One does not usually think of the late Sir Noel Coward, that ubiquitous eminence of the British theatre for five decades, as being particularly a “political” dramatist. More often than not, public recollection of this playwright tends to recall his international celebrity, his status as world traveller and bon vivant: others remember his composition of witty (“Mad Dogs and Englishmen”) or sentimental songs (“I’ll See You Again” or “Someday I’ll Find You”), or his stage and screen appearances. Even critics and students of the theatre appraising his career generally begin by acknowledging his wide-ranging versatility and then tend to concentrate their attentions on his major, most frequently staged comedies. Those plays (Hay Fever, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit, Design For Living, and Present Laughter) are characterized by their clever dialogue, a lightning-fast repartee, and the sparkling, yet blasé, sophistication with which they dispatch the stylish indulgences of the clever, such little pleasures of life as a menage a trois, adultery, spiritualism, or general Bohemian non-conformity. Even his final play, the three-part Suite in Three Keys (recently produced in abbreviated form in New York), which dealt in part with homosexuality, was voted by the Outer Critics Circle as the “best comedy” of the 1974 season. Although Coward achieved his first great success in the 1920s with a controversial play about mother fixation and drug addiction (The Vortex), the critical propensity in the years since has been to categorize him as a comic playwright of superficial concerns.

Yet, an examination of the dramatist’s total canon of work reveals him as an author who frequently questioned, and often set himself against, the prevailing social and political tides of his times. For example, Coward commented unfavorably many times about those in British political life who, through their policies, reduced his nation’s power and influence in international affairs. Indeed, this writer of sophisticated comedy also wrote often commending nationalism, endorsing patriotism and tradition, praising the class system, and favoring the “common sense” approach of an enlightened middle class to that of pretentious intellectuals of the progressive Left in solving social ills. He also saluted bravery in battle in an era when most influential voices in the theater (and the arts, generally) were becoming increasingly anti-military. His views, coming when the world’s theater espoused one school after another of despair and nihilism—from the Marxist-oriented social realism of the 1930s through the Existentialists up to the Absurdists—mark Coward as either a brave eccentric among the fashionable playwrights of his time or as a writer with a distinctly individualized, but nonetheless conservative, point of view.

Professor Robert Schuettinger, in his book, The Conservative Tradition in European Thought, suggested that the essence of true conservatism lies in its being an attitudinal disposition rather than a consistent ideology; thus, a conservative may desire simultaneously order in society and the toleration of personal non-conformity, he can doubt the existence of equality in the abstract but hope for the greatest variety in human experience. This combination—the orderly society combined with considerable expression of individual eccentricity—exists in our time, almost as nowhere else, in the England of a writer such as Noel Coward.

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In 1930, after several years of success in the theater had already granted Coward both fame and wealth, he wrote a drama of World War I, Post Mortem, which remains one of the more curious plays of our century in its theme. Although Post Mortem never received a major production on stage, it deserves attention because of its message among the war plays of the 1930s. Set in the trenches of World War I in its opening scene, the play is constructed in what must be termed reverse flashbacks; that is, the characters introduced as soldiers in the opening moments are shown a sequence of scenes of their future lives after the war has ended. Soldiers and their families are visited by the spirit of John Cavan, a comrade fatally wounded in the first scene. The dying man’s spirit goes forward in time to see if the ideals the war allegedly was fought for have been carried out in the peace that followed. Although the play is bitter in its tone, itdoes endorse ultimately some aspects of human behavior during war, suggesting that man often aspires to and attains higher levels of individual morality—superior levels of personal idealism—during the pressure of combat than he is capable of achieving in peacetime. When wars end, Coward argues in this play, man quickly reverts to his naturally baser instincts: greed, stupidity, the inability to love, and the failure to show compassion for others. The play is a curious switch on most anti-war drama of the period which tended to argue that war was evil and that if man could overcome his capacity for violence and aggression, humanity might be improved or saved. As Coward sees it, war is futile not because of its inherent evil but because, as one character in his play suggests, no one ever learns anything from it. The flaw is not in the act, but in the man. Given man’s inherently flawed nature, an individual’s conduct in wartime generally is more highly motivated than that of peacetime. “War is no evil compared with this sort of living,” he has his hero say after viewing the petty existence of the war’s survivors:

War at least provides the opportunities for actions, decent instinctive clear actions, without time for thought or scariness, beyond the betrayal of fear and common sense, and all those other traitors to humanity which have been exalted into virtues.1

Obviously, the dramatist was not praising war per se,however, he was attacking the manner in which peace allows complacent men to forget the ideals for which they have fought and sacrificed.

