That, I suppose, is nothing more than a long-winded way of saying you can't recapture the past. Some of Coward's plays, notably Blithe Spirit and Private Lives, are always being performed in one part of the world or the other. But in reading about them like this you come to a stark realization of how much a part of their times they were.
The author neither overvalues nor dismisses Coward's achievement. As he points out, though Coward's writing grew more polished as the years went along, and though he attempted to change with the times, essentially for almost 50 years he wrote biting satire built on mannered epigrams and gestures and brilliant effects and ripostes. This sort of brittle comedy, born in the 1920s, tends to crumble with age, like the contemporaneous wisecracks of the Algonquin Round Table.
To say this is not to take anything away from Coward's tremendous creative talent. Nor is it to suggest that Hoare's book is less than admirable: as far as recapturing the past goes, Hoare has done as good a job as any biographer, and better than most. If there is any fault, it is that he has the habit of discussing how roles were cast before discussing the plays themselves, which leaves those of us not intimately familiar with the totality of Coward's work temporarily at sea. But it is a minor irritant.
Noel Coward was born in London December 16, 1899. He had distinguished forebears and aristocratic connections on both sides of his family, the Veitches and the Cowards, though his immediate family's fortunes were rather pinched. His ambitious mother, Violet, was intensely devoted to him and remained so all her life, as he did to her. His father, Arthur, tends to fade into the wallpaper.
Coward was attracted to and proficient at music and the theater from an early age. He was extremely precocious. He had his first role at 10, and was basically never off the stage after that.
He was also attracted to -- and, one might even add, proficient at -- men from an early age. The central fact of Coward's life and of this book, aside from his artistic ability, is his homosexuality. Whether or not he was physically homosexual while in his teens, it is a fact, Hoare says, that early on he drifted into gay, not to mention pedophiliac, circles.
Throughout his life he had several long-lasting (if not entirely faithful) relationships with male lovers, and uncountable one-night stands with both the unknown and the famous-including Michael Redgrave, whose future wife, Rachel Kempson, was most upset one night during World War II when Redgrave chose to go off with Coward rather than her.
While Coward deplored the stigma attached to homosexuality, he chose not to make a public issue of it (not that anyone could during most of his lifetime). This was in keeping with Coward's surprising conventional streak. We don't usually associate conventionality with a man considered the supreme sophisticate, whose plays mocked the establishment, but one of the values of Hoare's book is that it shows us how stoutly Coward could support the status quo.
For deep in his heart was a brass-bound Englishman with a fervent belief in the values of the British way of life, never more so than in Cavalcade, This Happy Breed, and the wartime film, In Which We Serve. This, too, is connected to an overlooked and equally surprising thread in his makeup that Hoare picks up again and again: "Coward remained essentially childish throughout his life"; he always had a "deep nostalgia for his short-lived boyhood." The critic Kenneth Tynan saw it as a key to both Coward's personality and his success: "Noel Coward never suffered the imprisonment of maturity."
He could be vain, bad tempered, and selfish, as well as kind and charming. By the age of 25 he was, through his own hard work and talent, rich and famous, and he remained rich and famous until he died in Jamaica on March 26, 1973. By that time, according to the picture Hoare draws, he seemed both happy with his life and ready to leave it.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.