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A man with the talent to amuse Jonathan Yardley
THE NOEL COWARD READER Edited by Barry Day Knopf. 596 pp. $39.95
S
ince a genuinely satisfactory biography of the great Noel Coward has yet to be written, this compendium of bits and pieces from his massive life’s work can serve as a useful and thoroughly entertaining introduction to that life and work for those who do not know either, as well as a treasured bedside companion for those who do. Coward, who died in March 1973 at the age of 73 (he was a mere 15 days older than the century itself) seems in no danger of vanishing from our collective consciousness, but it is good to have Barry Day’s “Reader” because it covers the full sweep of his career and leaves no doubt as to the depth and
breadth of his accomplishment. Most of those who know his work will agree as to its breadth. Coward wrote numerous plays and several film scripts, musical comedies and revues, many short stories, one novel, two volumes of autobiography (and fragments of a third), melodies and lyrics in profusion and even the occasional poem; he also acted in numerous plays and movies and toward the end of his life became a star of cabaret. But doubtless there is disagreement as to its depth. Certainly he possessed in abundance what he called “a talent to amuse” and could be deliciously, wickedly funny, but too often he is pigeonholed, or dismissed, as a mere entertainer. This completely misses the point that there is nothing “mere” about entertainment when it is done at a level so high and sophisticated as Coward’s. Beyond that he had things to say, mainly about love and its fleshly companion sex, which he called that “sly biological urge,” that often have far more depth and complexity than is commonly found in popular culture. Day tells us that Coward once was asked by a
TV interviewer “to sum up his life in a single word.” The question was met with “an uncharacteristically long pause,” after which he said: “Well, now comes the terrible decision as to whether to be corny or not. The answer is one word. Love. To know that you are among people you love and who love you. That has made all the successes wonderful — much more wonderful than they’d have been anyway.” Instructively, though, Day has placed that quotation immediately after the lyrics of a tart little number called “Bronxville Darby and Joan.” As many Americans may not know, Darby and Joan live in British legend as a happily married old couple who epitomize sentimentality about love and marriage, but in Coward’s hands they become “a dear old couple
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Noel Coward, actor, composer and playwright, at Waterloo train station in London in 1937.
who detest one another,/ We’ve detested one another since our bridal night, / Which was squalid, unattractive and convulsive/ And proved, beyond dispute,/ That we were mutually repulsive.”
Coward was playing that for laughs (in the musical comedy “Sail Away”), but, as in many other places in his work, there’s a biting edge to it. In his splendid comedy “Private Lives,” Amanda and Elyot, once married but now divorced, encounter each other accidentally and agree that “we were so ridiculously over in love,” as Elyot puts it, to which Amanda replies: “Selfishness, cruelty, hatred, possessiveness, petty jealousy. All those qualities came out in us just because we loved each other.” Well, says Elyot, “perhaps they were there anyhow,” and Amanda closes the case: “No, it’s love that does it. To hell with love.” As Day astutely comments: “On an anything-but-superficial level it can be claimed that the play is really about the impossibility of sustaining love. The wit is merely the surface coating to conceal the hurt.” “Private Lives” is a characteristic piece of Cowardiana not merely for its wit and crisp dialogue but because it was written with astonishing speed. This took place in the Far East in 1929, as he tells it in “Present Indicative,” his first volume of autobiography, written eight years later: “A bout of influenza laid me low in Shanghai,
and I lay, sweating gloomily, in my bedroom in the Cathay Hotel for several days. The ensuing convalescence, however, was productive, for I utilized it by writing Private Lives. The idea by now seemed ripe enough to have a shot at, so I started it, propped up in bed with a writing-block and an Eversharp pencil, and completed it, roughly, in four days. It came easily, and with the exception of a few of the usual
LITERARY CALENDAR OCTOBER 18-21, 2010
18 MONDAY 6:30 P.M. Activist and graffiti artist William Upski Wimsatt discusses and signs his new
book, “Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs: A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement,” at Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St. NW, 202-387-7638. 7 P.M. Nicole Krauss reads from and discusses her new novel, “Great House” (short-listed for the National Book Award) at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 “Eye” St. NW, in an event sponsored by Politics and Prose Bookstore. Tickets are $10 each or two free with purchase of the book at P&P; call 202-364-1919 or visit
www.sixthandi.org for details. 19 TUESDAY 10:30 A.M. Caldecott Medal-winning children’s author and illustrator Peter Sís reads from and discusses his new picture book, “Madlenka Soccer Star,” at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-364-1919. A book signing follows. He will return to the store that evening at 7 p.m. for another reading. Noon. The new season of the Library of Congress’s
