The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  You may well imagine that with such a jaundiced view I am a very unhappy creature but this is not so—I have a very nice time all told and enjoy life keenly—I can't explain this—perhaps there will be a reckoning—perhaps I only think I'm happy—perhaps I shall suddenly find Jesus but I still have the grace to hope, both for his sake and for mine, that I don't!

  At all events, my darling old cow, I salute your ideals with (for me) considerable reverence and I'm sending the ten pounds from the heart because, as you know, I'm just au fond &n old beauty lover and dreamer {soi disant).

  All love

  POJ

  All French interpolations in this letter by courtesy of the Linguaphone!

  In 1934 Noël is still pondering the autobiography—and Esme, who knows her subject better than anyone, is continuing to ponder him:

  You know, it's practically impossible to talk really seriously face to face with you. I believe it's a sort of psychological armour. And it certainly has its points—and disadvantages, the chief of them being that you always see other people with a layer of artificiality over them. You prefer them like that, depth being uncomfortable.

  She was one of the few people at this stage to see the phenomenon called “Noël Coward” in perspective.

  I wonder if you realise how you, personally, are getting to dwarf your achievements … it gets more noticeable every time I see you…nothing to do with your writing at all—though, of course, it will affect that.

  Three years later she—and everyone else—could read the result in Present Indicative, It contained an affectionate account of the early years of Poj and Stoj, but Esme took strong exception to it:

  Flat 3

  19 Chesham Place

  Brighton

  8.6.37

  Darling,

  —even in the sense it's rather like squashing soap bubbles with a hatchet to apply the touchstone of truth to your bright and gay babblings about our early life together, but I think a little honest psychoanalysis on the subject mightn't come amiss. I can't believe you're as inaccurate when dealing with other aspects of your life as you are on the points which concern us.

  I can understand you exaggerating, as you do in places, to make a good story—that's the showmanship coming out—but to invent and to twist facts until they become the reverse of facts isn't worthy of a Cynic or “a seeker after relative truth.” I enclose a copy of corrections for you to ponder … I can't think why you've got this so wrong. It's as though you invent an aspect to a case which you want to believe, and then insist on believing it.

  I found that part of your life when we were not together most interesting and it explained so much I'd not realized. I never understood before what you must have gone through in that epileptic ward, for instance, or during that first visit to America … I think the book is clever, too, in the way the writing matures with the life. The frivolous beginning and that really impressive piece of writing about the production of Cavalcade, which is, of course, your chef d'oeuvre up to date. But I wonder if you realize that to the discerning eye what you have not told reveals even more than what you have told, which may or may not be a good thing. On the whole, I do feel a little what you felt so strongly when Ethel Mannin wrote her autobiography—that it's not good policy. Meanwhile, of course, while it is earning so much money and publicity, it must be hard for you to judge.

  The chief interest to me in the book is that throughout you are asking “Why?”—still seeking for truth. But there's a stumbling block that will always prevent you finding it—until you deal firmly with the stumbling block. You will accept any relative truth (the symptoms of T.B., for instance) and your one desire is not to be fooled, by any uncomfortable, fundamental Truth, which is going to interfere with your way of living, or alter your attitude towards life, you will, so far, resist to the last ditch.

  Of course, this is only the fringe of a very large subject which I don't feel you want to discuss yet—anyhow with me. I used to think your habit of evading a logical issue to an argument through abuse or humour was weakness. I'm now convinced it's a protective armour— and that's another big subject.

  So I will what is known as “close,” writing pads being finite and time being so frightfully on the wing….

  Fondest love—malgre tout—and that's charitable anyhow— though when I think of the things you couldhave said, it's a puzzle to me why you didn't keep to facts!

  But there, you always were a “puckish sprite”.

  Eternally—

  Titania.

  Twelve years later the “large subject” looms even larger and Esme has even written a book on it (The Unity of Being). As far as she was concerned, Noël was “dead from the neck up” when it came to religion, and it was her mission to resurrect him.

  17 Gerald Road

  London S.W.I.

  19th October, 1949

  Darling Stoj,

  It was lovely to hear from you and to know you are still bright as a button and not lost and gone before.

  I am writing this before reading your book, because I am at the moment in the throes of doing a new musical [Ace of Clubs] which is very cheerful and robust and neither Victorian nor nostalgic, and am also casting my new comedy [Island Fling] and putting finishing touches to the film I have just done [The Astonished Heart]; and as your book does not seem the sort of little book-stall number that would make an unnecessary journey go in a flash, I shall wait for two or three weeks and read it carefully. In the meantime, do you ever come up to London or are we never to meet again until I am on my deathbed and you appear with, I hope, not extreme unction?

