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There is a book called These Charming People. In making this statement I pause for an uncertain time. It is necessary to allow a little interval for readers—quite as necessary as it is for the orator to give his audience its innings. Readers do not create the same interruption for a writer, and that is in itself a pity. That fact defeats much writing; for the writer has rushed on before the reader’s mind has had a chance to seethe a little and settle, passing on to a comparatively calm acceptance of the next assertion.
But you can take anybody’s word for These Charming People—anybody’s, that is, who has read it; and the number of persons who have read it is very large and increases steadily. The truth is, this book and its author have become fashionable; and when a book and an author have become fashionable, some persons will go to any length. Now it is known that Michael Arlen is the author of These Charming People, but who knows who Michael Arlen may be? Is there a View of Michael Arlen? In the favorite adjective of one of Mr. Arlen’s characters, is there a reasonable view of the presumptively charming person?
Yes.
The main perspective is before us. Looking down it, we discern that two years (and less than two years) ago, nobody in America who was anybody in America (or anywhere else) had heard of Michael Arlen. I will not conceal the dark fact that two books of his, entitled A London Venture and The Romantic Lady, had been published in America.
However, two years ago (as I write) there was published in America a novel called “Piracy.” No reason existed why people should buy it and read it, apart from the usual totally inadequate one of the book’s merits. Yet people did buy it and read it. People said: “This is rather nice!” “Piracy” sold. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Spanish Main. If it took life—and perhaps it did take a life or two, socially speaking—it did so, in Mrs. Wharton’s words describing the methods of old New York society, “without effusion of blood.”
And early this year (1924) there was published a book called These Charm—Exactly.
Well, it was so gay, so well-mannered, so witty, so far more than so-so that women of the most varied taste (and even strong prejudices) raved over it, and men of the most invariable taste bought as many as six to a dozen copies to give away to their friends.
The success of Michael Arlen’s new novel, The Green Hat, has thus been rendered a mere matter of dispersing the good news. It will not do to broadcast it; one must be a little particular in matters of this sort. At the most, it is permitted casually to mention the fact that a new novel by Michael Arlen is about. Quite of course, one cannot decently say more than that The Green Hat is a well-polished affair; for still more of course, it isn’t the hat but the head beneath it which counts.
The head belongs to Michael Arlen.
(As far as The Green Hat goes, the woman of the green hat was Iris March, “enchanting, unshakeably true in friendship, incorrigibly loose in love,” as the disturbed reviewer for the London Times puts it. “Everything she does has an unnatural elegance and audacity,” he went on. But what had she done? She had broken a good many hearts before marriage and one afterward; she had turned a lover into a husband and then into a cynic; and what she did to Napier Harpenden and his young wife should have been unpardonable. Should. “It is with a sense of having been cheated that we witness her final whitewashing.” You see how upset he is, though one cannot say he is outraged, can one, when he talks about a lady like that?...)