Noel Coward; “Private Lives: An Amalgam of Opposites.”

 

Noel Coward; “Private Lives: An Amalgam of Opposites.”

An exploration of the relationship between Noel Coward and his characters in Private Lives (1930) and his plays of the 1920s.

How seriously can we take Noel Coward? Private Lives, his most critically acclaimed work, has, it seems, “no plot, no characters, no theme, and no apparent purpose” (Brustein1992) and his biographer, Philip Hoare, isn’t sure that Coward had “any purpose in life beyond entertaining.”  If Coward’s intention in his early plays was to simply “gratify middle-brow fascination with supposed leisure-class behaviour” (Sinfield 1991), Private Lives is then, arguably, just another frivolous, commercial exercise.  Yet this view does not sit easily with us today.  Coward was, perhaps, being self-deprecating when he claimed that “the most I’ve had is just a talent to amuse”. Yet despite his frivolous tone and pace, his work has a potency that encourages us to read a little more carefully than perhaps was intended (or, even, expected) by Coward himself.

The Demands of a New Decade

Coward’s plays of the ‘twenties capture the behaviour of a slice of society which can afford to embrace the freedoms engendered by post-war optimism. His characters, largely the idle rich, play at being creative and, worse, believe that, as “artists”, they have a right to be both critically acclaimed and paid ( John Lahr called this the “the egotism of the talentocracy”).  These dilettantes are grouped by Coward in dysfunctional family groups, but we are never sure whether the dysfunction causes or is caused by their overwhelming failure to contribute to society.   The conflict created by the pressures of their so-called “work” and the emotional demands of their domestic arrangements provides much of the dramatic tension and comedy in early plays such as Hay Fever (1925).  

The austerity foreseen by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 seems to have encouraged reflection in Coward.  The threat of imminent world-wide social upheaval led him to re-examine his attitude towards his characterisations.  In Private Lives, there are no retired actresses  like in Hay Fever or struggling pianists, as in The Vortex and Bittersweet (1929). Social context is stripped away; parents and children are noticeably absent.   Amanda and Elyot, thus exposed, stand or fall by their own actions. Coward bypasses all possible excuses and requires audiences to respond directly to the blinkered egotism of the idle rich in a world facing a new morality.  Scratching the surface, their flippancy indicates what a lifestyle of decadent, aimless self-indulgence can lead to.  The raison d’etre of the idle rich (typified by the likes of Amanda and Elyot) is challenged by a general feeling that hedonism may well be last year’s craze.  The demands of the new decade seem likely to prove challenging.  Just as Isherwood is to foreshadow the gloomy rise of National Socialism in Europe, Coward reveals the ‘dark amusements’ of his smart set, who live a correspondingly depressing reality, barely hidden beneath the surface of bon mots and frantic partying.

No Sense of Reflection

“He believed in an absolute discipline…Noel worked  eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day” (Farley)

Throughout the ‘twenties, Coward’s trademark was his presentation of those with money and time who had become cast morally adrift.  Elyot’s careless philosophy in Act Two of Private Lives (“Be flippant! Laugh at everything!”) reinforces this archetype and in many ways defines the decade alongside Bertie Wooster and The Great Gatsby.  As in Gatsby, when hedonism’s regularly replenished sparkles  face ever-diminishing returns, all that is left for Coward’s party animals are their empty relationships with each other.  They don’t realise the irony of this, of course.  As the “futile moralists” are upbraided and they excuse their excesses,  the ‘take us for what we are’ line wears thin, as does the joke about enjoying life’s party like “small, quite idiotic school children”.  But there’s no sense of reflection here.

 Neither Elyot or Amanda can quite grasp the enormity of their lack of self-awareness.  Elyot cannot see that his bizarre threats of violence (“I’ll murder you!...) are directly and darkly related to his intolerance and physical abuse of Amanda, and we wonder where this will lead. While Amanda often recognises her inconsistencies (“I’m not so sure I’m normal”),  she is incapable of doing much about them.  At times, we are tempted to believe that there is a conscience lurking within; she concedes, with concern for Victor and Sybil, “We ought to be absolutely tortured…”; yet four lines later, says, unfeelingly, “We sent a nice note…what more can they want?”   Her excuse, that “ I’m so apt to see things the wrong way round”,  is self-indulgent and unconvincing. Elyot (“I’ll take back anything, as long as you stop bellowing at me…” ) cannot even begin to reflect and hides behind flippancy, while Amanda’s scruples are merely a flash of a scrap of dormant morality, quickly forgotten.   What does this mean for the Amandas and Elyots of Coward’s world?  What sort of future does Coward predict for them?

A New Decade

Sybil: Oh dear, I’m so happy.                                                                                                                          Elyot: Are you?                                                                                                                                                   Sybil: Aren’t you?

It seems that happiness will elude Elyot and Amanda as they cannot ever hope to succeed in ‘normal’ society- that is, one that requires not only a degree of emotional maturity, but also resilience, duty, patience, self-sacrifice and altruism.  This world is then not for them.  Penny Farfan argues that in Private Lives, Coward subverts “conventional…heterosexual coupling and creates space for alternative paths” with “being clamped together publically”, Amanda’s view of marriage, represented as “an impossible situation”.  Yet paradoxically, if Coward’s characters seem allergic to a heteronormative, somewhat unexciting lifestyle, they insist upon trying to live it, unaware that they do not have the strength of character to succeed. Destined forever to live a life of breakup/makeup cycles, they drift along, swaddled in a protective layer of money and privilege, learning little, achieving less….particularly the audience’s sympathy.

