The Letters of Noel Coward

by Noel Coward

  111 Ebury Street

  S.W.I.

  [Undated]

  Just a correct note to thank you very much for having me.

  I read Gold in the Wood on the train. It has a great moment when Theckla looks at Jake with eyes full of wistful yearning and accuses him reproachfully of breaking the field mouse's home—“ Poor pretty thing!”

  Your writing gives me an unpleasant sensation of vilely sophisticated decadence—I don't feel quite worthy next to Robin, who, after being lassoed, gagged and bound by Jake, looks him full in the face and says, “You scamp!”

  By the way, have you read Jeffery Farnol [a successful contemporary novelist of “period” fiction]? If not, do, because I'm sure he has stolen a lot from you.

  Do you and your husband like Gold in the Wood very much?

  I have a passionate desire for Theckla and Robin and Sirio and Lucy (from Sirocco) [a play he had written while in New York] to have a picnic together—I feel they'd get on marvelously! All among the fairies and the bracken and the mice!

  Yours ever

  Noël Coward

  I wish you'd make Jake a sexual pervert with “saddist” tendencies.

  If she detected the merest touch of irony, it certainly did nothing to deter her. After the success of The Vortex in 1924:

  18th December 1924

  Noël Coward, Esq.

  Royalty Theatre

  Dean Street, London W.

  Oh, my dear Noël Coward!

  It is now eleven hours since I parted from you, and the play exists; that is to say the play that I told you in your dressing room we must write together, you and I. You see what a vitality your play must possess, thus instantly to procreate a successor. Your play is, of course, tremendously fine and interesting but the position perfectly beastly, as you have so vividly demonstrated. The one I have just done should resolve the abominable tangle and achieve ultimately a happy ending, but by most unusual means. Anyhow I have got it. Perhaps there are fewer tantrums, but I think it contains as much dramatic interest as in your first great beginning.

  Is there any reason why plays should not be serials and the vital interest created by your living characters carried on in a second complete play, independent in itself, so that those seeing it without having seen The Vortex would not feel too lost, but at the same time it would be of far greater interest to those who had seen The Vortex}

  Now tell me, before I trim up the dialogue, shall we collaborate? Is it to be a play by Noël Coward and Marie Stopes, in which case the same characters Florence Lancaster, Nicky, the Husband, Helen and some of the others come in and live their lives out on Monday and Tuesday, or am I merely to do it all by myself? In that case I suppose I must not call the heroine Florence Lancaster and Nicky cannot be you, but I want him to be you, and you to have the part you have now in The Resolution, I think the continuity of interest in a completely fresh play about the same characters, with the further intensified drammatic [sic] situations which my play creates is by far the best scheme, and would give such advertising value to them both as would ensure a vital interest.

  Would you let me know at once how you feel about it, because it is all red-hot in my mind, and if you are not going to be my collaborator I must finish it off myself. If you are, you and I must get at the skeleton and fill in the dialogue in harmony with The Vortex,

  In any case I shall be producing it, I hope, early next Spring, as I am intending to take a theatre.

  I hope you will understand all the millions of things I would like to see in this letter if I could only make it a million times longer.

  I do hope your head is not swelled up too terrifically, but this I think is far finer than anything I expected from the mid-Atlantic.

  Good wishes, congratulations and hopes for the future.

  Yours ever sincerely,

  MARIE STOPES

  Royalty Theatre

  W.I.

  December 27th 1924

  Dear Dr. Stopes

  Thank you so much for your letter. I am afraid I never collaborate with anyone, and, even if I did, it would not be over a sequel of The Vortex as, psychologically speaking, there is no sequel—unless of course the gardener's boy found the box of cocaine and gave it to his younger sister who took a boat to Marseilles and went into a bad house; one of those particularly bad houses for which Marseilles is justly famous.

  I would rather you didn't use the names of my characters, as I feel that I have already brought The Vortex to an inevitable, if not altogether a successful conclusion. I do hope you have a happy New Year.

