‘It might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season—I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.’
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
‘I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s—’
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
‘He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.’
(Baby Warren and Dick Diver chatting in ‘Tender Is The Night’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book 2, chapter 21)
‘Your generation,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘is a mess.’
(The Green Hat, chapter 3)
She suspected they might be thinking she was going to more than powder her nose. They were, she was, who cared?
(chapter 4)
She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel.
(chapter 4)
‘The Marches are never let off anything…’
(The sense of doom clinging round twins Iris and Gerald March, a phrase often repeated)
She [Billee Ponthéveque, a cocotte] never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach.
(The blasé attitude to sex and drugs which helped make the book notorious; chapter 7)
‘Why is every one so awful these days!’
(poor Venice Pollen, wailing the eternal wail; chapter 7)
I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.
(One of hundreds of passages where the narrator adulates the protagonist, Iris Storm; chapter 9)
‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was the publishing sensation of 1924, making its author famous overnight, quickly becoming a touchpoint for the culture, going on to be referenced in contemporary newspapers, magazines and other fictions for the next decade and more, as epitomising the spirit of the day and the year.
It more or less invented the concept of the heedlessly hedonistic bright young things of London. More specifically, it crystallised and defined the idea of the new woman about town, smartly dressed, comfortably off, defying conventions (wearing short skirts, bobbing her hair, smoking!). The heroine in question is Iris Storm, wearer of the green hat in question, fast driver of a Hispano-Suiza motor car and breaker of men’s hearts.
Michael Arlen
The most striking thing about the author of this quintessentially English comedy is that he wasn’t English at all, but a Bulgarian of Armenian descent. He was born Dikran Sarkis Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria to an Armenian merchant family. In 1892, his family moved to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after fleeing Turkish persecutions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In Plovdiv, Arlen’s father set up an import-export business and a few years later, he moved his family to England. It was here that young Dikran went to school and was raised speaking posh English, before enrolling at Edinburgh University.
During the Great War Dikran was regarded with suspicion as Bulgaria was allied to Germany and Austria. He gravitated to London and fell in with other conscientious objectors and outsiders. He began writing essays and article for the New Age magazine, and took to signing them Michael Arlen to allay the xenophobia his real name aroused.
During the 1920s Arlen rented rooms opposite ‘The Grapes’ public house in Shepherd Market, then a bohemian Mayfair address. He used Shepherd Market as the setting for the novel. Here’s Shepherd Market on Google Maps. In 1920 he became infatuated with one of the leading socialites of her day, the brilliant and charismatic Nancy Cunard, and she is the inspiration for Iris Storm.
It is, then, as you can see, a strongly autobiographical novel, but with the central character exaggerated for sensational effect.
‘The Green Hat’ made Arlen famous and rich. He enjoyed dressing smartly, driving round London in a yellow Rolls Royce (precursor to John Lennon’s white Rolls Royce forty years later), hobnobbing with other celebrities. He regularly travelled to the United States to work on plays and films. He was understandably nervous about writing a follow-up to his big hit and, indeed, none of his subsequent novels were nearly as successful but he was, until his death in 1956, famous for being famous.
Chapter 1. The Green Hat
Introducing the narrator and Iris Storm
It is the summer of 1922. The story is a first-person narrative told in a breezily facetious style by a well-educated, posh but poor man about town. He lives in a crappy flat above a sordid alleyway in Mayfair’s Shepherd’s market and takes us into his confidence with various arch and self-conscious narrative comments, which hark back to Victorian storytelling.
It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins…
He has just got back to his flat after a party when the front doorbell rings. It is a woman wearing a fashionable small green hat pulled down over her eyes, come to visit her brother, Gerald March, who lives in the flat above the narrator.
As he lets her into the ramshackle house, the narrator is dazzled by her beauty and self possession, by her striking car, a big yellow Hispano-Suiza, by the panache of her green hat, by her small face and dancing auburn hair. He notices she is wearing a large green emerald ring on the third finger of her right hand. He comes to notice that she has tiger-tawny hair and a husky voice. Unfortunately, when they get to the door of Gerald’s flat they see that he is blind drunk.
After the first few pages you realise it is going to overflow with infatuated descriptions of the charismatic Iris. Rhapsodies. A love letter.
She stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfreluches, who know how to stand carelessly.
About her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of many adventures.
The magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.
It seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.
One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.
She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular,
She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.
She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?—as someone who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours.
She wasn’t that ghastly thing called ‘Bohemian’, she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called ‘society’, ‘county’, upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not.
One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.
She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about…
Arlen isn’t afraid to deploy shamelessly poetic prose:
White she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams.
She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world.
Anyway, they look into Gerald’s room long enough to realise he has passed out drunk again. The narrator explains that his binges go on for three days. Iris introduces herself, Iris Storm, Mrs Storm, and explains that she and Gerald are twins, born within the same hour 29 years ago. They come from a posh landed family, the Marches, which has fallen on hard times.
I could somehow ‘cope with’ my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat…
Gerald is ‘absurdly shy’, can’t cope with life hence the alcoholism. She spends most of her time abroad, which she explains why she hasn’t seen her brother for ten years. But he’s drunk and after a bit of chat and explaining these facts, they leave the drunken brother, Iris bitterly commenting that ‘the Marches are never let off anything…’ which becomes a refrain through the book.
On the way back down she suddenly drops into his room asking for a glass of water. The narrator is embarrassed because he is moving out of the place next day and his belongings are scattered all over the floor. She picks up various books, we discover that the narrator is (alas) a writer, and they have some literary chat (she thinks D.H. Lawrence is ‘nice’) which seems terribly dated and irrelevant, for example about the quality of ‘vulgarity’. Then they’re talking about ‘the Jews’ and their love of luxury which leads into a consideration of Chesterton, his Catholicism and blowing on about beer and Britain. Very dated, almost at times incomprehensible.
But the conversation is just filler while he observes and studies the woman he has already become besotted by:
The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are.
She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains.
She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself.
Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair.
More information is revealed, such as Iris has been married two times, both dead. Second husband, Captain Storm, won a Victoria Cross in the Great War but a year later was murdered by Sinn Feiners in Ireland.
