The title The Green Hat has for many years held a distinctive allure for me. One of the biggest and most scandalous bestsellers of the Jazz Age, Michael Arlen's 1924 novel was also adapted (by Arlen himself) and produced multiple times for stage and screen: on Broadway with Katherine Cornell, in the West End with Tallulah Bankhead, and on screen with Greta Garbo (as A Woman of Affairs) and Constance Bennett (as Outcast Lady). The role of the sexually magnetic, socially defiant, and grandly tragic Iris March (then Iris Fenwick, then Iris Storm)--who, as Arlen describes, "reached Excelsior in the abyss"--for years provided a potent star vehicle for these and other actresses.
More recently, I've been drawn to The Green Hat as one of the many allusions summoned by Ropes in 1932's 42nd Street, where the author uses it as a skillful stroke of characterization for Pat Denning, a bisexual actor who juggles his mercenary liaisons with Amy Lee and Dorothy Brock with a more sincerely ardent relationship with Peggy Sawyer. In conversation with Peggy at a Greenwich Village party, the small-town Ohio-born Pat both acknowledges the influence of the novel on his carefully crafted urbane persona---but also its distance from the reality of his life in the theater.
"But you've become a New Yorker." Peggy pointed out. "A suave well-fed man of the world."
Pat made a fearful grimace. "I suppose you picture me as a Michael Arlen sort of person who meets ladies in green hats, spills epigrams with that bored air that marks the perfect clubman, and who will reach a deserved end by running an Hispano Suiza off a cliff or drinking the poison concealed in a Borgia ring."
"You fit the portrait admirably. And now do utter some epigrams."
"My dear, the Hispano Suiza and the epigrams are non-extant. I struggle for a living like Geoffrey Waring; earn a few dollars every now and then; squander them on Sulka ties and Dobbs hats and then haunt the agents' offices for another engagement."
So when I stumbled across an inexpensive first edition of The Green Hat recently, in a Seattle used book store, I couldn't resist picking it up and finally reading it. The experience further illuminated how specifically Ropes uses The Green Hat (subtitled A Romance for a Few People) as a stroke of characterization for Pat, as an ambivalently "Michael Arlen sort of person." In the novel, Ropes draws a sharp parallel between Pat's hidden life as a gigolo and that "shameless, shameful lady" Iris, who strays from her patrician background to shock London high society with her multiple lovers. Though thoroughly a "child of Forty-Second Street," Pat longs for the life of luxurious European cosmopolitanism conjured by Arlen in The Green Hat: for views of the Bay of Capri; for "some villa near Cannes," and "drinking sidecar cocktails with Scott Fitzgerald."
More recently, I've been drawn to The Green Hat as one of the many allusions summoned by Ropes in 1932's 42nd Street, where the author uses it as a skillful stroke of characterization for Pat Denning, a bisexual actor who juggles his mercenary liaisons with Amy Lee and Dorothy Brock with a more sincerely ardent relationship with Peggy Sawyer. In conversation with Peggy at a Greenwich Village party, the small-town Ohio-born Pat both acknowledges the influence of the novel on his carefully crafted urbane persona---but also its distance from the reality of his life in the theater.
"But you've become a New Yorker." Peggy pointed out. "A suave well-fed man of the world."
Pat made a fearful grimace. "I suppose you picture me as a Michael Arlen sort of person who meets ladies in green hats, spills epigrams with that bored air that marks the perfect clubman, and who will reach a deserved end by running an Hispano Suiza off a cliff or drinking the poison concealed in a Borgia ring."
"You fit the portrait admirably. And now do utter some epigrams."
"My dear, the Hispano Suiza and the epigrams are non-extant. I struggle for a living like Geoffrey Waring; earn a few dollars every now and then; squander them on Sulka ties and Dobbs hats and then haunt the agents' offices for another engagement."
So when I stumbled across an inexpensive first edition of The Green Hat recently, in a Seattle used book store, I couldn't resist picking it up and finally reading it. The experience further illuminated how specifically Ropes uses The Green Hat (subtitled A Romance for a Few People) as a stroke of characterization for Pat, as an ambivalently "Michael Arlen sort of person." In the novel, Ropes draws a sharp parallel between Pat's hidden life as a gigolo and that "shameless, shameful lady" Iris, who strays from her patrician background to shock London high society with her multiple lovers. Though thoroughly a "child of Forty-Second Street," Pat longs for the life of luxurious European cosmopolitanism conjured by Arlen in The Green Hat: for views of the Bay of Capri; for "some villa near Cannes," and "drinking sidecar cocktails with Scott Fitzgerald."
Beyond more specifically noting The Green Hat's relevance to 42nd Street, I was also powerfully struck by a set of parallels I hadn't anticipated: the resemblance of the novel to the plays of Tennessee Williams. Reading an early passage in the novel, I immediately thought of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire--and specifically, the relationship between Cat's Brick and his dead college football teammate Skipper--in Arlen's description of the passionate feelings Iris's twin brother Gerald has held for Iris's first husband, the poet Boy Fenwick. Fiercely resenting his sister, Gerald believes that Iris, with her infidelities, has driven his hero Boy to suicide.
Iris discusses Boy with the novel's Narrator, through whose romantic perspective the reader perceives Iris:
Iris discusses Boy with the novel's Narrator, through whose romantic perspective the reader perceives Iris:
I was sufficiently struck by the resonances with Williams's plays to see if the great American dramatist regarded the dandy-ish Arlen as an influence. What I found both confirmed and unsettled my instincts. In a 1976 interview with The New York Times, written shortly before the Broadway premiere of Eccentricities of a Nightingale (the revised version of Summer and Smoke), Williams confirmed that he was indeed very familiar with Arlen's steamy bestseller:
"A literary phenomenon of the Jazz Age was a hugely successful and atrociously bad novel titled The Green Hat. It was written by Michael Arlen, perhaps with the late and great Tallulah Bankhead in mind as the heroine of the stage or screen adaptation, since this heroine had many flamboyant mannerisms such as driving a yellow Hispano-Suiza about the late night, nearly dawn, streets of London, a vehicle rendered more notable by a long silver swan on its hood.
