by Noel Coward
Let me hear from you. Just an ordinary love letter will do.
NOËL
Apparently undeterred and unoffended, Albee and several colleagues proposed to stage a Coward repertory season in the fall of the following year—though for one reason or another, it never came to pass.
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NOëL'S NATURAL EQUILIBRIUM was always to be found on the English stage, and he kept in touch with those who made an impact on it over the years.
Among those was Margaret Kennedy (1896—1967)—in whose 1926 The Constant Nymph he had briefly and uncomfortably starred. After the Sunday Times articles she wrote to him:
180 Oakwood Court
London W.14
January 15 th 1961
My dear Noël,
I venture to put this point to you: The decline of the Drama is nobody's fault, and neither the dramatist nor the critic can do very much about it. This epoch is extremely unpropitious to all the arts; they are all in the doldrums, and all for the same reason.
Comedy is out. It is essentially good humoured and genial. It needs institutions, social, moral, etc., which are so well established and so much respected that everybody can afford to laugh at them. On se moque de ce qu'on aime, Roman Catholics are able to make irreverent jokes which shock Protestants and scandalise atheists.
Tragedy is out. It always implies some recognition of the essential nobility of Man. Man, at the moment, is not inclined to see himself as noble. He has a lot on his conscience and he may shortly be going to wipe himself out with a great big bang—or, as our poets [T S. Eliot] prefer to believe, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
What is left to the dramatist? Either farce, the resource of people who “laugh but smile no more,” or some kind of tract—some petulant scrutiny of a mess.
It's not the critic's fault. Critics don't produce artists. Artists produce critics. Both flourish and decline together. Art and criticism have in the past been through these bleak, undernourished periods, though never before … in such an atmosphere of “smirking self congratulation”.
It's this smug complacency, as though Angst were not a regrettable disease but a State of Grace, that can perhaps be attacked. Also the tendency to use “skill” and “entertainment” as terms of derogation. If art is going through a hard time, let's all say so, and keep on keeping on, as best we can, until the times mend.
Yours ever,
MARGARET KENNEDY
Oxford don and historian A. L. Rowse was of a similar mind:
July 18th 1962
We live in a time that is utterly antipathetic to the creative in the arts and … for a reason very relevant to the arts—the whole atmosphere of self-conscious, destructive, constant niggling critically is frightfully unpropitious psychologically to creation. If they were really clever they would see the point. The Elizabethan age was quite the other way: hardly any criticism, and a really clever man like Shakespeare—a damn sight cleverer, really, than any of the critical intelligences—could go forward naturally to create all the time. It did not mean that he was uncritical: far from it (e.g., his remarks on the technique of acting in Hamlet), but that he could use his critical faculty to aid his creation, refine the points, clear up the difficulties, resolve the problems.
Now, Criticism is an end in itself. And the whole circumstances of our bloody time and society immensely increase the strangle hold of the middle-men in the arts—newspapers, broadcasts, sessions of The Critics to criticize the Critics—and now trebled with TV!
In addition to sensitiveness and perception, our stock-in-trade, we have also today to be bloody-minded. Be Bloody-Minded! (Write a song about bloody-mindedness!)
On top of all the other boredoms, the contemporary tone is so portentous, no sense of humour, otherwise they wouldn't go on as they do. What is there worth reading that comes from them, compared with the 1920s? We had Hardy, Kipling, Shaw, Wells, Yeats still all writing, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Eliot, Aldous Huxley— something to excite one every publishing season. What's in a publishing season today’?
•
WHETHER NOëL FOUND himself dealing with Angry Young Men or Anguished Older Ladies, the common denominator that had to be present was talent,
Enid Bagnold (1899—1991) was a writer who had started out as a novelist—Serena Blandish (1924) and National Velvet (1935)—before deciding to concentrate on writing plays. Her first major success came with the 1956 The Chalk Garden, in both London and New York, and she always credited Noël with helping to make it so.
Rottingdean
Sussex
June 10th 1956
My dear Noël,
I just wanted to say how you were the first to put the sword on my shoulder … the accolade. Up till that moment I had thought The Chalk Garden doomed. We had an awful out of town experience, rumours flying back to New York how bad we were … crows settling on the grave. Then girding oneself for the first night. Then coma. Apathy …
Enid Bagnold (1899-1991) to Noël: “I had thought The Chalk Garden doomed. Then your voice. ‘For those who love words,
darling.’ … it was my Mescaline, my Happiness Pill.”
