Waiting for the Barbarians (44 page)

One nice continuity through the many years covered here—the first letter dates to 1906, the last to 1970 when Coward received his scandalously delayed knighthood—is provided by the fact that an astonishing number of them were written to the playwright’s mother, Violet Veitch Coward, who throughout her long life was the recipient of weekly missives that Coward faithfully wrote to her from wherever he happened to find himself. (She died at ninety-one in 1954, and apart from an occasional lapse into stage-motherishness—“I forgive you for making me so unhappy,” she wrote to him during World War II, after he had admonished her for being less than totally patriotic—seems to have been entertainingly sharp-witted herself.) This continuity is admirably enhanced by the manner in which Day has organized Coward’s correspondence, woven as it is into a fluid, year-by-year narrative, complete with potted mini-biographies of long-forgotten music-hall stars, novelists, and personalities (and, indeed, photographs of them, which give the whole affair a charming, scrapbook feel), which make of this volume of
Letters
virtually a new biography.

And so Day is able to evoke, with great narrative verve and a gratifying richness of detail, the entire career. There is the apprenticeship in touring companies (
Charley’s Aunt
, notably), where he learned his craft and suffered from a terrible separation anxiety which he never quite conquered (“I really ought to have got over being a mother’s boy by now, but I never shall!” he wrote to his mother when he was in his late twenties) and, soon after, the relatively few years it took him to find his voice as a playwright and songwriter composing for the musical revues that were so popular at the time.
There are the early career-building trips to New York where he made discoveries that would strongly influence his technique (“The
speed
! Everybody seems to say their lines at such a rate you’d think you wouldn’t understand a word—but you do! And then it suddenly struck me—that’s the way people actually
talk
”), and that laid the groundwork for many long-lasting friendships recorded here. “I went to see her [Lynn Fontanne’s] opening night with her fiancé, an actor called Alfred Lunt and, my dear, a star was born,” he wrote Violet in 1921, during his first trip to America. These early letters also provide fascinating glimpses of the precocious youth in the process of turning himself into “Noël Coward.” Of a female relation whom he went to visit while touring with his fellow child-actor Esmé Wynne: “Esmé and I sang ‘We’ve been married just one year,’ and she was most shocked. I’ve never met anyone so painfully provincial in all my life.” Thus spake Teddington’s most famous son.

Not the least of the attractions of Day’s approach, particularly in the letters from these early years, is that, unlike many other editors, he will often interrupt the chronological trajectory at a given moment to trace for the reader how this or that relationship would develop over time—with Esmé Wynne, for instance, a friendship that began in the 1910s and stretched into the midcentury, when Coward was a celebrity and she, much to her old costar’s amusement, was writing inspirational books with titles like
The Unity of Being
; or, more important, with figures like Jack Wilson, the American Yalie who started out as Coward’s lover in the 1920s and ended up, disastrously as Coward realized only too late, as his business manager. These digressions provide context for later correspondence that might otherwise remain obscure.

After the remarkably brief journeyman period came the successes that at first seemed to have caught the young Noël by surprise (“And
when you consider that bright particular star will be me!” he wrote Violet in 1922. “It’s a bit breathless!”) but that soon thereafter became almost, as Coward might say, monotonously predictable, first with
The Vortex
and then, in rapid succession,
Hay Fever
(1924),
Private Lives
, the patriotic historical pageant
Cavalcade
(1931), the ménage-à-trois comedy
Design for Living
(1932)—the list was to go on and on. And once Coward achieved his fame, the cast of correspondents was anything but “provincial.” A major advantage of this collection is that Day has included numerous letters to Coward as well as from him, a choice that allows us to gauge the effect that the theatrical prodigy had in his heyday on people we might not have thought were fans. In 1928 Virginia Woolf wrote to him that her heart had “leapt” to find out that the twenty-eight-year-old Coward had liked
Orlando
—although to her diary she confided that she hoped to “save him from being as clever as a bag of ferrets & trivial as a perch of canaries.”

That the piano salesman’s son had risen to very high heights indeed was made clear during World War II, when Coward (who, despite the fact that he spent much of the war on grueling trips to entertain the troops, had enemies in various government offices) made use of his connections to people like Louis Mountbatten in order to guarantee what he was convinced would be the great success of his cinematic hymn to the Royal Navy,
In Which We Serve
. As the
Letters
make clear, certain higher-ups in the British war effort thought “Noël Coward,” the elegant star, was unsuited to the role of the Captain, who was based on Mountbatten (who along with his wife, Edwina, was an old friend from the 1920s); “Dickie’s” assiduous intervention got Coward the part. Later on, when a hostile government figure wanted to scuttle the entire project on the grounds that the film depicted a British warship being sunk, George VI himself quite sensibly intervened on Coward’s behalf:

Coward was never to get over feeling slighted by the way his hard work during the war was continually misrepresented by the English press—among other things, much was made of a quite innocent tax mistake early on in the war, which gave Churchill grounds for blocking a knighthood. These feelings, along with the devastatingly onerous tax strictures after the war, led this most English of entertainers into tax exile, first in Jamaica and then in Switzerland.

