The Letters of Noel Coward
Page 24
There's no future in “Good,” my lad
So try, oh try to be bad.
From his temporary home in Hollywood Maugham wrote: “I hope your review [revue] will be a huge success. It's no good your saying your Willie is not a portrait of me. I had long fair curls and a black belted suit. Since he is the hero, though I won't bring an action, I shall be terribly affronted. I insist on his getting the girl in the end.”
At the time, Maugham, like Noël, was still in exile from his home, because of the war. The army had requisitioned Goldenhurst in Noël's case, but Maugham had an even sadder story regarding his Villa Mau-resque, in Cap Ferrat:
I shall not return to me native shores till early next year, partly because I have nowhere to go in England and partly because I can't get a visa to go to France and, even if I could, there would be no object in it, since for the moment neither labour nor materials are obtainable.
The Italians occupied the villa and took my cars, the Germans occupied it next, took the yacht, emptied the wine cellar and mined the property; and then the British fleet shelled the house!
Another area in which friendly competition continued to take place between the two men was in the writing of short stories. For all his skill as a playwright and novelist, it was and is generally conceded that Maugham was the master of this particularly subtle literary form—the British O. Henry. Noël, too, turned his hand to it. He sent Maugham his 1939 collection To Step Aside,
Villa Mauresque
Cap Ferrat
Alpes Maritimes
Aug. 20.
My dear Noël,
I have just finished To Set [sic] Aside and should like to tell you how much I enjoyed it. The Wooden Madonna is a story after my own heart, and What Mad Pursuit is perfect. It is a grand companion piece to Hands Across the Sea, But I'm sorry you have wasted Aunt Tittie on a short story; you had material there for a great picaresque novel…and it is a shame to have squandered thus such a wealth of splendid stuff. Heaven knows, I'm all for concision but there you had a subject that screamed to be treated on the grand scale.
Willie
Whatever his flaws as a human being, both early and late, Maugham was never less than generous with his experience and advice and he continued to be Noël's first port of literary call for many years.
But perhaps his most moving communication to Noël was the letter he wrote recalling the death of his longtime companion, Gerald Haxton (1892-1944):
Parkers Ferry
Yemasee
South Carolina
February 13th 1945
My dear Noël,
I have been meaning for a long time to answer your very kind letter, but I have put it off and put it off. Since Gerald died I have been very far from well. You see, for six months I had seen him nearly every day and was anxious and worried all the time, even when I was not with him he was in my thoughts, so that after his death I broke down from the nervous strain. It is three months since he died now and I cannot get used to it. I try to forget and a dozen times a day something I come across, something I read, a stray word reminds me of him and I am overcome with my first grief.
They tell me time will help, but time flows dreadfully slowly. For thirty years he has been my pleasure and my anxiety and without him I am lost and lonely and hopeless. He was nearly twenty years younger than I and I had every right to think that he would have long survived me. He would have been terribly upset at my death, but he would have got drunk for a week or two and then reconciled himself to it, for he had a naturally happy temper but I am too old to endure so much grief. I have lived too long.
Yours affectionately,
WILLIE
And Maugham was to live another twenty years.
•
NOëL MET EDNA FERBER (1887-1968), a regular at the Algonquin Round Table, during his visits to New York in the early 1920s. There was the predictable initial verbal sparring, but soon they were fast friends, and she confessed that she “deeply adored” him.
The thing that drew them together initially was a shared passion for the theater. Most of the many letters they exchanged over the years were devoted to who was writing or acting in what and how well or badly they were doing it. In a typical letter to Noël, Ferber wrote:
…My feeling about the theatre is so strong I am so exhilarated when I am working in it at one moment and so despondent the next that I think I act without caution, like a person in love … I have, I suppose, lived the life of a stage-struck Jewish nun: working very hard, occasionally running around doing good deeds. Footloose but the hands tied to the typewriter for hours daily….
