Emotion and Objectivity

...May Fair, Such Charming People, Babes in the Wood, Lily Christine...

...It is hard to trust a writer of any age who lets such pseudoprofundities slip by without challenge...

...He knows that emotion and objectivity are not separate choices, that events and responses are indissolubly linked in the indivisible human whole...

...IF originality of manner and matter is stupefy-ingly absent from Jay Neugeboren's autobiography, it is nearly overabundant in Michael J. Arlen's Exiles (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 226 pp., $6.95), an erratically brilliant, moving, odd, and patchy account of a singular upbringing...

...Yet this headlong rush to become one's own chronicler has tended to obscure some irrevocable facts about the nature of all biography...

...Neugeboren's "autobiographical journey" is useful, and dismaying, for a very different reason: He has provided us with an indiscriminate grab bag of every last guilt-ridden, self-serving, naive, hortatory, and fuzzy-minded moral cliche of present-day radicalism...

...Upon graduating from Columbia College in the late '50s, Neugeboren spent a numbing year in a General Motors plant in Indiana as an executive-in-training, and the erosive vacuity of Midwestern corporate life transformed him into a political activist...

...How, led by whom, to achieve what...

...He loved having money, and being asked to dinner with Otto Kahn, and buying speedboats, and all that stuff...

...Such pedantries do not trouble this latter-day Danton...

...Neugeboren has chosen to fill the void with politics, but it doesn't work because his political thinking is as conventional as most of his experience...

...It consists in personality...

...Wherever he has a choice between thought and high-sounding rhetoric, he opts for the rhetoric...

...He used to speak of the mixed, unsettling feelings that he'd had when he realized . . . that somehow, more or less by chance (although not entirely by chance), he had happened to strike one of those chords that a very few writers strike each generation, or semi-generation...

...the very idea of taking a backward glance implied a long span of full years to glance back at, an impressive stock of achievement and experience recollected in tranquility and judged from a proper distance...

...We are told over and again that this apologia pro vita sua is a ruthless, unflinching self-scrutiny, but Neugeboren is not nearly so hard on himself as he thinks he is, for he lapses continually into the sententious and the superficial...

...Regis—he talking, conversing, conversing with himself, reminiscing...

...Neither irony nor understanding tempers his instinctive pomposity...

...Unlike other beautiful people of the '20s, Arlen did not have to face the sudden disappearance of "all that stuff...

...It seems he began Parentheses during a stay in the south of France, when his stifled guilt about abandoning radical work in America was reawakened by the French uprising in May 1968...

...In the extraordinarily narcissistic America of today, however, none of these conditions is any longer necessary to the act—if not the art—of autobiography: The writer of modest years (and immodest self-absorption, in the unchanging way of the young), more amply stocked with ambition and desire than with memory and experience, makes no attempt to rein his eager confessional fluency till middle or even older age...

...He loved the success part...

...At its most serious, Arlen's book is a portrait of failure—the father's, not the son's—and since the failure does not yield to easy explanation, Exiles is complex, poignant, and entirely without the tawdry affirmations of Neugeboren...

...As a graduate student and teacher at various universities around the country, he was an early participant in the civil rights and peace movements, while writing novels on the side...

...In contemporary usage, the word "now" is more than an adjective (and such a graceless one), it is an imperative...

...Since the money never altogether gave out—he married a high-born beauty, her father a Greek nobleman, her mother an American heiress—Arlen went from the villa in Cannes to the mandatory stay in Hollywood to a duplex on Park Avenue, from lunch at Willie Maugham's to lunch in the King Cole Bar of the St...

...In his heyday he was an intimate of Maugham and Wells, Hemingway and Lawrence...

...In the discovery of how to deal with the painful memories of his father, young Arlen forms a portrait of himself that seems equally unsentimental and true...

...Impatient to be heard, raring to let go, young writers as dissimilar in temperament, competence and point of view as Norman Podhoretz, Willie Morris, Paul Cowan, James Simon Kunen, and more recently Jay Neugeboren, all seem to believe that the proper study of mankind is Me...

...If achievement is not the impetus to a young man's memoir, and if the substance and place of his growing years have been in no way singular, then he must, through artistry and eloquence, render the commonplace extraordinary...

...Michael Arlen pere managed to keep up a brave and painful pretense that what the world called "failure" was something else, of his own carefree choosing...

...They are journalists of the personal—what exists, what has happened, is less important than how I feel about it all—but Arlen is a writer...

...And this is the significant difference between Arlen's account of family and youth and those of the eager young autobiographers...

...Readers with long memories knew that he was Armenian, that his real name was Dikran Kouyoumdjian—which his first publisher (in London, 1919) said simply wouldn't do—that he grew up in England, that he made a killing with The Green Hat in the early '20s, that he wrote very little after that golden era of affluence, that he lived in New York after the War, that he died in 1956...

...One is awed by the sheer mustering of will it must have taken for Arlen fils to write this book...

...How unbelievably dated those titles sound today...

...The only hope—for the world, for myself?is immediate revolution...

...By this touchstone, Jay Neuge-boren'c Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey (Dutton, 221 pp., $5.95) is a loser...

...Coming after Alfred Kazin and Podhoretz, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn must summon up more than Brooklyn and the Jews to differentiate his own experience from that of the writers who have walked those streets before him...

...But his son knew better: "He seemed to have let it all go by, as if it had been somebody else all along...

...Success—all the years I knew him, he had this ambivalence towards success...

...For the younger Michael Arlen has set himself the interesting task of examining that strange modern phenomenon, success, and what happens to those the bitch goddess once favored so lavishly when the wells of talent—or ideas, or popularity?have run dry...

...Regis, somehow trying to pretend that nothing had really changed...

...Set-pieces...

...What his son has now done, in an impressively candid tribute, is to give the substance of years and voices to this shred of a vanished past, and to reveal in the process how an Armenian in England was able for a while to out-Mayfair Mayfair (as S. N. Behrman, the Jewish boy from Worcester, was able in the same period to mimic with startling authenticity the brittle drawing-room-comedy voice of rich New York) and sustain the '20s dream of luxury, elegance, and wealth far beyond its time...

...For decades his name lingered on as a synonym for the '20s, though people had long since stopped reading his books, and could remember none of their titles except The Green Hat...

...Thus, to sustain and justify a book devoted mainly to itself, the personality has to be at once uncommon and plausible, remarkable and real...

...Maybe you can't trust people over thirty because they know they're going to die," he observes on his 30th birthday...

...What makes Exiles more than an act of pity is the strength of the son's feeling for his father, the clarity and depth of the love he can define without falsifying the aching reality of disappointment...

...The logic of events continues to confirm the notion of an 'historical force,' " Neugeboren informs us, "the Vietnam war and the events that have been attached to it continue to make Marxists of many of us (without, like myself, bothering or needing to read Marx...

...Virginia Woolf remarked of "the new biography," by which she meant post-Stracheyan accounts like those of Harold Nicolson: "We can no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works...

...We'd sit around that circular table at the St...

...In fact, what makes Parentheses worth discussing at all is not its tiresome, intellectually threadbare equations and denials about capitalist society, the plight of American blacks, the hypocrisies of modern politics, and the moral shortcomings of American universities...