighteen he had nothing else to write about. His confessions confessed little except poverty and loneliness.

He was foreign, young, careless of literary cliques, stayed up dancing all night and worked all day. London got to hear about him. He got a name in Fleet Street by never going to see an editor in his office. Michael Arlen always asked the editor to come outside and face him over a cocktail.

_The Romantic Lady_ arrived, greatly disappointing the publishers, as she was a book of short stories. Arlen said she would get on and she did, in moderation.

“_Piracy_” was perhaps the book of a young man who had lived hard and fought hard, with his tailors. It enabled him to pay them; but it was Arlen’s opinion that he had not yet begun to write. In an interview he said that so far he had been playing scales in public. _These Charming People_ came on, but the author was writing his big novel, _The Dark Angel_, and gave little heed to anything else. _The Dark Angel_ took him a year. He destroyed it. He realized that it was not the advance on “_Piracy_” which he and the most intelligent part of his public expected. _The Green Hat_ more nearly satisfies him.

v

But already there is a word minted. “_These Charming People_,” observes Mr. Philip Page, in some nondescript London newspaper cutting, “is very Arlenesque.” Mr. Page preferred it to “_Piracy_”—and it is indeed better work—although he missed the fun which “_Piracy_” afforded “of celebrity spotting, and the satisfaction of being able to say to myself, with a glowing feeling of being in the swim: ‘Here is Lady Diana Cooper!’ or ‘Here is Mr. Eddie Marsh!’” It is to be feared that most Americans cannot have Mr. Page’s warm sensation of culture, but in our uncultured way it is quite possible for us to enjoy such a portrait as the following, from “_Piracy_”—for we have him in America, too:

“The poetry Pretty Leyton discovered was often good, for his was a delicate and conservative taste; but it would have been easier to appreciate the good if one could only have discovered it among the bad, for his was also a delicate and kindly nature. While as for the young poets, of whom many called and all were chosen, he was continually begging his women friends, particularly Lois and Virginia, not to be ‘_too_ cruel’ to them, for they were so sensitive and worthwhile. To see and speak to Pretty Leyton in a crowded room was really very comforting, sometimes—which was just as well, since he was always in every room that happened to be crowded, saying: ‘Isn’t it a marvellous party?’ He gave all his women friends beautifully bound copies of _Tristram Shandy_, which he said was _the only_ book.”

And now—what shall I say? I could quote the processional of admiring, envious and rapturous adjectives applied to Mr. Arlen’s work. I could quote other notes of his fashionable progress as a person as well as a writer; but it would be repetitious. Besides, you will prefer to form your own adjectives and perfect your own legend; which is right and proper, and ever so charming of you. Kindly note that the correct name and address is Mr. Michael Arlen, 14, Queen Street, Mayfair, London, W. 1. Ask to be put through to Grosvenor 2275. But only in the Season, only in the Season.

BOOKS BY MICHAEL ARLEN

1920 _A London Venture_ 1921 _The Romantic Lady_ 1923 _“Piracy”: A Romantic Chronicle of These Days_ 1924 _These Charming People_ 1924 _The Green Hat: A Romance for a Few People_

SOURCES ON MICHAEL ARLEN

Review of _These Charming People_ by Arthur Waugh in the Daily Telegraph, London, for 6 July 1923.

Curtis Brown, Curtis Brown Ltd., 6, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London, W. C. 2.

17. Palettes and Patterns in Prose and Poetry

i

Was it Emerson who said of the poems by Emily Dickinson that they were “poetry pulled up by the roots, with the earth and dew clinging to them”? I can’t be sure, for someone has culpably made off with my copy of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s _Ponkapog Papers_, in which there is a pleasant essay on Emily Dickinson. Aldrich, of course, said in his meticulous way that poetry should not be pulled up by the roots; but modern feeling does not agree with him, holding the bit of earth and the sparkle of dewy freshness evidence incontrovertible that the flower is authentic and not mere paper or wax. Emily Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, a recluse who in her lifetime wrote over 600 poems, hardly any of which were published until after her death. And then?

Ah, but the estimation in which she is held, and a sequence of fame, steadily grows. Almost forty years after her death, she is more read and more delighted in than ever. “A mystic akin only to Emerson,” W. P. Dawson, the English critic, says in his own anthology. “Among American poets I have named two—Poe and Emily Dickinson.” And a reviewer for the London Spectator said not long ago: “Mr. Conrad Aiken in his recent anthology of American poets calls Emily Dickinson’s poetry ‘perhaps the finest by a woman in the English language.’ I quarrel only with his ‘perhaps.’”

Splendid news, therefore, that we now have a new one-volume edition of her work! _The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson_ contains all the verse which appeared in _Poems, First Series_, in _Poems, Second Series_, and in _Poems, Third Series_, and also those in the book brought out as recently as 1914, _The Single Hound_. The total body of Emily Dickinson’s work is therefore presented, and all in a new and proper arrangement, making the edition definitive. Emily Dickinson’s niece and biographer, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, has written an introduction for the work.