This Bankhead-type heroine gave the novel its title by wearing always a green hat when she was about to take on a new lover. She was a lady of high degree who had fallen not out of fashion, exactly, but out of respectable repute because on her wedding night, in Biarritz or Nice, her ideally handsome, youthful, and well-born bridegroom, known as Boy Fenwick, I believe, leapt out of the bridal suite to his death on the stones of the courtyard below, which caused a considerable sensation, probably making headlines, in two nations, mainly because of the heroine (Iris March) announcing to the press that 'Boy died for purity' and declining to go into further details on this intriguing matter."
In his article, Williams goes on to distinguish his own drive for literary and artistic purity--for a disciplined excising of the inessential--with the sordid tale of Iris March and Boy Fenwick, as he discusses rewriting Summer and Smoke and its transformation into Nightingale. He also (spoiler alert) goes on to reveal the true cause of Boy's "dive out the window," before concluding, "One good turn deserving another, she (Iris) kept his dreadful secret into her early grave. Not so Michael Arlen. He turned it into an atrociously bad novel which became, predictably, a runaway bestseller and he, at least lived more or less happily, or at least nattily, ever after."
"A literary phenomenon of the Jazz Age was a hugely successful and atrociously bad novel titled The Green Hat. It was written by Michael Arlen, perhaps with the late and great Tallulah Bankhead in mind as the heroine of the stage or screen adaptation, since this heroine had many flamboyant mannerisms such as driving a yellow Hispano-Suiza about the late night, nearly dawn, streets of London, a vehicle rendered more notable by a long silver swan on its hood.
This Bankhead-type heroine gave the novel its title by wearing always a green hat when she was about to take on a new lover. She was a lady of high degree who had fallen not out of fashion, exactly, but out of respectable repute because on her wedding night, in Biarritz or Nice, her ideally handsome, youthful, and well-born bridegroom, known as Boy Fenwick, I believe, leapt out of the bridal suite to his death on the stones of the courtyard below, which caused a considerable sensation, probably making headlines, in two nations, mainly because of the heroine (Iris March) announcing to the press that 'Boy died for purity' and declining to go into further details on this intriguing matter."
In his article, Williams goes on to distinguish his own drive for literary and artistic purity--for a disciplined excising of the inessential--with the sordid tale of Iris March and Boy Fenwick, as he discusses rewriting Summer and Smoke and its transformation into Nightingale. He also (spoiler alert) goes on to reveal the true cause of Boy's "dive out the window," before concluding, "One good turn deserving another, she (Iris) kept his dreadful secret into her early grave. Not so Michael Arlen. He turned it into an atrociously bad novel which became, predictably, a runaway bestseller and he, at least lived more or less happily, or at least nattily, ever after."
The Green Hat is many things: lurid and sensational, written in deep-purple prose, and full of satire-ready town-and-country affectations, along the lines satirized by Ropes. It has character names like Venice Pollen; Napier Harpenden (Iris's true love, rather than Boy); and the decadent French artist/potential ice cream flavor Cherry-Marvel. It's unabashedly a melodrama, and Arlen shares with the novel's narrator a drive to be "as improbable as life" in his storytelling; to "destroy every cannon of art in a throb of a desire."
What the novel is not is "atrociously bad," and I suspect that Williams held The Green Hat in higher regard than he was willing to admit in 1976. At the very least, it appears to have influenced him deeply, at least on a subconscious level. There is perhaps not a very far distance between Iris March, shamed as a "nymphomaniac" by London high society while living according to her own defiantly romantic moral code, and the magic-seeking, realism-scorning Blanche DuBois (a character that Williams originally intended Bankhead to play, as she finally did, to exaggerated camp effect, at City Center in 1956).
The Green Hat may be full of lurid, "profligate melodrama"--but it's also fueled by Arlen's critique of class-bound English society that crushes non-conformists, and particularly sexually adventurous women, like Iris. She vows to the sympathetic Narrator, "Sweet, you and I shall stand arrayed against the warriors of conduct."
Returning to Bradford Ropes--
In Greasepaint Puritan, I discuss how Ropes--on the few occasions he discussed his literary inspirations--acknowledged as his biggest influences the names a select few gay or bisexual male writers. The Green Hat, given its only tacit implication of male homosexuality, has not historically been classified as queer literature. Likewise, the Armenian-British Arlen--a fascinating and colorful figure who was born in 1895 as Dikran Kouyoumdijan--seems to have publicly identified as heterosexual, entering into highly publicized romances with Nancy Cunard (who has been cited as an inspiration for Iris) and a marriage with Countess Atalanta Mercati. Nevertheless, The Green Hat converses with other iconic works of queer fiction, both in the implied relationship of Gerald March and Boy Fenwick, and through a baroque, hothouse prose style that situates Arlen as a predecessor of both Williams and Truman Capote.
Reading The Green Hat revealed to me not only Bradford Ropes's subtle use of the novel through his characterization of Pat Denning--but also illuminated a strand of camp modernist style that links Ropes to Tennessee Williams, by way of Iris March. Whether Ropes satirizing luxe "Michael Arlen sort of people" through contrast with the scarcities of backstage life, or Williams commenting on The Green Hat's "atrocious badness" while distilling its essences and purifying its excesses in the scenes of his plays, The Green Hat suggests fascinating conversations and continuities among the works of all three writers.
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