  You ask me how I am thinking these days; do you know, the awful thing is I don't believe I am thinking very differently from the way I always have thought. My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noël Coward. I do not care for any Church (even the dear old Mother Church) and I don't believe there is a Universal Truth and if you have found it you are better men than I am, Gunga Din.

  In spite of my unregenerate spiritual attitude, I am jolly kind to everybody and still attentive and devoted to my dear old Mother who is hale and hearty, sharp as a needle and occasionally very cross indeed.

  I have built myself a little house in Jamaica on the edge of the sea where I eat bread-fruit, coconuts, yams, bananas and rather curious fish and where also I lie in the sun and relax and paint a series of pictures in oils, all of which I consider to be of great beauty but which, in reality, are amateur, inept and great fun to do.

  I have not yet found Jesus but I am pegging on with my nose to the grindstone and my shoulder to the wheel and also with a great deal of love for my childhood playmate whom I should like to see again if some old Universal Truth would lead her (in an off moment) to 17 Gerald Road, S.W.i.

  Love and kisses

  PS Lorn sends you her best love

  PPS I also drink rum in Jamaica

  PPPS I am looking very pretty in a chocolate-boxy sort of way.

  God bothered Noël. And Esme was perceptive when she observed that vhen something became too difficult or serious for Noël to handle, he eemed to feel the need to distance himself from it—usually with a joke. iome things were too serious to be taken seriously.

  In his own way he would return to the subject of God frequently for the rest of his life.

  When, in 1917, John Ekins, a mutual friend of his and Esme's, suddenly died of spinal meningitis while serving in the Royal Flying Corps, Noël expressed the depth of his feelings in verse.

  LINES TO GOD

  If I should ultimately meet my God,

  He will not be the God of love or Battles,

  He'll be some under God whose job it is

  To organize sharp sounds and things that rattle.

  He'll be the one who, all my life on earth

  Can, most sadistically, my spirit shatter


  With little hammerings and sudden shouts

  And hollow ricochets of empty mirth.

  John Ekins's death—like Philip Streatfeild's—would certainly qualify as one more “hollow ricochet.”

  John Ekins, a mutual friend (who died in 1917), Esme, and Noël (1916).

  21.10.49

  My darling Poj,

  As to churches, I couldn't agree with you more—including “Mother”—probably principally “Mother”—as you will gather from the careful perusal of The Unity of Being which you've promised. But, my pet, you don't know what you've promised. Experienced metaphysicians blench, or blanch at the task. But there, I'm a great believer in common sense; and you always have had that. At any rate, I hope you will read it attentively enough to see that I am so far from being Church-bound that the entire book is a plea for “living the life” without benefit of the clergy. I loathe hypocrisy. And the habit of all the churches, except the Quakers, is to teach its tots the ten commandments and the sermon on the mount Sunday after Sunday and then when war comes, incite the little thugs to kill as many of their fellow men who don't happen to agree with them, as they can. And then these dolts of ministers and priests ask why the Church has lost its authority.

  You say you don't believe you're thinking very differently from the way you've always thought. Might that not indicate a slight lack of progress? But in fact, your memory appears to fail you. You say “I love smoking, drinking….” But in the most clear-sighted period of our close companionship, you did neither, thinking it was more original and sensible not to. On the other hand, I like your Jamaican diet, except for the fish. Why take it out on the fish?

  I am glad to hear you've still got your precious Mum in a visible state; but then you always were firm about anything you really wanted. Is she parked in England or Jamaica?

  Darling, I've only been to London for three separate days in the last ten years, twice to see [her son] Jon's flat in Hampstead and once to divorce Lynden. And if that poor lad has ever regretted anything more than the fact that I married him it is the fact that I divorced him. He lost a front tooth three weeks after marriage owing to a wild Australian wife's unerring aim. (That'll teach him to break with a pacifist) and has spent the intervening months trying to get protection from her by law. See references to Karmic wheel!

  Heaps of love, my pretty lamb, and big hugs.

  Yours,

  STOJ

  In the years that followed the relationship drifted still further, but the memories of events they had shared and that had shaped the people they had become were never far from the surface. “Remember what our eight years’ companionship was all about,” Esme wrote in March 1953. “If we aimed too high, at least we didn't commit the common mistake of remaining aimless.”

  In a letter dated February 24, 1960, she asks him:

  I wonder if you remember us standing in a field during that awful Charley's Aunt tour, realizing (as I see it was now)power} We admitted to each other that we felt within us the power to achieve anything, and your integrated wish was to have the world at your feet, theatrically speaking. How surely that wish came true! Yet how far from it you seemed at the time. Mine—just as integrated—was to “know the Truth.” It has taken much longer but it's happened.

