Hell! said the Duchess Read online

  Hell! said the Duchess

  A Bed-Time Story

  by

  MICHAEL ARLEN

  With a new introduction by

  Mark Valentine

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Hell! said the Duchess by Michael Arlen

  First published London: Heinemann, 1934

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1934 (renewed 1961) by Michael Arlen

  Introduction © 2013 by Mark Valentine

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  The period just after the First World War and before the Depression of the Thirties has passed into legend as a time of wild abandon and fateful devil-may-care: these were the doomed days of the Bright Young Things. F. Scott Fitzgerald was the American chronicler of those years, but in Britain it was Michael Arlen who most caught the Twenties mood, and especially in his suave supernatural thriller of 1934, Hell! said the Duchess.

  In this and a few other dashing and cynical books, which the New Statesman typified as unequalled in evoking the “dandysme of the soul,” Arlen wrote of the fast set of Mayfair and Belgravia, those who were to be termed the Lost Generation. His characters are jaded young war heroes still hungering for excitement; newly emboldened and abandoned heroines; raffish cads and outcasts from convention; or, as in this book, beautiful but strange aristo­crats. The appeal of Arlen’s insouciant characters was so great that he became one of the first million-sellers and revelled in fame and luxury. He was one of the first media celebrities, whose every move was newsworthy. Yet he wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, was proud of his friendships with D. H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary figures, and in his last years despaired at his inability to write something new.

  Today, Michael Arlen remains little more than a footnote in histories of 20th century fiction. Perhaps this is partly because of his obscure background. He was born on 16 November 1895 in Rustchuk, Bulgaria, to an Armenian merchant family fleeing persecution. They came to England in 1901 and settled in Lancashire. Christened as Dikran Kouyoumdjian, Arlen attended an English public school (“So I’m completely self-educated,” he quipped), and, briefly, Edinburgh University. Breaking away from his family, who disowned him, he went to London to put into practice his firm belief that writing was his vocation.

  As a foreigner, he was not permitted to play any part in the war effort and so lived frugally, scraping a living from newspaper and magazine contributions. He created a poetic, consumptive alter ego, Michael Arlen, and when his writing began to attract attention, adopted the name for himself. He became a naturalized British subject in 1922, and took the pen-name as his legal name too. Armenian refugees had been the object of pity in Britain, but Arlen knew that this pity was mixed with liberal doses of condescension which a proud race found hard to bear. He saw he would never be fully accepted in his adopted country, and his success certainly bred resentment. Another popular author, Sydney Horler, sneeringly described him as “the only Armenian who never tried to sell me a carpet.”

  So Arlen set himself to become more English than the most aristocratic of the English. Even when he was struggling in the early years, his tailoring was always impeccable, he perfected the languid air of the born dilettante and beguiled the opposite sex with his studied, immaculate manners. But he also played upon his foreignness, describing himself as “every other inch a gentleman” and “a case of pernicious Armenia.”

  His first book, The London Venture (1920), was a lightly fictionalized account of his early literary struggles. On its appearance, it was thought by some to be a pseudonymous work by George Moore, whose candid memoirs written in an ornamental, Eighteen Nineties style were highly acclaimed. Full of literary references, the book is notable for its championing of D. H. Lawrence, whom Arlen had befriended when they were both beginning their writing careers. It was Lawrence who advised Arlen that he would be best advised to write fantasy, because of his Romantic notions. Later, much of Arlen is to be seen in Lady Chatterley’s first lover, in Lawrence’s notorious novel (1928), where he is scarcely disguised as Michaelis, a successful society playwright: “Connie really wondered at this queer, melancholy specimen of extraordinary success . . . Sometimes he was handsome: sometimes, as he looked sideways, downwards, and the light fell on him, he had the silent, enduring beauty of a carved ivory Negro mask, with his rather full eyes, and the strong queerly-arched brows, the immobile, compressed mouth . . . Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion . . . The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a bounder!”

  His first major success was “Piracy” (1922; the title includes the inverted commas), which recounted the life of Ivor Pelham Marley in a decade spanning the war years. A writer of romances, from an aristocratic background (“Missed an earldom by an heir’s breath” says one character), Marley epitomized the sense of futility of the war generation. He has a doomed love for provocative and glamorous Virginia Tarlyon, a Soho bohemian as well as a Society figure: “Virginia has a mind like a cathedral,” proclaims her father. “Of course every cathedral has its gargoyles,” he adds wistfully. Her appearance—slim, white-faced like a carnival mask, delicate—and her lifestyle were based on the poet and heiress Nancy Cunard, whom Arlen had met in 1920. At one point, Aldous Huxley regarded Arlen as a rival for Nancy’s allegiance, and he satirizes him in his novel Those Barren Leaves (1925), where he is travestied as “the swarthy Syrian with the blue jowl and the silver monocle . . . he never lost an opportunity of telling people he was a poet; he was for ever discussing the inconveniences and compensating advantages of possessing an artistic temperament.” Though Huxley altered Arlen’s race and physical appearance, the urgent insistence on his writing was pure Arlen.

