All posts tagged Celia Johnson

This Happy Breed by Noel Coward (1939)

‘There’ll always be wars as long as men are such fools as to want to go to them.’
(Frank, the ex-soldier, in This Happy Breed, Act 1, Scene 1)

‘This Happy Breed’ is a play by Noël Coward. It was written in 1939 but, because of the outbreak of World War II, not staged until 1942. He wrote it at the same time as another of his best works, ‘Blithe Spirit’, also put on hold because of the war. Coward suspended writing for the stage the duration of the war and many critics think that, when he resumed, his writing never regained its charge and brilliancy. So, the argument goes, these two plays, ‘Breed’ and ‘Blithe’, represent the peak of his achievement.

Title

The play’s title is a phrase from John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Act 2, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play ‘Richard II’ where he gives a lyrical description of the England of his youth:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…

But in the play, all this stirring patriotic imagery is just the preliminary to Gaunt going on to lament that this wonderful England had in fact declined into a state of decay and mismanagement under the disastrous king Richard II, who had exiled Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke. Understandably, patriotic writers like Coward leave that bit out, but anyone who knows the play knows that these fine words are an exaggerated and rose-tinted view of the past of a country which has now fallen into decay and decline. How much of this heavy irony Coward intended to hang over his play is not clear.

Class

‘This Happy Breed’ is one of the few Coward plays not to be set among the affluent middle or upper middle class. Its consciously lower-middle class milieu recalls just a handful of other works in the same setting, namely ‘Cavalcade’ (1931) and the short play ‘Fumed Oak’ from ‘Tonight at 8.30’ (1936). But he does it well, persuasively. His mum kept a boarding house and his family was often on the verge of poverty. He captures the speech rhythms and in particular the clichés of the class. You can almost hear the shrill voices of the women working class characters as you hear them in movies from the period.

I’m not going to stand here catching me death.
Well, I like that I must say.
It doesn’t matter, I’m sure.
I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.
A nice way to behave, upsetting me like this.
These boots are giving me what for.

And Frank’s recurring catchphrase, ”Op it’, which I’ve been trying out on the wife, daughter and cat, with varying degrees of success.

Synopsis

The play is made of three acts, each containing three scenes, which cover exactly 20 years, starting in June 1919 and ending in June 1939. They are all set in the same location, the front room of the Gibbons family in Clapham.

Act 1

Scene 1: June 1919

It’s seven months after the end of the Great War and the Gibbons family is just moving into 17 Sycamore Road in Clapham, South London (an area Coward knew well, having lived in various houses around the area in his boyhood). They lived for the four war years with her mother, Mrs Flint, in a shabby house in Battersea.

The room is mostly empty of furniture with packing cases scattered about.

Ethel Gibbons manages her grumpy mother, Mrs Flint, while Frank fixes up the curtains. Mrs Flint doesn’t like Sylvia, Frank’s sister, who Ethel asked to move in after her fiancée Bertie was killed in the war. Frank comes down and puts his arms round Ethel, they stare into the garden (which needs work) and she tells him how relieved she is that he returned safe from the war, unlike so many of the men they knew.

They’re just having a connubial kiss when the next door neighbour, Bob Mitchell, startles them by knocking on the window. Turns out he used to be an old army colleague of Frank’s and they reminisce about the war, and then details of each other’s kids.

Scene 2: December 1925

Christmas 1925 and the kids are all about 18. The grown-ups (Frank and Ethel, Ethel’s mother (Mrs Flint) and Frank’s sister, the permanently unwell Sylvia) have gone into the front room leaving the young people to clear the table, being Frank and Ethel’s children (Vi, 20, Queenie, 21, Reg, 18). Reg hero worships his friend Sam who proposes a toast but Queenie interrupts and mocks him which triggers him to an earnest speech against capitalism and injustice, anticipating the great day of the revolution:

SAM: She is only one of the millions who, when the great days comes, will be swept out of existence like so much chaff on the wind…

The others carry on mocking so he and Reg go up to Reg’s room. The young women are tidying up when there’s a knock at the window and it’s Bob Mitchell’s son Billy from next door. The others leave him with Queenie who he’s sweet on. He’s a sailor and he asks whether, in a few years, they might get married. But Queenie tells him she hates suburban life, she wouldn’t make him a good wife and rushes out.

