Noël Coward and Facebook
Nice notes today about my Cambridge-snowstorm post last week are prompting me today to shimmer gently towards another non-FCC direction.
What would Noël Coward think of Facebook?
The Vice President of the Noël Coward Society, Barry Day, has a book of Coward letters out, and it’s completely engaging. Good review here. Coward was a “productive” guy.
Lord Louis Mountbatten said this at Coward’s 70th birthday celebration in 1969:
“There are probably greater painters than Noël, greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars. If there are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combined all fourteen different labels - The Master.”
(Coward called himself “The Master” in his frequent letters to his staff.) Not to mention painters and letter-writers. Coward did a lot of both of those things, too. There are letters in this recent collection from Virginia Woolf, Nancy Mitford, Rebecca West, T.E. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber, Harold Pinter, and lots of others. (He patiently tried to cheer up Marlene Dietrich, who fell apart (for a long time!) over Yul Brynner.) NC wrote to amuse, constantly, as well as to converse, and the Woollcott letters in particular are full of cheerful invective.
Coward wrote to his mother, faithfully, week after week for most of his life, and these letters are among the most affectionate of the lot. He often said to her that he wouldn’t be able to write, or she wouldn’t be able to reach him, because he was going on a long trip, but to leave letters for him at X or Y place; he reveled in being able to call people on the telephone across great distances.
Given all of this letter-writing and communicating, what would Coward’s reaction have been to Facebook?
I think it would have alarmed him.
Initially, perhaps, he would have enjoyed having all the Algonks near him, little thumbnail pictures of his favorite sculptress and the enormous Woollcott. There would have been zingers tossed across the walls, pictures from the Theatre, light verse composed for the occasion.
But Coward often felt that people were too much. Everyone wanted something from him. Very often in his life he raced away as speedily as he could, getting on an endless cruise to the Far East, or collapsing in Honolulu, or staying for months at a time in Jamaica. For all of his conviviality, he needed to be alone, traveling, for long stretches. After resting, he would emerge with the new play (or three new plays), convinced he had a surefire hit.
The idea of being constantly in touch, with his friends’ doings ticking by a few hundreds of times a day — that would have been overwhelming for him. He had more friends than Scoble (who has more than 5000 Facebook friends). And as frank as Coward often is in these letters, he was fundamentally a very discreet, private fellow.
But, just for fun, he would have cajoled the Queen Mother into joining Facebook. They were chums, and he would have gotten a gentle laugh out of her tremulous-but-brave joy in trying it on. They would have tried it together, sending each other little notes on birthdays accompanied by tiny electronic gifts. Perhaps she would have told only Noël of her pseudonym - a small private royal Facebook joke.
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