In 1934 Arlen published his novel Hell! Said the Duchess, an unhappy blend of detective fiction and horror story. It recounts the efforts of Scotland Yard to crack the identity of a ‘Jane the Ripper’ murderer, who according to all their evidence must be the gentle, chaste and high-born duchess, Mary Dove. The criminal in question proves to be Dr Xanthis Axaloe, a supernatural being but also a vampire, hermaphrodite and erotomaniac with a cosy pied-à-terre in Leatherhead, where he represents ‘sin incarnate and sin triumphant.’ Arlen sets the novel in the future – 1938. The government has fallen and a Conservative-Fascist coalition is in power. The amateur sleuth, Colonel Wingless, describes the situation to his professional counterpart, Assistant Commissioner Icelin:
‘England has been greatly disturbed by factions for a year past now. If I am not wrong, I think it was you yourself, as chief of the C.I.D., who warned Winston Churchill on his formation of a Coalition in the autumn of 1936 that it would be very prejudicial to the peace of this country, and that it would be considered by the increasing number of Communists as a provocative gesture, to appoint Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, to the War Office.’[1]
Not strong on political forecasting, the book was a keck-handed foray beyond Arlen’s usual fictional territory and found little favour with critics or the public. Nevertheless, it provides a starting-point for considering Arlen’s minimal contacts with the man who did indeed become Prime Minister – in May 1940; less than a fortnight later, Mosley was interned under newly tightened Defence Regulations.
Our main source is the American journalist, biographer and novelist Vincent Sheean. His wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson, was the niece of Maxine Elliott, and the couple were frequent visitors to the Château de l’Horizon, Elliott’s Art Deco villa near Juan-les-Pins. Elliott’s other guests in the 1930s included Winston Churchill, who found the relaxing atmosphere of the Côte d’Azur conducive to writing and painting, and Michael Arlen, who lived further along the coast at Cannes.
One day in 1935 Arlen came to lunch at the villa and somehow fell into a discussion with Churchill on forms of ideal government.[2] Arlen succeeded, so Sheean tells us, ‘by a combination of questions and independent sallies, in irritating Mr Churchill into a rather ambitious flight, a description of how government ought to be conducted.’ Churchill suggested that government and civil administration should be entrusted to a small hereditary class of specialised workers, trained for these purposes from childhood and paid enough to sustain them in comfort but without luxury or special emolument. They should have no economic function in the society but purely a political one and, unlike the old feudal aristocracy they were not to be landowners. Sheean attached little importance to this ‘flight of Mr Churchill’s fancy’. Viewing the politician as a ‘parliamentarian of parliamentarians’, Sheean nonetheless sensed that Churchill regarded such a born-and-bred governing class as ‘the most fanciful optimum’. His experience was ‘too great to permit self-deception in the matter, and yet an optimum it was.’
We don’t know what ‘independent sallies’ from Arlen provoked this postprandial improvisation. With his admiration for the English upper classes, Arlen’s sympathies were distinctly conservative, and after emigration to the US in the 1940s, he found friends among Republican Party supporters.[3] He had considered becoming a member of Mosley’s New Party when inspired by Mosley’s rhetoric over dinner at Monte Carlo in summer 1931, but there is no reason to suppose that he followed the politician as he lurched to the extreme Right.[4] As for Churchill’s ‘flight of fancy’, it bears some relation to H. G. Wells’s plans as outlined in A Modern Utopia (1905), in which a voluntary order of nobility known as the ‘Samurai’ effectively rule a ‘kinetic and not static’ World State as a means to solve the problem of combining progress with political stability.[5] Churchill read the book after Wells sent him a copy and wrote to the author in 1906: ‘there is so much in your writing that stimulates my fancy that I owe you a great debt’.[6] In 1931 Churchill claimed to have read all of Wells’s books twice over, boasting that he ‘could pass an examination in them’. However, while Churchill shared Wells’s faith in science, he saw it as a means of reinforcing his beloved British Empire, not creating a World State.[7]
The second encounter between politician and novelist was more confrontational. Arlen, Churchill and Churchill’s cousin, Lord Londonderry, were all guests of society hostess Maud Cunard at her home in Grosvenor Terrace. In all, it was a luncheon party of thirty or forty people. Sheean’s (unpublished) account, albeit reporting at second-hand and thirty years after the event, is worth quoting in full:
