NONFICTION - June 28, 1992

NOEL COWARD: A Biography by Clive Fisher (St. Martin’s: $24.95; 289 pp.). “Let’s be superficial and pity the poor Philosophers,” Amanda tells Elyot in Noel Coward’s play “Private Lives.” “Blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic, schoolchildren. Let’s savour the delight of the moment. Come and kiss me, darling, before your body rots, and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.”

Living a life of Bermuda vacations, ocean cruises, royal auctions and garden parties, Coward did his best to follow Amanda’s advice. But fortunately for the dramatic purposes of this smart, sympathetic but never sycophantic biography, Coward was torn between too many conflicting desires to sail smoothly through life. Most notably, he was obsessed with “behaving beautifully” in a society that found his predilection toward homosexuality anything but that. And so he sublimated his desires, expressing most of them only through the anonymity of the characters in the plays that Fisher, a London journalist, quotes liberally here. “No more fighting,” says one, “no more efforts to behave beautifully. I’m going to see him--I’m going now--and if he is unkind or angry and turns away from me I shall lie down in the gutter and howl.”