Exiles: A Memoir

by Michael J. Arlen

Back in print, "a wry and moving . . . rare and minute accounting of growing up." ( Time )

Exiles is the story of two glamorous people ― one, a beautiful aristocrat; the other, a self-made man, one of the most famous authors of the 1920s. In this slender volume, which was nominated for the 1970 National Book Award and helped reestablish the memoir as a genre, Michael J. Arlen evokes ― with humor and honesty ― his parents' seemingly charmed life in Hollywood and New York, his own childhood spent between homes and boarding schools, and the decline of a family full of love, joy, and pride in one in other words, a family as ordinary as it is unusual.

Genres: Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1970

About the author

Michael J. Arlen is an Anglo-Armenian writer and former television critic of the The New Yorker. The son of the prominent Anglo-Armenian writer, Michael Arlen. He is the author of Exiles and the critically acclaimed Passage to Ararat, both of which are autobiographical narratives of Arlen's Armenian ancestry. He is also the author of Living Room War, a book on the Vietnam War's portrayal and the social culture of America in the media in the USA.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Who are these people? Why did I read this? One could probe these mysteries for thousands of years and never arrive at an answer.

The author, Michael Arlen, is writing about his father, also named Michael Arlen, and his mother, who seems to be a very minor Greek aristocrat. The father wrote novels in the 1920s. These novels are long-forgotten (the most famous was called The Green Hat). We're told that D. H. Lawrence wrote Arlen Sr. into Lady Chatterley's Lover as Michaelis. Also Ernest Hemingway makes a brief cameo in this memoir at the very end, when the Arlens run into him in a New York restaurant. After, Dad reveals to son that he had introduced Hemingway to the girl he was with one year in Paris; her name was Duff Twysden and she became the model for Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises.

Serendipities often happen to me when I'm reading books. This memoir made a reference to Arnold Bennett's novel Riceyman Steps (Arlen Sr. was reading it while dying of cancer, and recommended it to his son). The book I had finished only the day before, Frank Kermode's book about E. M. Forster, also had a reference to Bennett and Riceyman Steps.

In addition, Arlen Jr.'s Harvard girlfriend was writing a term paper on sexual symbolism in the Malabar Caves (in A Passage to India) and Kermode's book went on at length about the Malabar Caves.

This is the first book I've read in which a man getting ready to seduce a woman puts on a condom ahead of time in the bathroom, then zips up and walks back into the living room as the condom slips off and falls down inside his trousers.

I hope this scene won't appear in the next book I read too.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Arlen's prose is weirdly fascinating. This is the one thing we should all take away from reading this odd little biography of his parents.

From the blurb on the back, I expected this to be a tale of joy and despair, intense pleasure followed by a tragic downfall and a life lived in confused resignation, the freedom and parties of the '20s gone forever, and in their place nothing but old age and a changing world.

I guess I must have read too many of those biographies by now, because I couldn't have been more wrong.

Arlen subverts our expectations of even the most basic biography by having no recognisable structure at all. Both parents die at random points throughout the book, in between accounts of their own parents' histories and their son's boarding school reminiscences. I very much liked this, though, because it meant we weren't 'riding for a fall', so to speak. We knew they would die at the end because... they'd already died halfway through. Does that make sense? In this way, we could step away from the expectations of the traditional narrative structure and focus on the anecdotal nature of Arlen's storytelling.

The prose is bizarre, and ultimately very difficult to get through. Arlen will repeat words for effect, end sentences with a string of words aimed at creating an ambience and generally use language in as original and unusual a way as he does his narrative structure. I am not well versed enough in early '70s writing to be able to judge whether this was a sign of his times, or just a Michael J. Arlen quirk. Either way I found it hindered my reading quite significantly.

