Review: The Green Hat

ARLEN, Michael, The Green Hat, William Collins and Co., London, 1924.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine and upper board titles, 329pp. (+4pp. of adverts), all opened. Moderate wear; slightly rolled; boards rubbed and stained; corners lightly bumped; spine extremities softened; previous owner’s bookplate to the flyleaf. Lacks dustwrapper. Very good.

I’ve been after this book for quite awhile. I went looking online for a copy some time back and it couldn’t be had for love or money: there were a handful of copies available in the Northern Hemisphere but prices were high and then factoring-in postage to Australia… It was outside of my budget.

Things changed in 2008, however. At that time a paperback version was released and suddenly the Internet was awash with copies, both new re-prints and the original copies which had been overlooked as not worth listing. Incredibly, I located a copy in Melbourne that seemed passable and reasonably priced and I swooped in to snatch it up. Finally, my quest was over.

But why, you might ask, was I in such a furor to get a copy of this book? Well here’s a clue: this is the tenth edition of this book, printed in October of 1924. The first edition was published in June of the same year, re-printed twice more in the same month, two times more in July, three times more in August and again in September. Yes, this book was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time, but a better read across the board than that dreck.

In playing “Call of Cthulhu” one of the things that appeals to me about the game is the ability to research the period in which it is set, specifically the 1920s. To that end, I enjoy reading the literature of the time, in order to get a sense of the zeitgeist. It’s possible to play the game with a blanket sense of what was going on then – jazz; Prohibition (in the US); the Charleston – but to really delve into the tenor of the times, it pays to go beyond the surface details and understand the era. Reading the literature of the times helps to convey that.

Historical accounts will only get you so far, apart from the nuts and bolts of what was going on at the time. This information is essential for context, of course, but it’s the day-to-day stuff that really breathes life into the roleplaying. What’s needed is social history, and the novels and short stories of the time tend to spring from this material rather than the grand themes. If for example, you read a modern book which is set in Britain during the time period, you can usually tell straight away because it will focus on the news of the day rather than the small attitudes and ideas: they will go on about the imposition of Income Tax and striking miners, rather than the upper class contempt for the police, or the proper use of calling cards.

For most people, this depth of knowledge is probably not necessary, but for those who want to get it right, and who believe that what you get out of something depends upon what you put in, it’s the icing that is the finishing touch upon the cake of your roleplaying efforts.

It’s like trying to explain to teenagers today what the world was like without the Internet. Yes, someone out there is probably going to write a roleplaying game set in the 80s, because it’s so archaic and far removed from everyday life. Sheesh!

Given that the core activity of “Call of Cthulhu” is investigation, it pays to read up on the mystery writers who were at work during the period. The obvious place to start is with the Great Dames of detective fiction – specifically, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham (Ngaio Marsh joined them later in the 40s). Diving in to their books will give a definite sense of the time and place. Little things will jump out at you, things like the fact that there was a bound timetable of train stops called the ABC, which most households had access to, or that there were several post office deliveries each day, as well as morning and evening editions of the newspapers. One of Christie’s best books – A Murder is Announced - has, as a major clue, the fact that, after someone cashed your bank-cheque, the bank mailed the cheque back to you so that you could check it off in your bank-book. That particular book was written in 1950, but it was a practise that was going on for years before that as a matter of course.

The other sources of information about social conduct are the comedies of manners that were written in the period. For these, you can do no better that pick up a copy of something by P.G. Wodehouse. These are light, easily digested, and fun, so that the research time spent is hardly onerous. Another great writer is E.F. Benson and his ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels, that cast a scathing light on small town life among the English gentry. And then there’s Hector Hugh ("Saki”) Munro, who wrote humorous short stories like Wodehouse but penned them in acid. The benefit of literature is that it mostly transcends the time in which it was written, being set in a ‘no time’ somewhat contemporaneous of its date of release. Therefore, if it’s not a book written in 1925, but a few years either side, it will serve you regardless.