Having begun, in spontaneity and pleasure, with poetry, let us stick to it a while. Here are three more volumes by women poets, sisters, the Brontës, no less. Clement K. Shorter has edited them and C. W. Hatfield has provided the bibliographies and notes. They are _The Complete Poems—of Charlotte Brontë, of Anne Brontë, of Emily Jane Brontë_, respectively. Each is a first complete collection, and each contains a large percentage of poems never before published. I need not say anything of the romance investing the lives of these three women. Shut in a lonely parsonage in bleak moorland country, haunted by ill health and destined to die young, they made their lives one of the most extraordinary adventures in the history of the literary spirit. Their verse, of course, shows the Byronic influence.

The indefatigable J. C. Squire has been busy compiling an _A Book of American Verse_ with ingratiating results. Himself a poet, an editor who selects new verse and a critic, Mr. Squire has ranged over the whole field of American literature from its beginnings and has been at once personal and catholic in his inclusions. His most recent collection of his own work, _Essays on Poetry_, includes short papers on Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, W. B. Yeats, and some others.

_Walter de la Mare: A Biographical and Critical Study_, by R. L. Mégroz, is the first book devoted to the life and writings of this poet and prose writer of such marked distinction. Mr. Mégroz says that the purpose of his volume is “to show the poet of dream in a human light and in relation to the rest of society.” It is difficult to think of a living writer of more interest for such a study than the author of the _Memoirs of a Midget_, the close friend of Rupert Brooke, and the poet of happiest childhood as well as of soberly reflective and tranquil age. Mr. Mégroz’s book has the charm of its subject, and more.

One need not be a professor or scholar in the technical sense to write a good book on English literature, and the proof of it, if a fresh one be needed, is T. Earle Welby’s _A Popular History of English Poetry_. Mr. Welby is an amateur, unless his amateur standing may have been impaired by his articles in the London Saturday Review and his other book, a critical study of Swinburne. _A Popular History of English Poetry_ is said to be the only one-volume book of its sort, but whether it is or not, it is remarkably welcome. Its survey runs from Chaucer (there is even a prefatory chapter on pre-Chaucer) to Meredith and Hardy and Masefield and de la Mare. And it deserves the adjective in front of the word “History” in its title. Anyone who knows or cares about poetry at all can read with delighted ease and will learn something in every chapter. Mr. Welby has both a fertile knowledge and a light touch. His judgments are neither vague characterizations nor conventional utterances; he has taste and he has an opinion, and he gives you each.

ii

To leave the poets for the moment but to keep in the sense of an exquisite color and form: _Echo de Paris_, by Laurence Housman, is a bit of severely ornamented reminiscence which I think of first when now I think of decorative prose—not so much because of its own brief perfection as because of its subject. Oscar Wilde’s influence is not a negligible thing in a contemporary literature which embraces Cabell, Hergesheimer, Elinor Wylie, Carl Van Vechten, and others, both American and English, who value words somewhat as James Huneker valued them, for their sound, shape, smell and taste. I take from the London Times a description of _Echo de Paris_:

“At the end of September, 1899, three friends are sitting in a café near the Place de l’Opera. They are awaiting a guest for luncheon, and from their amicable chatter we learn that it is Wilde who is expected. Presently he appears, and while they take their aperitifs holds his audience with that marvelous conversation which long before had made him legendary. It is substantially the record of an actual conversation, Mr. Housman tells us, for he was the host on this occasion. Apart from the actuality of the setting, he has imagined a dramatic incident which he believes, though symbolical, will represent the existing emotional situation. As Wilde talks, with an apparent indifference to his personal disaster, another man is seen coming along the street. He advances toward the group, all of whom he knows well, especially Wilde, who befriended him before his imprisonment, but, after clearly recognizing them, passes on without a sign. Wilde continues to weave his unwritten stories; but he has been deeply hurt and gracefully disentangles himself from a luncheon which, faced with the spectators of his pain, would have been more than even he could bear.

“The difficulty of producing a reasonable imitation of Wilde’s conversation has been overcome so successfully that we sometimes feel that one of his essays is being read by one of the characters in his comedies—there is that combination of verbal wit and bold intellectual paradox. In these pages we are made to feel something of the reality on which his reputation was built.”

Judges so diverse as Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell, and Carl Van Vechten have uttered words of extreme praise for Elinor Wylie’s _Jennifer Lorn_. I don’t know of a recent work before which one feels an equal impotence of the descriptive faculty. This novel of an eighteenth century exquisite and his bride is as brightly enameled as the period it deals with; every paragraph is lacquered. You have perhaps stood long before some Eastern carpet with old rose, cream, ivory and dark blue in enigmatical patterns, your eye delighting in its intricacy. Have you tried afterward to tell someone about it? Then, precisely, you know the difficulty of reporting _Jennifer Lorn_. It is worth noting, though, that the novel does not merely purvey an eighteenth century story; it seeks to purvey it, with delicate, inner irony in the eighteenth century manner. The adroit printing and binding in simulation of an eighteenth century format was inevitable, perhaps; but it was not so inevitable that it should be so delightfully well-done.

