Edited and with commentary by Barry Day
Methuen, 800pp, £25
THIS IS A MAN WHO WITH A suspiciously large number of friends. Among writers, he was in touch with Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Nancy Mitford, Rebecca West, Daphne du Maurier, Margaret
Kennedy, TE Lawrence and Ian Fleming. From the worlds of theatre and film, there were John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Christopher Plummer, Terence Rattigan, Alec Guinness, David Niven, Marlene Dietrich, Kenneth Tynan, Ivor Novello, John Mills, John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker. Among his regular penpals were Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Thornton Wilder, JM Barrie and more, but your head is already spinning. And we haven't even mentioned the Royals...
With all these letters to and from Noël Coward, Barry Day provides copious amplifications and explanations, biographical data and background material. The result is a first-class biography right up there with those by Cole Lesley and Sheridan Morley. There is also a lot of juicy gossip, some of it documented, some speculative, such as whether Coward and the Duke of Kent were lovers.
Let's face it: Coward was a genius. Who else was outstanding in the following capacities: actor; author of comedy, drama and farce; also operetta, musical comedy and revue, as both composer and lyricist? Furthermore, novelist, short-story writer, light versifier (independent from music), autobiographer, diarist, travel writer, filmmaker (In Which We Serve – a masterpiece) and, as we see here, letter-writer extraordinaire. Modestly, he claimed only a talent to amuse.
His chief correspondent was his beloved mother, Violet, who made serious sacrifices to jump-start Noël's career as an 11-year-old actor in 1910. Adored by Coward above all others, she received at least one letter or telegram from him every week all her long life; failing that, an abject apology soon after. Squeamish stomachs may be perturbed by the nicknames – Snig, Snag, Snoop – but even these have their charm. In her posthumously discovered memoir, Violet confessed, "No mother ever had such a son."
Day divides his book neatly into four parts, each subdivided into chapters, most of them with clever titles derived from Coward's writings. Especially apt are sections labelled "Intermission," where special relationships are examined in greater detail, sidestepping the chronology of the rest of the book.
The first Intermission traces Coward's relationships with his not always apt and often irresponsible producer-director-lover, John C Wilson, and with his invaluable lifelong secretary and confidante, Lorn Loraine. The second focuses on his close but often frustrating ties to Gertrude Lawrence, finest interpreter of his heroines. Others cover Coward's important early triumphs; Marlene Dietrich's missives about her unhappy affair with Yul Brynner; his friendships with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; samples of the wit of Noel's famous correspondents, from letters not included in the book.
For Coward fans, the most revelatory aspect of the book is the section about his contribution to the war effort, which he wasn't allowed to publicise. He was a sort of genteel, semi-official spy for Britain, not the Eric Ambler or John le Carré kind, but one whose "disguise would be my own reputation as .... a merry playboy".
He was to travel abroad and ferret out the antipathies or sympathies with the British cause for propaganda purposes. As playwright, world explorer and social lion he had easy access, and faithfully reported to one government official.
But because this was not known and he spent so much time away from the Blitz, he was regularly attacked in the press and chided even by friends. After the war, similar censure was heaped on him for living abroad – Paris, Jamaica, Switzerland – for tax purposes. But as he explained in 1957, "What I have done is to avoid paying any more surtax which, if I had continued to be domiciled in England, would have completely crippled me and left me no cushion at all for my old age which is due to begin next Tuesday."
Yet no-one loved England (climate apart) and its people more than Coward, as his friend the Queen was first to acknowledge. Repeatedly he flaunts his pride in the Scottish and English blood to which he ascribed his success.
What made the playwright Coward so special is that – unlike Wilde, Shaw, Maugham and Rattigan – he was also an actor, and as he reminds us, a splendid one. Praise from fellow actors was unstinting. John Mills wrote: "I don't know any actor alive today who could get laughs with, apparently, so little effort. You never compromised or went out after our sympathy for one moment." After playing in a movie with Coward, Michael Caine allowed it was "a bit like playing with God".
As in his life and letters spontaneously, so in his plays artfully, his humour had a fine impromptu quality. "I ... won a thousand pounds in the Cannes Casino. Several old ladies were trampled to death I was in such a hurry to get out. I NEVER WENT BACK which proves that I have a very, very strong character as well as being beautiful as the day."
How many of Coward's sallies are recorded here! Take this cable: "I am back from Istanbul where I was known as English Delight." Or consider his addressing Lawrence of Arabia (who liked to preface his letters with his army serial number), "Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?)."
He could size up a performer brilliantly. About the opera singer Jean Fenn: "She is cursed with refinement and does everything 'beautifully.' Oh dear, I long for her to pick her nose or fart and before I'm through with her, she'll do both." Particularly interesting are his exchanges with younger playwrights, often beginning in mutual hostility but ending in reciprocal admiration. Apropos one of his lovers, he writes to Edward Albee: "I have enjoyed sex thoroughly, perhaps even excessively all my life but it has never, except for brief wasteful moments, twisted my reason."
Not until his last stage work, Suite in Three Keys, had Coward, as Day writes, "dealt overtly with the subject of homosexuality. To the end of his life – even when the social climate had become more permissive he remained firmly private in his private life."
As Tynan perceptively wrote, "Coward took the fat off English comic dialogue; he was the Turkish bath in which it slimmed." In 1973, at a gala performance of the revue Oh, Coward!, he made his last public appearance. Leaning on Dietrich more than escorting her, he was asked if he enjoyed the show. Answer: "One does not laugh at one's own jokes – but I went out humming the tunes."
