The Letters of Noel Coward Book

This is the kind of book I'll buy and set on a table to read over time. Cloudy days come. The persistent sniffle. Some long wait for a package or a plumber or a pot of Hungarian stew. Baseball. And I'll reach for a book like this, a collection of letters to fill the odd hour; a temporary placement of mind. Correspondence, especially a lifetime's worth, affords that kind of negligent commitment. You can put it down and pick it up again without stretching for the strands of a plot or struggling for a character's name. Actually, it's a lot like going to the mailbox.

Noel Coward - playwright, actor, composer, wit and all-around bon vivant - lived most of his long and well-documented life in the playing fields of the entertainment industry. I had imagined this would mean his letters would be filled with lots of great celebrity dish, but it's really not that at all. While he's fierce and funny and cutting on occasion, these are much more dispatches from the combat zone of a ridiculously brilliant career. He was constantly writing new works, negotiating contracts, mounting plays, mediating temperaments, mending fences and waiting, on pins and needles, for the dreaded critical review. The man, even at rest, seemed to be forever in motion.

What I found most poignant were the months he spent at the outset of World War II, travelling the globe in an attempt to drum up support for Britain - with a few secret meetings on the side. Half ambassador, half British agent; he was certainly of the belief he'd been recruited by the government, and yet that effort went unrecognized. Rumor had it Churchill himself blocked any honor that may have been accorded for this service, and it cut Coward to the quick. His correspondence betrays the briefest of breaks in that legendary bravado. Also deserving of mention are several letters he composed to confront those who had disappointed him - actors and agents for the most part, and for the most part friends. These are masterpieces of gently-held fury: precise, practical, firm, and startlingly diplomatic. All the offender could feel at the end of such a communique was profoundly apologetic. Noel was so obviously in the right, and so obviously taking the high road, all the damn time.

Barry Day, who has edited this work, houses each missive in context and produces the relevant photographs to fully capture the mood. I feel obliged to warn you there are 756 pages here. It took me a year. (Although I'm fairly sure Mr. Coward, wherever he may be at this moment, is chuckling in genuine pleasure with that news.)