Under the Green Hat

EXILES by Michael J. Arlen. 226 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

In the '20s, when he was in his 20s, an Armenian named Dikran Kouyoumjian created a string of literary entertainments about the Bright Young People of London's Mayfair. No one was better than he at writing about "silly young Lords, who drink champagne in the morning, and marvelous new 1920s women, who swear (ever so slightly) and are bored with silly young Lords." His greatest confection was Iris March (in The Green Hat), a fell lady who seductively drops her keepsake emerald on the floor in Chapter 1, but finally dies, for love and honor, in a flaming yellow Hispano-Suiza.

Kouyoumdjian believed in his characters with the ardor of an outsider yearning to be let in. He married a Greek countess, Atalanta Mercati, and called his son Michael Arlen, the nom de plume he had permanently adopted for himself. His daughter he called Venetia--after the heroine of one of his novels. As Michael Arlen, he became a celebrity from Mayfair to Detroit in the days before the word and the condition were tired and devalued. Now his son, a TV critic and essayist, has written a wry and moving but far from fond memoir of his parents. He avoids the more impersonal roles of biographer or critic, as well as the casual stance of a raconteur with weighty names to drop. Instead, Exiles is a rare and minute accounting of growing up: the connections made and missed between parent and child.

"In the beginning," says the son, summing up the most dazzling period in his parents' life, "it must have been lovely." But the scene swiftly darkened. Arlen's novels were like the Christmas ornaments his mother repacked each year in the exact order they fitted on the tree--studded with glittery, Wilde-like epigrams and romantic rejoinders. In short, just what the Depression years would find abhorrent. In the '30s, Arlen wrote a few books--unsuccessful --after that, none at all. He passed most of the day gossiping with admiring cronies in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis. He had accepted the judgment of the times with rather poignant gallantry: the world he understood had collapsed and he could do no more. "I have the affection of my wife, the tolerance of my children and the friendship of head waiters," he liked to say. "What more do I need?"

Apparently he was unaware that he was often barely tolerated. The man whom the world saw as the ultimate boulevardier seemed to his son remote and incapable of friendship. Young Michael spent his early years shuttling around Europe--London, the Riviera, boring resort hotels in Austria. Early in World War II, he was clapped into a Canadian boarding school and did not see his father again until 1945, when the family was united in Manhattan. Then boredom in Austria was replaced by stultification in Hot Springs.

More than anything, young Michael wanted to be an American, one of the crowd. But his parents were exiles not only from their own place but their own time. Father was witty and aloof, Mother imperious and ill-tempered. She had sought to escape her own protected past "into this unusual man's vitality, life, imagination, energy--well, as maybe with many men, it turned out to be an especially fragile kind of energy."

Literary Corporal. Lord knows they tried to launch their child. His mother finagled him into St. Paul's school, where he fell in love with almost anyone else's parents--"red-faced, flush-nosed Wall Street Dads and Mothers with their sleek county look, their cashmeres, stationwagons, teensie-weensie drinkies." His own looked stiff, formal, and above all foreign. He bridled when his father called his wife beautiful: "My mother, what the hell. Anabelle French, who lived on the third floor, was beautiful."

Only in the rueful tone of these reminiscences can one see that young Arlen finally abandoned his dreams of Dads and Mothers and followed his father's vocation. He is never maudlin or self-castigating. He has the courage not to forgive, or be too fond of either his father or himself. His scrupulously personal book is uncharted miles away from Father's evanescent Young Men in Love or These Charming People. Perhaps because he has the candor to admit his own snobberies and delusions, he is singularly able to record his parents' failures: coldness, stubbornness and his mother's shattering tendency to pick apart her children's appearance and personalities as if they belonged to the people across the hall.

When he was beginning his career as a short-story writer and journalist, both parents died wretchedly of cancer, his father first. Both spoke their last words to him. His father assured him jauntily that "I was a corporal, and Wells and Bennett were my Field Marshals." His mother, delirious, went back to the time when it must have been lovely: "Let's take the road down by the sea this time," she murmured. "It will be longer, but nothing starts until ten anyway . . ."

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