This is not to say that he ever lost his sense of humor, which glints and flashes through virtually every page of Day’s collection, from its descriptions of the many exotic places his travels took him—a letter he sent while on a government-sponsored intelligence-gathering trip to Russia before the war describes the country as being “exactly like a whole world composed of the Whitechapel Road on August Bank Holiday”—to the sly signatures he’d append to his letters from Paris, where he worked in 1940 for the British propaganda service: “DREYFUS,” say, or “GERMAINE DE STAEL.” What’s remarkable here is how innocent the humor most often is; Coward’s letters are strikingly free of backbiting or bitchiness, and when he sharpens his pen, it’s hardly with the intent to kill:

So there is much to dazzle here, in just the way we expect from a very Noël Coward sort of person. As the years and pages go by, it’s
often amusing to see Coward smoothly dealing with the great—in 1938 he writes that he is taking “the [Anthony] Edens and the Gary Coopers out to dinner” after Eden was forced to recite a public apologia for Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” (to his credit, Coward had a lifelong loathing of Chamberlain)—and the merely glitzy: “We dined with Mike Todd and Liz [Taylor] who was hung with rubies and diamonds and looked like a pregnant Pagoda.” Of particular note is his correspondence with his close friend Marlene Dietrich, particularly during her tortured love affair, during the 1950s, with Yul Brynner—an exchange that sheds sympathetic light not only on Coward’s loyalty but on Dietrich as well. “I long so for intelligence and brain food,” the worldly star managed to sigh even in the midst of being humiliated by the younger, married Brynner.

Other correspondents inevitably included many stars of screen and stage, some of whom had been given a leg-up by Coward at the start of their careers: John Gielgud got his start as Coward’s understudy in
The Vortex
, and Laurence Olivier’s first important part was in the original production of
Private Lives
in 1930. There are also crowned heads and presidents—Coward particularly admired Roosevelt, whom he visited at the White House during one of his many trips to the US trying to drum up support for Britain at the beginning of the war (“I shall long to be in the warm friendly atmosphere of your study enjoying your very special cocktails,” he wrote to FDR in 1940)—and of course many other writers: Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott, Somerset Maugham and Ian Fleming, Daphne Du-Maurier and Edith Sitwell. From the start of his long career as a letter writer, Coward remained unintimidated by such famous names. To Lawrence of Arabia, who had rather officiously headed a letter to Coward with both his alias and his full RAF identification number, the thirty-year-old Coward replied, “Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?) …”

What is striking about this volume of correspondence by the twentieth century’s archetype of urbane elegance, however, is the degree to which it’s devoted to family and the intimate friends to whom Coward would remain so impressively loyal: his secretary Lorn Lorraine, his great friend Gladys Calthrop, the actress Joyce Carey, the inner circle on whom he liked to heap the improbable nicknames of which he was so fond (“Snig,” “Snog,” “Poj”). To them particularly he loved to address epistles composed in light verse, a form of which he was a master and which, as his letter home for Christmas 1939 indicates, was not necessarily limited to martinis and cigarette holders:

All these letters end with effusive valedictions (“Love and mad mad kisses,” “Love, love, love love, love”), and you don’t ever feel that it’s forced.

If anything, this epistolary portrait of Coward reveals an enviably sane personality strikingly devoid of tics and neuroses, in which a healthy self-respect is nicely balanced by a realism that never curdles into cynicism:

His teasing words about his old friend Esmé Wynne’s idealistic writings betray his own informal but deeply felt philosophy, which prized above all the importance of snatching happiness in a world filled with emotional confusion imposed from without and exploding from within—the theme of so much of his work (“I think very few people are completely normal, really, deep down in their private lives … there’s no knowing what one might do,” Amanda says in
Private Lives
):

Remarks such as these make you realize that Coward’s theatrical work is, essentially, Epicurean in nature—with a capital rather than a lowercase “E,” perhaps.

Most impressive are his letters during wartime, which often seem to sum up some essential aspect of the English character as he saw it, a kind of secretly tender sturdiness, a trait that in fact saves so much of his theater from being the brittle drawing-room comedy it is now thought to be. There are traces throughout the correspondence of this deep sentimentality about England, the provenance of which was the Edwardian theaters he grew up in, which makes itself felt in everything from
Cavalcade
to
In Which We Serve
to
Brief Encounter
.
Here he is in the letter in which he admonishes his mother for being too critical of the English leadership (she had written him saying that no one should fight for such incompetent governments):