These Charming People

These Charming People by Michael Arlen

These Charming People* is a linked collection of stories by Michael Arlen, narrated by Ralph Wyndham Trevor and set among the idle, elegant, and faintly decadent society of London and its country houses in the early 1920s. The book has no single plot; instead it circles a group of "charming people" — Trevor, George Tarlyon, Aubrey Carlyle, the beautiful Shelmerdene, and their friends — whose lives intersect across a series of ironic, often melancholy episodes about love, vanity, and self-deception among the fashionable rich. The opening story finds Shelmerdene, newly returned from Persia, telling the young novelist Raymond Paris a "story" that is really her own confession: her unhappy marriage to a naval officer she could not divorce, her passionate but doomed love for a cold, dutiful young soldier who could not give himself wholly to her, and her attempt to exorcise that heartbreak with a reckless affair at the same Welsh inn — only to glimpse her lost love in a mirror. The tale ends without a "point," which is itself the point: real feeling rarely fits an editor's formula. A companion piece follows Ralph and Joan Loyalty and Joan's lover, the earnest Hugo Carr. Believing Ralph has staged his own death to test them, Hugo is paralyzed by guilt over "betraying" his friend, delivering a feverish speech on honor — until it turns out Ralph really has engineered the whole charade to force the lovers together, only for Hugo to storm out before learning the truth, undone by his own priggishness. A darker note is struck in the story of Aubrey Carlyle, a reserved big-game hunter, and his wife Gloria, who leaves him without explanation after years of marriage. Returning from his travels, he finds only a note — "You know why" — and that night Gloria briefly reappears to explain: he has treated her, in his long absences and abrupt returns, "like a wild beast" rather than a companion, ravaging her and vanishing by turns. She walks off into the dark and never returns, leaving Aubrey to recognize too late how he failed her. Comic relief arrives with Michael Wagstaffe, the self-styled "cavalier of the streets" — a broken-nosed young con man who first appears posing as a vengeful Armenian avenger pursuing a Turkish "Pasha" (actually his own father, whose Roman coin collection he has stolen), duping Tarlyon and Trevor into helping him "rescue" a nonexistent sister. He recurs throughout the book: blackmailing the lovely, secretly adulterous Mrs. Fay Avalon over her affair with an impoverished Russian émigré artist, only to reveal he engineered the scheme to shame her out of a worthless lover, then falls half in love with her himself; and later stealing a diamond ring at a Hampstead garden party, tracking it down through a discarded mistress, Betty, and letting her keep her half of its value before allowing himself to be arrested with wry good humor. Other episodes include the tale of "Captain Fortune," a weeping stranger at a nightclub who tells Trevor and Shelmerdene of losing the woman he loved — and helped make politically brilliant by ghost-writing her speeches — to a luckier, more dashing rival, Victor Fortune, who turns out to be the very man telling the story. There is also the eerie, possibly supernatural episode in Carmion Wood, where Tarlyon and Trevor witness what seems to be a present-day parricide, only to discover from the local police sergeant that the farmhouse burned down decades earlier and the "boy" they tied up bears the face of the sergeant himself — a meditation on the unpardonable sin of blasphemy. Lighter romantic comedy appears in the courtship of the amiably hapless Major Hugo Cypress and Shirley St. George, George Tarlyon's young sister, whose repeated refusals of his proposals turn out to mask her own dawning love; and in young Raymond Paris's uneasy fascination, during a stay in Algiers, with the seemingly innocent eighteen-year-old Consuelo Brown, whose careless allure is later revealed to have driven a sensitive young man's brother to suicide. The Canadian millionaire Cyrus Fall provides another comic-pathetic turn: unable, out of scrupulous honor, to correct a widow's idealized (and entirely false) memory of her philandering late husband — whom Fall had known well — he seeks Tarlyon's advice on how to declare his love without shattering her illusions; Tarlyon, recognizing the widow as a woman who has been stringing him along as a second suitor, brutally insults her by telephone to clear the way for Fall's proposal, which promptly succeeds. A final sequence concerns the immensely wealthy but resolutely unmarried Lord Paramour, heir to a hairpin fortune, whose obliviousness to social maneuvering by ambitious mothers provides a satirical closing note on the marriage market of Mayfair society. Throughout, Arlen's recurring cast — Trevor the narrator, the sardonic Tarlyon, the enigmatic Shelmerdene — bind these episodes into a mosaic portrait of a glittering, self-conscious social world where wit, honor, and romantic self-deception collide, and where the "charming people" of the title are charming precisely because, and in spite of, their vanities and failures of feeling.

By Michael Arlen · First published 1923 · Genre: Literary fiction, Social satire, Romance · 15 chapters · 74,628 words

First lines

There was, and (by the grace of God) there still is, a lovely woman whom it once pleased a young man to call Shelmerdene, because, he said, though it is not her real name, it becomes her better than any real name could. And about Shelmerdene books have been written and for her men have died, which just shows you the sort of woman she was. Now it happened one day that Shelmerdene returned to England after a long absence abroad in Persia, but I can tell you nothing about that because I know nothing of Persia, except that it is rather inadequately governed by a Shah who is a pretty fat young man and wears a diamond in his hat.

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satire · short-stories · british-literature · 1920s · upper-class · society · irony · wit · manners · comedy · social-commentary · london

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