Frank enters and cheers up a disconsolate Billy. The latter asks if Frank will put in a good word for him with Queenie and Frank kindly agrees to. Billy leaves and Ethel comes in. Sylvia’s started singing in the living room and they’re both relieved to avoid her.

Scene 3: May 1926

Set during the ten days of the General Strike of 1926. Frank is up in town breaking the strike as a volunteer bus driver, along with Bob from next door. Meanwhile young Reg had a blazing row with his dad about the strike and stormed out a few days earlier.

We learn all this because Ethel is beside herself with worry for both of them. Her nerves are on edge and she gets into an argument with tearful Aunt Sylvia, herself continually picked on by nasty old Mrs Flint.

In the middle of this bad-tempered bickering Frank and Bob arrive home a bit tipsy from the drinks they’ve had on the way back from their shift. Barely has Ethel tutted over them and told him, no, he can’t have another drink, than the front doorbell goes and it’s Sam and Reg.

Reg has been absent since he ran away a few days earlier and Ethel has been worried sick. His head is bandaged with where someone threw a stone at it. Vi confronts Sam for leading Reg astray and throws him out.

Left alone together, Frank doesn’t tell Reg off as the latter was expecting. He says everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. But he criticises Reg for falling for other people’s slogans and language. Also points out that the idea that society is unfair is very old. And thinks where Reg goes wrong is blaming it on government and systems whereas he, Frank, thinks it runs deeper than that, it has its origins in ‘good old human nature’.

After sharing a drink and having this little man-to-man chat they bid each other goodnight and go off to their separate bedrooms. I wish my Dad had been that understanding or articulate.

Act 2

Scene 1: October 1931

It is Reg’s wedding day. The scene opens with Frank having a nice cup of tea after breakfast while all the women in the house run round in a panic, getting ready, fussing about dresses, their hair etc. The family servant or maid, Edie, tells him about her own son, Ernie, who’s just started shaving and cut himself.

Bob pops round for a chat and a smoke. His wife isn’t doing too well since her miscarriage six years ago. God, the great abortionist.

We learn that Reg has abandoned all his socialism, in fact was critical of the last Labour government, has settled down and got a job. His firebrand pal, Sam, has settled down and married Vi.

In comes Reg and Bob leaves allowing Frank to give some fatherly advice. This is to always put your wife first but then, rather surprisingly, to tell Reg it’s alright to have a bit on the side, just make sure nobody finds out and nothing causes upset to your wife and family. Reg is embarrassed, father and son share a little hug, then Frank exits.

Billy from next door comes in, wearing a naval Petty Officer’s outfit. He’s going to be Reg’s best man. Some banter which establishes Billy as a jolly, flippant fellow, before Reg leaves, bumping into Queenie in her bridesmaid’s dress. Remember he had a pash for her? He still does. In fact it turns out that last night he proposed to her and she said no. He asks if she’s in love with someone else and it comes out that yes she is, and he’s a married man. What a fool.

Billy exists and Frank and Ethel come in, dressed for the wedding. Their conversation with Queenie develops into an argument (but then all conversations in Coward tend towards argument), with Queenie eventually saying she thinks her family are common, and hates their narrow horizons and she wants to make something of herself. ‘I’m sick of this house and everybody in it’ etc. She fears being seen by the girls in the posh shop she works in. She flounces out and Frank and Ethel have a parently post-mortem on where they went wrong bringing her up.

Then Reg and Billy come bounding in and his mother bursts into tears and says it seems only yesterday he was a wee baby boy etc, Billy drags Reg out the front door to get into the fancy wedding car to take them to church. Enter grumpy old Mrs Flint and sickly Aunt Sylvia. Then Vi and Sam enter, Sam looking smart and respectable. In effect, we are reviewing the entire cast of characters at this pivotal moment. Even more pile in until there are about 8 characters all talking and fussing onstage. The most striking one is old Mrs Flint complaining about everything but whose conversation is dominated by her own ailments and stories about lots of other old women falling ill or dying. It all leads up to a blazing clash between Mrs Flint and Sylvia and the classic Coward situation of everyone telling everyone else to shut up. ‘Shut up’ must the commonest phrase in Noel Coward’s lexicon (see below).

