Abstract
The Green Hat vexed the critics. Ralph Wright, reviewing it for the New Statesman, found Michael Arlen ‘an irritating writer’. Wright was particularly irritated by the ‘smart and thin style’ of Arlen’s prose, the boastful parade of knowledge about modern literature, and, last but not least, by the self-assurance of the man-about-town on matters related to women and sex:
There is a sort of epigrammatic cocksureness on all the details of love-making that I find particularly unpleasant: an assumption that love has something to do with silk underclothing at one moment and at the next a rhetoric outburst on almost Wellsian lines of optimism. I do wish he [Arlen] would be a little more modest and show a little better taste when dealing with the subject.1
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Notes
Claude C. Washburn, ‘Sophistication’, Opinions (Constable, 1926) p.53.
Alec Waugh reviewed it as ‘Is this George Moore?’ — Michael J. Arlen, Exiles (André Deutsch, 1971) p.65.
On the relationship with Orage see Martin Wallace, The New Age under Orage (Manchester University Press, 1967)
Philip Mairet, A. R. Orage: A Memoir (Dent, 1969)
Harry Keyishian, Michael Arlen (Twayne, 1975) p.21.
Lawrence mentions him in seven letters, and one, to Lady Ottoline Morrell, is especially perceptive: ‘Kouyoumdjian seems a bit blatant and pushing … but it is because he is very foreign even though he does not know it himself. In English life he is a strange alien medium’ — The Collected Letters, ed. Harry T. Moore (Heinemann, 1962) I, 396.
For the American stage production see Katherine Cornell, I Wanted to he an Actress (Random House, 1938).
For the London production consult James Agate, The Contemporary Theatre, 1925 (Chapman and Hall, 1926)
and Noël Coward, Present Indicative: An Autobiography (W. Heinemann, 1937).
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Penguin, 1982) p. 117.
Michael Arlen, The Green Hat: A Romance for a Few People (Collins, 1924) p.6.
Roger Abingdon, The Green Mat: A Romance for Askew People (Collins, 1925) p.15.
Ford Corey, ‘Three Rousing Cheers!!! The Parody Adventures of our Youthful Heroes. The Rollo Boys with Sherlock in Mayfair or, Keep it under your Green Hat’, Bookman, vol. 62, no. 5 (Jan 1926) p.584.
See Grant Overton, Cargoes for Crusoes (Appleton and George J. Doran, 1924) pp.272, 275.
The best study of Nancy Cunard’s life is Anne Chisholm’s well documented Nancy Cunard (Penguin, 1981).
For additional information see Daphne Fielding, Emerald and Nancy: Lady Cunard and her Daughter (Athenaum, 1968)
and Hugh Ford (ed.), Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896–1965 (Chilton Books, 1968).
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© 1988 Billie Melman
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Melman, B. (1988). 1924: The Green Hat. In: Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19099-7_5
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