Noël wrote back: “Dear Blighted Bernhardt …”
There were times when each needed to keep up the other's morale. After almost half a century of what we would now call “blockbuster” novels such as So Big (1924), Shaw Boat (1926), Cimarron (1929), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958), and hit play collaborations such as The Royal Family (1927) and Dinner at Eight (1932), Ferber published her second volume of autobiography, A Kind of Magic (1963). In general the reviews were lukewarm, the reviewers having decided the Ferber moment was past.
Noël rallied to her support, writing:
Darling Ferber:
It was YOU who said that it was repetitious here and there. Well, perhaps it is, for the layman, but for a fellow writer NO. All the pains and pangs and sturms and drangs, so eloquently and vividly described, merely made me go on nodding my head like an old Buddha in a state of masochistic euphoria. That awful writer's conscience. That ghastly and rewarding self-discipline that civilians have no idea of. Oh dear. Oh dear. I hope that every conceited amateur that lives in this great big world reads your book and has a nice quiet think and goes out to have his or her hair done.
You also said with beguiling modesty, that there were some good things in it. This, dear, was a coy understatement. There are far more than SOME good things in it. There is, for instance, the chapter on Israel: the savage accurate and loving description of New York. The bit about noise emerging incessantly from the Chatterbox and, above all, the last chapter which I suppose is the most brilliant descriptive writing you have ever done. As I said on the telephone, your use of English is, to me, endlessly satisfying. No one, in my experience, has ever equaled you in your sentimental t/wsentimental, shrewd, affectionate, astringent, deeply understanding appraisal of your own country. (You're not the only one who likes adjectives). Nobody but you also, who I have always suspected of having a secretly baleful disposition, would have sent such a book to a poor struggling composer-lyricist on the eve of a major production [The Girl Who Came to Supper]. For the last three days I have been sitting in a rococo ballroom at the Bradford Hotel spearing wrong notes out of a heavy and complicated score only to return to my bedroom and be compelled to go on reading about all YOUR troubles. Not only that, I have regularly wakened at about three in the morning, eaten some chocolate (My old energy trick) and read just one more chapter. I have now, at last, finished the book. Exactly ten minutes ago and what the hell am I to do when I come home tonight? I shall buy Life magazine, that's what I shall do.
I must add obsequiously and slavishly that without A Kind of Magic this particular week might have been insupportable. So there.
I will enlarge upon all this when next I see you, which I hope will be here.
Thank you, darling Ferb, very very much indeed.
Noël Coward
Although Ferber's novels were not to Noël's personal taste, he admired them for their professionalism. When she published her novel about Alaska, Ice Palace, in 1958, he wrote:
Darling Ferber
I know you endured blood and sweat and tears and knocked yourself out and that we didn't see nearly as much of each other as we should have done while I was in New York. However having just finished Ice Palace I can only say that it was all worth it.
I was held by it from beginning to end and nobody, nobody but you could have dreamed up a Floosie called Butterfly Magrue.
The fabulou
s vitality of your writing is entirely undiminished and your trained observant eye misses nothing. I never thought that I should want to go to Alaska but now I do. Bridie is enchanting, both the Grandfathers utterly real and uncompromising, Christine, of course, a darling. The love story is handled with such sureness and delicacy and the devotion of those people to their own territory is moving and completely convincing.
I tremble to think what an enormous amount of research you had to do to absorb all that detail and I am lost in admiration because not once, with all the detail, does the story and the narrative quality falter. There is no dullness anywhere in the whole long book; it moves along with speed and your particular brand of urgency from the first page to the last.
I really do congratulate you, darling and thank you for such a satisfying and stimulating treat.
And years later, when he had lost track of her whereabouts: “How are you, my old duck? My voices tell me you are up to something. Your disappearances usually mean that some state of the Union is going to get it in the kisser.”
