Arlen into Wells

MAN'S MORTALITY--Michael Arlen-- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Michael Arlen, who was not born yesterday, is sensitive to the shifts and veerings of popular sentiment. With the barometer dropping and economic-colored clouds massing in the sky, he needs no plebiscite to tell him that ladies in green hats had better come in out of the rain. In Man's Mortality there is not one perfumed whiff of Mayfair or Park Avenue; like a young H. G. Wells and without a backward glance Author Arlen has soared into the world of the future.

International Aircraft & Airways, founded in 1935 by an Englishman, a Russian and an American, had an ambitious idea behind it: world transport must govern the world. As the power of I. A. & A. grew, transcending governments, the idea became a fact, and for 50 years the world lived under an international pax aeronautica. Real and acknowledged world rulers of those days were the twelve Directors of I. A. & A. Armament was permitted only to the I. A. police. Popular government, individual liberty were anachronisms in this sternly centralized system. And though peace & prosperity were everywhere, here & there the old superstition of liberty still lingered on. Individual hotheads got nowhere, however, till young David Knox, greatest scientist of them all, took a hand in affairs.

Knox was an individualist--more than anyone knew--and disgruntled young men, smarting under the tyranny of I. A. & A., began to desert their posts and come to him by night. Soon he had a picked corps. Directors of I. A. & A. wanted no trouble with Knox, partly because of his fame (he was the Lindbergh-Edison-Einstein of his day) but mostly because they feared some threatening invention up his sleeve. Sure enough, Knox had discovered Motive Air: utilization of elements in the air itself to drive airplanes at a speed of over 1,000 m.p.h. In his carefully guarded laboratory he had built more than 100 fighting machines which traveled so fast they were practically invisible, could shear through the toughest steel as if it were butter. When the Directors finally made up their minds to arrest him Knox and his rebels had disappeared. From a lonely Arctic island Knox defied I. A. & A., smashed their fleet and the pax aeronautica to hopeless fragments. When his followers discovered that Knox thought himself sent by heaven to destroy the world, in horror they tried to halt the spreading catastrophe.

The Author, like Harry ("Prince Michael Romanoff") Gerguson, whose conscious suavity is not unlike Arlen's, has long carried on under an assumed name. But "Michael Arlen's" career has been based on a less precarious platform than "Michael Romanoff's." Born 37 years ago, in Ruschuk, Bulgaria, as Dikran Kouyoumdjian, son of Armenian parents, he was put to school in England, studied medicine (three months) at Edinburgh University. At 17 he settled in London, wrote for Editor A. R. Orage's New Age, published a first book called The London Venture. Socially and sartorially minded, he was soon able to have what he had a mind to: coats by Hawes & Curtis, shoes by Lobb, cigaret case by Asprey, car by Rolls-Royce, a Countess (the beauteous Atalanta Mercati) for a bride. As "Michael Arlen" he has been a success. But he remembers his father: Man's Mortality is scribed to the memory of Sarkis Kouyoumdjian, "merchant, of Manchester, by his youngest son."

Other books: These Charming People, The Green Hat, May Fair, Men Dislike Women.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.