The war emerges as the true watershed for Coward (‘We won the war. My concern is — how shall we win the peace?’ he asks Joyce Carey). Revealingly, he lets slip to his ex-lover and American business partner Jack Wilson that the theatre’s doings ‘no longer matter quite so much as they did’. Gradually he moved away from England geographically — to Jamaica and Switzerland — and spiritually, retreating often in his work into the Victorian past (Quadrille, Pacific 1860), increasingly set in the aspic of his imaginary tropical colony of Samolo, his private Never Never Land. His plays (but not, intriguingly, his songs, which remained spring-heeled to the last) bloated as his comedic arteries hardened.
It was T. E. Lawrence who spotted that Coward, although no intellectual, had ‘a hasty kind of genius’, writing to him of Private Lives: ‘Your work is like swordplay; as quick as light.’ Day illustrates that this pace and economy emerged from Coward’s earliest, impecunious visits to New York. Writing to director Basil Dean, a powerful figure in 1920s theatre, if never light of touch, he instructed him briskly to direct the next Coward venture ‘with three times the speed and finesse’ of the last.
This fizzing, concentrated energy fuses the best of this selection. There is rather too much of Dietrich’s lachrymose screeds (‘my exalted friend of the soul,’ she addresses Coward, ever loyal but not blind to her lack of humour) bemoaning her lovers’ indifference, while Gertrude Lawrence’s letters tend towards theatrical parish-pumpery. Overall, however, Day’s choices are admirably wide-ranging, the many illustrations (including a generous selection of caricatures) often unfamiliar or previously unseen.
Coward clearly enjoyed settling down to write his letters — whether in London, New York, China, Paris, South America or the South Seas (he adored travel, particularly by sea, whether on transatlantic luxury liner or on the Indian Ocean on a tramp steamer ‘no bigger than a channel boat and loaded with salt fish and Ford cars’) — and the trademark crisp terseness makes one further regret the extinction of the telegram, of which he was always fond. Day includes several, including one from Istanbul (‘I AM KNOWN AS ENGLISH DELIGHT’), and another, flu-stricken, from Florence (‘AM COUGHING MYSELF INTO A FIRENZE’).
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