  LES AVANTS

  Sur MONTREUX

  March 9th 1960

  My Darling Stoj,

  I was so very very pleased to get your sweet letter. And what with telepathy and one thing and another it arrived just as I was thinking of you. I happened to be having my annual re-read of the E. Nesbits, which I still prefer to any other literature, and there on the fly leaf of The Magic City was the evocative name Charles Steuart! And I remembered without remorse how we had broken in and stolen it! Out of evil cometh good is what / always say and I don't believe a word of it. The phlebitis was a grave bore and my monotonously beautiful right leg swelled up like a pink sausage and I had to be carried about like a parcel. Fortunately I have an Italian house boy who is quite square like a biscuit box and likes carrying wardrobes up and down stairs, so he placed me on the loo every morning and then placed me back in bed again and the stupid old clot disappeared and the Good Mind sodden with universal truth suddenly decided that this was all too easy and so, in order to teach me a further sharp lesson, gave me congestion of the left lung which was not serious but jolly painful for three days, because of my stubborn devotion to the frivolous pleasures of life such as breathing! However that has now disappeared too and I am now scampering up and down stairs like a 60 year old and waiting eagerly for the first joyous signs of syphilis.

  I was very distressed about Edwina's [Mountbatten] death but, as you say, what an enviable way to go. The sadness, as always, is reserved for those who are left. In any case so many of my friends have upped and died during the last few years that I'm becoming sort of hardened to it. I start practically every letter now quite automatically with “Words are useless but please accept my deepest etc.,”

  “Stoj” at seventy.

  All I ask of my friends who are left is that they should live through dinner.

  [It was a line good enough to use again and again, sometimes substituting “lunch” for “dinner.”]

  I remember, I remember so very, very well that long ago day in that far away field. I think we both decided then and there (if not before) that we were going to get what we wanted and, both being determined characters, to say the least of it, we succeeded. I only know that if I should happen to “pop” tomorrow that I have no complaints—I have had a very happy and full life with enough sadness here and there to highlight the happiness. I have had, to quote that classic, Bittersweet [sic], “A talent to amuse” and, with it, have been able to make many millions of my fellow creatures laugh, which, when all is said and done, is not a bad accolade to retire to the grave with! You have found peace and content in research and solitude. A rare treasure. Whether or not the truths you have discovered are transferable is not the point. The point is that you have discovered them. Or It. But don't dear perennial* reformer waste too much mental energy trying to impart it because that, my darling, leads to disillusion, irritation, discouragement, a thorough upset of your spiritual acids and frequently spots on the back. Just be grateful that you are convinced and healthy and still have a twinkle in your eye….

  I am really in love with this house. When I first saw it it was hideous beyond belief but now, after spending forty million pounds eighteen and fourpence on it, it is lovely. The views are fabulous, lake and mountains and, at the moment, snow. In the Spring it still looks like snow because of the wild narcissi. Kindly write again and oblige

  Your ever loving

  POJ

  To which she replied:

  9 Park Lane, Selsey, Sussex

  14.3.60

  Poj darling,

  Until I found Science, I was certainly not ethical, but I WAS cautious (thank heaven or goodness knows what I'd have been landed with!)…

  But darling, aren't you a bit unrealistic in your advice to me not to impart what I know? It is just as though I said: “Yes, Poj darling, you have indeed a talent to amuse, but don't use it to make other people laugh. Just sit in the bath and have a thoroughly good time with your own jokes.” People don't search for a lifetime to find something for the good of mankind and then sit in a corner of a very stoney beach mumbling to themselves about it…Darling, it really isn't just a cosy “piece of mind” I've found. It is the answer to what I believe are fundamental questions, which no one ever would or could answer in my youth. Nor would I lay claim to having achieved the abounding physical fitness you credit me with. I ‘ave me problems….

  I LOVE the way you throw off here a ballet, there a light novel. But do leave yourself something to do in your early hundreds. If the first twenty years are too dull people have a tendency, at 120, to commit suicide by going to New York. Whereas the famous Irish countess still enjoyed climbing apple trees at 145. Look after your infant self, still much loved by his


  …………………………………………STOJ

  PS. Fondest love, darling. Bits of us remain just the same as they were fifty years ago, and we're probably right to keep to them, instead of meeting and disagreeing on many issues. I really do think your letter of the 9th is the funniest I have ever had from you in my life, which is saying something when I think how letters from you preserved me from near-suicide at that dreadful convent, in 1914….

  Which brings me to your extremely fictional account of how we procured the [E] Nesbits. You must know perfectly well that we never “broke in and stole.” We went to Steu's flat, armed with a letter from him saying that I could have anything or everything that was in the flat (which he was going to give up). I had to show the distinctly hostile landlady—a friend of his—the letter before she would admit us. And, looking back on my financial situation at the time, it is a wonder to me that I was so moderate, only taking a pink rug, a waste paper basket and a few books….

  Noël's 1964 Christmas card seems to show him taking a more relaxed view of Esme's religious preoccupation.