Coward again stressed this idea some thirty years later in a poem entitled “The Battle of Britain Dinner, New York, 1963.” The poem marks the occasion of an annual memorial salute to the participants of the 1940s air war. There are toasts, a raising of glasses by the survivors “trying to make believe that their sacrifice was worthwhile. . . .”:

They flew out of life triumphant,
leaving us to see
The ideal that they died for humiliated and betrayed
Even more than it had been betrayed at Munich
By those conceited foolish, frightened old men.2

This attack on postwar leadership by Coward is coupled with an equally scathing literary assault on the “angry young men” of British letters who, as the author sees it, “disdain our great heritage” and who were

Seeking protection in our English sanity
And spitting on the valiant centuries
That made the sanity possible.3

This strong strain of nationalism is found elsewhere in Coward’s work. His spectacular chronicle play-with-music, Cavalcade, produced in 1931, often has been cited as his most fervently nationalistic work. That huge production did perform for the stage the same function that Galsworthy’s nine-novel Forsythe Chronicles had for the novel by tracing the growth and changes in a family against the backdrop of historical events from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. Coward’s play included scenes coinciding with the Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic, World War I and the Armistice, and, finally, a depressing nightclub locale in the thirties where there was sung the despairing “Twentieth Century Blues.” The attribution of nationalism in this work derived primarily, from its final scenein which a gigantic illuminated Union Jack filled the stage while the entire cast (and the audience) sang “God Save the King.”

Perhaps the most overtly nationalistic work in which the dramatist presented his innate conservatism is his This Happy Breed, a drama of middle-class life, written in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of World War II. It is the story of the Gibbons family set in a London suburb between 1919 and 1939, from the end of one war to the eve of another. Like Cavalcade, actual events serve as backdrop to fictional incidents: the General Strike of 1926, the Abdication of Edward VIII, the Munich Crisis of 1938, and, of course, the final summer of peace before the invasion of Poland. The focal character is the head of the family, Frank Gibbons, who gives us his views on everything as it happens—war, peace, love, human nature, traditional British liberties, the Germans, the Japanese, the League of Nations, and communism (a consideration necessitated by his son’s flirtation with radicalism). Through Gibbons, Coward develops two themes: first, human nature is responsible for most of the world’s evils, and, second, lofty idealism, although sincerely motivated, is a poor substitute for common sense in solving most of the crises in one’s life, whether domestic or political.

Gibbons is, naturally, the symbolic “common man,” not unlike that character who kept changing costumes in Robert Bolt’s more recent drama, A Man for All Seasons. Gibbons, however, is a good deal more admirable. He is an affirmation of the best in the average man, the enlightened as opposed to the narrow-minded middle class citizen. In several conversational exchanges with his son, he dismisses the “Bolshie business”: “That’s what all these social reformers are trying to do, trying to alter the way of things all at once.”4 At another point, he tells the young man that “it’s up to us ordinary people to keep things steady.”5 When his son blames the existing order for social injustices, Gibbons tells him:

where I think you go wrong is to blame it all on systems and governments. You’ve got to go deeper than that to find out the cause of most of the troubles of this world, and when you’ve had a good look, you’ll see likely as not that good human nature’s at the bottom of the whole thing.6

Elsewhere in the play, Gibbons is highly critical of the appeasement of Germany, scoffs at isolationism when someone suggests the threat of Japan is very far away, and suggests the League of Nations has been completely ineffectual in curbing aggression. He hopes “we shall never find ourselves in a position again when we have to appease anybody!”7 He is equally blunt about pacifism: to him, a pacifist is merely someone trying to bring down his own country from within:

. . . People who go on a lot about peace and good will and the ideals they believe in, but somehow don’t believe in ‘em enough to think they’re worth fighting for . . . the trouble with the world is, Frankie, that there are too many ideals and too little horse sense.8

This play’s bold conviction about the stabilizing role of the British middle class—a group secure in its habits, traditions, attitudes and ideals—show Coward to be a dramatist squarely in the tradition of such earlier writers as Edmund Burke or Samuel Johnson.

