Men Dislike Women by Michael Arlen (Presentation Copy)
ARLEN, Michael. Men Dislike Women. London: William Heinemann, 1931.
First edition. Presentation copy to writer and occult expert Dennis Wheatley, with his bookplate (designed by Frank C. Papé). The bookplate illustrates Wheatley sitting naked at the feet his mentor Eric Gordon-Tombe, depicted as the god Pan smoking a cigarette, with a bottle of champagne and a saxophone next to him, while tutoring the writer on his doctrine of hedonism. Wheatley’s spy thrillers often featured Gregory Sallust, a character whose looks and personality were inspired by Tombe. A womanizing playboy spy, Sallust was a forerunner to Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was a best-selling novelist, one of the finest chroniclers of Jazz Age notable for his portrayal of the glamorous and decadent world of the Young Bright Things. An Armenian immigrant to Britain, Arlen, according to Somerset Maugham, was able to portray London in such a way as to ‘make it the scene of adventures as rich with glamour, as fantastic, incredible, romantic and vivacious as those with which Scheherazade beguiled her caliph’.
In the 1920s while living in Paris, Arlen met Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, his name making an appearance in A Movable Feast (1964) in the chapter dedicated to Scott Fitzgerald, where Hemingway recalls: ‘Michael Arlen, he [Fitzgerald] said, was the man you had to watch and he and I could both learn much from him.’ While Arlen’s breakthrough novel The Green Hat (1924) was regarded as the English counterpart of The Great Gatsby (1925), the present novel is set in Gatsby’s world – Park Avenue penthouses and chateaux on Long Island.
309 pp. 8vo, original cloth, gilt, spotting to edges. Dust jacket a little chipped at foot and lightly foxed. A very good copy.