Winston evidently was drunk and was very angry with Lord Londonderry who had just then published a pro-German, pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler book. Londonderry kept howling down the table at Winston, saying, ‘Winston, I have repeatedly asked you, have you read my book?’ and Winston roared back, ‘My dear Charles, I no longer read unless it is for pleasure or profit.’ […] At this point poor Michael raised his voice, and as you know he was no Nazi, merely to say that by all expert accounts the German Air Force was indeed quite wonderful. Winston burst into flame, all directed at Michael. He said, among other things, as quoted to me by Michael, ‘You are a foreigner, an intruder, an Armenian who dares to come into this country and write books purporting to be about the manners and behaviour of its aristocracy. You do not belong and never will belong to the classes in this country which you are so profitably describing. You have, in fact, no right to be sitting at this table.’ At this point, Lady Churchill […] said, ‘Winston, Winston, for heaven’s sake, I am feeling ill. Let us go home.’ And poor Lady Cunard, who had no brains to begin with, was left with an appalling situation of disorder and debacle.[8]
There are reasons to treat this story with scepticism. Unlike the luncheon in 1935, Sheean was not present. While Sheean and his wife were staying at the Château de l’Horizon, Sheean ran into Arlen by chance on the promenade at Cannes. On hearing that Churchill was also of the party, Arlen warned Sheean not to mention his name to Churchill. Arlen explained that ‘only one week before’ there had been an ‘appalling scene’ at Lady Cunard’s, and the author proceeded to tell the story of his humiliation, which left him badly shaken. Arlen was given to exaggeration – and free invention – in narrating his own life, but the story may have a basis in fact. If so, when did it happen? Sheean places the event in April or May 1940 – that is certainly impossible – Maud Cunard moved out of her London home into the Ritz in January 1940, which severely curtailed her entertaining.[9] The appeasement-minded Londonderry – jocularly known as the ‘Londonderry Herr’ – published the book to which he refers, Ourselves and Germany, in March 1938. Churchill thanked him for a copy in May, but it was only in the following year, April 1939, that Churchill confirmed having read it.[10] It is impossible to find a date when all the alleged antagonists were in London at the same time. The fracas must have occurred prior to Churchill’s last visit to the Château de l’Horizon in January 1939, which coincided with the Sheeans’ last stay.[11] Possibly it happened around New Year. If Arlen was in London then, he was safely back in Cannes by 3 January.[12] However, Clementine could not have exerted a restraining influence on her husband at the Cunard table since she was cruising, apart from him, in the Caribbean over the festive period.[13]
Londonderry referred to this unpleasant incident several times. He told Lady Desborough that he and Churchill ‘had practically a stand-up row at Lady Cunard’s when he attempted to browbeat me across the table, and I was not standing for it, nor was I ready to kowtow’.[14] Henry ‘Chips’ Channon recalled Londonderry lamenting
how his political prospects were blighted by an unfortunate dinner party [sic] at Emerald’s [Lady Cunard] before the war, when he argued with Winston, and said that France was unreliable and rotten and could not be depended upon. Winston lost his temper, being a fanatical Francophil; and could not forgive Londonderry then, and certainly not later, for being proved right.[15]
Londonderry nowhere mentions Arlen’s presence. Sheean was surprised by the ad hominem attack on the author since he ‘had heard Winston speak quite amiably of Michael on a previous occasion’.[16] A fellow author who was downright sceptical was the Armenian-American William Saroyan. After the scholar Harry Keyishian published details of the Churchill incident in his book on Arlen, Saroyan wrote to him:
Why do I absolutely disbelieve the harangue or curse that is supposed to have been directed at him by Winston Churchill? Are you on solid ground there? It makes interesting (if insulting) reading (to Armenians) and it needs to be put there even if it is apocryphal... but if there is the least doubt that it is that, then that doubt must be respected. Why should Churchill need to become outraged in that manner? Anthony Eden and various other Londoners and old acquaintances of Arlen remembered him at a dinner table with fondness and no order [sic] of impatience or annoyance, as in the Churchill episode, and as I wrote you long ago at a dinner at 21 in New York with three couples, Arlens, O’Haras and Saroyans […], Michael spoke with enormous admiration for Winston Churchill – might he have done that specifically because he had been so violently insulted? That is of course a possibility […].[17]
Arlen claimed to have enjoyed warm relations with Churchill’s son, Randolph, despite an age difference of fifteen years between the two men. This is the background to an obsequious letter from Arlen to Winston Churchill in the Churchill archive, dated 11 October 1940:
