The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Don’t let’s be beastly to Noël Coward
Behind his ‘mask of flippancy’, the playwright was a workaholic who dabbled in wartime espionage
The last biography of Noël Coward, by Philip Hoare, was published in 1995. A sizeable object, it had the air of being the last one there would be, so assiduous was its trawl through the man’s enormous corpus of plays, songs and diaries.
Is there room for another? It turns out there is, one by a young writer who combines industriousMASQUERADE: ness with stylistic flair. Oliver Soden follows his monumental 2019 biography of the composer Michael Tippett by making a persuasive case for revisiting Coward: “There are new things to say about him; he has new things to say about us.”
The outline of Coward’s life will be familiar to his admirers: a stagestruck child makes himself into a grown-up star, writing, acting and composing at a prodigious pace from his late teens. He finds his métier in a kind of arch, dialogueheavy drama, combining (as Soden puts it) “gaiety and mournfulness, sentimentality and cynicism”. But the effortless early hits are followed by flops that start to border on selfNorth parody. Little avails but for him to leave Britain for a Caribbean tax haven, becoming a self-pitying selfexile whose tastes and politics grow steadily more reactionary.
Soden does not deny the kernel of truth in this narrative, but shows us just how much it leaves out. Coward did indeed strive to exude an air of sprezzatura, seeking to make “his talent appear a virgin birth”, but that impression took a great deal of effort to achieve, hiding “months of discipline and a determined autodidacticism”.
It is vital, Soden sees, to avoid the impression that Coward’s early life was simply “a fast-moving parade of interchangeable partygoers... love affairs ended and begun with hasty abandon, amid waterfalls of champagne and money”.
Coward’s estate has given Soden what it did not give his predecessors: permission to quote extensively from his unexpurgated diaries – including those covering his clandestine activities for the British government in the Second World War, “perhaps the first event in Noël’s life which would spur him into seriousness, and lead him to drop his mask of flippancy”.
He provides gripping accounts of Coward’s meetings with foreign leaders including Franklin D Roosevelt (“a first rate man”) and Herbert Hoover (“he must have been the hell of a dull president”), his travels through Europe and America, and his bumbling attempts at espionage.
Soden knows that the secret of keeping the reader interested is to allow the supporting cast full speaking parts. And so we meet the figures who gave up any prospect of a life of their own to serve “the Master”: Jack Wilson, Coward’s American lover and business manager; Cole Lesley, a fan who became first Coward’s valet then his faithful Boswell; Lorn Loraine, his loyal secretary, whom Coward treated with enormous generosity but whose name he never quite learnt to spell.
Unusually for a biographer, Soden is also a thoughtful critic. He finds in Coward’s plays, even the silliest, a deep commitment to two values: freedom and truthfulness. “To dismiss Hay Fever as artificial,” he sensibly says, “is to miss the fact that it is a commentary on artifice.” He gets to the heart of what is special about Private Lives, the everpopular comedy about a divorced couple honeymooning with their new partners in the same hotel, when he writes that its pacy script is “punctuated for rhythm rather than grammar... not so much written as notated”. Coward the
performer is not neglected in favour of Coward the writer: his singing voice beautifully characterised by Kenneth Tynan as “a baritone dove”, songs emerging from it “with the staccato, blind impulsiveness of a machine-gun”. Soden also brings out the sincere sense of duty which animates Coward’s work on that classic naval film, In Which We Serve: “within the bounds of its patriotism an honest concession of the horrors, rather than the glories, of warfare”.
Coward’s tastes turn out not to be as predictable as one might have supposed. He evolves from a childhood love of JM Barrie, E Nesbit and Saki to a grown-up appreciation of writers as diverse as James Joyce, Stevie Smith, Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard. Equally revealing are Coward’s theatrical dislikes: Oscar Wilde (“tiresome, affected sod”), Arthur Miller (“embarrassing”), Samuel Beckett (“pretentious gibberish”), and the early plays of Harold Pinter (“insultingly boring”).
His other bêtes noire, predictable for a man of his age and formation, include Nabokov’s Lolita (“quite disgusting”), the “Teutonic mentality” (humourless) and the Beatles (overrated). Gandhi’s assassination, he declares, is “a bloody good thing” that came “far too late”. Soden quotes, with minimal judgment, the patronising remarks about foreigners and socialists that would place Coward on the wrong side of the spirit of our age. But he does not tell his readers what to think.
Even in his later life, when, as Soden puts it, “the Bright Young People [of the 1920s] had been ousted by the Angry Young Men”, Coward’s work would stand up to new readings. However earnest Coward’s protestations of being a mere entertainer, Soden makes a good case for taking the plays seriously as literary and dramatic works, into which “meaning had worked its way... without the author’s noticing”.
This being a volume that at least some readers will treat as a reference, it is pleasing to see that it comes with a detailed and thoughtful index. What a pleasure it is to delve into a book into which so much labour, and so much affection, have evidently gone. But the labour is never flaunted and the affection is mingled with the same sophisticated irony that made Coward such a giant of the theatre. This is the biography – truthful, sympathetic and thorough – that Coward deserves.
He found Pinter ‘boring’ and Oscar Wilde ‘a tiresome, affected sod’ – but liked Tom Stoppard