  “Piracy” was a great success, for it portrayed both the unconventional, spontaneous, consciously modern life of those artistic circles which gathered in the Café Royal and the Eiffel Tower Restaurant in Soho, and certain ageless qualities of gallantry and chivalry which were seen to be bound to fall under the onslaught of mass movements and mass industry. The novel’s theme may perhaps be summed up in the defiant toast offered by the last gentle­man in England in a fantasy scene conjured by Marley in which the old order is besieged by armies of the nouveaux riches: “For King and Cocktails!” he proclaims.

  The novel was followed by Arlen’s most successful collection of linked short stories, These Charming People (1923), with its splendid subtitle, “Being a Tapestry of the Fortunes, Follies, Adventures, Gallantries and General Activities of Shelmerdene (that lovely lady), Lord Tarlyon, Mr. Michael Wagstaffe, Mr. Ralph Wyndham Trevor and Some Others of their Friends of the Lighter Sort.” The fifteen stories are quicker in wit and cleverer in storyline than his earlier work and their twist endings and elegant, sardonic style suggest a strange hybrid of the American short story master O. Henry and the epigrammatic, quintessentially English Saki (H. H. Munro). For the first time, Arlen introduces fantasy and the macabre to his tales, and we find the tone of dark insouciance he was later to perfect in Hell! said the Duchess. The bizarre adventures his characters find in the London streets suggest the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights. All the tales are laced with fine irony and understatement, and a kind of bantering
tone with the reader which was becoming Arlen’s hallmark.

  But it was The Green Hat (1924) that precipitated Arlen into a world of unimagined acclaim and prosperity. The novel was quite simply the novel of the year, seized upon as the poetically true testament to a brilliant, daring and doomed generation. The owner of the green hat is Iris Storm, whose wild pursuit of pleasure in the parties, masquerades, night clubs and restaurants of London and Paris has led to her reputation as a “shameless, shameful” woman: but paradoxically there is some calm reserve in her which seems to imply a secret inner grace. The melodramatic narrative, written in what one critic called an “opium dream style,” sonorous with exotic and cosmic images, may only draw a wry smile today.

  Enriched by the success of the book, Arlen made his home on the French Riviera where he could indulge his taste for the high life in full. He mingled with minor royalty and international aristo­cracy, and married the Greek countess Atalanta Mercati. Yet he remained mindful of his origins in a persecuted people: the story goes that when he saw Goebbels strutting on a hotel balcony below his room, he carefully prepared a Martini and poured it languidly over the Nazi minister’s head.

  The Green Hat was clearly going to be difficult to follow, and Arlen bought time by publishing next a further collection of stories featuring the “charming people” circle, May Fair (1925). In the epilogue, “Farewell, These Charming People,” Satan attends a brilliant, world-weary dinner party: “‘Young man,’ said the Lord Chancellor severely, ‘are you seriously implying that you are the Prince of Darkness?’ ‘We do not recognize that title,’ cried Lady Surplice. ‘It is not in Burke, Debrett, or the Almanach de Gotha—.’” Stories in which a decaying aristocracy become mingled with the sinister or supernatural are frequent in Gothic fiction— such as Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula and M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski. But Michael Arlen introduced a more modish, scintillant, mocking tone to this Gothic motif, fully exemplified by Hell! said the Duchess, his most overt work in the form.

  It was, of course, another Green Hat the public wanted, and Arlen had three attempts to oblige them, with Young Men in Love (1927), Lily Christine (1928) and Men Dislike Women (1931). On the strength of his name, these all sold well, but none received anything like the adulation of The Green Hat. The first, ominously, includes a portrait of a fantastically popular author who finds he has “had enough of publicity,” is “tired of making a fool of himself” and wants to be “a serious man, one of the world’s workers.” The author is taken to task for failing to write about “lords and champagne and lovely painted ladies”: readers find him “very disappointing,” publishers accuse him of ingratitude, and critics say he is “insincere” and “affected.”

  It is to Arlen’s credit that he did not simply resign himself to the comfortable production of formula fiction, perennially fashioning a new form of Iris Storm to gratify the Green Hat fanatics: but his downfall was that he could not quite throw off his creation. He tried to break new ground with a serious futuristic novel, Man’s Mortality (1933). This is set in the 1980s, when an international aircraft syndicate has monopolized all forms of global communications and effectively controls the world. There has been peace and a measure of progress for fifty years, but now a generation of younger officers in the service are reviving ideas of freedom and national identity. Arlen tries to explore the tension between these ideals and the need for stability, while still giving his readers the action and adventure of a thriller, but the result is unconvincing. Though he was proud of this attempt to tackle profounder themes, Arlen’s novel was indifferently received, most critics comparing it unfavourably to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which had appeared the year before.