Dear Prime Minister, May I respectfully offer you my sincere congratulations on the birth of your grandson? My long friendship with and warm affection for Randolph lend me the courage to express to you the proud satisfaction, which all who are inspired by this island’s history will share, in this most timely and happy continuation of that which your leadership has established as a great English [ceremony?], the Churchill tradition. Very sincerely yours, Michael Arlen.[18]
A reply is typed at the top of the letter: ‘Thank you so much for your kind letter, Winston Churchill’. Evidence for the ‘long friendship and warm affection’ with Winston’s son is hard to find. Undoubtedly their social circles intersected, but Arlen was wary of some of the company that Randolph kept – for example, Doris Delavingne, later Lady Castlerosse, who numbered Randolph among her numerous lovers.[19] Randolph joined his father on holiday at the Château de l’Horizon in August 1934, a holiday that included several excursions into Cannes, so there may have been social contacts with Arlen at that time.[20] Randolph does make reference to The Green Hat in an obituary piece on Winston’s great favourite Brendan Bracken:
I recall being at Chartwell with my father that Sunday in 1931 when Britain went off the gold standard. Brendan, who was thirty at the time, arrived about 10.30 a.m. in his chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza, which the early writings of Mr. Michael Arlen had led him to believe was the appropriate vehicle for a rising and fast-moving young man.[21]
At the time of the blitz on Coventry (14-15 November 1940) Arlen was staying with his friend Lord Dudley at nearby Himley Hall. Dudley held the post of Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence. Like many authors Arlen was keen to contribute to the war effort and what he witnessed that night and the subsequent measures for relief spurred him into action. His connections (principally Dudley) found him an honorary position as ‘public relations officer’ for the West Midlands Civil Defence Region.[22] This appointment was not well received locally and led to an oral question in Parliament. Walter Higgs, MP for West Birmingham, tackled the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison:
Mr. Higgs
asked the Home Secretary whether he is now in a position to reply to the communication sent by the hon. Member for West Birmingham, on 23rd December last, concerning the appointment of Mr. Michael Arlen as a public relations officer for the Midland region; and is he further aware that this appointment is causing considerable dissatisfaction?
Mr. H. Morrison
I am now in a position to communicate with my hon. Friend, and am doing so.
Mr. Higgs
Is the Minister aware that this man is a Bulgarian, and that his original name was Dikran Kouyoumdjyian, and does he consider that the general tone of his writings fits him for the position? Is he also aware that this man has access to confidential information?
Mr. Morrison
The hon. Member is wrong in some of his statements, and I think it best that he should await the letter which I am sending him.
Mr. Mander
Can the letter not be communicated to the House as a whole? Why should the information be given only to the hon. Member?
Mr. Sorensen
What is the general tone of the writings of this man?
Mr. Morrison
I do not know.
Mr. G. Strauss
Could my right hon. Friend give us the gist of the letter?
Mr. Morrison
The letter is not yet written, so I cannot do that.[23]
The novelist was reported to be ‘surprised and indignant’ at the reaction to his appointment. ‘The question seems a little out of place at a time when I am doing all in my power to help this country,’ he told the press. ‘I offered my services, I am doing the job voluntarily, and it is unpaid.’[24] He had become a naturalised British subject in 1922, and yet, twenty years later, his patriotism was still being called into question. Churchill, as Prime Minister, was dragged into the argument a few weeks later
Mr. De la Bère
asked the Prime Minister whether he can give the House an assurance that, with the exception of the necessary consideration of security in war time, the recent practice by certain Ministers of the Crown of answering Questions which have appeared on the Order Paper by writing to the Member concerned and not circulating the reply, shall be discontinued?
The Prime Minister
Apart from the considerations of national safety to which my hon. Friend refers, there is no intention of departing from the well-established practice whereby answers to Questions are circulated in the Official Report. There are cases, however, where the matter is not of general interest or importance, or the information asked for is detailed and not immediately available. In these cases a reply by letter is, I think, not without precedent. Even so, it has always been open to any hon. Member to ask for the Answer to be circulated in the Official Report or placed in the Library for reference.
Mr. De la Bère
Will the right hon. Gentleman have the answer given to the hon. Member for West Birmingham (Mr. Higgs) recently in connection with the appointment of Mr. Michael Arlen circulated, as it is of great interest to Members of Parliament for the Midland Region?