There’s a knock at the door and it’s the local policeman on his beat and worried about an unusual car parked in the alley. The narrator reassures him, but when he returns to his flat, discovers Iris has gone into his bedroom and fallen asleep on the bed. He studies her beauty intently, sitting in a chair smoking till dawn. At which point she awakes, puts on some powder and the famous hat, and departs.
Her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself.
Wow! He is hooked.
Chapter 2. The Cavalier Of Low Creatures
Profiling Iris’s twin brother, [the alcoholic] Gerald March
The book very heavily uses the old thriller trick of saying ‘But one was to learn later…’, ‘As I found out later…’, ‘That was to come much later…’ and most ominously of all, ‘But now I’ll never know what she was thinking’, ‘that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know…’ and the like, incredibly obviously signalling that something bad is going to happen, that the astonishingly charismatic Iris Storm is doomed to die!
More generally the narrator spends a lot of time telling us what he’s going to tell us later, constantly promising us stuff later: ‘He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.’ He fusses about what he’s going to say when.
At some point the narrator began to remind me of the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier‘, John Dowell, who comes over as an amateur storyteller, constantly fussing about when to tell us and how to tell us key elements of the plot, continually explaining how he didn’t understand this or that at the time they occurred. ‘It was only later that I realised…’ ‘But one notices those things only later on…’
In this manner the narrator declares that he’s talked the events which make up the narrative he’s going to tell with friends who knew Iris, Hilary Townshend and Guy de Travest, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war (‘I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string’).
This chapter is about Gerald March, twin brother of Iris Storm, six foot two, lean, one time captain in the Grenadier Guards, who’s gone completely to pot after the war. ‘He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it’, ‘the most lovable man I ever met.’,
That was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy
The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine, twisted, defiant mouth…
If I haven’t mentioned it before, Arlen’s prose style is odd, quirky, eccentric, mannered.
It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.
There was by ordinary no grinning froth about Gerald.
I thought I heard Guy mutter something between his teeth.
He has an odd way of saying, not that so and so was an x type of person, but that ‘that was an x type of person’.
That was a most deficient man in every other respect
That was a sad lady, most grave… That was a very quiet lady… That was a gallant lady.
That was a conscientious man, Conrad Masters.
That was a fell lady for whom I bought a green hat that day.
Now that was a loquacious lady.
It seems just not quite standard English usage, although maybe it overlaps with American street slang of the same period or a bit later, Damon Runyon characters saying ‘Now that was some swell broad!’ And he’s addicted to reversing standard word order, often sounding like Yoda from Star Wars.
Thoughtful he was always.
But not I to be provoked!
His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder, for tall was Gerald.
Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it.
Dark it was, the curtains drawn.
A boyish voice, a very boyish voice Venice had.
Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey.
Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern.
Too tall was Guy, in that light.
An amiable man, he looked.
Impatient, Iris’s voice was, I thought.
Soft she was now, soft and white and small.
Or both in one sentence:
The Blues, that man knows.
A man given to muttering, that.
I thought of… Mrs Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that.
Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way.
Why? Maybe he thought it was modish and modern. Throughout the book his style is often just odd;
We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed.
Venice was in high looks that day.
The narrator first met Gerald when he turned up at the magazine where the narrator worked, the New Voice edited by the testy Horton. He gruffly declares he has written a novel. It’s big, titled ‘The Savage Device’, concerns a young idealist named Felix Burton who marries the ghastly Ava Foe. Only later does Iris tell the narrator that Ava is based on her and Burton is based on her first husband, the legendary Boy Fenwick.
Back in the present, when the narrator rings Iris’s London home, the woman she rents the place to, Mrs Oden, tells her Iris left that day for Paris. Some days later he gets a git package from Paris. Iris has sent him a pack of beautiful writing paper with his new address printed on it.
Chapter 3. For Purity!
Portrait of family friend Hilary Townshend
Sometimes his prose is so overwrought and baroque as to be almost incomprehensible.
The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat.
At other times, in fact very frequently, he’s suddenly bright and clever.
Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age.
Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays.
‘Oh, Naps, such a wonder!’ cried Venice on the instant, and I saw what one is so apt to see after an intimate talk with a woman, that one has only been talking to a mood. (chapter 7)
‘Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other people’s expense…’ (chapter 8)
‘Oh, friends and enemies! One relies on what people are in themselves, no matter what circumstances may make them feel.’ (chapter 10)
And funny:
Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest night-clubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. (chapter 4)
The faint, slow lilt of the tango, pleasantest of all dances but one that is so seldom danced in London because nobody in London can dance it… which is a pity. (chapter 9)
She [Iris] drove that menacing bonnet ever more furiously along the road to Maidenhead, so that corners perished like midgets before our head-lights and Hugo and Shirley, who sat behind, murmured against her driving, saying that it would be bad for their reputation as a happily-married couple to be found dead on the road to Maidenhead. ‘A friend of mine,’ yelled Hugo, ‘was asked to resign from Buck’s for being found dead on the Maidenhead road…’ (chapter 9)
‘I do wish,” Hugo said violently, ‘that perfect strangers wouldn’t force themselves on us like this. Any one would think we were at a Royal Garden Party!’ (chapter 10)
And has some dazzling phrases:
Napier stared at her—he was sitting now—and it was as though he had put his hand to his mouth and placed a smile there. (chapter 7)
In the still air of Guy’s great, bare dining room those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat. (chapter 10)
Iris smiled, and those very white teeth bit the moment into two pieces with their smile and dropped the pieces into limbo. (chapter 11)
Well, in the days after Iris Storm’s apparition, the narrator goes for dinner with Hilary and we learn a bit more about all the characters. For example that shy alcoholic Gerald is heir to the earldom of Portairly (would become the 19th Earl of Portairley and Axe). That the second husband, Hector Storm V.C., left Iris everything, which explains why she’s loaded and can jaunt off to the continent all the time.
That her first husband was the legendary Boy Fenwick. That his body was found on the courtyard below their bedroom window on the first night of their honeymoon, Hilary thinks Boy threw himself to his death on a matter of purity. In other words, he discovered the love of his life, Iris March, was not a virgin. Iris could have stuck to the hotel’s suggestion that Boy was drunk on champagne and fell out the window by accident. But she is constitutionally incapable of lying and so said he threw himself out the window while she watched and lit a cigarette. Thus damning her reputation for ever.
