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Passage to Ararat/ Exiles
A profile of his parents accompanies the author's account of his search for his lost Armenian heritage, and the history, culture, and character of Armenia
- GenresMemoir
528 pages, Paperback
First published November 18, 1982
20 people want to read
About the author
Michael J. Arlen
16 books5 followersMichael 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.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 12, 2009
The photograph on the cover doesn't suggest how short they both were, how small. All you notice is their elegance, her pleated skirt just so, his hands shoved casually in the jacket pockets of his natty double-breasted suit. Their gaze is direct. Confident. Elegant.
But there's something the photo doesn't catch. Michael Arlen --- author of a novel called “The Green Hat” --- may be more successful than his friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But Michael Arlen isn't who he looks like; he was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian. In London, he won't fit in. Ditto in New York and the South of France. And his wife isn't exactly who she looks like either.
Exiles. So their son, Michael J. Arlen, thinks of them, and so he casts them in a memoir that's so astonishingly well-written you won't believe it's out of print and can be bought, used, for as little as a penny.
Exiles? How can that be --- they had it all. Michael Arlen's photograph was on the cover of Time Magazine. In the South of France, he owned the very best speedboat and hired a driver for it. Willie Maugham and Winston Churchill came for lunch. “The day he arrived in Chicago, the Daily News ran a front-page story --- saying that he had arrived in Chicago.” But when the fame went away, he was beached.
Michael J. Arlen gets the glitter. And, even more, the courage that kept his father going. He tells the delicious story of his father running into Louis B. Mayer, the movie mogul, at the “21” Club in New York. Arlen had just arrived from England; Mayer asked about his plans. “I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn,” Arlen said --- which was true, he'd just encountered Mayer's rival, who had urged him to buy horses. Mayer asked, “How much did he offer you?” Arlen thought fast: “Not enough.” A few minutes later, he had a 30-week contract as a writer at MGM for $1,500 a week.
Michael Arlen wants to be a father to his son, so he invites the boy out to California. There's a weekend in Santa Barbara. At Clark Gable's house. Only Gable's not there. It's a house party of tanned men and attractive women. Of cigarettes and liquor. And a terrible moment when his father is talking --- and nobody's listening. Later, the boy finds his father sitting by the pool. “I was out here a long time ago,” his father said. “We used to play tennis. Thalberg --- he always wanted to talk about literature.”
These are people of a breed long vanished, and their lives will seem strange. The big duplex apartment. Long lunches. Cocktail time. Sitting in the library at night, reading and drinking. And the sadness: young Michael hearing his father in the afternoon, not writing, just pacing, pacing. Here's his mother, dying, her last words coming across decades, from Monte Carlo: “Let's take the road down by the sea this time. It will be longer, but nothing really starts until ten anyway...”
Other stories are right out of Salinger or John O'Hara. Young Michael, at boarding school, not winning and then winning a history prize. Michael, a senior at Harvard, desperate to marry his 19-year-old girlfriend. Their parents don't approve. Oh, the agony, “the back-seat-of-the car fifteen floors above Park Avenue.” And, a little later, Michael, frustrated, making a phone call and getting a job in the Henry Luce empire.
I haven't mentioned the writing. I think this book is right up there with the stories of James Salter, but some will find it falsely casual, like talking, but like a very self-conscious voice talking. Maybe. Consider where Michael J. Arlen came from. And consider, too, that this is an elegy, and elegies should shine. Like this:
"They were both of them beautiful. They were also, both of them, in a kind of exile, and sought to find a home, a country, in one another, and very nearly did, came as close to it as maybe it is possible to do, but they were each so deep in exile when they met --- and how would they have known that? My mother, so seemingly established --- a title, even, money somewhere in the background, big houses, gardens, furniture, wax for the furniture, polish for the silver, manners, style, and more than manners or style, a seeming feel for independence.... and seeking to escape from her (still unknown) exile, from all those mannered, self-protective people into this unusual man's vitality, life, imagination, energy --- well, as with many men, it turned out to be a fragile, an especially fragile kind of energy. So delicate, really. Too delicate. But that was for later, for much later. It was later that they found these things out, or didn't find them out, just lived them, lived under them. In the beginning, though, it must have been lovely...."
As I say, tastes differ. But if you can find a better book for a penny, hey, let me know.
[cross-posted from: http://www.headbutler.com/books/memoi...]
But there's something the photo doesn't catch. Michael Arlen --- author of a novel called “The Green Hat” --- may be more successful than his friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But Michael Arlen isn't who he looks like; he was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian. In London, he won't fit in. Ditto in New York and the South of France. And his wife isn't exactly who she looks like either.
Exiles. So their son, Michael J. Arlen, thinks of them, and so he casts them in a memoir that's so astonishingly well-written you won't believe it's out of print and can be bought, used, for as little as a penny.
