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The Hard Work of an Effortless Pose

A consummate boulevardier's image belies the hard work of an exacting artist

Noël Coward in 1955 near Las Vegas, where he enjoyed a renaissance as a cabaret performer. ENLARGE
Noël Coward in 1955 near Las Vegas, where he enjoyed a renaissance as a cabaret performer. Bettmann/Corbis

Oscar Wilde famously said that he had merely put his talent into his work—he saved his genius for his life. In Noël Coward's lifetime, it seems that he, too, relished dancing along the divide between his life and his art, appearing content to pour much of his inspiration into maintaining a certain style. He crafted what became a familiar vision of the wry sophisticate, kitted out in smoking jacket or tuxedo, with Gertrude Lawrence on his arm, cigarette holder in hand, a bon mot on his lips. He loved to point out the songs that he knocked off between tea and cocktails, and the plays that he wrote in three days.

Barry Day's quest in "The Noël Coward Reader" is to show us that Coward's pose was simply that—charming but misleading. His lasting genius lay in his work, Mr. Day argues, and this anthology makes a compelling case.

A poster for 'In Which We Serve,' the flag-waving 1942 movie he wrote, starred in and co-directed with David Lean. ENLARGE

Born in 1899 in the completely unaesthetic London suburb of Teddington, the young Noël took the stage professionally at age 12 in a fairy play called "The Goldfish." From then on he acted, sang and danced; he wrote and directed plays, movies and operettas. In addition to his diary and hundreds of letters, he also wrote poems, short stories, essays and the odd novel. Coward served briefly in World War I in the army and much more extensively in World War II—sometimes entertaining the troops, but also heading up the Bureau of Propaganda in Paris and even spying for William "A Man Called Intrepid" Stephenson. Not least of his achievements was transforming himself from what he himself called a "brazen, odious little prodigy"— this was not false modesty, apparently, since co-stars from his early days endorsed the self-assessment—into an empathetic and grateful grown-up.

Though he affected a nonchalance toward his work, his ferocious productivity suggests a man familiar with the demands of concentrated labor. I suspect that he resembled one of his short-story characters, from "What Mad Pursuit" (1939), who "like so many people who have attained fame and fortune by their own unaided efforts, was a firm self-disciplinarian." This was not in keeping with the Coward image (his role as the tenacious naval captain of the 1942 movie "In Which We Serve" seemed at the time an aberration) and perhaps he came to regret it. As he got older and found that "Time's wingèd chariot is beginning to goose me," he said that his biggest regret was "not having taken more trouble with some of my work."

The Noël Coward Reader

By Barry Day

Knopf, 596 pages, $39.95

Coward's glory days are generally considered the interwar years, and Mr. Day devotes the bulk of the book to Coward's writing from that period. His first big hit, the 1924 play "The Vortex," is an Oedipal drama that remains a curiosity but is painfully bad to read. It's far more dated than some of his sentimental songs from the period, which retain much of their winsome appeal. But he was ambivalent about his songwriting—this is the man who, in "Private Lives" (1930) penned the line: "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." Snippets from that brittle society play and others from the era are a pleasure to encounter in "The Noël Coward Reader." The 1924 play "Hay Fever" is invigorating simply because of the sheer pleasure that the super-dramatic members of the Bliss family take in their own antics. Coward's "Private Lives" and "Design for Living" (1932) remain irresistible to producers—a revival of "Design for Living" is on in London's West End right now—and justly so.

I love the speed of Coward's dialogue, even on the page, but after a while I do tire of the carping to-and-fro that passes for sexual flirtation. He knew his artistic limits: "To me passionate love has been like a tight shoe rubbing blisters on my Achilles' heel," he wrote in a 1957 diary entry that Mr. Day provides.

But depicting deep feeling was not beyond his scope entirely. With the outbreak of World War II he began to explore, convincingly, the emotional terrain of comradeship, married love and patriotism. The greatest of these, to almost everyone's surprise, was patriotism.

In a 1940 BBC broadcast, Coward recalled that in 1931 on the opening night of his play "Cavalcade"—a pageant of Britain's past, traced through the history of one family—he had gotten carried away and made a speech saying it was "a pretty exciting thing to be English." Almost at once he had winced at the line as "glib and theatrically patriotic." The outbreak of war, however, put bad taste in perspective. "Now, of course, it almost belongs to the Understatement Department. I maintain that it is not only a pretty exciting thing to be English but essential as well, because on this side of the world it is all that there is left."

Just as his prewar comedies shine with Coward's honest pleasure in being terribly clever, his work from the 1940s shows the rather different pleasure he took in being unironic, speaking out for England with a most un-English straightforwardness. In the family drama "This Happy Breed"—written in 1939, when England stood alone against Hitler, but not staged until 1942 in wartime London—a working-class grandfather holds forth to his infant grandson: "You belong to a race that's been bossy for years and the reason it's held on as long as it has is that nine times out of ten it's behaved decently and treated people right. Just lately, I'll admit we've been giving at the knees a bit and letting people down who trusted us and allowing noisy little men to bully us with guns and bombs and aeroplanes." But, the grand father adds: "We know what we belong to, where we come from, and where we're going."

Coward didn't forget the need to lighten hearts during dire times. He wrote one of his most delightful comedies, "Blithe Spirit," in 1941, and the thoroughly ironic song "Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans" (1943). He must have been doing something right, because Coward discovered after the war that he'd been on a Nazi blacklist. A co-listee, writer Rebecca West, sent him a telegram: "My dear the people we should have seen dead with."

During the war, he proved very good at public stiff-upper-lippery. Mr. Day includes a longish section on the flag-waving movie "In Which We Serve" —Coward wrote the script, composed the music, starred in it and co-directed with David Lean. But about the fate of England after the war, Coward was less certain. He confided to his diary: "We shall see how the sweet face of peace looks. I cannot help visualizing an insane, vacuous grin."

His prewar cynicism had been of a glittering sort. "Were we happy in the Twenties?" he wrote in a letter in 1957. "On the whole I think that most of us were but we tried to hide it by appearing to be as blasé, world-weary and 'jagged with sophistication' as we possibly could. Naturally, we had a lot of fun in the process." Coward's postwar cynicism, though, was the real thing. Consider the 1952 song "There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner": "There are bad times just around the corner, / We can all look forward to despair, / It's as clear as crystal / From Brooklyn Bridge to Bristol / That we can't save Democracy / And we don't much care. / At the sound of a shot / We'd just as soon as not / Take a hot-water bag and retire to bed."

The Noël Coward we encounter in this anthology is surprisingly substantial. He once remarked about his wartime spy work in Paris: "Celebrity was wonderful cover. My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot." Something similar might be true about the way his life and his work have been perceived—his versatility, and the boulevardier image he cultivated, misled people into thinking him facile. In this collection, Coward's words, even without his personal charm to put them over, stand on their own just fine.

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