I really got into the book in its last third. This was where he really seemed to get into the swing himself, and his memories of loving cricket at school in Canada, going out to LA with his father, and beginning to consider his mother as a sexual being were extremely engaging. The book's very last sequence is mesmerising: Arlen and his father have just been out shopping in New York, and stop in at 21 for drinks. Upon leaving, they are hailed from across the room by Hemingway, and stop for a chat whilst Hemingway is surrounded by press-men and hangers-on, all calling him 'Papa' as he ignores them and talks to Arlen's father. They take their leave, and walk on out into the twilight of New York. A surreal and perfect way to end a strange little book, and an ending that will linger with me for a long time to come.

[Kid · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a reissue. . .and with the deluge of terrible memoirs out there currently this is something of a miracle. That this modest-seeming book about an author who's fame is long past and who's writing is currently out of vogue is surprising. . .my recommendation is that you snatch this up.

Michael J Arlen is the son of a famous father, Michael Arlen and he peoples this book with powerful and significant moments of his adolescent and young adult life with his family and without. The voice is unique and robust - kind of like an older Holden Caulfield. . .and while this pat description might give you pause - it shouldn't. What I mean is that the voice is casual, brutal and disarming - and reveals the deep sensitivity of the author. I'm a lover of memoirs that do not puff up the writer's own earlier self. . .

This is a remarkable book about life that's not damaged by depravity in the form of some addiction that drags the writer into poverty of various kinds. This is just some beautifully and frankly wrought portraits of remarkable moments in this author's life. Super juicy and gratifying.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exiles is a memoir of a father and a son in a different era both from our own and the one in which I grew up. I was impressed with the literary references which, not surprisingly, were due to Michael J. Arlen's father's own profession as a writer of novels and essays. The change in American letters is made clear in the sons life as writer and critic, perhaps best symbolized by an early job at Life magazine. His schooling and other events seem to be apart from his father, not so often his mother, but the presence of the father seemed always there in the background. While he would later become a writer for The New Yorker, Michael Arlen's son was part of a new generation. Fortunately for us he captured the essence of his father's style and generation in this exceptional memoir.

[Ryan Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Light and rich, this little innocuous book skirts almost all of the narcissistic pitfalls of the memoir through charm and an almost autistic detachment from one's own experiences. How do you write about your incredibly interesting family when they provide scant points of entry, and you're too polite to ask? If you're Arlen, you do so in little snippets that reveal much more than exhaustive family trees or pages of imagined dialogue.

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

really a wonderful memoir: elegantly realized sketches of an emigre family, just beautifully observed and written

[Woolfhead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsentimental, detached, episodic, like a slideshow out of order. Not at all what I expected, yet a completely original approach to a portrait of one’s parents’ marriage, interspersed with scenes from one’s own childhood. Is this the only non-narcissistic approach to writing a memoir of your family? Is this series of vignettes a valid alternative to a full-blown researched volume with footnotes, glossy-paged sections of b&w photos, bibliography, and pages of acknowledgment? I know which type of memoir I prefer, but reading this one did expand my definition and expectations of the genre.

[Keith Runyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have wanted to read this since 1970, and finally, in 2023, I've done so. It is a modern classic about a famous couple and their son, who became a very distinguished writer in his own right. It's not a long book, but every word is memorable. I am glad I waited from the age of 20 to 72; it is far more resonant now.

[Heidi Quinn]

I could not attach myself to this book at all and finally gave up 100 pages in.

[Rivse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a mannered melancholic prose of Salter-like cadences, this curious, elliptical memoir summons the author’s parents--a debonair Anglo-Armenian writer father and a remote, soignée, perpetually sloshed mother who enjoyed a brief apogee of fashion and literary fame during the interwar years only to peter out in alcoholism and an itinerant, impecunious hotel existence in the decade after WWII--back from the dead so that they may be subjected to a ritual Oedipal murder in print at the hands of their son, all with the intention of setting himself free to forge his own (not clearly more meritorious or prestigious) literary career. Participating in such a gloomy vivisection, even just as an onlooker, is never a pleasant experience, especially when the lingering feeling or question on the part of the reader is why it needed to be done, at least publicly--or rather a sense that the gory enterprise has not yielded sufficient literary dividends to justify the carnage.