The Prime Minister
Certainly, if it is asked for.[25]
If the ministerial answer was ever circulated or deposited in the Library of the House, it does not survive. A few days later, anxious to extricate his friend Lord Dudley from ‘a situation which had become embarrassing’, Arlen resigned his post.[26] Later that year – September 1941 – Arlen sailed to the United States, where he lived for the remaining years of his life.
[1] Michael Arlen, Hell! Said the Duchess (London: Heinemann, 1934), 93-4. There may be a reminiscence here of Harold Nicolson’s 1932 novel Public Faces, a futuristic political fantasy set in 1939 in the immediate aftermath of a Churchill-Mosley coalition government. (I am grateful to Jonathan Rose for this suggestion.)
[2] Vincent Sheean, Between the Thunder and the Sun (London: Macmillan, 1943), 44-5.
[3] For example, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce: Philip Ward, Encounters with Michael Arlen (Leicester: Troubador, 2023), 14. Randolph Churchill had a ‘passionate affair’ with Clare in the 1930s after his father served as matchmaker between them, and Randolph continued to carry a torch for her for the rest of his life: Ralph G. Martin, Henry and Clare: An Intimate Portrait of the Luces (New York: Perigee, 1992), 131, 371.
[4] Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family (London: Pimlico, 1998), 197. Arlen’s fervent anti-Nazism was clearly laid out in his wartime writings, e.g on Goebbels: ‘an arrogant and intolerable little monster in whom was concentrated all the venom and corruption of this unhappy world’: Michael Arlen, ‘I Knew Dr Goebbels’, The Tatler, January 17, 1940, p80.
[5] H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967 [1905]), 75.
[6] Jonathan Rose, The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 2014), 85.
[7] Rose, 83.
[8] Vincent Sheean, letter to Harry Keyishian, 28 October 1970; part quoted in Harry Keyishian, Michael Arlen, Twayne’s English Authors Series 174 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975), 116-17.
[9] Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, The Diaries 1938-43, ed. Simon Heffer (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2021), 249: entry for 2 February 1940.
[10] Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill. Vol.5, Companion. Pt.3, Documents: The Coming of War, 1936-1939 (London: Heinemann, 1982), 1035-6, 1452-3.
[11] Mary S Lovell, The Riviera Set: 1920-1960, The Golden Years of Glamour and Excess (London: Abacus, 2017), 181-2, 188; Sheean, 52. Churchill arrived at the villa on 8 January. Churchill’s previous visit to the Château was in January 1938 (Lovell, 164), before the publication of Londonderry’s book, Ourselves and Germany.
[12] Letter to Harold Nicolson written from Arlen’s home, Villa Bella Vista (Ward, 225)
[13] Lovell, 180
[14] Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 319.
[15] Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, The Diaries 1943-57, ed. Simon Heffer (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022), 71-2: entry for 4 December 1943. Another reference, in a letter from Londonderry to Lord Halifax, is quoted in Kershaw, 319-20.
[16] Sheean letter (n8 above).
[17] William Saroyan, letter to Harry Keyishian, 12 April 1978.
[18] Churchill Archives, Churchill College Cambridge, ref GBR/0014/CHAR 2/392A-B#37.
[19] And his father as well, if persistent gossip is to be believed: Lyndsy Spence, The Mistress of Mayfair: Men, Money and the Marriage of Doris Delavingne (Stroud: The History Press, 2016), 115-16 (on Randolph), 106 (on Winston); in a letter to Lord Beaverbrook, Arlen writes ‘Beware of Miss Delavingne’ (11 December 1926, Parliamentary Archives, House of Lords, London). Hell! Said the Duchess is dedicated to Castlerosse, ‘a man of good will’, Doris’s much-cuckolded husband.
[20] Lovell, 127-6, 133.
[21] Evening Standard, 8 August 1958, quoted in Charles Edward Lysaght, Brendan Bracken (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 129. Iris March, heroine of The Green Hat, drives a yellow Hispano-Suiza.
[22] Manchester Guardian, 23 November 1940, p9.
[23] HC Deb vol 368 30 January 1941 cc659-60.
[24] Quoted in Daily Record, 31 January 1941.
[25] HC Deb vol 368 11 February 1941 cc1221-2.
[26] Market Harborough Advertiser and Midland Mail, 14 February 1941; Times, 18 February 1941.
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