Exiles? How can that be --- they had it all. Michael Arlen's photograph was on the cover of Time Magazine. In the South of France, he owned the very best speedboat and hired a driver for it. Willie Maugham and Winston Churchill came for lunch. “The day he arrived in Chicago, the Daily News ran a front-page story --- saying that he had arrived in Chicago.” But when the fame went away, he was beached.
Michael J. Arlen gets the glitter. And, even more, the courage that kept his father going. He tells the delicious story of his father running into Louis B. Mayer, the movie mogul, at the “21” Club in New York. Arlen had just arrived from England; Mayer asked about his plans. “I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn,” Arlen said --- which was true, he'd just encountered Mayer's rival, who had urged him to buy horses. Mayer asked, “How much did he offer you?” Arlen thought fast: “Not enough.” A few minutes later, he had a 30-week contract as a writer at MGM for $1,500 a week.
Michael Arlen wants to be a father to his son, so he invites the boy out to California. There's a weekend in Santa Barbara. At Clark Gable's house. Only Gable's not there. It's a house party of tanned men and attractive women. Of cigarettes and liquor. And a terrible moment when his father is talking --- and nobody's listening. Later, the boy finds his father sitting by the pool. “I was out here a long time ago,” his father said. “We used to play tennis. Thalberg --- he always wanted to talk about literature.”
These are people of a breed long vanished, and their lives will seem strange. The big duplex apartment. Long lunches. Cocktail time. Sitting in the library at night, reading and drinking. And the sadness: young Michael hearing his father in the afternoon, not writing, just pacing, pacing. Here's his mother, dying, her last words coming across decades, from Monte Carlo: “Let's take the road down by the sea this time. It will be longer, but nothing really starts until ten anyway...”
Other stories are right out of Salinger or John O'Hara. Young Michael, at boarding school, not winning and then winning a history prize. Michael, a senior at Harvard, desperate to marry his 19-year-old girlfriend. Their parents don't approve. Oh, the agony, “the back-seat-of-the car fifteen floors above Park Avenue.” And, a little later, Michael, frustrated, making a phone call and getting a job in the Henry Luce empire.
I haven't mentioned the writing. I think this book is right up there with the stories of James Salter, but some will find it falsely casual, like talking, but like a very self-conscious voice talking. Maybe. Consider where Michael J. Arlen came from. And consider, too, that this is an elegy, and elegies should shine. Like this:
"They were both of them beautiful. They were also, both of them, in a kind of exile, and sought to find a home, a country, in one another, and very nearly did, came as close to it as maybe it is possible to do, but they were each so deep in exile when they met --- and how would they have known that? My mother, so seemingly established --- a title, even, money somewhere in the background, big houses, gardens, furniture, wax for the furniture, polish for the silver, manners, style, and more than manners or style, a seeming feel for independence.... and seeking to escape from her (still unknown) exile, from all those mannered, self-protective people into this unusual man's vitality, life, imagination, energy --- well, as with many men, it turned out to be a fragile, an especially fragile kind of energy. So delicate, really. Too delicate. But that was for later, for much later. It was later that they found these things out, or didn't find them out, just lived them, lived under them. In the beginning, though, it must have been lovely...."
As I say, tastes differ. But if you can find a better book for a penny, hey, let me know.
[cross-posted from: http://www.headbutler.com/books/memoi...]
April 5, 2009
Exiles [1970:] - his childhood and his mother and father [the exiles:] living in the US. Good insights into what it can be like as the child of immigrant parents.
Passage to Ararat [1975:] - author's search for his Armenian father's heritage. 'Why did my father never once mention Armenia or his Armenianness or the Armenian genocide to me?" Extremely interesting for me after my recent travels in Armenia.
Most unsettling to learn more about the Ottoman AND Turkish murder of their Armenian population between 1915 and 1920; worse than I had known, and no indication of any purpose it served. Author explores why a gov't would want to exterminate a whole popul. group, why other gov'ts would sit back and let it happen, and most importantly, what it does to the psyche of the massacred population group itself; Arlen decides that if your ethnic group is hated and massacred, you would go into survival mode which might include denial, silence, and other behavior that is hard for others to understand.
Passage to Ararat [1975:] - author's search for his Armenian father's heritage. 'Why did my father never once mention Armenia or his Armenianness or the Armenian genocide to me?" Extremely interesting for me after my recent travels in Armenia.
Most unsettling to learn more about the Ottoman AND Turkish murder of their Armenian population between 1915 and 1920; worse than I had known, and no indication of any purpose it served. Author explores why a gov't would want to exterminate a whole popul. group, why other gov'ts would sit back and let it happen, and most importantly, what it does to the psyche of the massacred population group itself; Arlen decides that if your ethnic group is hated and massacred, you would go into survival mode which might include denial, silence, and other behavior that is hard for others to understand.
January 22, 2016
The author explores the family history on his father's side in ARARAT and the history of his parents' own lives and how they found each other in EXILES. Both are thoughtful and well-written, looking into corners of history usually left unexplored by the average American.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews