The Michael Arlen We Never Knew: A New Biography Offers New Revelations

What was missing, of course, was a proper biography of Arlen, one he deserved for his many-faceted writing career, his life among literary celebrities, and his journey through eventful eras of history.  Stepping into the breach is Philip Ward, a prolific British author, critic, translator, and biographer with a keen eye for what is interesting in the world of letters and culture. The result is Encounters with Michael Arlen: A 1920s Literary star as Seen by Himself and His Contemporaries (Market Harborough, Leicestershire: Troubador Publishing Ltd., 2023).

Ward lists four sources of information for his knowledge of Arlen’s life: what he said about himself; what appears in his correspondence; the extensive press coverage he received in his years of fame; and, finally, his interactions with others — for example, D. H. Lawrence (who made him a character in the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover); F. Scott Fitzgerald (who lectured Ernest Hemingway on his plots);  and Aldous Huxley (who was his rival for the affections of Nancy Cunard) — among many others.

Ward’s descriptive powers are strong: he draws vivid pictures of the physical and social settings into which Arlen was thrust by his fame, which hit Arlen early and hit him hard. He was up to the challenge of being the celebrity of the moment, offering quotable quips, getting invited to the right parties and, though suffering his share of British class/cultural snobbery, holding his own. (He met and survived the Algonquin Circle in New York.)

What is likely to interest Mirror-Spectator readers most is the light Ward sheds on Arlen’s relationship to his Armenian identity, with special reference to a controversy over Arlen’s short story “Confessions of a Naturalized Englishman,” which he published in 1929. Some phrases he expressed about the Armenian people infuriated Armenian readers — references to Armenia as “an unlovely courtesan”; as an ignoble race”; as an “outcast people” who were “inheritors of centuries of ignoble martyrdoms and mean escapes.”  The narrator of the story asks, “What art could come from an Armenian? What greatness? What even of worth?” The piece concludes, with reference to Armenia, “Why could you not die with dignity, why did you not die with Ninevah, Carchemish, Babylon?”

This piece aroused as much fury among Armenian readers as one might imagine, but Ward carefully and excellently explicates the context and aim of the piece. The narrator of the story is a young man — let’s assume, Dikran Kouyoumdjian — who has just been “stood up” by a woman he had fancied and was feeling very, very sorry for himself, his sorrow taking the form of an adolescent self-flagellation that lit on his Armenian identity. The story portrays one of those moments in youth when the world seems determinedly in opposition to one’s dreams and one’s prospects in life look hopeless. And who is to blame for that?

Ward’s account of this incident, and the material he has uncovered and reprints in his book, offer tremendous insight not only into the mind of Dikran/Michael, but also of a host of broader cultural issues and understandings. One should read the whole to understand what it meant to carry a cultural identity into a context that never quite becomes home to the soul.