The stilted, antagonistic dinner with Hilary is often very funny.
‘Seldom,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.’
Chapter 4. Aphrodite
At the Loyalty nightclub
Not wanting to go home to bed the narrator invites Hilary to a new nightclub on Pall Mall, the Loyalty, overseen by its directeur du restaurant, the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, and packed with social luminaries, an embodification of the roaring twenties.
As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling. She looked bored with boredom.
He had observed that the whole purpose of a “best-seller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban matrons.
The best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends.
There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the Cloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will.
The Loyalty is packed with people they know, and it’s maybe in this scene that Arlen created the sense of ‘Mayfair’ and nightclubs full of cynical bright young things dancing to ‘the Blues’.
There’s a buzz of news, people talking about the evening papers. Then suddenly everyone knows: the news is that Gerald was arrested in Hyde Park for bothering a woman, sitting at the same bench and making indecent proposals to a middle aged women who started screaming and the police appeared.
Iris is at this nightclub and comes up to the narrator and asks him to accompany her to his old house (which we saw him packing to move out of) but where Gerald still lives, because the narrator has a key to get in.
So they drive there and the narrator lets himself in, goes up to Gerald’s flat and it is elliptically done, but we slowly realise he discovered Gerald has blown his brains out. Without pausing he goes back down to Iris who’d waited in the hall and tells Iris he found Gerald in the same posture as the other day, i.e. sprawled drunk and insensible.
She thanks him and jumps into her powerful roadster and drives off. Turning back to his old house he discovers Guy who took a taxi there, who smokes thoughtfully and says: ‘Had an idea he might blow his brains out.’
Chapter 5. The Dark Letter
Paris 10 months later
All the preceding happened in June 1922. The narrative suddenly cuts to the last week of January of the year 1923 (although he later says it’s 10 months after Gerald’s death?) – and to the Place Vendôme in Paris and a description of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre which, under the lofty title of l’aristocratie internationale; the shops, the tourists, the Americans buying everything.
The narrator is with his sister. He’s spent four months at Cannes where he bumped into her and they drove across France to Paris. The sense of France, and the south of France, as a playground for tourists, reminds me of ‘Tender is The Night’ and perhaps explains why ‘The Green Hat’ is specifically referenced in it: Arlen described this world exactly a decade before Fitzgerald’s (far more profound and moving) account of it was published.
He has several amusing glances at the habitual rudeness of the French, especially French hotel staff, who refuse to help him or his sister, along with a number of comic generalisations (slurs) on the French character.
The French sections evinces a cosmopolitan knowingness epitomised by the dandyish Mr Cherry-Marvel who knows everybody and knows everything about everybody but drones on in endless confidential monologues. In the middle of this endless droning, the narrator drifts off to the present moment, the moment of writing, and tells us how he had, in the 6 months of Iris’s absence, received some long rambling often indecipherable letters from her, and quotes and comments from them at length, hence the title of this chapter.
But somehow, in the middle of his summary of the letters, the narrator describes Guy paying a visit to Iris lying ill in bed, and their conversation (as reported to him later by Guy). This long conversation included stuff about her marriage to Hector which seems to include references to her having gotten pregnant by Hector but Hector being killed before she came to term. This is all very obscure: did Iris have an abortion? Was that so completely illegal and socially stigmatised that Arlen can’t spell it out, even in fiction?
Eventually the narrator manages to interrupt Cherry-Marvel and extract the address of the house where Iris is staying. So he jumps into a taxi, a ‘clever little Citroën taxi’ which takes him on a delirious midnight drive into dark areas of Paris he has never been before, and Arlen gives a wonderfully purple description of the dream Paris of debauchery.
Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced a minuet du cœur with a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours…
The taxi pulls up in front of the address Cherry-Marvel gave him, a huge dark imposing building which he hallucinates is like a fortress or an asylum.
Chapter 6. The Red Lights
The nursing home where Iris is recovering
Continues straight on from the previous scene: When the narrator rings the bell the door is opened by a nun (who turns out to be a lay sister) and who explains that it is a convent-nursing-home. (‘Perhaps of all the nations in the world the French alone are capable of fixing the loudest possible bell to a nursing-home.’) When she explains:
‘Nous avons ici,’ she was pleased to add, ‘la clientèle européenne la plus chic’. [‘We have here the smartest European clientele]
It really made me think of ‘Tender Is The Night’ with its theme of high living inextricably linked with mental collapse. Except that Fitzgerald’s great achievement is to make everything seem wonderful and romantic and somehow innocent. Even when describing squalid scenes Fitzgerald somehow manages to keep his aura of romantic innocence. Not so Arlen:
Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a clientèle européenne la plus chic…. One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America.
When I read the following sentence it struck me that Arlen is attempting in prose the wild coloration and stylisation of modernist painting.
How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards….
Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.
The nun fetches the doctor in charge who turns out to be someone the narrator knows (of course), Dr Conrad Masters, a compulsive bridge player. Masters is a haunted, nervous man and twitchily leaks out to the narrator that Iris has been there for weeks, something to do with ‘septic poisoning’ leading to some kind of nervous collapse, delirium, occasionally waking into lucidity, but not caring. Then Dr Masters goes home in his flash Renault car.
Cut to the narrator that evening taking his (older) sister to the latest Paris nightclub, La Plume de Ma Tante – leaving reader to ask, why didn’t he simply ask to see Iris or force his way to her room? Because the doctor said she needed rest?
Anyway, this Paris nightclub is significantly more debauched than the London one, and reading Arlen’s description of it you realise why the book crystallised an entire era and came to be so widely referenced. Sorry it’s such a long quote but it’s the accumulation that makes its impact.
