by Greg Johnson
With the publication of The Noël Coward Reader, which chronologically mixes excerpts from his public work and private diaries and letters, we can now take a synoptic look at six decades of artistic public work and private rumination and not only see that Coward deserves, as Real suggested, Russell Kirk’s sobriquet, Bohemian Tory, but also some idea of how he came to be that way.
The Reader is a big, well-organized, finely-produced volume, but it suffers from a couple of odd flaws. First, it claims that “to date, there has never been a Noël Coward reader; this is the first”; in fact, The Cream of Noël Coward was published in 1996 by the Folio Society.261 One might claim this was a “limited edition,” but it is still easily available online for half the price of the Reader. More importantly, although the Reader is three times larger, it ignores Not Yet the Dodo, which as we will see is Coward’s most explicit discussion of homosexuality, the artist, and society; it even claims that “A Song at Twilight” from the previous year is “the only time he touched upon the subject of homosexuality in his work” (Reader, p. 546). What could explain this curious omission?
Despite Coward’s reputation, and carefully constructed pose, as the quintessence of high-class sophistication and airy panache, his biographers have shown how the man was shaped by his distinctly unglamorous childhood, what the Reader calls the “refined suburban poverty” and proud of it to the end of his life:
How fortunate I was to have been born poor. If Mother had been able to send me to private school, Eton and Oxford or Cambridge, it would probably have set me back years. I have always distrusted too much education and intellectualism. . . . My good fortune was to have a bright, acquisitive but not, not an intellectual mind, and to have been impelled by circumstances to get out and earn my living.262
He earned that living as a hard-working child actor, which he considered to have taught him quite a lot about the “basic facts of life by the age of fourteen.”
What were those facts of life? Here is John Simon’s summary of them:
Yet no one loved England (climate apart) and its common people more than Coward, as his friend the Queen was first to acknowledge. “England may be a very small island, vastly overcrowded, frequently badly managed,” he wrote, “but very much the best and bravest in the world.” Repeatedly he flaunts his pride in the Scottish and English blood to which he owes his success.263
That success, early on, came from work that, though superficially as “decadent” and “modern” as the Bright Young Products of Oxbridge, was actually bringing the critical eye of a practical, working-class mind to their intellectual pretensions.
Like his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, Coward created a character, what Kenneth Tynan later called his “protective pose” (Reader, p. 522), which made him seem to be of that very milieu, while employing a subtle wit to create aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable works that also mockingly expose the flaws in “the modern age.”
As Guillaume Faye advises, “It is mocking and ‘eccentric’ brainwaves that should lay the foundations” for any critique, a principle also well known to the Surrealists (“Gravity lies in what does not appear serious”—André Breton) and the Situationists (“subversive ideas can only come from the pleasure principle”—Raoul Vaneigem).264
Coward was far from a flapper or a toff, but rather an honest and sympathetic participant-observer and conservative critic, in the same way Burroughs played with crime and drugs and Kerouac with irresponsibility, but were not themselves “Beat” as that “lifestyle” was distilled from their works by the mass media. In the same way Coward writes of hopelessly romantic couples while privately, in his letters and diaries, disdaining the very idea of “love.”
The pose was solidified for all time after his first major success, his play The Vortex (which was almost banned until a surprisingly perceptive civil servant noted that this mélange of drugs and incest served a serious aim, and observed that “if we ban this we shall have to ban Hamlet”) when he allowed himself to be photographed in Chinese garb, in bed, with a look of “advanced degeneracy” caused (he later said) by the flashbulb. But his teasing interviews were designed to leave the same impression: his mind is “frightfully depraved” and “a mass of corruption” due to incessant visits to “opium dens, cocaine dens” (Reader, p. 103).
There is certainly no attempt to advance any kind of “gay agenda.” The “camp” of Demi-Monde was a serious attempt to explore morality that had been shattered but not destroyed by the First World War (as he says quite openly in his Preface) and Bitter Sweet is intended as parody of Wilde, not hagiography.
Eventually real or affected decadence led to a nervous breakdown, where his treatment involved composing a list of good and bad qualities—among the former: “common sense.”
Gradually, his “exploration” of modernity modulated to an open disillusionment with this life of bobbed hair and cigarettes; were people really happy?
By dancing
Much faster
You’re chancing
Disaster
Time alone will show
(“Poor Little Rich Girl”)
“These words from me may surprise you” indeed; and three years later, in 1928, Coward is even more emphatic, and specific:
But I know it’s vain
To try to explain
When there’s this insane
Music in your brain . . .
Nigger melodies
Syncopate your nerves . . .
And when the lights are starting to gutter
Dawn through the shutters
Shows you’re living in a world of lies.
(“Dance Little Lady”)
Indeed, as Spengler observed five years later (in a book published by same house as The Noël Coward Reader today), “jazz music and Negro dancing [are performing] the Dead March for a great Culture.”265
All this subtly subversive work culminated in 1931, when encapsulating the “essential psychology” of his time in the classic song “Twentieth Century Blues.”