  But if there is one book from his later period that does deserve more attention it is the strikingly entitled Hell! said the Duchess. Here, Arlen catches some of the contemporary turmoil of the Thirties, with the unemployment marches, Fascist and Communist demonstrations, social upheaval and a ponderous, stagnant National Government. But this forms the background to a bizarre thriller about a series of “Jane the Ripper” murders perpetrated by a young, unknown feminine killer on working class men. The beautiful Duchess of Dove is suspected, but Scotland Yard cannot bring themselves to believe that an aristocrat could be responsible, especially in view of the sexual nature of the crimes. As agitation to arrest the irreproachable Duchess increases, a private detective begins to find discrepancies in the case against her. In a strong and rather daring climax to the novel, we learn what lies behind the mystery of the Duchess’s apparent complicity in the crimes. Suffice to say there are echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan. But Arlen has made a macabre romance for the modern age.

  Hell! said the Duchess was Arlen’s last great success. He returned even more closely to his original formula with his next book, a collection of short stories (or “legends” as he called them) entitled The Crooked Coronet (1937), dedicated to a princess of the deposed royal house of Serbia, whom Arlen knew from his South of France circle. The eleven stories include two new adventures of the Cavalier of the Streets and a return for some of the “charming people” of his earlier volumes. But there are signs of repetition in the plots and the witticisms of these stories and the preposterousness of incident is more forced, as if even Arlen was tiring of his own inventiveness. The one unusual tale is the legend of “The Black Archangel,” in which a winged West African messiah leads an uprising against colonial rule. Despite the typically outré theme, the lead character is portrayed with some sympathy.

  The Flying Dutchman (1939), Arlen’s last new book, was another attempt to find a new direction. A political thriller, it is interesting today as a record of the troubled atmosphere of the years immediately before the Second World War. Ranging widely across the world, it links together revolutions, assassinations, riots and civil wars in a biting portrayal of humanity going out of control and moving remorselessly towards all-out war. After much intrigue and mystery, the novel unveils a nihilistic conspiracy, the Société de C, whose members are all outcasts from other extreme organizations, and whose sole aim is to act as agents provocateurs in every volatile situation they can find: but all is not quite what it seems. Once again, however, Arlen was to be disappointed by the response to his search for more challenging writing. The book was even less well received than Man’s Mortality.

  After he had ceased writing, Arlen’s last years were tragic and wasted. He returned to England to serve as an air raid warden during the Second World War, but found the old suspicions of his foreign ancestry were stirred up again and left for America. He co-wrote a screenplay for a mild romantic comedy, The Heavenly Body, starring Hedy Lamarr, and found other Hollywood work. He created a TV detective, Gay Falcon, who was mildly popular for a short while. He was used to introduce a TV series of strange tales, and he recycled some old ideas to sell stories to American magazines. But his inspiration had gone, his flair for clever turns of phrase and unusual plots had faded. His son, Michael J. Arlen, has written a moving memoir of this time (Exiles, 1971) which portrays the aimlessness of his father’s life, leisured but barren, a constant round of socializing with people who hardly knew him but were attracted by the old cachet of his name. He recalls too Arlen’s long, lonely night-time pacings in their library, which would end as they began: with the white writing-paper on the desk still neatly stacked and unmarked. Michael Arlen died of cancer in New York on 23 June 1956.

  Since then, Arlen’s work has remained largely unregarded. The Green Hat has had periodic revivals as a touchstone novel for the Twenties, and a few of his macabre stories have been anthologized. But his glinting wit and literary bravado deserve a revival. Hell! said the Duchess, heady and lurid as a nightclub cocktail, swift and sleek as a Hispano-Suiza, is a wonderfully outré Art Deco fantasy that surely ought to lure a discerning new set of readers.

  Mark Valentine

  April 14, 2013

  Mark Valentine
is the author of several collections of short fiction and has published biographies of Arthur Machen and Sarban. He is the editor of Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural, and decadent, and has previously written the introductions to editions of Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. P. Hartley, and others, and has introduced John Davidson’s Earl Lavender (1895), R. C. Ashby’s He Arrived at Dusk (1933), Claude Houghton’s This Was Ivor Trent (1935), and Oliver Onions’s The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939) for Valancourt Books.

  HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS

  This book is inscribed

  affectionately

  by his friend and obedient servant

  the author

  to Valentine Browne

  commonly known as Viscount Castlerosse

  of London and Killarney

  soldier, dandy, banker, gossip, golfer, philosopher

  and

  a man of good will

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the writer permits himself the familiarity of calling her Mary Dove it is not from any disrespect to a lady of rank, nor with any pretensions to the intimate condescension of a lady of fashion. It is written so merely because he finds it a pleasant thing to set down the name: Mary Dove.

  Now when the familiar history of our times comes to be written it will be the more readable for the inclusion of this quiet and gracious lady. Since she was so very quiet and lived so privately, it was by repute that her generation was enamoured of her, and there never was a person who was better spoken of in all the counties of England.

  But it would be doing the lady an injustice to say merely that her loveliness was a trea­sured ornament of English life, both of the town and in the country, and it must be emphasised that she was admired not only for her slender beauty. For she was gifted with qualities of the mind and heart which endeared her to young and old alike, and her kindness was incorruptible by any prejudice whatsoever.