“Poetry at Noon” series gets underway with “Rhode Island Sampler,” with readings by Rhode Island poet
laureate Lisa Starr, hip-hop poet Charles “Chachi” Carvalho, former state poet laureate Tom Chandler and Amber Rose Johnson, national champion of the Poetry
Out Loud competition, in the Thomas Jefferson Bldg., Whittall Pavilion, 10 First St. SE, 202-707-5394. 20 WEDNESDAY 7 P.M. The University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives presents a discussion by W. Royal Stokes—jazz historian, radio personality, former music writer for The Washington Post and editor of the magazine Jazz Notes as well as author of “The Jazz Scene: An Informal History From New Orleans to 1990” and “Growing Up With Jazz: Twenty Four Musicians Talk About Their Lives and Careers” — as part of its “Jazz Forum” series in the university’s Recital Hall, Building 46-West, 4200 Connecticut Ave. NW. For details, call 202-274-5265 or e-mail
jazzarchives@wrlc.org. 21 THURSDAY Noon. Nora Titone reads from and discusses her new book, “My Thoughts Be Bloody: The
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Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy,” as part of the series “Noon at the National” held at the National Theatre, Helen Hayes Gallery, 1321 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Free tickets will be distributed 30 minutes prior, one ticket per person, on a first-come, first-served basis; for details, call 202-783-3372. She will also speak on Friday at noon at the National Portrait Gallery, Eighth & F Sts. NW in the museum’s bookstore; call 202-633-8300 for details. 7 P.M. Chris Kimball, founder of the magazine Cook’s Illustrated and host of public television’s “America’s Test Kitchen,” discusses and signs his new book, “Fannie’s Last Supper: Re-creating One Amazing Meal From Fannie Farmer’s 1896 Cookbook,” at the Friendship Heights Village Center, 4433 S. Park Ave., Chevy Chase, Md., 301-656-2797.
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AMI VITALE/PANOS PICTURES
BOOK WORLD THIS WEEK
COMING IN STYLE
MONDAY Nicolle Wallace’s thriller Eighteen Acres may be the best novel ever written about life in the White House.
TUESDAY Israeli writer David Grossman’s To the End of the Land is a powerful antiwar novel.
WEDNESDAY A mysterious old desk is at the heart of Nicole Krauss’s Great House, recently nominated for a National Book Award. Actor James Franco takes a bow as a fiction writer with his first story collection, Palo Alto. And our New in Paperback column.
THURSDAY Explorer Richard Burton and poet Algernon Swinburne team up to investigate murder in Mark Hodder’s novel The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack.
FRIDAY The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood, by Barbara Almond, looks at women’s
ambivalent feelings about children and motherhood.
SATURDAY Thomas McGuane’s Driving on the Rim is a risk-taking novel of death and redemption.
voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm
6
Read our blog, Political Bookworm, which focuses on books that stir the national political conversation.
‘blood and tears’ moments, I enjoyed writing it. I thought it a shrewd and witty comedy, well constructed on the whole, but psychologically unstable.” What Coward means by this last is unclear, at least to me, but “shrewd” is precisely the word for this play and so much else that he wrote. His sense of human psychology was acute, every bit as much as that of Oscar Wilde, to whom he can be compared to the benefit of both, though Coward found Wilde overrated. He was as capable as Wilde of writing snappy epigrams, but as his writing matured, “my dialogue was becoming more natural and less elaborate and I was beginning to concentrate more on the comedy values of situation rather than the comedy values of actual lines.” Coward’s finest plays, “Private Lives” and “Blithe Spirit,” rank with Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and have every bit as much staying power, as is attested to by the frequency with which they are still performed by theatrical companies both amateur and professional. As for the rest of Coward’s work, the autobiographies are superb, the short stories rather less so because (oddly, considering that Coward wrote them) there’s too much description and too little dialogue, and the songs are simply out of this world. It’s a pity that a compact disc of “The Noel Coward Album” isn’t included with this volume, because his live recordings from the 1950s in Las Vegas and New York are the definitive interpretations of this sublime (and in many instances sublimely funny) music. The love songs really do need the music as well as the words to convey the full effect, but encountering the lyrics as intermittently reproduced in this collection is invariably a pleasure: “A Room With a View,” “I’ll Follow My Secret Heart,” “Mad About the Boy” and of course, above all, “I’ll See You Again,” which “dropped into my mind, whole and complete,” during a 20-minute New York traffic jam: “Brass bands have blared it, string orchestras
have swooned it, Palm Court quartets have murdered it, barrel organs have ground it out in London squares and swing bands have tortured it beyond recognition. . . . It has proved over the years to be the greatest song hit I have ever had or am ever likely to have . . . and I am still very fond of it and very proud of it.”