His distrust of intellectuals and their solutions to problems is clearly revealed again in Coward’s 1947 production, Peace in Our Time, a play taking its title from Neville Chamberlain’s notorious reference upon his return from Munich. This drama is a study of the attitudes of a populace facing enemy occupation. In this instance, Britain has beets occupied by Nazi forces, Parliament is being opened by Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. Churchill has been executed, and the Royal Family is isolated at Windsor Castle. The play’s attention is centered, however, on average citizens again, a cross-section of types who encounter one another in a pub, the Shy Gazelle. The question of how a conquered people confront their situation is posed. Coward juxtaposes an idealistic, emotional response (patriotism) against a cynically detached, intellectual view (reason). Should a citizen be “reasonable,” adjust, accept, compromise, in other words, collaborate? Or should a person respond emotionally, accepting the more sentimental appeal of idealism and patriotism, the appeal of “King and Country”?

The choice of intellectual cynicism or emotional involvement was one Coward had posed for himself early in the war years. In his second volume of autobiography, Future Indefinite, he described how he found himself safe in America in 1940 at the time England faced Germany alone. He was naturally concerned about family and friends and their safety, but he wrote that he had to consider for the first time how he felt about England itself. His reflections and final resolution is one of the more ringing affirmations of national patriotism by a literary figure of the period:

I had no cynical detachment where my emotions were concerned. . . . I did love England and all it stood for. I loved its follies and apathies and curious streaks of genius; I loved standing to attention for “God Save the King”; I loved British courage, British humor, and British understatement; I loved the justice, efficiency, and even the dullness of British colonial administration. I loved the people, the ordinary, the extraordinary, the good, the bad, the indifferent. . . .9

This same consideration—intellectual pragmatism or emotional idealism—is argued in the pub in Peace in Our Time. The chief spokesman for collaboration is Chorley Bannister, the editor of a small, intellectual journal pretentiously entitled Forethought. He tells those who wish to oppose the Nazi occupation that sentiments like patriotism are “conditioned by environment and education and habit and propaganda. Patriotism is not an inevitable, fundamental part of human nature.”10 Chorley has been a pacifist in the thirties and derides all expressions of nationalism. He is rebuked, however, at one point by a woman who detests the ideaof an Englishman bargaining with his conquerors. She despises Bannister’s political relativism (he has moved from pacifism in the 1980s to a pro-Communist position of anti-Imperialism to, ultimately, that of a pro-Nazi sympathizer):

You and your kind pride yourselves on being intellectuals, don’t you? You babble a lot of snobbish nonsense about art and letters and beauty. You consider yourselves to be far above such primitive emotions as love and hate and devotion to a cause. You run your little highbrow magazines and change your politics with every wind that blows.11

The play’s patriots are further enhanced in their position when at the end of the drama Britain is being liberated and the persons in the pub who have always opposed Bannister are united in an anti-Nazi underground movement.

Coward’s other dramatic statement about national pride in war time was in a motion picture he wrote, the impressive In Which We Serve, in which Coward acted, co-directed, produced, and also wrote the music. The film embodied many of the same elements as This Happy Breed and Peace in Our Time. For a wartime film, it is characterized by a remarkable understatement dramatically. Ostensibly, it is the story of a destroyer and its crew who recall past experiences in their lives and naval service in a series of flashbacks as they cling to a raft after their ship has been sunk. Again, the views and life of a cross-section of the English public are given, and an admirable image of humans enduring real crisis emerges. Of course, the ship on which they served was more than a wartime vessel; it was the ship of state, the symbolic microcosm of Britain in duress. There were scenes of everyday people enduring the terrors of the Luftwaffe raids, and of the evacuation Dunkirk, but the image that emerged was of a people grimly determined to save their nation, a picture unlike the super-heroics of many World War II films. Coward’s film remains a moving document even when viewed today, a statement that cannot always be made of many Hollywood films of the period.