  Sincerely yours,

  NOËL COWARD

  Noël did leave behind a little verse that summed up his feelings and put Marie Stopes in his personal pantheon of formidable ladies led by Mary Baker Eddy.

  If through a mist of awful fears

  Your mind in anguish gropes,

  Dry up your panic stricken tears

  And fly to Marie Stopes,

  If you have lost life's shining goal

  And mixed with sex perverts and dopes,

  For Normal soap to cleanse your soul

  Apply to Marie Stopes,

  And if perhaps you fail all round

  And lie among your shattered hopes,

  Just raise your body from the groundAnd crawl to Marie Stopes,

  •

  HE ARRIVED BACK in England just seven pounds richer than when he had left—still poor in everything but experience.

  The family's fortunes had, if anything, deteriorated, and Noël found Violet tired and worried. He determined to do what he could to reduce the pressure on her and—with Gladys's help—searched the highways and byways of Kent to find her a country home, finally settling on a small cottage at St. Mary-in-the-Marsh, near Dymchurch. Violet would later refer to it as the first time she “left” Arthur. Meanwhile, it was Arthur who was left to run the Ebury Street boardinghouse, which he did quite happily without Violet's “supervision.”

  During his wanderings Noël himself fell in love with Kent and would make his own home there years later, in Goldenhurst and St. Margaret's Bay.

  He also seized the opportunity to get to meet his literary idol, E. (Edith) Nesbit (1858—1924). If he had been asked to name his favorite writer, irrespective of time or genre, he would almost certainly have named her. Throughout his life he would reread the entire Nesbit canon, and one of her books, The Enchanted Castle, was on his bedside table the night he died.

  Nesbit wrote fantasy adventure stories involving her Edwardian children protagonists, but her special appeal lay in the way she refused to talk down to her young readers. The tone of her books holds up even today, and in her time she attracted significant supporters. One of the bonds between Noël and the Queen Mother was a shared love of E. Nesbit. In 1964 Noël sent the Queen Mother a present and she replied:

  Clarence House

  December 2nd.

  My dear Mr. Coward,

  I was enchanted to find four nostalgic E. Nesbit books sitting on my table today, and I do want to send you my warmest and most grateful thanks for giving me such a delectable present.

  I am longing to plunge into them again, and I am quite sure that I shall once again be terrified of the Uglie Wugglies—oh the horror of the kid gloves clapping! Do you know, that I often take off my gloves to clap at theatres or ballet or opera, and I know that this is purely because the sound of the dull thudding of languid hands in gloves brings back vividly the dreadful Uglie-Wuglies!

  E. (Edith) Nesbit (1858-1924) was the most popular writer of children's stories of her time. Noël owned a complete set of her books and read them over and over. On the night he died, The Enchanted Castle was on his bedside table.

  She saw that fully half of the chairs were occupied and by the queerest people

  —THE ENCHANTED CASTLE

  The characters she refers to appear in The Enchanted Castle. The children put on a concert and “create” an audience out of brooms and old clothes, only to find their
creations come to malevolent life. The passage is perhaps one of the most disturbing in children's fiction:

  The seven members of the audience seated among the wilderness of chairs had, indeed, no insides to speak of. Their bodies were bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were broom handles, and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas…their hands were gloves stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper masks painted in the afternoon by the untutored brush of Gerald, tied on to the round heads made of the ends of stuffed bolster cases. The faces were really rather dreadful … Their eyebrows were furious with lamp-black frowns—their eyes the size, and almost the shape, of five shilling pieces….

  And at the end of the performance, when the humans were applauding: “.…someone else was clapping, six or seven people, and their clapping made a dull padded sound. Nine faces instead of two were turned towards the stage, and seven out of the nine were painted, pointed paper faces. And every hand and face was alive.”

