Word: arlen
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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...
...moon landing, social conscience may be developed so far beyond the power of people to change anything that the fiery political frustration is being mistaken for the reform. And television may be the cardinal source of this paradoxical feeling of unprecedented turmoil throughout an essentially sullen and unmoving nation. Arlen's most moving pages try to capture this sorrowful ambivalence...
Still, perhaps one a year it inadvertently reveals what we need to see and hear. One example which Arlen describes was the irony of a Vietnam special by CBS newsman Morley Safer. As Westmoreland asks about basic training and remarks about the high morale, a soldier tells Safer that he dislikes riding down people's gardens. Safer then routinely asks him about the war. The soldier looks melancholy (did we see it?) and then, in one of those moments when everything comes alive in a gesture, tells Safer passionately: "The country's so beautiful, fertile, and everything...