One might think, if one were under the “general perception” of him, that the ensuing Depression and war would leave a campy social critic like Coward without a subject. But what was called for was patriotism and belief in the British spirit, and these were hardly alien.
And while it would be inaccurate and even absurd to think Coward welcomed the war, it did give him the opportunity to exercise his profoundly conservative instincts in a more open, as it were out of the closet, fashion.
Coward’s patriotic work was on two fronts; one was more public than ever, to buck up British spirits with a play, Blythe Spirits, a song, “London Pride,” and a movie, In Which We Serve. “To make that film he had to overcome extraordinary opposition from high up, only to have it turn into a major artistic and morale-building hit.”266
The other was more secretive: undercover work promoting, among other things, US involvement in the war. Though some conservatives might prefer the “isolationist” side from today’s perspective, Coward, like Lindbergh after Pearl Harbor, was simply defending his homeland from attack by outsiders.
This is again consistent with Gottfried’s notion of “conservative”:
[F]riend/enemy distinctions are natural to how people live. The way out of this situation, even when it becomes heated, should not be through international administrative regulation of individual human lives for the sake of perpetual peace and brother- or sisterhood. Such utopian efforts can only lead to tyranny and the utter destruction of traditional ways of life. The best we can do in dealing with conflict is to control and channel violence through timely diplomacy and only if absolutely necessary, military interventions.
Rooted in real connection to his country, Coward’s patriotism did not entail any ideological demonizing of the German enemy, or a demand for “unconditional surrender” (the typical motive of the modern war of “humanism” versus “enemies of humanity”), and certainly no dream of a post-war “world administration,” whose actual manifest
ations, displacing the beloved Empire, he despised. As Guillaume Faye has said:
It is possible to be a “patriot,” someone tied to his sub-continental motherland, without forgetting that this is an organic and vital part of the common folk whose natural and historical territory . . . extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.267
No modern neocon or liberal ideologue could have the sense of his enemy’s humanity that would allow him to see the ironic humor in a song like:
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans
When our victory is ultimately won,
It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight
And their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite
Let’s be meek to them—
And turn the other cheek to them
And try to bring out their latent sense of fun.
Let’s give them full air parity
And treat the rats with charity,
But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.
Certainly the BBC didn’t appreciate it.
Oddly enough, Churchill loved the song; but maybe he just loved forcing Coward over and over to jump up and sing it on command. In any event, Coward’s authentic patriotism was miles from the war-mongering ideologue Churchill, and the two hardly saw eye to eye on anything involving the war. Churchill rebuffed his offer to work for the war effort, disparaging his talk of “intelligence” (though Coward pointed out that he was talking of his own talent, not “Intelligence” in quotes, à la James Bond) and suggested he “sing to the troops while the shooting goes on” (“not practicable,” Coward later sniffed).
Churchill was no doubt part of the “higher authorities” who didn’t want him involved with the film In Which We Serve, and Coward, rightly as later documents showed, suspected Churchill had personally torpedoed his knighthood for the ensuing film.
For his part Coward hardly granted Churchill the reverence today’s neocons demand; he considered him “a spoiled petulant gaga old sod.”268
Coward was hardly committed to idolizing the Yanks (who still seem to think that “the war” began in January 1942, by which time Britain had been in action for three years).
In Coward’s Middle East Diary, he made several statements that offended many Americans. In particular, he commented that he was “less impressed by some of the mournful little Brooklyn boys lying there in tears amid the alien corn with nothing worse than a bullet wound in the leg or a fractured arm.”269
Tame, it would seem, but one can sense the sneer underlying “mournful little Brooklyn” and “the alien corn” and the corresponding -witzs and -steins it implies. After protests from both the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Foreign Office urged Coward not to visit the United States.
One is also reminded of a similar incident, around the same time, involving General Patton and an apparently malingering soldier. Coward and Patton (who once proposed a tank uniform of green leather jumpsuit and gold helmet) belonged to an earlier generation that expect soldiers to get out there and get results, whatever their taste in haberdashery; today’s macho commanders worry about “gays” but haven’t won a war since, well, Patton.
And speaking of “macho,” the incident also gave him an opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of his “campy” persona, when backed by genuine physical courage. As fellow spy David Niven tells the story:
Now [on the day that Stars and Stripes headlined “Kick this bum out of the country”], Noël opened in Paris with Maurice Chevalier, whom the American soldiers were sure was a collaborator, and with Marlene Dietrich, whom they were sure was a German spy. . . . I went to see Noël before the performance, and I said . . . what are you going to do about it? Sir Noël said, “First I shall calm them, and then I shall sing some of my very excellent songs.” So I went out and stood at the back by the exit, and Noël came on to a deathly hush, which he’s not used to. A deathly hush. And then he looked at them and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, and all you dear, dear, sniveling little boys from Brooklyn . . .” And they fell down and absolutely loved it.
