This article is taken from the April 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

You know how this begins. We all think we know him: dressing gown, the cigarette holder, the utterly imitable voice, recognisable by even the very worst impression. It has become a cliché to note even in passing what a cliché the cliché has become, before polishing off the opening paragraph with the eternal Coward Question: “But what really lies behind the mask?”

Until now, biographers’ attempts at an answer have comprised, perforce, fantastical dollops of conjecture, their primary sources being invariably unreliable and sometimes entirely made up. They include Coward’s autobiographies (from diaries which, as his fame increased, were written with publication in mind — thoroughly expurgated and exaggerated) and his contemporaries’ haute couture anecdotes, hacked about and repurposed for the next encomium or hatchet job. They are dustsheets slung over his lower-middle-class start in life — fine gauze obscuring his private life. 

It has always been difficult to make sense of Noël Coward’s passage from his inchoate childhood desire to be “a success” (in any artistic discipline, by almost any means) to becoming, as Oliver Soden tells us, “the highest-paid writer in the world”. In the quarter-century since Philip Hoare’s biography, two new archives have been established. In this resplendent book, Soden shares the spoils of untrammelled access: vivid evidence of the man not seen. 

The youthful Coward is unappealing. It’s not his fault. An entitled, shoplifting, tantrum-suffused child actor with no obvious talent, he’s aided and abetted by a cartoonishly snobbish and infatuated mother (in mitigation: the death of her first son). His brutish school being no guarantee of an education, “calmly [the 11-year-old] Noël played truant … purchasing a wig and beard so as to wander the capital unnoticed”. 

The outsider becomes inveigler: a jaw-dropping tale of a teenager gate crashing the holiday of near-strangers (“ARRIVING PADSTOW FIVETHIRTY. TALL AND DIVINELY HANDSOME IN GREY”) suggests the self-aggrandising little upstart couldn’t help himself. “‘Call me Noël,” he gushed at dinner. “I think, Mr Coward,” came the response, “we would rather wait a little.’” 

Coward no doubt understood that his self-promulgated myth of genius not only advanced his ambition but also distanced him and others from his provenance and proclivities. Soden inverts a common assumption: “Noël Coward never hid in plain sight; he revealed himself through flagrant disguise.” Surely this proved invaluable in the world of espionage? 

He whips out 40 notebooks of unpublished juvenilia to reveal an autodidact and grafter

Archival access from his time as a (volunteer) spy promises a fresh frisson, but his short-lived career (ending with bruising dismissal) resembles a ripping tale from his childhood favourite, The Boy’s Own Paper. Working for Z Organisation, “a shadow network kept entirely separate from the Secret Service … which it was intended to replace completely in the case of invasion”, the most complex cipher in Noël’s diary is his reference to an unnamed source: “X”. 

We have a curious contempt for our icons. Whom the British disdain, they first make myth. We worship and condemn Coward for his evident facility; Soden notes his faux-modest claim that prior to his smash hit, The Vortex, he had only drafted two plays, “the better to make his talent appear a virgin birth”. Now, from behind the scenes, he whips out 40 notebooks of unpublished juvenilia — ha! We knew it! — to reveal an autodidact and grafter. 

Characters, aphorisms and epigrams (“She married in haste and repented at Brixton”) jostle with Ancient Greek verb tables. “He forced himself into brilliance by dint of sheer industry. In many ways his ambition created his talent, rather than the other way around.” The thrilling speed is already evident, if furtive: not two, but 30 plays written in just one year. 

What we see in Coward reveals more about us than about him. The misconception that he was just “a talent to amuse” is outrageous, especially given the poignancy of the Bitter Sweet lyric in context. (Worse: it’s engraved on his memorial at Westminster Abbey.) Amusement and wit for the sake of it rapidly enervates if nothing lies beneath. 

Soden rejects the notion that the surface sheen is all (“to dismiss Hay Fever as artificial is to miss the fact that it is a commentary on artifice”) with his substantial analysis of Design for Living and Private Lives, both of which he takes seriously (“none of which is to ignore the fact that [they] can be terribly, terribly funny”). 

Each of the book’s nine sections is “loosely structured” as one of Coward’s genres (play, musical, revue, screenplay, short story) and begins with a cast list of principals from each stage of his life. Soden’s rules of engagement are clear: passages written as dialogue use only verbatim quotations; “nothing is made up”. His stage directions are wonderful evocations of time and place, sensuous, drenched in detail. 

The final chapter is most vivid of all and a one-act play, a mimetical paradox. Coward, a master of the pastiche (and there’s an argument that this was his medium in toto), is treated to a pasticcio homage by Soden: an ingenious re-styling of words written and uttered by Noël, his mother, friends, characters and even his biographers, all of whom are in the cast. It’s a romp, with trenchant unreliable narrations and furious interjections from those who felt they knew him best. 

Coward, a master of the pastiche, is treated to a pasticcio homage

It’s also funny. Soden amends a historical howler from Hoare whilst, as his stage direction admits, “[trying to keep a note of smug correction from his voice]”. Given his meticulous fact-checking he has earned himself, at the very least, a satisfied smirk.

Once John Barrymore had opined that reading footnotes “was like having to go down to answer the front door just as you were coming”, Noël Coward couldn’t even glance at one. Fortunately, Soden’s notes are incisive, pertinent and — nestled at the back of the book — make for a happy ending.

Masquerade is a pleasure to read — not just for Oliver Soden’s splendid survey of Coward’s life, but also for the rhythm and tempo of his writing as he parries with his mercurial subject. This Coward commands our empathy: more real, more mortal, “more Noël than Coward”, as Soden intended. 

“His was the gaiety of a man who knew grief, a comic self-creation grounded in suffering and taking refuge in performance as an armour against a dangerous world.” His fallibility renders him more likeable, lovable even. With this enriched arc from conception to denouement, the myth is made man. At last, the character of Noël Coward makes sense.