Mad Dogs and Blithe Spirits

By Gerald Clarke

THE NOEL COWARD DIARIES

Edited by Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley

Little, Brown; 698 pages; $22.50

Approaching 62 and suffering from one of his recurring periods of unpopularity, Noel Coward sat down for a heart-to-heart with the wisest man he knew. "I don't care for the present trends either in literature or the theater," he confessed. "Pornography bores me. Squalor disgusts me. Garishness, vulgarity and commonness of mind offend me." Was it possible, he asked, that he was out of touch with the new decade of the '60s?

The answer was a resounding no, and that wise gentleman--the selfsame Noel Coward--assured him that it was not he who was out of touch; it was the decade. And he was right, as he so often is in this wicked, witty and refreshingly sane volume of diaries. Much of the work he so archly deplored has already been forgotten, while his own plays continue to please and delight, as they probably will for as long as audiences enjoy laughing. Present Laughter (1942), with George C. Scott, is one of this year's Broadway hits, and just two weeks ago, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton announced that they will team up once again to do a Broadway revival of Private Lives (1930), which will probably always stand as the quintessential Coward play: sophisticated, charming and cynical, with dialogue so sharp it instantly carves itself into each generation's memory.

But Coward, like all great writers of comedy, was not just a funny man. He was a supreme realist, who saw the humor, or the absurdity, in most human situations. When his good friend Clifton Webb mourns over the death of his mother, Coward is, for instance, properly sympathetic. To his journal, however, he expresses his impatience: "Poor Clifton is still, after two months, wailing and sob bing over Maybelle's death. As she was well over 90, gaga, and had driven him mad for years, this seems excessive and overindulgent. He arrives here on Monday [Dec. 19] and I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas."

His weather prediction proves accurate, and on Christmas Day he writes: "[Clifton] has devoted a lot of time to weeping and telling very, very long stories about the various deaths of his various beloved friends. He retails these gruesome memories with a wealth of maudlin detail. How he first heard the dreadful news of their demises, how he reacted, how they were laid out, how the memorial services were conducted, etc. These slow, slow ramblings inevitably end up with Maybelle . .. and then he breaks down and sobs and we all gaze at each other in wild surmise. He admitted to me under a pledge of deep secrecy the other morning that he was 71. I expressed token amazement because the poor dear looks and behaves like 90. There is much that is sweet about him, but he is, and always has been, almost intolerably silly."

Most of his other friends he surveys with the same binary vision. He admires Margaret Leighton both personally and professionally; but when she divorces Laurence Harvey, he listens politely to her complaints, then writes in his diary how "it saddens me to see how these silly ladies muck up their lives. The moment they get their hooks into the gentleman of their choice they proceed assiduously to bash the whole thing to pulp with their tantrums and exigence ... It really isn't surprising that homosexuality is becoming as normal as blueberry pie."

Even Gertrude Lawrence, one of his greatest friends and favorite acting partners during the '20s and '30s, receives a small jab from the Coward scalpel. When she vacillates about accepting a part, he directs her husband "to tell Gertie to mind her manners and that if she wants another play from me she can fish for it." Yet when she dies a year or so later, he breaks down: "With all her overactings and silliness I have never known her to do a mean or an unkind thing. I am terribly, terribly unhappy to think that I shall never see her again."

He is as generous in praise, indeed, as he is in criticism, and he seems overall to be kind, without spite or envy. He appreciates good acting and treasures fine writing, in prose as well as dialogue. First and foremost, he loves the theater. He concludes a description of a delightful party by saying that there were few "civilians"--people from outside the theater.

Supremely confident in his own talent, he often pauses to massage his own ego. He says that he is rereading, with immense enjoyment, his own "excellent autobiography," Present Indicative. He views with admiration his newest play, telling himself that "it is a truly wonderful gift, my natural and trained gift for dialogue." When one of his plays is panned on Broadway, he retorts: "It cannot be anything but personal. No one in their sane senses could say the lyrics and music of The Girl Who Came to Supper were not good. They are good. Very good indeed."

Yet he is as accurate and candid about himself as he is about everyone else, and over and over he owns up to occasions when his initial enthusiasm led him astray. An early version of Island Fling "really wasn 't good enough and was curiously overwritten," he decides. "I seem, in later years, to have lost my gift for economy. This has been, and in the future must continue to be, remedied." It is a rare writer who is his own best critic.

The diaries begin in 1941, when Cow ard was 41, and end in 1969, three years before he died of a heart attack at Firefly, his beloved home in Jamaica. There are long, flat passages, and many entries are no more interesting than last year's society column. But these stretches are as much a part of a life, even a life like Coward's, as the glittering ones, and the diaries should be read whole or not at all. Coward was not a butterfly but a worker bee. During his 73 years, he turned out more than 50 plays, half a dozen books, many short stories, innumerable essays and reviews, and songs as varied as Mad Dogs and Englishmen and I'll Follow My Secret Heart. He also found time to act, perform in cabaret and direct. He may have partied at night, but he always composed the morning after.

Even talking to himself, Coward avoids garishness, vulgarity and commonness of mind, and references to his own sex life are usually oblique and always discreet. In one entry, in which he takes a splenetic swipe at Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot ("pretentious gibberish"), he goes on to attack Mary Renault's The Charioteer. "Oh dear," he says, "I do, do wish well-intentioned ladies would not write books about homosexuality. It takes the hero -- soidisant -- 300 pages to reconcile himself to being queer as a coot, and his soul-searching and deep, deep introspection is truly awful. There are 'queer' parties in which everyone calls everyone 'my dear' a good deal, and over the whole book is a shimmering lack of understanding of the subject. I'm sure the poor woman meant well but I wish she'd stick to re-creating the glory that was Greece and not muck about with dear old modern homos."

"Ah me! This growing old!" he says as he turns into his 60s. "I suppose I should envy the afterlife believers, the genuflectors, the happy-ever-after ones who know beyond a shadow of doubt that we shall all meet again in some celestial vacuum, but I don't. I'd rather face up to finality and get on with life, lonely or not, for as long as it lasts." Perhaps that cool, rather brave philosophy explains why he never in fact did grow old, and why the best of his work remains ever fresh and, like the title of one of his best plays, full of blithe spirit.

--By Gerald Clarke

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