Michael Arlen sketched by Edgar Spence, 1935

Michael Arlen's
Hell! Said the Duchess

commentary by Mark Dillon

   

   

   

In 1983, Karl Edward Wagner cited Hell! Said the Duchess (1934) as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels ever written.

An odd choice, perhaps, in light of the book's initial tone. For most of its length, it resembles a mildly amusing Firbank tale without Firbank's melancholy, a Waugh satire without vitriol, or a Wodehouse plot without precision.

Much of the book is undeniably droll, but as light & fluffy as meringue:

Mrs. Nautigale had a pronounced gift for collecting the most intimate friendships possible with men & women who could never overcome their surprise at having been collected. They then found themselves subjected to the alarming process of being pinned down, exhibited & fed in groups of not fewer than twenty, at which it was taken for granted that a good time was being had by all, though no one knew exactly why.

She was the soul of kindness, gave money freely to the rich, & had built her success as a hostess on having cleverly observed that there is no one like the distinguished Anglo-Saxon for enjoying a series of free meals provided that nothing, & particularly no conversation, is asked of him or her in return.

And so on, page after page, like Saki without venom. Not even a plague of sex-murders commited, apparently, by the chaste & proper Duchess of Dove can darken the mood, & the police enquiry is played for laughs:

"... My valet & I have been taking it in turns to follow her day & night for several days, & we have also searched her rooms in Camberwell."

"An illegal act," said Icelin. "We also found nothing."

The enquiry goes on, without emotional resonance, without credible characters, buoyed only by the writer's crisp & often witty style. Yet the prose remains non-pictorial from beginning to end, never evoking that vividness of locale & atmosphere essential to weird fiction.

But in the last twenty pages, Arlen veers into Arthur Machen territory when his heroes find themselves trapped by an Ancient Evil with an overwhelming lust for sex & bloodshed.

He could see nothing at all but her eyes, nothing in the whole world but two eyes. And then he could see two black bright points. He wanted to shut his eyes tight against them, but he was without any will at all. And he felt the coils of a snake around him. He saw the two black bright points of a snake's eyes reared above his head. He felt his hands caressing the rough sensuous coils. Then he found himself lying on his back on the sofa with her body pressed down on him and her pointed tongue darting in & out of his mouth. The surface of her tongue was very rough, rougher than a woman's.

Suddenly alive with malign eroticism & hints of alien doom, the final scene delivers an abrupt but undeniably effective change of tone. Here, the non-pictorial style actually heightens the sense of panic, as Arlen's heroes shy away from any glimpse of their assaulter. Yet hidden eyes are no defence; the book ends grimly.

Despite its powerful climax, the novel on the whole is weak. Many plot elements -- a fascist coup, class riots in Britain -- never cohere effectively, which gives the novel a hasty, improvised feel reinforced by that climactic shift of tone. The final leap from mild meringue-amusement to sex-and-death evil makes the ending seem like a separate story grafted onto a dying novel.

Yet the final pages of Hell! Said the Duchess reveal an intensity & dark imagination that may surprise those familiar with Arlen's other weird tales. For that alone, the book remains worthwhile.

   

copyright © 2000 by Mark Dillon, all rights reserved

   

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