At the height of the argument the wedding car arrives and they all have to fix their hats and bustle out the room to go to the wedding.

Scene 2: November 1931, midnight

It’s midnight when Bob and Frank tiptoe through the french windows into the living room. They’re both a bit tiddly having attended their regimental reunions and joke and banter and raid the pantry for snacks (fishpaste on Huntley and Palmer crackers with a dash of AI sauce). Through them we catch up on news of the other characters: Billy the sailor is in Malta; Reg and Phyllis are settling into marriage; Vi and Sam have had a baby, making Frank a grandfather.

They drunkenly discuss whether they’ll see another war: not in their time, thinks Bob, but Frank, the more realistic and cynical character, says Don’t bet on it. What about the threat from Japan? They need to keep the Navy up to scratch.

Then, in trying to prevent him pouring him another bog Scotch, Bob grabs Frank’s arm and makes him drop the bottle with a crash. This brings Ethel downstairs in her curlers. She sees Bob off the premises and is just launching in on Frank when she sees a letter on the mantlepiece. It was left there at the start of the scene when we saw Queenie, dressed and in a coat and carrying a suitcase, put it there. Obviously she’s done a bunk.

Sure enough, when they open it, the letter tells them Queenie has run off with her married man because his wife won’t divorce him. She doesn’t say where. This triggers an argument between Frank and Ethel, both claiming the other one spoiled Queenie. Ethel is the harshest. When Frank says he’ll track her down and bring her back, Ethel says she doesn’t want Queenie back. She’ll never forgive her till her dying day. Frank is taken aback at her vehemence.

Scene 3: May 1932

Six months later. Mrs Flint and Sylvia aren’t arguing so much. Mrs F credits it to the new job Sylvia’s got at the library, thanks to a Mrs Wilmot. The regular hours and company have done her good. Frank gets cross with Sylvia for bringing a spray of may into the house and putting it in a vase: bad luck. When he exits, Sylvia remarks that he’s been more short-tempered since Queenie ran away.

They’re in the middle of more bickering and low-level resentments when the front doorbell rings, Vi comes running in with the appalling news that Reg and Phyll have been in a car accident and are both dead. God, how brutal.

Act 3

Scene 1: December 1936

The play really asserts its continuity with ‘Cavalcade’. That play followed a family through major historical incidents from 1900 to 1930. This one has been more domestic but still features contemporary historical events. We’ve had the 1926 General Strike and this scene focuses on the ex-king Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast on the radio. (He abdicated because the Establishment wouldn’t allow him to be king and marry his true love, Mrs Wallis Simpson, who was divorced from her first husband and in the process of divorcing her second.) The scene begins just after the king’s historic broadcast has concluded.

Frank and Ethel have aged since their son’s death. Sylvia, by contrast, looks older. She has adopted the Christian Science faith and its confidence obviously agrees with her. In fact she has an argument with Sam about it, in which she infuriatingly refuses to lose her temper,

We learn that in the past four years Mrs Flint has passed away and the servant Edie has left and not been replaced. Bob next door, his wife Nora has died, after being ill for year.

After some nattering there’s a knock at the french windows and Billy comes in. He’s now an experienced and impressive Royal Navy Warrant Officer.

He has some staggering news. He’s seen Queenie. Ethel bridles because that name has been banned in the house for five years. But Billy quickly gives a recap of Queenie’s adventures, how the married man she ran off with dropped her after a year and her struggles to earn a living, then a case of appendicitis, then taking up with another Brit she met in hospital to set up a tea room in the South of France, and that’s where he met her and…

All in a rush he tells Frank and Ethel that he’s married Queenie. He always said he’s wait for her and he did and she finally accepted him, and she’s next door. Frank shakes Billy by the hand then runs out the french windows and moments later reappears with Queenie. Ethel breaks down in tears etc and there is an awkward but loving reconciliation between her and Ethel. To be honest, I had tears in my eyes when I read it. God, what a world.