An autobiography would seem to belong in Chapter 12 of this book; I saved out Thomas Burke’s autobiographical volume because the spirit of it, and the color of his writing, seemed to place it here. He calls it _The Wind and the Rain_; it is the most intimate book he has ever written, and the best since _Limehouse Nights_ (from some standpoints it is better than that work). In _The Wind and the Rain_, Thomas Burke returns to Limehouse, telling of his boyhood and youth, of the squalor of his early years, of the loneliness and hunger of his City days, of the moments of spiritual exaltation that came to him at night in London streets. He recalls his friendship with old Quong Lee, a storekeeper in the Causeway; his one-room house with an Uncle; his adventures in the kitchen of the Big House at Greenwich where his Uncle worked; his rapturous hours in the street; his four wretched years in an orphanage; his running away and being sheltered by the queer woman in the queer house; his first job; his friendship with a girl of thirteen and its abrupt end; his discovery of literature and pictures and music; his first short story accepted when he was still an office-boy; and then his first success. This somewhat long recitation speaks for itself and will kindle the imagination of anyone who ever read Thomas Burke or saw Griffith’s film, “Broken Blossoms.”

Hugh Walpole’s critical study of _Anthony Trollope_ is welcome both because a good account of Trollope is needed and because Walpole’s own work used to be likened to that of the author of _Barchester Towers_. I believe the comparison is pretty well obsolete—Mr. Walpole is now rather the object than the subject of comparisons—but those who know Walpole best have long known of his very definite interest in Trollope and his gradual acquisition of materials for a survey of Trollope’s work. The _Anthony Trollope_ by Walpole is a book to set beside Frank Swinnerton’s _Gissing_ and _R. L. Stevenson_; we have a right to hope that the fashion will spread among the novelists; and I should like nothing better than to record a similar book by Arnold Bennett, even if, as is very probable, he would consent to do one only on a French subject—in which case he would probably select Stendhal.

But this leads directly to the whole subject of literary discussions. It is too big to deal with here, and yet I can’t drop it without some reference to the two most provocative books of the sort in recent memory. Dr. Joseph Collins is a well-known New York neurologist whose literary hobby has been cultivated in private during a number of years. It was the rich pungency of his conversation which first led to insistences that he write a book about authors. He did. _The Doctor Looks at Literature_, with its praise of Proust and its incisiveness regarding D. H. Lawrence, its appreciation of Katherine Mansfield and its penetrating study of James Joyce, was something new, sparkling, resonant and simply not to be missed. Dr. Collins’s second book, _Taking the Literary Pulse_, is as strongly brewed and as well-flavored. I find it even more interesting because it deals to a much greater extent with American writers—Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Amy Lowell and others—and because of the uncompromised utterance in the first chapter on literary censorship, a subject which most discussion merely muddles.

iii

Of collections of essays, I have no hesitation in putting first the anthology by F. H. Pritchard, _Essays of To-Day_. Not only are the inclusions amply representative of the best work by contemporary English essayists, but to my mind Mr. Pritchard has supplied, in his Introduction, one of the most inspiring essays of the lot. He writes, naturally, about the essay as a form of art, and shows quite simply how the essay and the lyric poem are “the most intimate revelations of personality that we have in literature.” His wisdom is equaled by a power of expression which can best be intimated by quoting a few of his words regarding the lyric:

“Ordered by the strict limitations of rhythm, and obedient to the recurrences of rime and meter, the unruly ideas are fashioned into a lyric, just as scattered particles, straying here and there, are drawn together and fused into crystalline beauty. The difference, indeed, is one of temperature”—the difference between lyric and essay. “The metal bar, cold or lukewarm, will do anywhere, but heat it to melting-point and you must confine it within the rigid limits of the mold or see it at length but an amorphous splash at your feet.”

Then follow thirty-four selections, each prefaced by a short biographical note on its author. Youth and old age, reminiscences, the spirit of place and of holiday, and various interrelations between life and letters are the subjects. Kenneth Grahame, Joseph Conrad, Maurice Hewlett, E. V. Lucas, Robert Lynd, W. B. Yeats, Hilaire Belloc, Rupert Brooke, C. E. Montague, E. Temple Thurston, Alice Meynell, George Santayana, Gilbert K. Chesterton and Edmund Gosse are some of the writers who achieve inclusion; and the variety of the essays is great—irony, humor, romantic feeling, delight in places and sadness all have their moment.

Such a collection, one feels, cannot but lead the reader to books by some of the authors represented; and I hope such readers will not miss Robert Lynd’s _The Blue Lion_. Here are some chapters dealing apparently with children, birds, flowers, taverns and the like, but animated by that interest in, sympathy for and appreciation of human nature which is the field of the essay’s most fertile cultivation.