In terms of the rest of the literary offerings of the time, they were mostly part of the Modernist movement of writing that tried to move literature away from the Realist writing of the Victorian period. Writers like Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola, who were extremely popular both in the original French and in (heavily censored) translation, were now seen to be ‘old hat’ and lifeless, and something else was needed to shake things up. Writers like Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot rushed in to serve this demand – Mrs Dalloway and “The Hollow Men” both appeared in 1925 to cause excitement and consternation in equal measure.

In the wake of the Great War, people were looking for reasons to move on in a world that seemed robbed of purpose. The options seemed to be either, find oblivion in constant partying, or shoot yourself in despair. Wodehouse, Benson and “Saki” are all products of, and commentaries upon, the former option (along with Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald), while Woolf’s Bloomsbury Set and many American writers -  John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein - seemed to be advocates for the latter. In an interesting twist, The Green Hat straddles the divide between both modes.

Michael Arlen (real name Dikran Kouyoumdjian) was an Armenian immigrant to Britain, born in Bulgaria. After writing The Green Hat, he was swept up into a world of fame and wealth, hobnobbing with the glitterati and frequently travelling to Europe and the US. He was well-known in London for swanning around in a yellow Rolls Royce.

All this being said, The Green Hat is not without its flaws: the language is jocular and occasionally, the fact that English is Arlen’s second language shows through. The likeness to other contemporary writers such as “Saki” and Dornford Yates is striking and often treads the same wry, sarcastic tone. Arlen’s narrator makes incredibly acute and scornful observations on the situations surrounding him, but, nevertheless, is well anchored within those scenes and part of them. There is a cynical world-weariness conveyed through much of the description, but this point of view partakes as much of the poisoned chalice as those around him.

There are whole passages that glow with gorgeous effect. Descriptions of night rides through Paris or parties in London are laden with heavily narcotic language, providing strange dreamlike sequences. These are both a strength of the novel and its detriment, as often the language actually clouds the action. To be fair, what is transpiring in the novel is more than a little dark and sordid, so Arlen was probably trying to infer what was going on rather than simply telling, if only to slide it beneath the radar of the censors. Take this as an example:

“Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not my own bit my lip, and where the red elephants marched to an unknown destination stirred by breasts full of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: ‘But enough of this hell!’”

This is the culmination of the scene wherein the narrator meets for the first time Iris Strong, the wearer of the green hat. She is, as is pointed out repeatedly in the book, a fallen woman; someone who defies society’s rules and lives according to her own ideals and desires. We are told that she was married once to Boy Fenwick, who killed himself on his wedding night rather destroy the “purity” of his and Iris’s virginal state (this turns out to be a lie); we learn that her second husband, Hector Strong, died during the War, probably driven to recklessness by the fact that their child did not survive long. Iris, now twice-widowed and wealthy, has no illusions about marriage, and sees herself as a “house of men” and destroyer of all that is good in their lives, somehow the perverter of their connubial ideals.

Arrayed about her are other male figures, including the narrator, who are attracted by her outsider status, her beauty and her wealth. Compounding matters are the enigmatic details of her and her twin brother’s parentage – another ruined marriage which left Iris and Gerald in the care of guardians. Early on, we meet Gerald, a hopeless drunk and would-be author, who is arrested for soliciting in a public park after hours: the shame of this act, which the Press gleefully reports, drives him to suicide. The narrator discovers the body but doesn’t tell Iris what’s happened; on the same night, she encounters a childhood friend – Napier – and they sleep together, despite the fact that he is going to be married in three day’s time. Unknown to him, she falls pregnant, and flees to the Continent to give birth alone.

Jumping forward some months, the narrator is in Paris with his sister and, meeting an old acquaintance at the Ritz Hotel, he learns that Iris is in a nursing home on the outskirts of the city. Concerned for her wellbeing, he takes a taxi out to see her by night and discovers that she is close to death, suffering from septicaemia as a result of a miscarriage, or an attempt to terminate the pregnancy, we’re not told. In the midst of this tragic moment Napier enters, thinking that Iris is merely “run-down”, and the discovery of her condition threatens to destroy his ten-month-old marriage.

Given the foregoing, it’s easy to see why the book was banned in parts of the US, and why Hollywood versions of the story were rigorously re-named to distance the movies from their source material. Concepts such as adultery, suicide, sexual freedom and homosexuality, not to mention intimate medical details of the birthing process, were far too strong for some markets to deal with. Nevertheless, the book sold out repeatedly and was the go-to read for chic literarians.

