“A Very Real Warmth”?: Hemingway and Michael Arlen

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Michael Arlen (1895–1956) was one of the most successful popular novelists of the 1920s. This essay examines his relationship with Ernest Hemingway on two levels, the literary and the biographical. Hemingway was alerted to Arlen’s work by Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway’s earliest reviewers assumed he owed a debt to Arlen. Hemingway denied any “influence.” Similarities between The Sun Also Rises and Arlen’s bestseller The Green Hat are examined. Arlen’s (possibly) satirical jibes at Hemingway in his own fiction and Hemingway’s racially inflected condescension towards Arlen call into question Arlen’s son’s claim of a “real warmth” between the two writers, who rarely met.