  When Noël met E. Nesbit, he found that she was no “sweet little old lady.” Nonetheless, the literary admiration survived, and when children's novelist Noël Streatfeild was writing the 1958 Nesbit biography, Magic and the Magician, Noël wrote to her:

  Her books have meant a very great deal to me, not only while I was a little boy of nine and onwards, but right up to the present day. I have re-read them each at least twenty times.

  It was in 1922 that I first met her, she was living near Dymchurch and I went boldly and called on her. I found her absolutely charming, with greyish-white hair and a rather sharp sense of humour. Her husband, “The Skipper,” and she were living in a sort of Nissen hut at Jesson St. Mary's, between Dymchurch and Littlestone.

  I told her how much I admired her books and we became friends. After this first visit I saw her on and off until she died.

  My favourites of her books are, in the following order, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The House of Arden, The Enchanted Castle, The Wonderful Garden, and the Bastable books.

  I can't, after all these years, remember her very clearly, but as I say, her books I never forget. She had an economy of phrase, and an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days in the English countryside.

  He neglected to mention how he had been introduced to the writer's works. Many of her books had been serialized in The Strand Magazine, and Noël had been in the habit of buying back numbers for a penny each until he had acquired the whole set and could read a book straight through without having to wait for the next installment. However, when it came to The Magic City, a few numbers were missing. The frustrated fan was forced to steal a coral necklace from a friend of his mother's, pawn it for five shillings, and buy the complete book from the Army and Navy Stores. “In later years I told E. Nesbit of this little incident and I regret to say she was delighted.”

  •

  A SERIES OF undated letters (but marked 1922 in the archive) give some indication of Noël's varied activities for the remainder of that year: “Jeffrey is taking me down to Cornwall this weekend….” “.…This next Sunday I'm going to Oxford” [where he stayed with Lady Sybil Colefax, a noted social name collector, and met Elsa Maxwell for the first time]. “I loved [Maxwell] at once … all her boastfulness and noise and shrill assertiveness.”

  On a more domestic note, when Violet's favorite cat becomes pregnant: “I'm sorry about your pussy—cats have so little restraint.”

  “I've been in bed all day resting and writing—my party-going has abated a good deal and I'm settling down.” What he was currently writing was a play he called Sweet Pepper. (“Sweet Pepper seems to be developing all right.”) There is no evidence that it was ever finished, but in these years his notebooks indicate numerous plays in synopsis form that never got any further, while others would start with one title and end up as something quite different. For example, Still Life became Hay Fever, but unwilling to give up a title he liked, he used the former for one of the plays in Tonight at 8:30, which became Brief Encounter when it was turned into a film.

  As the year wore on, there was The Young Idea to occupy him. Despite Shaw's injunctions, Noël was determined to see it staged and equally determined—despite the producer's doubts about the suitability of the casting—to star in it himself, as Sholto.

  The play opened a six-week out-of-town tour in Bristol on September 25. But before they brought the show in, there was Ned Lathom.

  •

  NED, THIRD E A RL of Lathom (1895-1930), was a peer with a passion for the theater. During the course of an all-too-short life he managed to spend the family fortune on it and died in poverty, but in 1922 he was to be Noël's Fairy Godfather.

  Depressed by his own lack of success—not to mention funds—Noël plucked up the courage to ask this man he didn't know particularly well for a loan of two hundred pounds. He was refused outright. Loans, Lathom was convinced, soured friendships. Here was a gift of two hundred pounds. It was a gift that forged a bond.

  Toward the end of the year, Lathom invited Noël to come and visit him and his sister. They were staying in Davos, where the peer was being treated for the tuberculosis that was to shadow the rest of his short life.