La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet. Many English people were present. They would be going to the Riviera, then they would be coming back from the Riviera. Colonel Duck was there, with the quality. Colonel Duck was, no doubt, just returned from some notably swift exploits on the Cresta Run. But he never was so talkative about his outdoor activities. Cherry-Marvel was there, with a great big woman and a nice-looking boy with the hands of a housemaid who was a famous boxer. There was the usual group of Argentines, very well dressed indeed. They talked about le polo. All over the room elderly women were dancing with young men of both sexes. Mio Mi Marianne was there, sitting alone, but I might not speak with her because I was with my sister. A demi-mondaine will feel insulted if you speak with her when you are with your sister. Two years before Mio Mi Marianne had one night tied a silk handkerchief round her wrist, and it became the fashion for women to tie silk handkerchiefs round their wrists. Then Mio Mi Marianne tied a silk handkerchief round her throat, and that became the fashion. She thought of these things while smoking opium. She sat alone, staring into a glass of Vichy Water. A young American polo-player called Blister went up to her table, and maybe he asked her to dance, but she just looked at him and he went away again. Her eyes were intent on an opium-dream, and she was very happy in the arms of the infinite. Mio Mi Marianne will be found one day lying on the Aubusson carpet of her drawing-room. There will be a hole in the carpet where her cigarette has died out.
A blackamoor beat a warning roll on his drum, the dancers left the floor, the lights dwindled and awoke again in swaying shadows of blue and carmine. A heavily built young man with the face of a murderer danced a tango with a lovely young girl with short golden curls. Then he threw her on the floor, and picked her up again. Rudolf and Raymonde. He did it beautifully. An American woman called the Duchess of Malvern threw Rudolph a pink carnation. The Baron de Belus said harshly: ‘That is a white carnation really, but it is blushing at the fuss that women make of Dagoes.’
(I comment below on the occasional use of racial terms or slurs in the text which we obviously find unacceptable now, a century later. On the other hand, modish open-mindedness about gender, about ‘dancing with young men of both sexes’ etc.)
Later that night the narrator returns to the nursing home and is surprised to discover young Napier Harpenden there as well, ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods’. He’s passing through Paris on the way to the Riviera with his wife Venice. When we last saw them both, in the nightclub scene at the Loyalty club, they were three days away from getting married. Now it’s ten months later. In Arlen’s characteristic tortured and oblique style, I think we learn from their extended but elliptical conversation, that Napier and Iris had an affair which started on the fateful night that Gerald killed himself. In fact, the narrator realises, he in a way facilitated it because, if he’d told Iris the truth about Gerald she would have reacted, gone home by herself etc, but instead thought everything was normal and so succumbed to the advances of Napier, who had followed her to Gerald’s digs from the club. Complicated.
Also complicated that his wife, Venice, is waiting outside in the car all this time. And Napier has a letter Iris wrote him. Just imagine if Venice saw it! Devastated! End of marriage!
Dr Master emerges and tells them Iris knows they’re there, and asks for Napier. So he takes Napier in to see her, leaving the narrator outside. Is she going to die without ever seeing the narrator again? Is that the drift of all the doom-laded prolepsis in the opening chapter (‘I was never to find out…’).
Back out front of the building Venice is sleeping in the taxi she and Napier came in. The doctor invites the narrator back to his place to join a bridge party. On the way he explains that Iris’s problem is she doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. She bucked up when she saw Napier. And that’s why he – the narrator – must do all he can to prevent Napier travelling on to the South the next morning.
Chapter 7. For Venice!
Venice’s torment that her husband, Napier, doesn’t love her
Next morning the narrator wakes up in his hotel in the Rue de la Paix. When he’s gotten up he phones Venice Harpenden at her hotel and she in that posh darlings loves kind of way compels him to come meet her and buy her lunch.
This lunch is an agonising affair because Venice reveals she is stricken with jealousy by the way Napier (or ‘Naps’, as she calls him) seems obsessed with this Mrs Storm. They had planned to leave Paris this morning and now Naps has changed all their plans. Why? This puts the narrator in the embarrassing position of having to defend Napier and explain away his dogged visits to Iris’s care home as the loyalty of an old friend.
It’s made ten times worse when young innocent Venice confides in the narrator that she cannot have children, and asks him whether that puts a man off a girl, her being infertile; whether it might be enough to drive the man away and into the arms of an old lover (Mrs Storm)?
They’re in the middle of this sticky conversation when Naps himself walks in. The narrator tries to get away but is forced to sit there as the happy-happy conversation of the couple becomes more and more strained until she becomes angry-upset and he momentarily loves his temper. He says Alright then let’s go, let’s go now, let’s go right away to the South. (There’s a detail that Venice had met the narrator’s sister who kindly agreed to loan them her car and its chauffeur to drive them south.)
Only the narrator knows what a sacrifice this is to Naps, not just because he (apparently) loves Iris, but because Dr Masters had specifically said Iris’s recovery rested on Naps visiting her; that only Naps’s presence was giving her any reason to live. And now because of the nagging of his wife, she’s forced him to break his promise and jeopardise Iris’s life (‘a very cruel decision’). Only the narrator realises what this means, as they all get up, shake hands and part with jolly smiles.
And after they’re gone he is left to ponder the infinite capacity of human beings to screw up their loves lives. When he phones Dr Masters to tell him Napier won’t be coming to the nursing home this afternoon, the doctor swears freely. Will I do? asks the narrator. ‘You!’ The doctor says he’ll come and collect him. (If it was lunch he just ate with Venice then this might only be 2 or 3 in the afternoon.)
Chapter 8. Piqure Du Cœur
French for ‘heart sting’, description of very ill Iris in the nursing home
So Dr Masters drives the narrator to the nursing home, they enter a series of courtyards and quadrangles, all appropriately solemn, the narrator led by a gruff unsympathetic nun until he finally comes to the door on a dark corridor. It is opened by a radiantly beautiful nun, Sister Virginie, whose compassion shine forth. She indicates Iris lying in the bed and leaves.
It is dark. All Iris’s curled hair and style has disappeared. She looks small and frail and asleep but the narrator is reassured by her steady breathing. He is turning to go when he realises her great dark eyes are open and staring at him. He is worried she will mistake him for Napier but then sees in her eyes (as people in novels supernaturally can) that she recognised him. She says just one word, ‘Dying’. He goes to the bed to reassure her, takes a comb from the bedside table and gently combs her damp straight hair until she closes her eyes and breathes slowly. Then carefully gets up and leaves and silently closes the door. He is crying.
Sister Virginie accompanies him back to the doctor’s office. Masters tells him off for letting Napier leave. He was doing her some good. The narrator’s visit, not so much. Later, in a phone call Masters tells him not to visit for a while, say ten days.