In the postwar years, Coward’s dramatic work turned again to comedy, but many of his plays tended to be more topical in their humor than the well-known comedies of the twenties and thirties. Many critics during the fifties attempted to write Coward off as a playwright whose day in the limelight had passed; although some of his plays still commanded commercial success, he was dismissed by many as a “dated” commodity. Quite possibly, part of the critical animosity during the postwar years stemmed from Coward’s tendency to satirize in these new comedies many of the sacred cows of contemporary political liberalism. For example, in his play, South Sea Bubble (written in 1949 and also staged in some places as Island Fling), he humorously attacked the notion that all colonial possessions ought to be given their independence. In this drama, the little island of Samola is about to be given control of its own affairs, but its citizens do not want this break with the Imperial tradition. Doubtless, the playwright used Samola—an actual island possession—as his setting because he knew that in 1855, the ruler of Samola, King Kefumalani II, personally wrote to Queen Victoria begging her to allow his islands to have the privilege of belonging to the British Empire. In any event, South Sea Bubble pits a liberal-minded colonial governor, Sir George Shotter, against a British-educated (Eton) native leader who resists his islands’ being given “self-government.” As the governor’s aide explains the situation:

. . . Most Samolans are still Empire minded. You see they’ve been happy and contented under British rule for so many years that they just don’t understand when they’re suddenly told that it’s been nothing but a corrupt, capitalist racket from the word go.12

The old native leader, Punalo, who opposes independence, regularly argues with the governor telling him that minor economic gradations of caste provide the natives with incentives to work by allowing those who succeed the privileges of their improved social status. The governor has proposed the removal of coin-operated facilities in public conveniences of buildings of the island as his latest assertion of complete democracy. Punalo refutes the governor’s theories by pointing out that the removal of first and second class distinctions in favor of an overall tourist class on the island’s boat service has caused such a decline in business that the service has been forced into liquidation. About the governor’s scheme to democratize the lavatories, Punalo says:

. . . Even in the most Utopian Welfare States, privilege is accepted as a natural perquisite of authority. In the Soviet Union itself, that Marxist paradise of Left-Wing Intellectuals, there is no recorded instance of the late Mr. Stalin queueing up for a public lavatory.13

The play’s plot did have some romantic complications, but its thrust throughout was on the political folly of postwar “progress.” Coward also managed to work in many of his famed one-line witticisms; at one point, a visiting novelist, Boffin, discusses the day’s political realities with a native leader, Hali, who favors self-determination:

HALI: It is most dismal to lose something of sentimental value.
BOFFIN: Yes. Like India.14

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In his 1951 comedy, Relative Values, similar conservative questions were raised, that time about the possibility of social equality. That drama is a comedy about a young man of good family and high social standing who is about to marry a Hollywood actress who is both vulgar and outrageous in her conduct. The marriage ultimately is defeated by the efforts of the servants in the young man’s household who are horrified at the idea of social equality. At the end of the play, the butler, Crestwell, who has been active in opposing the marriage makes a toast to “the final inglorious disintegration of that most unlikely dream that ever troubled the foolish heart of man—Social Equality.”15

Earlier in his career, Coward had visited the Soviet Union and recorded his impression of that visit in his autobiography. In a passage that must have severely distressed Marxist-inclined intellectuals of the 1930s, he denounced the dulling conformity of the socialist state and praised the benefits of a society with class distinctions:

. . . it was evident that there was something sadly lacking in me, some missing core of human understanding, that debarred me from sharing, with so many intelligent and thoughtful people, the belief that communism, as practiced by the Russians, was progressive and hopeful for the future of mankind.16

To the visiting playwright, the Soviet Union appeared to be both a physical and mental prison:

Here, in this vast territory through which my train was carrying me, there seemed to be no semblance of freedom for the ordinary citizen. He was spied upon, regimented, and punished, frequently without even being aware that he had committed a crime.17

The dramatist’s approval of a social order based on qualitative distinctions followed:

Personally I have always believed more in quality than quantity, and nothing will convince me that the levelling of class and rank distinctions, and the contemptuous dismissal of breeding as an important factor of life can lead to anything but a dismal mediocrity.18

When viewed against such earlier statements as these, the satiric comedy of Relative Values takes on far greater impact.

