A "Comer" or a "Second-Rater"? Fitzgerald's Encounters with Michael Arlen

Abstract

Abstract:Michael Arlen was one of the most successful popular novelists of the interwar period, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1927. Best known in his day for the novel The Green Hat (1924), he lived intermittently in Paris in the later 1920s, where he encountered American expatriates, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This article examines his relationship with Fitzgerald, presenting the material in chronological order. The relationship took two forms: meetings between the two men (only two of which are documented, although they must surely have met on other occasions as well) and reception by Fitzgerald of Arlen's work. Fitzgerald showed early familiarity with Arlen's writings, even suggesting that Arlen was in some sense his successor and someone from whom he and Hemingway might learn. At the same time, he identified faults with Arlen's writing and by the end of the 1920s declared him "second-rate." Arlen himself borrowed motifs from The Great Gatsby for his novel Men Dislike Women (1931) but left no memoir of his personal contacts with Fitzgerald.