Then your voice. “For those who love words, darling …” you were saying, “for those who love words …” and you turned round and saw me in the gangway and kissed me. It was at the end of the first act. It was the first, first blessing I got and I shall never forget it. It carried with it all the glamour of your reputation, all the light intoxicated airy hopes I had twenty years ago … of pulling this off… it was my Mescaline, my Happiness Pill …
Antoine Bibesco used to say to me “Hurry, hurry! Success is only fun when you are young.” In a way he was right. Here am I—the owner of a success. Haymarket full to choking and steady as a rock. Play starting two tours in America … and how much does it do for me? I garden, I muse sadly with disbelief. Can I ever do it again? Was it I who did it? I—fat, old and grey … True the money comes in, but you know what happens to the money.
I am stunned and used up … but perhaps not for ever.
Anyway I send this to you, my deep thanks, with love.
Yours,
ENID
In later letters she was not too proud to ask for advice:
29 Hyde Park Gate
S.W.7.
December 26th 1958
… I've been battling with another play for the past two and a half years, and it's as unclear and hazy and rambling as ever. I never seem to learn to make a clear statement. When I have a theme—it shines—and I move towards it slowly and I find I am moving into the heart of a dark, dark wood (after a year's work) and then it takes me another year to hack my way out into clarity.
In 1960 her latest play, The Last Joke, was dismantled by the London critics. Noël found it “elegant, unreal, impeccably acted [by Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson] and, on the whole, enjoyable. First act excellent, but no play really. Some lovely stylized language, lovely set, and good acting, but it really won't do.” His own play in that same year, Waiting in the Wings, had suffered a similar critical drubbing.
Rottingdean
Sussex
October 3rd 1960
Dearest Noël,
Well, we've both been battered. But you are so full one can't get a seat. I've had a battering filled with hate. Hate because I had too much. Too many Knights, too much “lavish” … even married to a knight myself [Sir Roderick Jones] … Luckily it was so unanimous and such an onslaught that I couldn't feel a thing. As I told the News of the World when they rang up to know what suffering felt like—“ If you take too big a dose of calomel it goes right through you …”
I always remember your accolade in New York—“ For those who love words, darling!” Well, it's words now that they hate most of all. I forgive them hating my lack of clarity. I know that's a grave fault. But they hate and quote the words they hate and they are good ones! …
Love,
ENID
Noël took the trouble to write to her with his an
alysis of what he felt was wrong with her latest play. She replied to thank him for doing so and asked for future guidance.
Rottingdean
Sussex
Friday, Nov. 4, 1960
Dear Noël,
I read your letter which came this morning—with great comfort. First—in Switzerland—you are indignant with the critics, for me, and say you will see the play when you go to London. Next—you go and see it. Thirdly—you spot the trouble at once. I think it's coming off soon—but it's a real comfort to me that you confirm the worst trouble—the third act. It's always been the trouble.
In my daring moment, when I thought I held all power in my hands (i.e., at the conception—and before the play was written) it seemed to me I could pull it off. The third act had to be “out of this world” … i.e., halfway to heaven … i.e., (as it turned out)—a thing without a backbone … moony-mad. I thought I could reproduce, dramatically, that moment—alcohol, mescalin, vision … which trembles in me when I see a seagull swoop off a chimney pot and realise momentarily that there are experiences that living people never have.
But how can one do that in a play? In a poem, perhaps. But in a play—which has to go through God knows what and who knows what before it gets upright or even into rehearsal, let alone what it goes through after. I wrote 16 bloody third acts and by that time the quiver had gone out of every word and only the foolishness remained.
I am now going to bore you, perhaps. Don't bother to answer. I'm just thinking aloud. You have written so many plays and have kept them so beautifully in one mood from the beginning to the end, and obviously said what you wanted to say and not made vague hits at an ideal that hasn't come off… (you see I am going to ask for advice) … how do you manage to keep a play growing if you have already foreseen the end? And—if one doesn't foresee the end—then all is a gamble. I foresee something luminous but infinitely hazy, which recedes as I climb towards it. It recedes walking backwards, and often falls over its draperies into a ditch. This is what has happened this time.
Do you get all clear before you start? … But oh, I know it's no use asking. Every mind is an island on its own. And mine's a jungle without a clearing—where tropical plants grow—unstaked— throttling each other …
There! Don't bother. Nothing can be communicated. One is alone with the Thing.
Now I'm on another and I wake up in the night and say “What's the third act” and have a small nightmare and go to sleep again.
What one needs is to be the Goncourts. It seems to me it is vital to have two people working. But they must be a magic pair. One must be logical, the other not. One must have a million plots: the other only themes. And yet both must come out of the same mould— imagination. Bless you.
Love,
ENID
Rottingdean
Sussex
November 16, 1960
Dear Noël,
I was electrified yesterday morning. And now I'll make double use of “electrified” (since I've said it) and say you turned a current on over a system. Because that's what it felt like. I've been feeling dead and doubtful and suddenly, from Switzerland, through the post, came the “charge”.