Inhis other postwar works, Coward does not touch as obviously on political and social issues. Nevertheless, in his 1952 drama, Quadrille, he wrote in aadmiring way about the virtues of the United States, a land he had come to view as a second home. In an era of “Yankee Go Home!” he once more was striking a contrary mood. In that play, an American railroad man urges an English woman to visit theUnited States, saying she would recognize “its valour and forgive its young vulgarities.”19

His 1954 comedy, Nude With Violin, also saw Coward poking fun at a prevailing artistic fashion, “modern” painting. In this play, the comic plot was built on the possibilities for charlatanism provided by such painting. If the political views of Noel Coward, as they are variously revealed in his writing, were so conservative, one may ask, how then can his penchant for endorsing non-conformist behavior be explained? After all, he treats marriage and adultery in a cavalier fashion in several plays, notably in Private Lives: he presents an amusing and delightful ménage of Leo, Otto, and Gilda in Design for Living; and he argues for the legalization of homosexuality for consenting adults in Suite in Three Keys. The answer lies, I think, in the manner in which these acts are presented. In every instance, such nonconforming behavior is shown to be individualized; true, it is the individual’s right, but it is also his or her responsibility. In other words, the problem—if there is one—is the individual’s, not society’s. Coward may seem to endorse a“new morality,” but he also implies that personal morality is ultimately just that, personal. That might be seen as a kind of libertarian position. This attitude, coupled with his usual praise of common sense, is seen clearly in his long poem. Not Yet the Dodo, in which some middle class parents, General and Lady Bedrington, discover that their son, who has entered the theater, is a homosexual living in London with a young Irish boy. After several meetings with the pair and a lot of rumors cause natural parental anguish, Lady Bedrington determines to come to grips with the problem. She confers with a servant who has worked for the family for years (and who has been Barry’s “Nanny”), and they proceed to talk out the situation, one they’d never once considered a possibility. Maggie, the servant, again is an endorsement of down-to-earth common sense. She embarks, Coward says, “upon her speech for the defense” to her worried employer:

“If you want my opinion,” she said, “I think
We’re both of us wasting our breath,
You can’t judge people by rule of thumb
And if we sit gabbing till Kingdom Come
We’ll neither one of us sleep a wink
And worry ourselves to death.

People are made the way the’re made
And it isn’t anybody’s fault.
Nobody’s tastes can quite agree
Some like coffee and some like tea
And Guinness rather than lemonade
And pepper rather than salt.”20

She concludes her long speech saying she ultimately is more interested in the son, Barry, as a person than she is in his sexual predilections.

In summary, therefore, it might be said that Coward’s attitude was one of maximum toleration of independence and non-conformity for the responsible individual. However, on larger societal issues of order, patriotism in times of crisis, tradition, national loyalty, skepticism about man’s perfectability, and the inherent flaws of human nature, he was consistently conservative. Because of these views and his accompanying total trust in the intelligence of many average men, he qualifies, perhaps as much as any literary figure of our time, for that appellation Russell Kirk so frequently invokes, the Bohemian Tory.

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Notes

  1. Noël Coward, Post Mortem (Garden City, NewYork: Doubleday, Doran &Co., Inc., 1931), 96.
  2. Noël Coward, “The Battle of Britain Dinner, New York, 1963,” in Not Yet the Dodo and Other Verses (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1968), 82.
  3. Ibid., 83.
  4. Noël Coward, This Happy Breed, in Play Parade, Vol. IV (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1954), 462.
  5. Ibid., 480.
  6. Ibid., 479.
  7. Ibid., 542.
  8. Ibid., 553.
  9. Noël Coward, Future Indefinite (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1954), 146.
  10. Noël Coward, Peace in Our Time, in Play Parade, Vol. V (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1958), 153.
  11. Ibid., 211.
  12. Noël Coward, South Sea Bubble (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1456), 3.
  13. Ibid., 22.
  14. Ibid., 114.
  15. Noël Coward, Relative Values, in Play Parade, Vol. V (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1958), 371.
  16. Coward, Future Indefinite, 36.
  17. Ibid., 36–7.
  18. Ibid., 37.
  19. Noël Coward, Quadrille (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1955), 138.
  20. Coward, Not Yet the Dodo, 106.