•
CERTAINLY THE EXPERIENCE Noël enjoyed at the hands of his elders—and occasionally betters—encouraged him to offer comparable advice to aspiring younger writers as his own years went by. Sometimes the advice was warmly welcomed but there was a particular occasion when it most decidedly was not.
For some years after the war Noël had been concerned at the way he saw British theater going—aggravated, no doubt, by the fact that it was certainly not going his way.
The advent of John Osborne (1929—1994) and his Look Back in Anger (1956) seemed to crystallize a gritty, disaffected working-class attitude in contemporary playwriting that Noël found both self-satisfied and displeasing. “I wish I knew,” he wrote in his Diaries (February 1957), “why the hero is so dreadfully cross and about what? … I expect my bewilderment is because I am very old indeed and cannot understand why the younger generation, instead of knocking at the door, should bash the fuck out of it.” Later (May 5, 1959) he would conclude, “Destructive vituperation is too easy.”
Having been exposed to a great deal more of the same, he developed the theme in a 1961 series of articles for the Sunday Times, This was typical:
The theatre must be treated with respect. It is a house of strange enchantments, a temple of dreams. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, illiterate drill-hall serving as a temporary soap-box for propaganda.
I am quite prepared to admit that during my fifty-odd years of theatre-going, I have on many occasions been profoundly moved by plays about the Common Man, as in my fifty-odd years of restaurant-going I have enjoyed tripe and onions, but I am not prepared to admit that an exclusive diet of either would be completely satisfying.
It is dull to write incessantly about tramps and prostitutes as it is to write incessantly about dukes and duchesses and even suburban maters and paters, and it is bigoted and stupid to believe that tramps and prostitutes and under-privileged housewives frying onions and using ironing boards are automatically the salt of the earth and that nobody else is worth bothering about.
He might have remembered another quotation: “The public are asking for filth…the younger generation are knocking at the door of the dustbin…if life is worse than the stage, should the stage hold up the mirror to such distorted nature?” It was actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier fulminating against Noël's own “younger generation” in general and Noël's The Vortex in particular!
Not surprisingly, Noël's articles stirred up considerable controversy in the theatrical community. Naturally the “Kitchen Sink” exponents were outraged, particularly as the advice was coming from this figure from the past, as they saw him.
Critic Kenneth Tynan (1927—1980) of the Sunday Times's chief competitor, The Observer, and personally committed as the chief protagonist of the “new” drama, snarled, “The bridge of a sinking ship, one feels, is scarcely the ideal place … to deliver a lecture on the technique of keeping afloat.”
(Noël was to have his revenge on Tynan years later when the gamekeeper turned poacher by putting on the nude revue Oh! Calcutta! Leaving after the first act, Noël remarked, “I've seen quite a number of naked people and I don't think it's all that exciting.”)
Tynan was not alone in consigning Noël to theatrical irrelevance at this time—as Noël realized all too well, without ever accepting the verdict. In 1964 he is writing to Adrianne Allen's husband, Bill Whitney:
My professional demise has been predicted gleefully for years now by the same types who blame the Queen Mother for their own dreary lives and meagre talents, and who flock to see the soggy, turgid maunderings of left-wing, often carbuncular drones about whom even Ken Tynan has begun to say “Enough” and “Whither?”
If they only had good hearts and some humour I might more easily lend an ear, but any intercourse with them leaves me bored and inordinately depressed.
•
IT WAS 1966 before fences began to be mended. First John Osborne wrote to congratulate Noël on Suite in Three Keys, his return to the London stage as author and actor:
May 24th 1966
Dear Noël Coward,
First things, in their way, first: it is such a pleasure for me that you are back in London. Not only with your own work but appearing in it—as you should. You should be here always. I do hope you won't stay away too long.