[Liza May · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back at the beginning again. This makes three times I finish the book, and immediately restart. Every sentence is an amazement.

[Judy · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you're looking for info about Michael Arlen, you won't find it in this "odd little biography." Arlen's son, Michael J, has a few excellent anecdotes to share, such as one on the final pages where he and his father bumped into Hemingway at "21" in the early 50s. But, surprisingly, the author has almost no solid memories from his 20 or so years under the parental roof, and even as an adult he was self-absorbed and oblivious. Writers are observant witnesses, but not Michael J. In fact, this biography is not about his father or parents, but is actually a memoir about himself. I suspect he was under orders from his publishers to expand what was barely enough for a magazine article and so, having next to nothing to report about his parents, wrote about his own unremarkable schooldays and about his romance with "Amy", who, if he used her real name, has grounds to sue.

Michael J insists repeatedly that his parents were "Exiles", that they were lonely, were misfits, but his claim is unconvincing. He offers lots of "evidence", one such being that while with his father at a party at Clark Gable's house, no one listened to Arlen. This is evidence only that no one listens to anyone else at Hollywood parties. And the chapter where he speculates about his parents sex life should have been omitted. Disappointingly, only one photo of his parents is in the book although, he tells us, he has a suitcase full of snapshots of both parents and had some difficulty choosing just one. Maybe if there had been a dozen or more pictures, I would have a kinder and gentler opinion of this memoir that never should have been published.

[Dermot O'Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is wonderful, a real gem. I picked up Exiles in a charity shop thinking it was by Michael Arlen, the 1920s writer. In fact this is by Michael J. Arlen, his son, a memoir of his parents. His father was a Bulgarian-born Armenian who moved to England with his family at a young age and became a quintessentially dapper English gent, but was never quite able to shake off his ethnicity; his mother was Greek. One summer the family leave New York for a New England resort hotel: "My father and mother seemed to move through these places like émigré royalty, the innkeepers (and guests) vaguely conscious that somebody unusual was among them but not quite sure what currency they would be paid in, or when..."
He has a distinctive writing style, as if he's dredging episodes up from deep in his memory, one image at at time: "It happened in the spring, I think. I remember the time vaguely, April. It must have been spring, but I was in the army then and not paying much attention to seasons. Fort Dix. White board barracks. All that dust, and boots beside the bed, and those baggy dusty fatigues. A weird soft life, soft amid the weapons, the rifles, the machinery, the sounds of tank batallions and howitzers in the distant ranges." He also has these wonderful metaphors. In this scene their mother confronts his sister about a boyfriend: "...I can remember listening in my room one evening to my mother and sister doing what is known as "thrashing it out," which means in actual fact that my eighteen-year-old sister was issued a paper sword and a clockwork horse, and my mother sat twelve miles offshore and lobbed heavy shells at her for a couple of hours."

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

They used to say 'No man is a hero to his valet' back when men had valets. It might more universally be said that no man is a hero to his adult son. Though I didn't love the one novel of Michael Arlen's I read, I wish posterity had an alternative perspective on his life than that contained in this memoir by his son.

It is in part the story of Michael Arlen and his wife, and of the fame and fortune he found when The Green Hat became a huge success in the 1920s. Mostly it's his son, Michael J Arlen, documenting with unflinching honesty how he felt about his parents during his childhood and youth.

The style is intriguing, aspiring I think to speech, to the way Michael J Arlen might tell it if you bought him a few drinks and asked what it was like having Michael Arlen for a Dad. It is rich with the hesitations, repetitions, corrections and embarrassing honesties and speculations of a tipsy tale-teller.

[Janet Bailey]

Recommended by William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, p. 136.

[Alexandra Skoczylas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A raw and unsentimental memoir about family.