But the Navy was his true love:
I love the Navy, I inherited my affection for it, all my mother’s family were Navy. Admirals and Captains. I love everything to do with the Navy. To start with they’ve got the best manners in the world and I love the sea and Navy discipline, which is very hard. It wouldn’t have frightened me because I’m quite disciplined anyway, and I’m used to accepting discipline. I would have loved to have been in the Navy.270
The combination of pride in family heritage and personal predilection for self-discipline are expressed honestly, while in these days of “gay sensibility” as well as official “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies they seem almost “camp.”
Even Churchill’s opposition couldn’t stop his writing and acting in the classic film, In Which We Serve, a tribute to his friend, Lord Mountbatten, as well as to the regular sailors, whom he demanded be detailed to the production instead of actors. That confidence in the “ordinary man” was rewarded by performances that led the Admiralty Head of Personnel to exclaim: “By Jove, Coward, that convinces me you were right to ask for a proper ship’s company, real sailors. No actors could have possibly done that” (Reader, p. 432).
Although it must be said that when he gave his patriotism too free a hand (in the wartime isolationist-bashing Time Remembered, the pre-war Post-Mortem, or the post-war Peace in our Time) it tended to become strident and a bit hysterical, forgetting his first rule of the dandy’s pose: “The greatest thing in the world is not to be obvious—over ANYTHING.”
If the early Coward developed an aristocratic veneer for solidly working class values, and the wartime Coward was a simple spokesman for a patriotism considered old-fashioned if not criminal, the post-war Coward now became the “surprisingly” reactionary. Coward hadn’t changed; what had changed was England. Having won the war, would it now win the peace?
Coward had his doubts; the post-war “Festival of Britain” was like Britain itself: “the last word in squalor and completely ungay” causing him to riposte with the lugubriously conservative, almost Guénonian “Bad Times are Just Around the Corner”:
There are bad times just around the corner.
There are dark clouds travelling through the sky.
And it’s no good whining
About a silver lining.
For we know from experience they won’t roll by.
The ’50s were indeed a bad time for Coward, who was put on the shelf by critics who found him, and his work, terribly old-fashioned, though the public never deserted him.
His send-up of “modern” art, Nude with Violin, based, of course, not on rival “theories” but his own experience as an amateur painter, ran for over a year but was ignored by the critics.
Sebastien: I don’t think anyone knows about painting anymore. Art, like human nature, has got out of hand.
Since he wasn’t taken seriously in the theatre anymore, Coward even tossed aside the pose and began to speak over the heads of the critics, directly to the public, in a serious of articles for the Sunday Times, “Consider the Public.” Here he diagnosed and rebuked the bad new playwrights, who were:
[B]igoted and stupid to believe that tramps and prostitutes . . . are automatically the salt of the earth [or] that reasonably educated people who behave with restraint in emotional crises are necessarily “clipped,” “arid,” “bloodless,” and “unreal.”
Coward also lambasted the bad new actors who use a pretentious and unreliable “Method” to justify an inflated sense of their own “intellects” as well as a contempt for audiences, actors of the older generation, and the theatre itself, expressed mainly through coprophiliac stage business, slovenly dress, and dirty fingernails; and above all, the bad new critics, whose “old-fashioned class consciousness and inverted snobbism” (the Leftist as the true reactionary!) leads them to assume that any successful West End play is “automatically inferior” to a shoestring
production in the East End, and who mislead the actors and writers by over-praising anything that “happens to coincide with the racial, political and social prejudices of a handful of journalists.”271
Against all this Coward praised simple, unpretentious craft—“You must have the emotion to know it, then you must learn how to use the emotion without suffering it”—which he had honed the hard way entertaining troops; “Noël distrusted every emotion on stage and dealt solely in the illusion.”272 And above all, respect for theatrical tradition, and the audience itself, without which there would be no theatre at all.
The critics sneered, but as usual the public applauded Coward’s common sense, and the Times’ letters column had to be cut short.
Sadly, not much would have to be rewritten for publication in, say, The New Criterion; today actors like De Niro and Theron undergo grotesque physical metamorphoses for roles (satirized in the recent Tropic Thunder by Robert Downey’s character who preps for a role “by working in a Beijing textile factory for eight months”), writers seek only to shock and disgust their passive audiences, and critics impose a rigid, class-conscious code of political correctness and crap-Freudianism.
And there was bad politics as well; here comes that “reactionary” stuff, though confined to his Diaries:
The British Empire was a great and wonderful social, economic, and even spiritual experience and all the parlour pinks and eager, ill-informed intellectuals cannot convince me to the contrary.273
Bad actors and bad critics were one thing he could “rise above,” to use his characteristic expression, but not the parlor pinks. The tax-happy welfare state drove him out of his native land; at a professional ebb and subjected to scorn for leaving, Coward typically replied: “An Englishman is the highest example of a human being who is a free man. As an Englishman I have a right to live where I like.” That turned out to be Jamaica, where he was indeed able to “conserve,” as the Reader puts it, a little bit of the old England. By 1963 he had concluded that “the England we knew and loved was betrayed at Munich, revived for one short year in 1940 and was supreme in adversity, and now no longer exists.”274