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.