Frances Partridge, The Biography

By Anne Chisholm

Publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2009, 36 pages, ISBN 0297646737, 9780297646730

Everyone who loved reading Frances Partridge's diaries waited for this book with the sort of greed which could only be rewarded with a stomach ache. 

It was widely expected that many of the tantalising gaps Partridge had deliberately left in her published diaries would be filled by the author's access to previously unreleased papers and letters, as well as Frances Partridge's friends and acquaintances and to Frances herself, who co-operated with the writing of the book for several years, until she died in 2004.

Some of the gaps are filled, such as the deaths of her husband and her son (painful events which Frances Partridge edited out of her published diaries), but most are not.  It's impossible not to wonder why or to conclude that the author decided not to include material which would dismay Frances Partridge or her many friends and aquaintances still living.

Ultimately, the biography adds little to the diaries; in fact, it relies heavily on them for content and this defeats its purpose.  Considering Frances Partridge's almost uniquely privileged position as an accute observer of British art, literature, music and society throughout the entire twentieth century, and Anne Chisholm's access to her during the last ears of her life, this biography is cause for significant disappointment.

July 2009

The Letters of Noel Coward

Barry Day (ed.)

Random House Inc., New York, 2007, Hardcover, 800 pages, $37.50, ISBN: 978-0-375-42303-1 (0-375-42303-6)

It's no surprise to that Noel Coward not only wrote notes and letters compulsively, but that he meticulously kept copies of them in a well organized archive so that he could be sure we would have the benefit of reading them decades later.

The trouble is, many of them (in fact most of them) are not worth reading.  Until she died in the 1950s his mother was the main object of his letters and his affections and it is impossible to read the letters to her without feeling slightly nauseated. It's a relief when now and again she attacks him for being pompous or patronising, because in the main he is, not only to her but to, well, almost everyone.

The editor's decision to 'stream' some of the letters into subject matter channels makes the book complicated because this interrupts the chronology, but sometimes this also saves one flipping back and forth to the index to find the next letter dealing with a particular subject. The tale of Coward's friendship with Marlene Dietrich is a good example. We are able to read of her unhappy affair with Yule Brynner without pausing to pant and fumble through the index to find the next lurid instalment (and it is lurid). But this approach destabilises the book's essential continuity.

The non-chronological approach frustrated me less than the inconsistent standard of the letters themselves.  Most are neither intrinsically interesting nor of a publishable standard. To the die hard fans such as the editor is (he has written or edited all of the authoritative works on Noel Coward) this would be no deterrent to enjoyment, but to those of us who love good letters more than we love Noel Coward it is a bore to have to wade through so much of so little consequence.