In the event it’s longer than that, ‘quite a while more.’ Description of his second visit, on 15 February. She talks a lot more this time, telling him off for still being in Paris, so he has an excuse ready, which is that an idea for a story came to him and he wants to stay in Paris to write it. (The idea is about a man who would not dance with his wife. Not a humdinger, is it?)
She’s been told by the doctors to lie perfectly still and not move hear head, not even a finger. She can’t laugh because it hurts. She says nobody wants her, not even a God and makes a joke about having all the paperwork reading, a temperature of 106, getting to the Pearly Gates but being told she is too full of life and rejected by God himself, who tells the archangel Gabriel to escort her back to the world.
She thanks him for bringing Naps to see her, chats some more but then turns querulous and tearful as the really sick do. More clearly than ever it is hinted that her ailment is something to do with pregnancy:
“As for me,” she whispered, “all this effort wasted … no playmate, no nothing. Masters warned me, too…. Dead as dead, the poor darling was….”
So was it a miscarriage? Or did Iris carry the baby to term and it was stillborn? Dr Masters enters and accuses the narrator of making her cry and Iris stands up for him, but it’s time to go.
She tells him she will never return to England.
Chapter 9. Talking Of Hats
London, July 1923: the narrator and Guy see Iris sweep past in a taxi with Napier
Six months later. July that year was swelteringly hot. After dinner at the Café Royal one boiling hot night, the narrator is walking home along Piccadilly with his older friends, Guy de Travest and Hilary. They’re thinking about popping into White’s, the gentlemen’s club, to fetch Napier when they see the very man come bounding down the steps and jump into a tax which roars past them. Both Guy and the narrator see that sitting on the back seat next to him was Iris Storm! Guy invites the narrator back to his house where, incongruously enough, they play squash before bathing and drinking cold drinks.
Guy idly casually says he was thinking of having a dinner party to which he’d invite Venice and Iris so they could finally meet each other. Does the narrator think that would be a good idea?
In fact Iris calls him the next day and insists that he take her shopping and buy her a new green hat. Which he does, and then lunch. She has fully recovered, she looks radiant, she is splendidly imperious.
I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. Strong were the people of that land, stronger than the gold they despised but used, deterred by not qualm nor fear, strong and undefeatable. And just like that was the white mask of this beautiful woman, strong and undefeatable. It knew not truth nor lying, not honour nor dishonour, not loyalty nor treachery, not good nor evil: it was profoundly itself, a mask of the morning of this world when men needed not to confuse their minds with laws with which to confuse their neighbours, a mask of the evening of this world when men shall have at last made passions their servants and can enter into their full inheritance…
Nietzsche wrote about the Superman. Iris Storm is the Superwoman.
Chapter 10. The Fall Of The Emerald
The skinny-dipping party at Maidenhead
Way back in the first chapter, Iris had told the narrator about the oversized green emerald ring she wears on the third finger of her right hand. It was given her by her second husband, Hector Storm, who told her he intended it a symbol of her inconstancy, which has driven him to despair: ‘my life is darkness without you, I love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’
Cut back to the present of the story, in which, after that dinner at Guy’s house, they all pile into cars and drive for Maidenhead to go swimming, they being: Guy, the narrator and Iris, Napier and Venice, and another young pair of newlyweds, Hugo and Shirley Cypress.
Iris drives like a demon. The narrator is amazed that everyone seems to be behaving as if nothing is wildly wrong. For he knows that Iris is planning to run away to Rio de Janeiro off Napier in a few days, and he knows Guy invited Iris solely to show her what she is doing is wrong, to show her the happiness of these young couples – Napier and Venice and Hugo and Shirley – to show Iris that she comes from a different world and must not interfere in and wreck their happiness. And yet no-one, not even Guy, acknowledges the elephant in the room. The narrator marvels at their English nonchalance and wonders at what point it becomes hypocrisy.
So when Guy mentions the notion of driving to Maidenhead to go skinny dipping they all jump at the idea, especially Venice and Shirley who think it’s too super! Guy chivalrously says it was the narrator’s idea and they all mockingly refer to him from that point onwards as the ‘he-man’, obviously the latest phrase from America (a phrase mocked by Gertrude Stein in a story told by Scott Fitzgerald).
While Venice and Shirley were gushing, the narrator lit a cigarette for Venice and his hand momentarily touched hers and he discovered it was cold as ice, and in a flash he realised the toll knowing her husband is in love with Iris has taken, how it has undermined that marriage, how desperate she is.
Anyway – the party drive in two cars from West London to Maidenhead, late at night, going at 70mph, taking bends at crazy speeds, Iris driving like a mad thing. They pull into the courtyard of hotel which is closed and bribe the grumpy owner to lend them towels, then stumble in the intense dark down to the river. The narrator finds Iris leaning on him in the darkness and goes purple:
She leaned on my arm, completely. “Foot hurts.” I wished she wouldn’t. I almost said, “don’t.” Her touch confounded, confused. She was tangible, until she touched you. She was finite, until she touched you. She was a woman, until she touched you. Then she became woman, and you water. She became a breath of womanhood clothed in the soft, delicious mystery of the flesh. Touching her, you touched all desire. She was impersonal and infinite, like all desire. She was indifferent to all but her desire, like all desire. She was a breath carved in flesh, like all desire. She was the flower of the plant of all desire. Desire is the name of the plant that Lilith sowed, and every now and then it puts out the flower that in the choir of flowers is the paramour of the mandrake.
She is also, as we have realised by this stage, poison.
They discover boats moored to a jetty and fuss around a motorboat. Several locals, apparently the hotel owner and a local constable, tell them they can’t, but they make all kinds of witty replies and go ahead anyway. Posh privilege.
I think they strip off – as with the situation around Iris’s pregnancy, Arlen’s style or his entire mentality, is so roundabout that it’s hard to be sure – and swim in the water, all except Iris who lounges among the cushions in the motorboat.
Guy warns of dangerous currents and I felt the hot breath of tragedy on my shoulder – would one of them drown like the young couple in Women in Love? No.