  “They are bound to repeat themselves, playing out their scene again and again with different words and different props but always with the same result." (Loss, 2011). 

Three years after Private Lives, Coward’s response to the Depression had developed accordingly. In Design For Living (1932), Coward decides to grasp this issue of normality more directly and, via Otto, offers a considered justification of the Bohemian denial of bourgeois predictability .  Empowered by a self-awareness that neither Elyot nor Amanda had ever come near to displaying, Otto provides an honestly impassioned (if not somewhat overstated and ultimately unconvincing) defence:  “We are different. Our lives are diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions; and it’s no use grabbing at those conventions to hold us up when we find we’re in deep water…”  

Coward’s career is interesting seen in this light; before 1930, his bohemian artists live in blissful solipsistic denial; “If ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise” (Hay Fever).  In Private Lives he detaches his characters primarily by removing the social context of work, and in doing so magnifies their lack of self-awareness;  then, later, in Design For Living,  Coward moves back to his trusted milieu, that of troubled artist/bohemians, aware of what the new world thinks of them but, nevertheless, offering self-righteous justifications.  It is interesting to debate whether Coward implies that it is more depressing to live in full knowledge of one’s shortcomings- or to be idyllically unaware of them.  

Decadent Suspension

Noel Coward: “Work hard, do the best you can, don’t ever lose faith in yourself and take no notice of what other people say about you.”

Penny Farfan maintains powerfully that the central cause of the increased levels of anomie implicit in Private Lives comes from the rejection, conscious or otherwise, of a heteronormative lifestyle, largely because Coward has de-gendered his lead characters to the point of androgyny.  This might be true for Private Lives;  yet, there is twisted morality galore in earlier plays, The Vortex, Hay Fever and Bitter Sweet (1927). Here, gender identity is more identifiable than in Private Lives.  So which factor other than gender confusion might have caused, in Private Lives, the “underlying sadness of glib and over-articulate people who twist their lives into distorted shapes because they cannot help themselves”? (Alan Strachan). In The Vortex (1924) and Hay Fever (1925) we knew that Coward’s wasters did, at least, attempt to engage in gainful employment (albeit as failed pianists, over the hill actors, and histrionic writers). In Private Lives, however, Amanda and Elyot seem to be decadently suspended in a social and moral vacuum.  They are not shaped by the demands of being “artistic” or “creative”, or by external demands of any sort; they just…are.  While Coward himself stated, “work is much more fun than fun”, Amanda and Elyot are merely empty thrill seekers.  They travel, searching for meaning, finding out nothing about themselves.  They go to parties, scorning their fellow guests, belittling bourgeois ways; they fall in love with various brittle versions of themselves, and never look closely enough in a mirror. No parents, children, or colleagues give them perspective.  Coward offers them no excuses.

Amoral Ruthlessness

“The achievement is to highlight Amanda's amoral ruthlessness without ever making us dislike her” (Billington, 2010)

Coward has little sympathy for these characters, and it is hard to accept that he was in any way celebrating their lives,  with Amanda and Elyot’s hollow, detached, idle-rich existence being utterly at odds with Coward’s own purposeful, disciplined lifestyle. While biographer Philip Hoare believes that Coward “liked Amanda and Elyot…he found them chic, and cynical, and clever….” It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the sybaritic way of life that they represent conflicts directly with Coward’s own committed work-ethic; therein lies the root of their ultimately negative presentation.  While Penny Farfan’s claim for androgyny explains their inability to function happily in a heteronormative  society,  this does not explain their ultimate pointlessness.  This judgement surely comes from deeper within Coward himself, a man whose “life, really was work”:   

“Coward was an extraordinary amalgam of opposites. He was a ceaseless globetrotter who famously liked to retire to bed early with ‘something eggy on a tray’; a proselytiser for Bohemianism who worked a relentless 12-hour day; a champion of sexual freedom who believed in fastidious decorum.”  (Billington, 1999) 

Central to an understanding of Coward’s workshy creations, then, is acknowledging the gulf between their existence and purpose.  For Coward, this centred on their disengagement from the struggle and meaning of hard work.  While he appeared to be both idle-rich and of a leisure –class that had hung on to pre- Great War values, his work ethic reflected a distinctly modern attitude.  His was, then, “…a paradoxical nature that enabled him to run with the late Victorian hare while hunting with the contemporary hounds.”(Billington, ibid.) This contradiction may have added to his enigmatic appeal, but almost certainly left him with diminishing respect for those characters he featured in his early plays.  He found it hard to represent positively those who were so self-obsessed that they could not embrace work as he did.

 

Billington, Michael    “Private Lives” The Guardian (Review), 4/3/2010,  “Oh What A Ghastly War” The Guardian (Review), 30/11/99.

Brustein, Robert “Comedy is Harder” New Republic  10/6/2002, pp.26-28

Farfan, Penny “Noel Coward and Sexual Modernism: Private Lives  as Queer Comedy” Modern Drama, Volume 48 No. 4, Winter 2005, University of Toronto Press.

Farley, Alan   “Speaking of Noel Coward”   Authorhouse, 2013 pp. 221

Hoare, Philip, “Noel Coward” Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995

Lahr, John “Coward The Playwright” Methuen, 1982

Loss, Archie K. "Waiting for Amanda: Noël Coward as Comedian of the Absurd," Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2 (July 1984), pp. 299–306

Noel Coward, “The Letters of Noel Coward”, ed. Barry Day Bloomsbury 2008

Sinfield, Alan “Noel Coward and The Politics of Homosexual Representation” Representations, No.36 (Autumn 1991) pp 43-63