“Paris rises in a cloud of chill darkness, the rain falls like whips of ice, the street lamps loiter on vague bitter errands, confused strings of light, a stealthy idiot wind glories in being corrupted by corners. The platforms of the omnibuses are packed tight with small men whose overcoats are too short for them, the brims of their felt hats too narrow, their trousers turned up too high, their eyes too dark, their face too pale. The jargon of the traffic on the rue di Rivoli, as it squabbles for every step between the deserted pavement beneath the railings of the Tuileries and the reeking pavement under the long archway lit by impudent shop-lights falling on imitation jewellery, is multiplied an hundred-fold by the shrewish air into a noise that hurts like warm water on a chill hand.”

This is the description of the narrator’s dash through Paris to find Iris at her nursing-home. The sheer exuberance of the passage almost obscures the fact that the grammar and the usage are clunky and awkward. It’s the power, more than the precision of the writing that makes it so exhilarating and enjoyable. Arlen often gets caught up on small details in his descriptions, sometimes pedantically so, but each time he does, there’s a reason for it, a subtle symbolism underscoring a pointed attitude. During the scene in the London Loyalty Club, he lingers on the number of green dresses present amongst the dancers, an attention to detail that would seem pedestrian but for the fact that, in the previous chapter, he made clear that green was fashionable that year and that, in his opinion, only the herd-like would slavishly don the colour to prove that they were in vogue.

The novel cuts back to London for its climax and no-one and nothing are spared the awful, awful conclusion. The writing in this last section is probably the weakest, with Arlen drifting literarily off into spirals of repetitive word shapes and reiterated concepts, and mostly unsuccessfully trying to juggle too many characters. However the pace established by the book’s beginning pushes the reader to the doom-laden conclusion. Many of the protagonists and antagonists have made firm decisions about whose side they’re on at this point, and their actions and dialogue often reflect quite poorly upon them, making the reader doubt their initial ideas of them as characters. There’s a kind of driving force pushing the narrative here, despite Arlen’s occasional lack of focus, as inevitable and powerful as Iris’s yellow Hispano-Suiza barrelling at high speed into the dark night…

It’s true to say that this is a flawed book; however, when it’s good, it’s really good. Some of the things it discusses would hardly raise an eyebrow nowadays, but it’s easy to see why they were so shocking back in 1924, and the delivery of those concepts, with Arlen’s occasional deliberate obtuseness, make them seem that much more sinister. If you want a solid glimpse of life – at least of a certain level of society – of the “Call of Cthulhu” classic period, it’s hard to find better.

Three Tentacled Horrors.

*****

Of course, as mentioned above, there are other books set in the same period which offer similar benefits to those wishing to set their stories in the 1920s. Below is a list of books that offer good insights and which were written around 1925 or earlier. Some of them – especially the Wodehouse books – where printed simultaneously, or later (sometimes earlier) in the US, often with altered titles; I have given those titles and dates in parentheses.

Dame Agatha Christie:

Dame Agatha kicked off her career with her first Poirot novel in 1920. Her oeuvre flip-flops between thrillers and murder mysteries, but they all offer a solid grip on the time period. If you read nothing else, read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – it’s a classic.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920); The Secret Adversary (1922); The Murder on the Links (1923); The Man in the Brown Suit (1924); The Secret of Chimneys (1925); The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Dorothy L. Sayers:

Sayers’s books are criticised occasionally for being crime novels with romantic interruptions, or vice-versa. For fans, this just means that she takes an holistic approach to revealing the society of the time. These two early books are fairly straightforward crime novels and well re-pay the interested reader.

Whose Body? (1923); Clouds of Witness (1926)

Margery Allingham:

Allingham took some time to hit her stride and these two books are probably among the weakest of her works. It took her awhile to acquire the skills to pen something as awesome as The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) but it was worth waiting for.