But there is a bad moment when the bantering men realise Iris’s dress is in the boat but no Iris! She must have decided to go in after all. Lots of shouting and they realise they can’t see or hear Iris, or Venice. There’s a mad couple of minutes while they splash and yell and swim off in different directions before they find them and bring them back to the jetty.
In fact Venice insists that she’d gotten into a bit of trouble, called out, and that’s why Iris dived in: to save her. She tells everyone crowded round her in the bottom of the motorboat the Iris saved her life! Which triggers tense and varied responses from the menfolk, who are all aware of the tangled web between Napier, his wife Venice, and his lover Iris.
Iris is cold. The menfolk fuss, Guy and Napier worry, after her illness. She gets dressed but is still cold. They make their way back to the cars and Iris snuggles up next to the narrator. He discovers she’s lost the famous emerald ring. Yes, at the bottom of the Thames, she explains. So after all the heavy symbolism attributed to it, associated with infidelity by husband Hector, it was in saving a rival woman’s life that she lost it, an unambiguously moral act.
Then again, as she falls asleep on the narrator’s arm, she whispers that she thinks Venice got into trouble, half consciously, on purpose. Why? To make her (Iris) like her (Venice). Like her enough to back off from stealing her husband. ‘Will it?’ asks the narrator. ‘No,’ replies Iris.
The Last Chapter: St George For England!
Arlen has his narrator introduce us to his Last Chapter with a heavy sense of impending doom, commenting on his own practice with the airy self-consciousness theorising of an eighteenth century novelist, of a Henry Fielding, or maybe Robert Louis Stevenson at his most chatty.
NOW as I come to that last night of all, a night that was as though set on a stage by a cunning but reckless craftsman of the drama, and as I look every way I may at the happenings that were staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my hand to, but a faithful chronicle of events. For it would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest man and loves his craft, must work always under a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell of life truthfully; since, as the old, old saying is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life. He may, to be sure, be as dingy as life, according to the mode of the day, or he may even achieve the impossible and be more dingy than life, also according to the mode of the day, but to be as improbable as life will be as far beyond the honest novelist’s courage as it must be against the temper of his craft; for should his characters have to “break out,” should the novelist be so far gallant as to concede something to the profligate melodrama of life, his people may only “break out” along lines which the art of their creator has laid out and made inevitable for them; whereas you and I know that living men will do queer things which are desperately alien from what we had thought their possibilities—nay, impossibilities—to be, living men will defy the whole art of characterisation in the twinkling of an eye and destroy every canon of art in a throb of a desire: so that we may make no count or chart of the queer, dark sides of our fellows, nor put any limit, of art, psychology, romance or decency, to the impossibilities which are, within the trembling of a leaf, possible to men and women.
It’s a big chunk of text but not particularly clever. Truth is stranger than fiction, so what. It’s this kind of rambling banter which makes the book approachable and easy company, but by the same token also prevents it being literature. It’s not deep or pioneering or particularly thought-provoking. Indeed at some moments it’s almost gibberish, like the long exchange between the narrator and Iris about why she’s inviting him to come for a drive into the country.
‘We are driving into the country, let me tell you, to meet my fear. And when we meet it I shall not mock, nor tremble, nor quail, but I shall be a very Saint George for steadfastness. That is the programme, so far. And you, will you be my esquire?’
‘You speak of darkness, of sun-dials, of fear, of Sir Maurice Harpenden, whom I do not know, of Saint George of Cappadocia, whom, alas, one sees only too little of these days. I think that you, too, must have dined alone. And you have gone mad. Else why must we drive into the country?’
‘But we go to keep high company to-night, that’s why! Are you afraid of that? The captains and the kings of the countryside are our adversaries. Sweet, you and I shall stand arrayed against the warriors of conduct.’
‘Not I, Iris! I am for conduct.’
There’s piles more like this but, despite the deep purple passages – or maybe because of them – it was wildly popular.
So what happened ‘on that night’ of dark repute? Well, Iris invites the narrator to accompany her as she drives west out of London towards a place called Sutton Marle and the house of Sir Maurice Harpenden, father of Napier, being irritatingly vague and obscure to begin with, and then spouting a lot of stuff to justify running off with Napier and ruining poor Venice’s life. She laments that Venice couldn’t have a child; then everything would be different.
Then in the middle of the countryside, she pulls up by a field with the headlights shining on a tree in a field and delivers a massive burst of backstory. She was brought up alongside her twin brother Gerald, Boy Fenwick and Napier, son of Sir Maurice. Her mother died and her father declined. Sometimes an aunt took her and Napier up to London, for tea at Harrods, which they loved as children because they got gleefully lost in it. And so they nicknamed the tree they played around ‘Harrods’.
Napier and she became very close but his father wanted him to marry rich, not the daughter of a bankrupt family and so forced Napier, when he got old enough to go to university, never to see Iris again.
She reveals that when they met for one last time by the tree they played in as children, she told him she loved him and would never love another man. And she kept her vow. She gave herself to Boy and then to Hector in marriage, but they both realised she didn’t love them. Hector volunteered to go off to Ireland where he was killed, because one night he heard Iris whisper Napier’s name in her sleep.
Now she has come back to beard Sir Maurice and tell him that his ban on their love consigned her to twelve years of hell, to the deaths of two husbands, and to the future misery of Venice Pollard.
She starts the car again and sweeps up the drive to Sir Maurice’s house and comes to a halt in front of the grand steps. Out comes the ancient butler, Truble, to greet them. He starts wittering about how he’s known Iris all his life, held her in his arms when she was a baby, and she declares he is her oldest friend, then he is crying and she tries to comfort him.
The narrator and Iris go round the back of the house and spy through the long windows three men inside playing bridge: Guy de Travest, Hilary Townshend and Sir Maurice. Iris forces the narrator to give a quick moral profile of all three. God this is dragging on. What’s going to happen?
They knock and the men get up from their game and greet them. Iris is, as he first saw her, wearing a green hat. Turns out Sir Maurice invited Iris down. The three men have known and loved Iris since she was a girl which is why they want to confront her about her plan to run away with Napier. There’s a lot of talk but it develops into a confrontation between Iris and Maurice who hate and fear each other. He says:
‘This isn’t badness. Damn it, girl, this is evil! There aren’t any words in English to describe what we think of a woman who comes wantonly between a man and his wife, a man and his career.’
