The subtitle of Oliver Soden’s biography of Noël Coward suggests that the reader will be presented with versions of Coward and be talked through each. This reader could discern only one life: that of performer. Although he made the occasional departure from the world of greasepaint – such as when he worked for the government before and during the Second World War – his life was basically one massive act of self-reinvention from struggling actor living with his parents in Clapham to great creator, churning out plays, songs and revues from a house in Belgravia. That gives us the measure of him. The real question is whether he is worth the extensive and scholarly treatment that Soden provides. 

Coward was born in Teddington in 1899 and died of heart failure in Jamaica in 1973; this book appears on the fiftieth anniversary of his demise. He instinctively wanted to perform almost as soon as he could walk, and in that regard he was fortunate to have a mother, Violet, who did everything to ensure he achieved his ambitions. There were setbacks: Violet’s hopes that her son would join the choir of the Chapel Royal were dashed when, to her horror, he failed the audition. But he was soon playing child parts in professional productions, notably Slightly in Peter Pan, and what he lacked in conventional talent he made up for with his unconventional wit and sheer gumption. Violet (his father, Arthur, a piano salesman, has a marginal role in this book and therefore, one presumes, played a small part in his life) seems not to have minded when, in the summer before the First World War, Philip Streatfeild, a society painter and a much older man, whisked Noël, aged fourteen, off to Cornwall as his companion. Men are, quite rightly, arrested for such things these days. 

Much of what Soden traverses is familiar ground. His book is at its most fascinating when he deals with Coward’s early years, which are relatively unfamiliar. Coward was never conventionally educated, and his facility with the English language appears to have come from a late spurt of autodidacticism, mainly involving reading novels (he had a lifelong love of E Nesbit). He frequently played truant from the schools he did attend, appearing impatient from about the age of eleven to be grown up and out in the world. When he got acting opportunities, he seemed to find it difficult to treat the directors with respect, so it was just as well that he had the talent to branch out on his own. As he grew older he became, to use a loose political term, rather right wing, eyeing his considerable riches as a capitalist would, but when starting out he saw nothing wrong with shoplifting or stealing to keep himself going. His mother even encouraged him in this. The great embarrassment of his youth came when, having been called up in 1918 after the German spring offensive, he appears to have engineered a nervous breakdown in order to avoid having to go anywhere near the front. 

When, after he had achieved success, high society and royalty began to show him favour (Louis Mountbatten seems to have been almost a groupie), this former shirker became deeply patriotic and imperialistic. Having visited India during the Second World War, he concluded that it would be impossible for its people to govern themselves at any time in the succeeding hundred years, and regarded Gandhi’s assassination as ‘a bloody good thing but far too late’. Doubtless that would be enough to have him cancelled today, though Coward did express outrage when Princess Margaret was told, on a visit to the Caribbean, that she was not to dance with any black men. 

Coward was never ‘out’ as a homosexual, and Soden is appropriately discreet in his treatment of his subject’s private life. There was a succession of inamorati through his adulthood, starting with his business partner Jack Wilson (who ended up embezzling from him) and finishing with his protégé Graham Payn. En route there were affairs with Michael Redgrave and others. Soden rightly avoids unnecessary speculation. When John Gielgud was arrested for cottaging in 1953, Coward expressed his love and support, but in private said what a bloody fool he was. That just about sums it up.

What made Coward’s fortune was not his mannered style as an actor or his unique style as a singer of popular ditties but his energy as a writer. He produced plays and revues, and later contributed to screenplays, with a ferocious determination. He could not read a word of music but played by ear and invented his own style of song – usually comic – that became his calling card. Soden depicts a man driven more by self-belief than by distinct talent. In 1921, when he was only twenty-one and had hardly had anything performed in the West End, Coward took himself off to New York, slept on sofas, crashed parties and aggressively inserted himself into Broadway and the world around it. When he returned to Britain later in the 1920s, he did so in considerable style; the press started paying him attention and people were keen to know him. And he soon knew everybody (he and one friend, Laurence Olivier, used ‘cunt’ as a term of mutual endearment).

The 1920s were his golden age. In the summer of 1925, four of his plays were running in the West End, led by The Vortex, the successful staging of which proved a turning point. There were failures – in 1927 he was booed off the stage by the audience of his play Sirocco, starring Ivor Novello – but generally he kept giving birth to drawing-room comedies and revues with jolly songs that cheered people up. One is tempted to say that his work fitted in with the flavour of the times, but Coward to a great extent dictated the flavour of the times. Profound he was not, and on occasion Soden in his thoughtful analysis of Coward’s various works treats him with more respect than he probably deserves. Having a facility is not the same as having an insight.

During the Second World War Coward, to his credit, tried to serve his country (although went about doing so in a flamboyant way that irritated Churchill) by carrying out propaganda work in Paris before the fall of France and then urging the Americans to come into the war. Soden suggests that he may have felt guilty about his inadequate performance in 1918 and for that reason extensively entertained the troops. This was also a period of four great feature film successes, several of which were adaptations of his own plays: In Which We Serve, in which he plays a ludicrous palimpsest of his friend Mountbatten; This Happy Breed, a period piece but also a useful document of a social climber’s perception of the class from which he had come; Blithe Spirit, one of his most enduring and penetrating comedies; and the ineffable Brief Encounter.

After the war, Coward’s popularity went into decline: the world he had latched on to no longer existed, the market for his work contracted, and first Terence Rattigan and then the Angry Young Men took over. However, he had a remarkable renaissance in Las Vegas as a cabaret star, which at least shows what a performer he remained. Otherwise, he spent more and more time in tax exile in his boltholes in Jamaica and Switzerland. His last great cameo came in 1969 in The Italian Job, where he could be found sitting on a lavatory. By then his health, undermined by decades of smoking, was showing him the red card.

Soden is to be congratulated on his scholarship and on writing lucidly. His book has its irritations: he injects passages at the beginning and end of each section that resemble the scripts of plays, and though he might have thought it a good idea to represent Coward’s death in a playlet at the end of the book, I suspect many readers will disagree. Even so, his biography will endure. How much of Coward will is another matter. Some of his work retains popularity, but much of what he wrote looks more and more like it is from another planet, samey, undemanding and trivial, designed to amuse a cadre of people who ceased to exist ninety years ago. Most Coward plays seem to have little to say apart from the bleeding obvious. He is perhaps destined to become one of those great writers whom all have heard of but whose works few have read or seen. That, however, will not be the fault of his latest biographer.