So many thoughts evoked at once. To make the shape? Or to travel inside? That you dealt with. “Make the shape”—you say, and very firmly. What delights above all that this very year you say you've made a hash and had to throw away. Comforted isn't the word.
My God, what a job it is to write a play. First there's the theme. (Not so difficult because that's the thing that generally starts one off). Then there's the plot … and I see that quickly, too—but only a little way. Then there are the inhabitants. Generally I get one splendid one and forget the others have to stand up to that quality too. Then the beasts won't talk all at once. And yet when I pick up peoples’ plays it all seems so straight ahead and easily-developed. I have piles here. Bjornson, Strindberg, Pirandello … (Six As in search of is a pretty bitter one—about the actors, isn't it?)
I'll tell you a terrible dark secret … a poison I learnt from Irene S. [Selznick] I admire her so much in many ways, but the more you admire someone who isn't absolutely breathing the same air as you are the worse for you it is. She made me (in Chalk G, days) almost unable to write a speech that was longer than two lines. And she hashed them about so that they belonged to anyone and even cut the speeches in half and gave half away across the table. I got them nearly all back in the end, after endless arguments, some tearful and some rude and some almost shouting … but it's left me with a terrible doubt about “where do you put the words?” I mean a phrase seems as good here—as there. Once you begin that (coupled with cutting and pasting) and you're in the bag (of doubt).
Yes, I've been buggered about. Charles Laughton, Irene, John G. [Gielgud] … Glen [Byam Shaw, the director] … You are quite right. I really think a play had better be wrong than not out of one mind. And God knows how strange it is what goes home. You can say little odd things, bits of observation, trumpery nothings, and suddenly the stupidest person laughs as well as the most intelligent. The mind seems to be open at odd corners. You never know who will understand what. So it's really safest not to bother but to go on with the stuff one's got—the stuff one can make oneself. And what a box of tricks it is (the mind) and how little one knows how it works. I'm reading your book [Pomp and Circumstance} now (at night … and at four this morning) and the things that make me laugh are odd juxtapositions of thought … something tipped against something … like a spoon standing up against a jug. It's got to be done by intuition (yours, too, is so done) and that's the horror of play writing— that intuition is so frail, so evanescent, lets one down, and yet is the only thing that counts. Alas, my words never “tumble in.” They groan out like old winches, rusty by the sea.
How can you know so much about the way mothers think? All those reflections of the heroine about her children, the rueful sighs … and goodness how well done the husband-wife relationship. I was reading at four this morning (pills no use) the bit about them both in bed, and Robin catching her ankle just before the maid swam in. The steadfast affection so beautifully under done, so that you trust them both—and trust them to say the riskiest things (that might undo it). The peculiar dry governess character of the heroine … (that is her own way of half hiding from me that she is beautiful and not governessy at all, and not dry). I imagine Mrs. What's her name, you only mention her name once and as it was the middle of the night I've forgotten it … to be a tremendous charmer. How wonderful to be able to bring that off while “full-facing” the lady. I find it's the people caught sideways who surprise one by growing unseen.
The “women relationships” together are delicious. I haven't got to Eloise's arrival yet. I'm panting for her. There's a rueful woman-pact about the lady and her chosen friends (as against the women-decor-people) which doesn't exclude the men they love. It's marvellously inside a woman's mind. The chores and the oil needed on the seat and the evoked domesticity without cataloguing it and the bits of moments alone and the odd things relished. I adore your book. And, thank God it's nice and long and more nights to come. It's downstairs and I made a note or two of what I specially liked. I'll add it at the end.
Back to plays. I feel a terrible need for two people to write a play. It's like a session at Scotland Yard. There are always two men who talk over the crime and one sees holes in the chain of reasoning that the other doesn't.
My trouble is that I have a sort of instinct for dramatic situations but they get left about undeveloped. “More mileage needed,” as Irene says. But oh, that isn't the only trouble. How much I need to do what you say and advise. How I'll try. In fact I have (since your letter) decided to abandon the second act of the mountain-of-trouble I'm building and get on and finish the third. I long to bore a clear mind like yours and see if I can get this theme into two lines for you and plot into ten lines … here and now. I'd like to bounce my ideas against you—like a ball on a wall. I'm doing it for me. You needn't even read. T
hrow away. But shivering against that critical face on the back of the book (it doesn't look critical there but I know it is) I might really come up with something hard … vomit a structure.
Now this is what one can't do in a damn play … follow one's twitching nose as you've followed yours, and all the minute seemingly unmentionable-worthy details and things felt to spring up and wave like delicate grasses. Everyone when they read a novel like this waves to the author as they read. Chunnering with murmurs … “I know! I know” Every page simply drips with things accurately felt and seen. They all live so brilliantly.