It turns into a long, melodramatic, overwritten confrontation, in which Iris, Maurice, Hilary and Guy all have extended speeches considering every aspect of the issue at inordinate length. I wasn’t very interested in all the fol-de-rol about love and the gods and destiny and whatnot, what interested me was the way Arlen makes it at least in part a clash of the generations. The old men realise that their generation screwed it up; with all their fine talk of honour and decency, they’re the generation which gave the world the Great War, which in fact destroyed all those values. Hilary states it clearly:
‘Maurice, years ago, didn’t realise that in our time we are not our children’s masters. Their ideas are not ours, their ambitions are not ours. And there’s no reason why they should be, since ours have sent all Europe to the devil.’
A point echoed by Guy:
‘I fancy Hilary’s right about this father and child business… after all, our cubs can’t make more of a mess of everything than we and our fathers have done.’
When Maurice states, or implies, that Iris is going to ruin Napier’s career in the Foreign Office, Iris makes the kind of set-piece statement that is quoted in history books about the 1920s generation rebelling against their parents’ bankrupt values:
‘You talk to me of your England. I despise your England, I despise the ‘us’ that is ‘us’. We are shams with patrician faces and peasant minds. We are built of lies, Maurice, and we toil for the rewards of worms.
‘You would have Napier toil for a worm’s reward, you are sorry I have broken Napier’s career in the Foreign Office. Maurice, I am glad. To you, it seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty arena of national strifes and international jealousies.
‘To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory. Maurice, there are better things, nobler things, cleaner things, than can be found in any career that will glorify a man’s name or nationality.
‘You thought to bully me with our traditions. You are right, they are mine as well as yours. May God forgive you the sins committed in their name! And may He forgive me for ever having believed in them…’
This all feels immensely theatrical, like the last act in a play by George Bernard Shaw, what with its strong independent female protagonist and stirring speeches against the dead hand of the older (male) generation.
It obviously represents a clash of moralities, as well: the older generation condemn people like iris for their selfishness, promiscuity or adultery; whereas people like Iris see themselves as being true to Life unlike the small-minded, parochial and stifling lives of the older generation which – unanswerable argument – led up to the greatest cataclysm in human history.
At the height of the confrontation there suddenly comes a voice from the French windows (it’s always the French windows) and it’s Napier himself! He’s come all this way to rescue Iris. And Venice has come with him, standing behind him. Napier steps forward and it is his father he steps towards. He says he wants to clear Iris’s name, Iris begs him not to confront his father, Maurice says they must part, Hilary says the young people must go now, it’s a very fraught busy scene.
Napier now makes his grand speech, accusing his father of sacrificing his life on the altar of stupid outworn values and traditions:
‘You sacrificed Iris for what you call my future, my career. Weigh Iris on one side and on the other my future, my career, now that I am thirty! You sacrificed my happiness to the ghastly vanity of making our name something in this world. You call that ‘working for my future,’ sir. And I call it the cruel sort of humbug which has dragged God knows how many decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness. Here I am at thirty, a nothing without even the excuse of being a happy nothing, a nothing liked by other nothings and successful among other nothings, a nothing wrapped round by the putrefying little rules of the gentlemanly tradition. And, my God, they are putrefying, and I bless the England that has at last found us out.’
Then becomes clear one of the most striking things in this madly extended and over-the-top finale, which is that Venice has come round to Iris’s point of view. She is ready to give her husband to her because she has come to appreciate how truly and deeply Iris loves him.
Napier’s anger has been intensified because when he happened to walk in Sir Maurice was yet again throwing the fact of Boy Fenwick’s suicide in her face, and this goads Napier beyond endurance. After a lot more ranting and raging he finally spits out why this is so unfair. Iris deliberately let people believe it was something in her that triggered Fenwick’s suicide, allegedly ‘for purity’. Now Napier reveals that Fenwick had syphilis when he married Iris, and killed himself when he realised he had given it to her.
!!!!
Iris is mortified and whispers, very powerfully, that Napier has taken from her the only gracious thing she ever did in her life. And with that they leave, Iris and Napier, through the open French windows.
Venice faints, the older chaps kindly bring her round and are just tending her when… Napier appears back in the French windows and there’s the deafening roar of Iris’s car, starting up, revving up, then roaring off into the night! What!?
Napier walks across the room, looking defeated, and tells Venice that he can’t leave her like that, he is not such a cad. Venice asks what he’s talking about? Napier says Iris tried to conceal it, said she’s promised not to tell, but then tells him that Venice is pregnant, with his child! So that’s why he came back. He’s not a perfect cad. He’ll stand by her.
Except it’s a lie! Venice screams that it’s a lie! She is not pregnant. Iris lied to him to send him back! Chaos, pendemonium, all manner of recriminations and explanations!
But above it all Sir Maurice confronts the narrator about the unnatural loudness of Iris’s car. Suddenly panic grips everyone. Is she going to do something stupid? And so they jump into Sir Maurice’s car and go hurtling off down the drive, then out into the country lanes, chasing Iris’s headlights which they can see in the night.
As the chase reaches its climax, they watch Iris’s car leave the road and race towards the talismanic tree named ‘Harrods’, the place she was happy as a child, race towards it and crash into it with a huge crash and flare of flame.
The others slow their car and park and run towards the wreck. The narrator’s foot touches something soft and he picks up her green hat, the green hat.
Thoughts
Goodness me, what a ridiculously over-extended and over-excited farrago it turned into at the end!
I’ve read so much about ‘The Green Hat’ that it’s a great relief to finally read it. I can see why it was such a hit, crystallising the frenetic partying of the era which everyone, at the same time, felt was so ill-omened and fated. It certainly portrays its little set of high society hedonists with imaginative force and humour, and combines a gossip column view of Paris and London, with tear-jerking scenes in the nursing home, naughty high jinks in Maidenhead, and then a Bernard Shaw moral confrontation followed by a fireball climax. No wonder it was immediately made into a play and soon afterwards into a movie.
At numerous points it has subtlety, acute observations and sharp writing. But a lot of it is obscure, oblique, written in an elliptical style which makes such a fetish of avoiding the point, as to make plenty of passages puzzling and some bits of it almost incomprehensible.
