UNDER THE HAT

I thought it might be jolly to pen the occasional blog looking in a little more detail at the lives of Capuchin authors. The man behind our second best-selling title - Michael Arlen and The Green Hat respectively - launches this initiative.

Arlen was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria, to Armenian parents, in 1895, but established his reputation in England during the 1920s. His works were first published in magazines and took the form of essays, book reviews, personal essays, short stories, and a play. Arlen moved into the romance genre, to which he added the spices of psychology, the supernatural and horror, culminating in a defining book of short stories called These Charming People (which we published last year).

All this work coalesced into The Green Hat, which, with its (then) racy story and brilliant description of its times, propelled him to instant fame and fortune. The book became a broadway play and was filmed twice, as A Woman of Affairs and Outcast Lady. The former was a silent film starring Greta Garbo, and deliberately understated or avoided altogether what were considered the highly charged subjects of the book, this reticence also motivating the change of name.

In subsequent work, Arlen again experimented with different genres and fantastic themes, producing a dystopian novel and an adventuring detective - Gay Falcon - who became the subject of several mystery films. He never, however, recaptured the peak of success attained by The Green Hat.

The various phases and locations of Arlen's life and career brought him into contact with many notable figures, including Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Nancy Cunard and Countess Atalanta Mercati, who he married. Having had his loyalty to Britain questioned in the House of Commons (due to his Bulgarian nationality and the complications arising therefrom), Arlen moved to New York in 1946, where he died ten years later.


David

THIS CHARMING WRITER

I'm enjoying our recently released edition of Michael Arlen's These Charming People. Arlen's novel The Green Hat is our best-selling title, and he is obviously a writer whose literary resurrection has met with the approval of many readers.

The stories are beautifully written, describing powerful emotions and dramatic situations with an acute power of observation and expression, and often using repetition to add energy and impact to the narration. Here's an example of the style from When the Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (the inspiration for the song):

....she lay still on the sofa by the windows, her head deep in the hollow of a crimson cushion, her eyes thoughtfully on the ceiling, which was high enough to refuse itself to exact scrutiny in the affected light of four candles.

Arlen also excels at a bitter-sweet depiction of the relationship between the sexes, albeit from the perspective of his own times; from Introducing a Lady of no Importance and a Gentleman of even less:

....for women are sometimes like sea-birds, they sometimes worship stone images, men who are carved of the rocky stuff of life...

Short stories are not the most fashionable form of fiction, but these exemplify the potential of this form to produce small gems of great literary worth and emotional significance.

David