Scene 2: September 1938

More of the ‘Cavalcade’ mentality in that the next scene is based round yet another major historical event, this time Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich and the famous piece of paper he waved around in the hope that it would assure peace in our time.

Developments in the Gibbons household include that Billy and Queenie have had a baby son, currently four months old. Queenie is ill, still recovering from the birth which was difficult.

Sylvia never believed there would be a war and the smug superiority of her Christian Science belief triggers an angry response from Vi, as it did from Sam in the previous scene.

Ethel tells Frank Queenie’s had a letter from Billy asking her to go out and stay with him in Singapore. If she goes she’ll leave the baby with them to look after. For maybe a year.

Bob pops in. Years after his wife died, he’s taken the plunge, is selling up and moving to the country. They’ll miss him. Ethel gives him an embarrassed kiss.

Bob says goodbye to Frank. They reminisce about all the things they’ve seen in the past 20 years and Frank wonders what happens to rooms and houses which have been lived in so intensely by people who then move away. Does a little part of them stay behind…? They drink a toast to happy days.

Scene 3: June 1939

Symmetry. Just as in the first scene, the room is mostly emptied with everything packed up into crates, because Frank and Ethel are moving out. They’re moving to a flat with a fine view of Clapham Common and running hot water.

We learn that Queenie has gone off to Singapore, leaving their baby, who I think is called Frank, with them. It irritates Frank who calls it ‘his lordship.’

Frank and Ethel share a sentimental moment, looking out over the garden as they did in the first scene, before Ethel bustles off in her busy way. This leaves Frank with the baby in a pram and Coward has him deliver a page-and-a-half monologue. This consists of Frank’s cynical view about ‘peace’ i.e. it’ll never happen. He expands the idea he’s mentioned briefly once or twice earlier, that there’ll never be peace because of human nature.

The trouble with the world, Frankie, is there’s too much idealism and too little horse sense. We’re human beings, we are, all of us – and that’s what people are liable to forget. Human beings don’t like peace and good will and everybody loving everybody else. However much they may think they do, they don’t really because they’re not made like that. Human beings like eating and drinking and loving and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who’ll give ’em half a chance.

Which segues into a passage more specifically about British politics. Frank admits that just recently Britain has allowed itself to be bullied by noisy foreigners and has let other people down.

But don’t worry, that won’t last. The people themselves, the ordinary people like you and me, know something better than all the fussy politicians put together – we know what we belong to, where we come from and where we’re going. We may not know it with our brains, but we know it with our roots.

He ends with defiance of our enemies, based on the optimistic notion that we (the ordinary British people) have fought for human decency for ourselves and won’t let it go lightly.

We ‘aven’t lived and died and struggled all these hundreds of years to get decency and justice and freedom for ourselves without being prepared to fight fifty wars if need be, to keep ’em.

Ethel comes in and finds him delivering this great speech and wonders what on earth he’s doing. When he explains ‘talking to the baby’ she tells him to close the french windows and come along for supper. Loudmouth men, practical women. Reassuring stereotypes to the end.

Thoughts

As you can see it’s not really a play with a dramatic narrative which tells a long complicated story or addresses distinct themes. It’s more like a kind of diary of a family. Or snapshots in a family album, very like Cavalcade. A continuation of Cavalcade but in another class.

Bickering

As you know, as I’ve read my way through Noel Coward’s plays I’ve been surprised at the absence of his supposed wit and the prominence, the ubiquity, of bickering and arguing. The core of all his famous plays is people snapping at each other, bad-tempered squabbling which frequently rises to real abuse and shouting matches. That’s what I associate Coward with.

To take it a bit further, all his characters – whether posh Mayfair types or lower class types as in this work – despite all their superficial differences, all have one basic function or activity, which is to try and shut down other people, and make their version of events or opinions prevail. His plays are battlefields, not of ideas because there are few if any ideas in his plays, but battlefields of will.

And ‘This Happy Breed’ is no different. In Act 2, scene 1, just before Reg’s wedding, there’s a huge argument in which about half a dozen characters are all trying to talk over each other, shut up and silence the others, in order to impose their version, to control the narrative.