And the final chapter with its torrent of revelations feels as if it has been hammered onto the rest of the narrative with six inch nails. All the revelations of her happy childhood, the tragic blocking of her love for Napier imposed by Sir Maurice, 12 years of hell, all this makes you fall right out of love with the book and then left reeling by the melodramatic ending.
I can see why it is on no-one’s academic reading list and is not even currently in print. Shame. A properly edited edition by, say, the Oxford University Press, would be worth reading for the historical footnotes and explanations alone.
Arlen was soon to be outdone. All around were other gifted writers describing the same sort of thing, but with much more restraint, balance, style and depth. Pure posh dimwit comedy was done better by P.G. Wodehouse; more thoughtful satire was being done by Aldous Huxley; far more stylish bright young comedy was to be done by Evelyn Waugh a few years later; Catholic guilt (if that’s what partly drives Iris) was to be patented by Graham Greene a few years later; while the psychological costs of all this frivolity was brilliantly captured by Noel Coward and, a bit later, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even D.H. Lawrence wrote some stories depicting the fast cars and partying of the younger generation (The Virgin and the Gypsy) – to name just a few.
On each of those individual terrains, Arlen compares badly but, at that moment, in 1924, Arlen combined them all to create a smash hit and he lived off its reputation for the rest of his life. Kudos.
Cast
London
Unnamed narrator
Gerald March
Iris March / Fenwick / Storm
Boy Fenwick – apostle of purity, killed himself on his wedding night to Iris when he learned she wasn’t a virgin (?)
Hector Storm – Iris’s second husband, hero in the war, came to realise she was incurably promiscuous, ironically gave her emerald ring, shot dead by nationalists in Ireland
Hilary Townshend – older friend of the narrator and friend of the March family, knew Iris as a girl – amusingly says ‘hm’ every other sentence
Guy de Travest – older friend of the narrator
The London nightclub
- The Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, directeur du restaurant of the Loyalty Club
- Mr Trehawke Tush, the popular novelist, who knows all the tricks of success
- Hugo Cypress
- Colonel Duck
- Mrs Angela Ammon
- Lady Cornelia Pynte
Paris
Venice Pollen, fragrant daughter of Nathaniel Pollen who owns half the newspapers in England, engaged then married to…
Napier Harpenden – ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods who never once relied on the favouritism of gods or men’ – says what at the end of every other sentence
- Mr Cherry-Marvel – master of gossip
- Dr Conrad Masters – treats Iris
- Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon who owns the nursing home where Iris is treated
Donna Anna Estella Guelãra who Martel-Bonnard nearly killed with his treatment
Names of background characters in hotels and bars to create a sense of being in the swim of cosmopolitan fast set:
- Lady Tekkleham
- The Baron de Belus
- Fay Avalon
The climax
Sir Maurice Napier – handsome, cunning old soldier, Iris’s sworn enemy for 12 years
Mr Truble – Sir Maurice’s fat old butler and Iris’s ‘only friend’
The roaring 20s
Direct description
By halfway through I realised the novel’s success, almost regardless of the ‘plot’, was at least in part because of its vivid picture of the world of the rich cosmopolitan fast set of London and Paris. This rises to a peak in the two nightclub scenes, the one at the Loyalty Club in London (chapter 4), one in La Plume de Ma Tante (chapter 6). They have the same kind of appeal as celebrity gossip columns do to this day, although with the added value of literary references or artfulness. (Compare the nightclub scenes in chapters 15 and 16 of Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay.)
The narrator’s worldliness
The image of bright young things is supposedly embodied in Iris Storm but really it resides in the tone of voice and tremendous worldliness evinced by the narrator. He knows everyone but, deeper than that, he has had experiences, many experiences. In every situation he remembers other times when… and lots of dark and troubled experiences are attributed to him. Oooh. Conveyed in almost every sentence, sometimes rising to a Noel Coward level of blasé worldly cynicism:
‘There is a new dance place open. I heard about it from a friend of mine, Mr Cherry-Marvel. You will meet him, he is charming. This new place is called La Plume de Ma Tante. It has only been open three nights, so it will be very modish for another two.’
Casual racism
Part of the breezy cynical dismissal of everything and everyone associated with these posh affluent characters, is a breezy cynical use of what we, a hundred years later, consider racist slurs and stereotypes, in particular of Jews and people of colour.
When the narrator is describing the new Paris nightclub La Plume de Ma Tante to his sister, and mentions it has a caged nightingale to sing, he goes on:
‘There is probably baser music to supplement this nightingale. There are, in fact, five lovely niggers.’
This is the only use of the n word, so it is not a major or even minor theme, just a throwaway remark, although soon afterwards:
La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet…
Any slur on people of colour is clearly just a detail in the general mockery of the whole scene and the entire milieu of international debauchery, but still…
Slightly less throwaway is the unpleasant references to ‘the wrong sort of Jewess’. In the nightclub scene, chapter 4, the narrator is emphasising how the Loyalty club is full of all sorts of colourful people, and:
There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr Trehawke Tush, the novelist: ‘The only decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar…’
He goes on to be just as rude about Mr Trehawke Tush, and then Venice Pollen, and pretty much all the other characters at the nightclub, in fact both remarks come amid a welter of descriptions of other aspects of nightclub life which the narrator clearly finds risible. The point is it is a satire on all these posh pretentious people and frenetic 1920s nightclub culture. But still…
Sex
How much literature is about the incredible difficulties human beings have finding and keeping a mate? Half of all world literature? More?
I sat there in that deep armchair, subdued by the thought of the awful helplessness of men and women to understand one another, and of the terrible thing it would be for some of them if ever they did understand one another, and how many opportunities the devil is always being given of making plunder out of decent people.
Such a simple task. So completely beyond the powers of people in most novels or plays, operas and poems.
P.S.
Mrs Forrest, a fabulously fashionable young woman in Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1927 novel ‘Unnatural Death’, proclaims that she ‘adores Michael Arlen’ and asks Lord Peter Wimsey whether he’s read his latest novel, ‘Young Men in Love’ yet.
Credit
‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was published in 1924 by William Collins. I read it online.
Related link
Related reviews
- 1920s reviews
‘Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel?’ (the narrator about Gerald March, chapter 2)
Books & Boots 