A peek at the self-created ‘Master’

The portrait on the cover of “The Letters of Noel Coward” complements perfectly this fascinating and revealing new collection. The photograph by Cecil Beaton shows the “Master,” as the actor, playwright and composer was known in his circle, bolt upright in a rocker, cigarette holder at a jaunty angle. It captures Coward’s public image and is the ideal companion to the dry, brittle, utterly distinctive voice that emerges from these letters. A Yeats’ biographer’s famous dialectic on the poet as the man and the mask applies to many 20th century literary lions but to none better than Coward, whose persona became as readily identifiable in his offstage pronouncements as in his plays.

Coward the man peeks through these letters, but it is the self-created Noel Coward, born into relatively humble circumstances from which he soon outsoared, who dominates this volume edited by Barry Day. His diaries, published three decades ago, were more reflective of the private man behind the image, and what they revealed was not always pleasant. Who can forget this shocking effusion? “Gandhi has been assassinated. In my humble opinion, a bloody good thing but far too late.”

But we value Coward for his peerless plays and his performances on stage and off: As he famously said, his was a talent to amuse, and these letters certainly do. Consider his account of directing costar Claudette Colbert in the 1956 TV production of “Blithe Spirit”: “Darling Claudette made a beast of herself from the word go. To begin with she wouldn’t learn her lines, which as you know is not the way to best please Father. . . . She then bossed everybody about . . . so that the correct profile of her rather large face should be presented to the camera. She had us all whirling around like dervishes, except that for quite a while I managed to be full-face, while the camera only caught the back of her head.”

He adds: “There were two blazing rows at the beginning, then comparative peace, then another blazing row. . . . She was determined to play [her part] like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Then rapprochement, because the mutual hatred was beginning to show on the screen, and last night she winged thru still not really knowing her lines but was very good, although not quite good enough.”

There you have the essence of Coward, the bitchiness, the sharp observation, the consummate professionalism and, ultimately, fairness but not to the extinction of expert judgment.

This last quality applies equally to the way this book has been assembled. Day has written on Coward before and has worked as a theatrical producer. To say that he is someone who understands Coward and his world would be an understatement: Clearly he is steeped in all aspects of them. The title page credits Day with editing the letters and providing commentary, but he has gone far beyond what is usually meant by those roles. This is not your usual epistolary collection with letter followed by notes followed by another missive, introduced and interleaved with explanatory texts. Instead, Day has woven Coward’s letters into a beautifully rounded text that reads more like a life portrait in correspondence. This lets the reader see the replies to Coward’s letters -- how often has one longed to be able to do that when reading someone’s collected letters? -- and so much more. For instance, in an early chapter dealing with Coward’s youthful friendship with Esme Wynne (his leading lady when he was 11), Day includes letters from later decades and even a photograph of her at 70. Just because he has found it useful to organize his narrative chronologically does not mean that he feels enslaved, to the reader’s immense pleasure and benefit.

If Day has a fault as midwife to Coward’s life in letters, it is that he is almost too perfect a match for his subject. In discussing the last Coward play, “A Song at Twilight,” Day cannot resist ending with an aside the Master himself could have delivered: “The twist on the original anecdote that Noel provided was to make his leading character, the writer Sir Hugo Latymer, a closet homosexual. . . . And, of course, what adds to the intrinsic interest of the play itself is that it was the one and only time that Noel 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, a decision that one wishes today’s gay community would honor.”

It is one thing to understand the exigencies of former times that led to such an attitude, another to editorialize in favor of it. Time and distance -- to say nothing of the hard lesson that silence kills -- should have led to more critical judgment. But given the wealth of knowledge and insight into most other matters Cowardian that Day has brought to this monumental book, this is but a minor flaw in a generally triumphant accomplishment.

Martin Rubin is a critic and the author of “Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life.”