  Noël wrote to Violet:

  Grand Hotel & Belvedere

  Davos-Platz

  Tuesday, November 20th 1022

  My Lamb,

  Listen—I have a slight disappointment for you. I have had a charming letter from Courtneidge [Robert, producer of The Young Idea and father of musical comedy star Cicely] saying he can't get any suitable dates, so we shall have to open at the Savoy straight away in February. He has arranged about keeping the cast. I shall arrive in London on the 22nd and I shall stay in London during Christmas week—then I think we'll retire in lordly state to our country seat while I write my new play, which I'm itching to do. Don't be disgruntled about not touring again—it may be for the best as I shall have time for The Vortex,

  My holiday is being that cheap you'd never believe…The German mark is 30,000 to the pound. One can have lunch at the Ritz in Berlin for about two shillings….

  On Sunday we all went up to the Schatzalp, a restaurant on top of a mountain—you go up in a mountain railway—then the uncon-sumptive ones and some of the consumptive too—come down in louges [small sleighs]. It's the most heavenly sensation in the world— two and a quarter miles zig-zagging through the trees like one long helter skelter. It's perfectly safe because when you feel you're going too fast you use your feet as brakes—and when you do fall off (which is very often) you only roll in the snow. The moment you reach the bottom you hitch on to a two-horse sleigh and gallop back through the town to the Mountain Railway again. Then once more down— one steers with a long pole! I'm sunburnt and healthy—I've never felt so well—I never wear a vest during the day—a shirt and coat are enough—it's too lovely for words.

  Yesterday I went driving (with a German Baroness) right up the mountain opposite where we warmed ourselves with the most delicious hot chocolate in the world. There were deep gorges with rushing torrents at the bottom and huge icicles hanging and desolate woods of fir trees—all snow almost up to your waist if you get off the road!

  I've just come in from skating at which I'm becoming quite roguish, doing figure eights mostly on my fanny but there—Vive le Sport!

  Ned is being perfectly sweet. He suddenly bought me the most lovely tortoiseshell cigarette case the other day.

  The leading men in the Revue will be Clifton Webb and Morris Harvey (if possible). I've done some heavenly new music. The whole thing will put me right up top and break several records.

  There are some rather austere Beethoven concerts sometimes which we go and giggle at!

  The hotel is full of Spaniards who teach me marvelous Spanish rhythms on the piano—and shriek and gesticulate wildly!

  Goodbye now, my Sniglet. I am getting too fat—Ned and I have bread sauce with everything.

  SNOOP

  Grand Hotel & Belvedere
>
  Davos-Platz

  Saturday, December 2nd 1922

  Darling,

  I'll write more at length I've just arrived having stayed a day extra in Paris—it is perfectly heavenly—thick snow, glorious mountains and bright sunshine! And the most luxurious hotel.

  Ned is ever so much better and perfectly sweet. I am to do all the music for the new Chariot Revue with a few extra songs interpolated, also all the words—isn't it thrilling? It will probably open in March at the Prince of Wales's with Maisie Gay and Gertrude Lawrence!

  Later. I had a huge success in Paris.

  Snoop

  Lathom had funded Andre Chariot's most recent revue, A—Z, and was in a very powerful position with the impresario, who had constant trouble finding the funding for his prestigious and popular shows. On this occasion Lathom summoned Chariot from London to meet with them in Davos, and he came posthaste.

  Grand Hotel

  Sunday December 3rd

  Darling,

  I've just played all the music to Chariot and he's delighted. He sat without a smile and then took me aside and said they were all good—so that's that. I now quite definitely enter the ranks of British composers! I am very excited as the music is good.

  I leave here on Friday.

  All my love

  Snoop

  Grand Hotel

  Tuesday December 5th

  Darling Lamb,

  Here is another disappointment for you. I shall have to return here for Christmas after Berlin—I had arranged to arrive in London on the 22nd, having seen Edward Molyneux in Paris—but now he is going to Cannes until the 24th, when he comes here. It is frightfully important for me to see him as he is dressing the entire show and Chariot wants me to produce and generally supervise … I do hope you won't feel miserable at Xmas without me—please write and say you won't be disappointed—it really is only a matter of sentiment and you really will be sensible about it. I know you will. We will have a Christmas day all on our own in the middle of the week—I shall bring home some rich presents from Berlin.