Word: arlen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Exiles, by Michael J. Arlen. A son's portrait of his famous parents that is almost unbearably eloquent about deep, ambivalent feelings...
EXILES by Michael J. Arlen. 226 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
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...
...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...