The White Cottage Mystery (1928); The Crime at Black Dudley (1929)

P.G. Wodehouse:

The ludicrous situations, the dialogue, the characters – these are all reasons to read Wodehouse. Many readers have favourite series – Blandings; the Jeeves novels and stories – but they’re all good. The following list doesn’t include his school series of books, which are set among prefects and students of the English public school system, since they’re fairly obscure, but the list includes some crackers, including one set in the US – Piccadilly Jim.

Love Among the Chickens (1906 & 1921); The Swoop! (aka. The Swoop! And Other Stories, 1979) (1909); Mike (1909); A Gentleman of Leisure (1910); Psmith in the City (1910); Psmith, Journalist (1915); Something Fresh (1915); Uneasy Money (1917); Piccadilly Jim (1918); A Damsel in Distress (1919); My Man Jeeves (1919); The Coming of Bill (aka. Their Mutual Child) (1920); Jill the Reckless (aka. The Little Warrior, 1920) (1921); The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922); The Girl on the Boat (aka. Three Men and a Maid, 1922); The Inimitable Jeeves (1923); The Adventures of Sally (aka. Mostly Sally, 1923) (1922); Leave it to Psmith (1923); Bill the Conqueror (1924); Carry On, Jeeves (1925); Sam the Sudden (aka. Sam in the Suburbs) (1925); The Heart of a Goof (1926); The Small Bachelor (1927)

H.H. (“Saki”) Munro:

“Saki’s” body of work is blackly funny and penned in pure venom. His short stories are perfectly crafted and hilarious and spare no-one who falls in his cross-hairs. Anything of his that you read will re-pay the effort; the only shame is that he was killed in World War One and what’s left is all there is.

The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900); Not-So Stories (1902); The Wastminster Alice (1902); Reginald (1904); Reginald in Russia (1910); The Chronicles of Clovis (1911); The Unbearable Bassington (1912); When William Came (1913); Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914); The East Wing (1914); The Toys of Peace (1919); The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924); “The Watched Pot” (play) (1924)

E.F. Benson:

The Mapp and Lucia novels are a perfect microcosm of social nastiness as the eponymous gentlewomen studiously try to outdo each other in the social politics of their upper class circle. Benson also wrote ghost stories as well, and those are very good too.

Queen Lucia (1920); Miss Mapp (1922); Lucia in London (1927); Mapp and Lucia (1931); Lucia’s Progress (aka. The Worshipful Lucia) (1935); Trouble for Lucia (1939)

Published in 1925:

The following is a list of works published in 1925, across the world. Of particular note are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, but there’s also the novelisation of Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking film “Metropolis” by Thea von Harbou. Kafka’s The Trial, although written in 1919, was also published in English this year. Baroness Orczy pumped out two more potboilers in her ongoing and eclectic oeuvre, confirming her status as the female H. Rider Haggard. In all, this was a great year for readers!

Sherwood Anderson – Dark Laughter; James Boyd – Drums; Louis Bromfield – Possession; Willa Cather – The Professor’s House; Blaise Cendrars – Sutter’s Gold; Ivy Compton-Burnett – Pastors and Masters; John Dos Passos – Manhattan Transfer; Theodore Dreiser – An American Tragedy; F. Scott Firtzgerald – The Great Gatsby; Ford Madox Ford – No More Parades; André Gide – Les Faux-monnayeurs; Thea von Harbou – Metropolis; Ernest Hemingway – In Our Time; DuBose Heyward – Porgy; Aldous Huxley – Those Barren Leaves; Franz Kafka – The Trial; Margaret Kennedy – The Constant Nymph; Sinclair Lewis – Arrowsmith; Anita Loos – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; W. Somerset Maugham – The Painted Veil; Liam O’Flaherty – The Informer; Baroness Orczy – The Miser of Maida Vale & A Question of Temptation; Marcel Proust – Albertine disparue; Henry Handel Richardson – The Way Home; Romain Rolland – Le jeu de l'amour et de la mort; Gertrude Stein – The Making of Americans; James Stevens – Paul Bunyan; Carl van Vechten – Firecrackers: A Realistic Novel; Hugh Walpole – Portrait of a Man with Red Hair; Edith Wharton – The Mother’s Recompense; William Carlos Williams – In the American Grain; Elinor Wylie – The Venetian Glass Nephew