MRS FLINT: I’ll thank you not to call me names, Sylvia Gibbons.
SYLVIA: You make me tired.
ETHEL: Don’t answer back, Sylvia, it’ll only mean a row.
SYLVIA: I’m sure I don’t want to say anything to anybody, but really–
MRS FLINT: Pity you don’t keep quiet then!
SYLVIA: Who are you to talk to me like that – I’ve had about enough of your nagging –
FRANK: Shut UP, Sylvia!

Or the passage in Act 2 scene 3 where Ethel tells Mrs Flint (her mother) to just hold her tongue, in response to which Mrs Flint huffily says ‘the less I open my mouth the better’. Once you notice it, you see it everywhere; on almost every pages characters tell other ones to shut up or they don’t like how they talk.

FRANK: I do wish you wouldn’t talk like that Sylvia.
QUEENIE: I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Dad.
ETHEL: It’s not a fit subject to talk about.
ETHE: How often have I told you I won’t have you talking like that, Frank.
ETHEL: Don’t let’s talk about it, shall we?
ETHEL: Don’t talk so silly.
ETHEL: Don’t snap at your father, Queenie.

They even disapprove of the king speaking, in the scene following the abdication speech:

FRANK: Well I suppose he ‘ad to make it but I somehow wish he hadn’t.

There’s another way of looking at it. Philip Hoare writes that Coward knew – like presumably most playwrights – that the essence of drama is conflict. But other playwrights use clashes of ideas, or really the different points of view of vividly conceived characters. Take Virginia Woolf’s favourite play, Antigone, which has at its core the completely irreconcilable positions of Creon and Antigone. Or take any of Ibsen’s mature plays, which dramatise real clashes of deeply portrayed and profoundly conflicting characters.

There’s nothing like that depth anywhere in Coward. A regular complaint is that his characters are generally too alike. In a play like ‘Design for Living’ it’s difficult to tell Otto and Leo apart, just as it’s challenging to tell the two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ apart. They’re basically the same characters given more or less the same qualities, but just set against each other over fairly superficial issues – in both plays squabbling over a shared love object (Gilda in ‘Design for Living’, Maurice in ‘Fallen Angels’).

What I’m driving at is that there’s conflict in Coward plays, alright, but it doesn’t arise from profound differences in character and point of view, as in the ancient Greeks, or Shakespeare, or Ibsen or Shaw. They’re just very similar types of people having an argument. Squabbling. Bickering. Often over absolute trivia. Their arguments don’t shed light on any great issue or illumine deep and interesting characters. They just yell at each other to shut up.

And it’s this which accounts for the regular criticism that Coward’s plays are ‘thin’. They are. The arguing and bickering may well work onstage, by raising the temperature and giving the impression that there’s dramatic action going on. But the superficiality of their bickers and arguments explains why, a few hours later, you can hardly remember what the play was even about. Like the proverbial Chinese dinner. Full of vivid, palate-pleasing flavours at the time. A few hours later you’re hungry again.

Caveat

I wrote that before I read the final scenes in which irritating Aunt Sylvia blossoms into a devout believer in Christian Science. This is an ideology or belief and it does give rise to something like actual debate between the characters as others, like Sam and then Vi, simply refuse to accept her outlandish beliefs (there is no such thing as evil, therefore there is no such thing as pain) and both end up raising their voices.

This is a debate about ideas, I suppose. But it’s not what the play is about. It’s a minor side issue, peripheral to the main narrative. And even here my rule applies, that the characters don’t really debate, none of them are educated or intelligent enough; instead they bicker in order to gain control of the field of discourse and shut each other down.

FRANK: Now listen ‘ere Sylvia, don’t you talk to me like that because I won’t ‘ave it, see.

So many times these bad-tempered quarrels end up in the same dead end as characters realise the pointlessness of even trying to have a discussion. What we could call the futility point which so many of these arguments arrive at.

REG: It’s no use talking, Dad, you don’t understand, and you never will.

QUEENIE: If you’re going to turn nasty about it there’s no use saying any more.

ETHEL: What’s the point of arguing with her, Frank? You know it never does any good.

FRANK: If you feel like that it’s not much good talking about it, is it?

VI: There’s no use arguing with her, Dad, she’s getting sillier and sillier every day.