With ample reason, but no doubt he was equally proud of his great humorous songs. They’re not patter songs in the Gilbert and Sullivan mode but cleverly constructed narratives in which Coward makes fun of his fellow Englishmen (“Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “The Stately Homes of England,” “I Wonder What Happened to Him”) or tells deliciously risque stories: “Alice Is at It Again,” “Uncle Harry” and, most brilliantly, “A Bar on the Piccola Marina.” My only regret is that Day does not include the lyrics Coward wrote to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It,” the Las Vegas recording of which is an indisputable classic. Yes, that’s a serious omission — “Teenagers squeezed into jeans do it,/ Probably we’ll live to see machines do it” — but it’s the only one that comes to mind. Otherwise thanks are due to Day, whose service in Coward’s behalf has been exemplary — this is the ninth Coward volume he has edited — and is still further burnished with this splendid “Reader.”
yardleyj@washpost.com
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2010
WASHINGTON BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER
FICTION 1 FALL OF GIANTS (Dutton, $36)
2
By Ken Follett. The debut of a historical trilogy following five families through the upheavals of the 20th century.
2 THE REVERSAL (Little, Brown, $27.99) 1
By Michael Connelly. Legal wrangling brings Mickey Haller, his ex-wife and Harry Bosch together on a case.
3 SQUIRREL SEEKS CHIPMUNK (Little, Brown, $21.99) 4 FREEDOM (FSG, $28). By Jonathan Franzen 5 DON’T BLINK (Little, Brown, $27.99) 2
By David Sedaris. Wry, dark animal tales comprise this modern bestiary with illustrations by Ian Falconer.
6
The relentless fracturing of the suburban Berglund family in St. Paul, Minn.; author of “The Corrections.”
2
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6 THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST 7 SAFE HAVEN (Grand Central, $25.99) 8 GETTING TO HAPPY (Viking, $27.95) 9 PAINTED LADIES (Putnam, $26.95) 20
(Knopf, $27.95). By Stieg Larsson. The Millennium Trilogy ends as Salander hunts for her failed assassin.
4
By Nicholas Sparks. An enigmatic young woman arrives in the small North Carolina town of Southport.
5
By Terry McMillan. The lively cast of “Waiting to Exhale” returns 15 years later, and things are rocky.
1
By Robert B. Parker. The late Parker’s final novel finds P.I. Spenser embroiled in a case of priceless art.
10 LEGACY (Delacorte, $28). By Danielle Steel
NONFICTION/GENERAL 1 OBAMA’S WARS (Simon & Schuster, $30)
2
A genealogical quest uncovers a unique history — a Sioux princess who marries a French marquis.
2
By Bob Woodward. An exhaustively researched look at the president as commander in chief.
2 EARTH (THE BOOK) (Grand Central, $27.99) 3 WASHINGTON: A LIFE (Penguin Press, $40) 3
By “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” A cheeky guide to the human race and its myriad accomplishments.
1
By Ron Chernow. A comprehensive, humanizing portrayal of perhaps our most revered Founding Father.
4 AT HOME: A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE 1
(Doubleday, $28.95). By Bill Bryson. An illuminating tour of Bryson’s own home, an English parsonage.
5 THE ROOTS OF OBAMA’S RAGE (Regnery, $27.95)
AGE OF OBAMA (Morrow, $27.99) By Bill O’Reilly. Rehashing familiar themes.
2
By Dinesh D’Souza. A controversial take on how the president’s upbringing colors his perspective.
6 PINHEADS AND PATRIOTS: WHERE YOU STAND IN THE 7 GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS 2011
(Guinness World Records, $28.95). A new design and an emphasis on American-specific stats.
8 THE GRAND DESIGN (Bantam, $28) 5
By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Theories that aim to unravel the nature of existence.
9 BLOODY CRIMES: THE CHASE FOR JEFFERSON DAVIS
AND THE DEATH PAGEANT FOR LINCOLN’S CORPSE (Morrow, $27.99). By James Swanson
10 WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM: THE NATURAL
HISTORY OF INNOVATION (Riverhead, $26.95) By Steven Johnson. The influences that inspire.
Rankings reflect sales for the week ended Oct. 10, 2010. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from Nielsen BookScan. Copyright © 2010 by Nielsen BookScan. (The right-hand column of numbers represents weeks on this list, which premiered in Book World on Jan. 11, 2004. The bestseller lists in print alternate between hardcover and paperback.)
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Monday IN STYLE: Nicolle Wallace
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