Word: cowardly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...