It’s this sense of stasis, this inability to escape the limitations of the characters they’ve been assigned by their creator, which links Coward, despite all the superficial differences, with the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, whose characters are similarly trapped in roles they can never escape.

So despite the little flurry of what appears to be actual debate about Christian Science (like the little flurry around Sam’s superficial communism in the first scene) it soon sinks under the usual attempts of everyone concerned to shut everyone else down. So I think the fundamental truth of my analysis remains valid.

Patriotism

Although he is a cynic about idealists and socialists like young Sam and the chances of peace – Frank’s final speech is an unalloyed rousing piece of patriotism. Coward was just going into the patriotic phase which would see his great war films, war work, and significantly change his public image. As Philip Hoare puts it in his excellent biography of Coward:

The Second World War came at a good time for Noel Coward. After the madcap Twenties and bleak Thirties, the war redefined Britishness and served as an antidote to the disillusion and decadence of the inter-war period. Its revival of the values of empire and Britain’s greatness was congenial to Coward: the quality of fortitude required (and mythologised) by the war neatly coincided with the fortitude displayed by Noel… the values he espoused dovetailed with the Dunkirk / Blitz / ‘Britain can take it’ spirit and he was able to exploit them fully. Cavalcade had announced his patriotism; the films, plays and concert tours of the early 1940s helped cement his image in the hearts and minds of the British public. (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, p.329)

Movie version

A 1944 film adaptation, with the same title, was directed by David Lean and starred Robert Newton and Celia Johnson. Interesting to see Johnson doing ‘common’ rather the refained middle class in ‘Brief Encounter’. It’s a fantastic performance. Newton looking fresh and young, nothing like the ramshackle twitcher of the Disney version of ‘Treasure Island’, just 6 years later. Apparently this was his breakthrough role, he was 39. And Stanley Holloway looking exactly as middle-aged as he does in ‘My Fair Lady’, 20 years later (1964). He was 54.

Or… is bickering actually a form of love?

Watching the film version made me reconsider a number of things about the play. The film is fuller and more varied than the play could ever be with, for example, more outdoor scenes and settings, and more historical touchpoints.

But the main thing the film made me reconsider was my hobby horse about arguing. Yes, in the film the characters do spend an inordinate amount of time arguing and bickering and telling each other to shut up and declaring there’s no use even talking to each other, in the classic Coward style, reflecting its ubiquity in the text, as I noted.

But in performance, in this wonderful film, you come to wonder whether the incessant arguing of pretty much everyone with everyone else, doesn’t at some deeper level indicate the enduring ties, and a deeper level of love and affection, between the members of this close-knit family of three generations plus in-laws, all living on top of each other.

Being trapped in each other’s presence in a small terraced house for their entire lives, means they not only know each other’s triggers and sore points and how to provoke and exasperate each other – but also, whenever anything really serious happens, they are there to support and sustain each other. Not very far beneath the bickering surface are the unbreakable ties of family.

At the end of watching the film, despite nearly two hours of bickering, squabbling and falling out, your abiding sense is of deep and enduring love, very beautifully and heart-warmingly portrayed.

Philip Hoare’s view

In his excellent biography of Coward, Philip Hoare says of the movie version that it is ‘an affecting tribute to a mythical England; a Cockney neo-romantic townscape, a snapshot of a city and a people that only existed in Noel Coward’s head’ (Noel Coward: A Biography, page 337).

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews

Tonight at 8.30 by Noel Coward (1936) – 3

‘Tonight at 8.30’ is a cycle of ten one-act plays by Noël Coward. It was first staged in London in 1936 with Coward himself and Gertrude Lawrence in the leading roles.

The plays are mostly comedies but three – ‘The Astonished Heart’, ‘Shadow Play’ and ‘Still Life’ – are serious. Four of the comedies include songs, with words and music by Coward.

One play, ‘Star Chamber’, was dropped after a single performance. The other nine plays were presented in three programmes of three plays each. There have been numerous revivals of many of the individual plays, but revivals of the complete cycle have been much less frequent. Several of the plays have been adapted for the cinema and television.