Now: I would like to ask a favour of you. Could you, in future, stop assessing your fellow writers to newspaper reporters? Clearly it gives them pleasure but you scarcely need their approval. I have always had the profoundest respect for you, both for what you do and as a unique and moving figure on our landscape. You are a genius. However, I think it is impertinent to pass judgement on other writers in this lordly way to gaggles of sniggering journalists. It is undignified, unkind and unnecessary. I don't need lessons in playwriting from you. The skin you inhabit is not mine. I do perfectly well and I think I manage—quite successfully—to do something no one else can. As you do. That in itself deserves the respect of reticence. In spite of your genius, your opinions on writers are mostly—not always—execrable. You admire those mincing middlebrow hounds because they offer no threats. So be it. But please say no more. I did it myself about ten years ago. About yourself, I seem to remember. I have always regretted it. You may find it hard to believe, but there is more goodwill and kindliness here for you to draw on than you might expect to find….
Believe me, with respect and admiration always,
Yours sincerely,
JOHN OSBORNE
Noël replied the very next day:
Noël admired Arnold Wesker's writing—if not his political views. “Your first allegiance should be to your own rich talent and you should go on using it…instead of wasting it trying to bring culture to people who neither need it nor want it.”
37 Chesham Place
S.W.I.
Wed. 25th May ‘66
Dear John,
I really am very grateful for your letter. It gave me a sharp and much deserved jolt. I absolutely agree that it is unnecessary and unkind to hand out my opinions of my colleagues to journalists. It is also pompous. I know by the grace and firmness of your letter that you will forgive me if I have inadvertently hurt you or even irritated you. I think far too highly of you to wish to do either of these things. I regret very much that since we first met years ago we have known each other so little. This at least can be remedied if you are willing. There is so much that I would like to talk to you about, even if our views on plays and playwrights may differ. Please come to lunch with me here either on Monday, Tuesday or Friday of next week or the Monday, Tuesday or Friday of the following week. You see I am pinning you down ruthlessly for the simple reason that I would truly like to see you. Please come. I shall not ask anyone else.
What you said in your letter about admiration and respect is entirely mutual…
Noël
From then on the two men became friends. Osborne went on to say:
“Mr. Coward, like Miss Dietrich, is his own invention and contribution to this century. Anyone who cannot see that should keep well away from the theatre. To be your own enduring invention seems to me to be heroic and essential. Even if you can begin to make it, it seems increasingly impossible.”
•
A WRITER WHO actually did more than Osborne to define the Kitchen Sink school was Arnold Wesker. Instead of being someone from the middle class writing “down” about the “workers,” Wesker was the genuine working-class article and took himself very seriously—as did some of the critics in search of new heroes.
Noël found it absurd to see Wesker compared with the likes of Tolstoy and Dickens, “when he really happens to be an over-earnest little creature obsessed by the wicked capitalists and the wrongs of the world.” But clearly Noël's Sunday Times strictures caught Wesker's eye, and in January 1962 he rang Noël up in Switzerland and asked if he could come over. Intrigued, Noël promptly agreed.
Wesker's mission, it transpired, was to raise funds for Centre 42, a project to bring culture to the masses. Noël would have none of it, but the subsequent discussion on the nature and purpose of theater—particularly Wesker's—proved stimulating.
39 Gloucester Drive
London N.4.
January 10th 1962
Dear Noël,
I regret only one thing—that I hesitated when you asked me whether I loved my wife. To have hesitated was to betray our relationship—it was an unfair question. Otherwise my 36 hour pass was a dream, excepting the drive down to the station of Montreux—that was a nightmare. Thank you for your graciousness and hospitality.
To pursue our discussion another stage—I still don't believe you and your scepticism. God knows what happened to you in early life, but you must have landed yourself among people who (sweetly) ridiculed your earnestness, and you must have vowed pretty violently never to let yourself be vulnerable again. I do not know you well, but no real human being can be cynical without holding a profound belief in something, some values. This is all that cynicism is: damaged belief; real cynicism, that is—the rest is flippancy, passingly amusing, but nothing of account. I do not know you well, but yours must be real cynicism—it stayed with me all the way home. You are the sweetest reactionary I know.