Background

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Coward wrote a succession of hits, ranging from the intimate comedies ‘Private Lives’ (in which Coward also starred alongside Gertrude Lawrence) and ‘Design for Living’, to the operetta ‘Bitter Sweet’ (1929) and the historical extravaganza ‘Cavalcade’ (1931).

After performing in ‘Private Lives’, Coward felt that the public enjoyed seeing him and Lawrence together on stage, and so he wrote the play cycle ‘Tonight at 8.30’ expressly as ‘acting, singing, and dancing vehicles for Gertrude Lawrence and myself’. But he also had the conscious motive of reviving the moribund form of the one-act play. As he wrote in the Preface to the printed plays:

A short play, having a great advantage over a long one in that it can sustain a mood without technical creaking or over padding, deserves a better fate, and if, by careful writing, acting and producing I can do a little towards reinstating it in its rightful pride, I shall have achieved one of my more sentimental ambitions.

Ten plays

The cycle consists of ten plays. In order of first production they are:

We Were Dancing: A comedy in two scenes
The Astonished Heart: A play in six scenes
Red Peppers: An interlude with music
Hands Across the Sea: A light comedy in one scene
Fumed Oak: An unpleasant comedy in two scenes
Shadow Play: A play with music
Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music
Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act
Ways and Means: A comedy in three scenes
Still Life: A play in five scenes

This blog post summarises and comments on numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10.

7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music

It is the evening of an autumn day in 1860. The entire 20-page play takes place in the same setting, the drawing room of a house in Kent belonging to the Featherways family. The play depicts this prosperous middle-class Victorian family, all wearing mourning and gathered after the funeral of their father. The group comprises his five children (in bold) and their spouses, if they have them:

Jasper Featherways, the facile flippant one, played by Coward
Jane, married to Jasper
Harriet Featherways now married to…
Charles Winter
Emily Featherways, now married to…
Edward Valance
Richard Featherways, unmarried
Lavinia Featherways, unmarried

They reminisce and call for madeira wine to drink a toast in. This is brought in by the ancient butler, Burrow, who is very hard of hearing which leads to utterly predictable and very enjoyable misunderstandings.

Jasper takes the lead in proposing toasts and is given a stream of comic and flippant remarks throughout. Lavinia is the most stern and Victorian of them all, strongly objecting to drinking after a funeral, and to many of the jokes and flippant remarks – ‘This is so wrong, so dreadfully wrong.’ As he proposes the toasts, Jasper breaks into song, the first of four songs in the piece:

The Toast

At which point Jasper suggests it’s time to get the big old family trunk down from the attic. Jasper asks Burrows to fetch the box, to which Burrows comically replies that, yes, he’s wound them all up, to which Jasper says significantly louder, The box not the clocks.

So Jasper and Richard go up into the attic and fetch down a bog old dusty box. But when he goes to unlock it, discovers it’s already open and then realises it’s an old box full of their toys and dressing-up costumes. The Featherways offspring get these all out and start playing an old favourite game of theirs, Princes and Princesses which, again, triggers a song, ‘Princes and Princesses’, which I can’t find on the internet.

Incidentally, they have all continued drinking the madeira very liberally and have now finished the first bottle so ring for Burrows to bring another one which they pour out with gusto. This strikes me as not very 1860s behaviour, much more the drunken behaviour of Leo and Otto in ‘Design for Living’ or Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’.

They drink a toast to Burrows, who was so sweet and kind to them when they were all children. Any the next thing they find in the old trunk is a musical box which they wind up and which, of course, provides music for more songs, which they sing, amid more drinking. Here’s a medley of two of the songs, ‘Hearts and Flowers’ and ‘Music Box’.

Hearts And Flowers/Music Box

The others are continuing uttering pious sentiments about their dead father when Lavinia amazes them and the audience by declaring she hated him.

LAVINIA: I hated Papa, so did you … He was cruel to Mama, he was unkind to us, he was profligate and pompous and worse still, he was mean.

Worst of all, he kept her at home as if imprisoned in the dark old Victorian home, counting his bills and sorting his linen and putting up with his silence or his insults. She hated him and she’s glad he’s dead.

(All this resonated with me much more since I read Virginia Woolf’s searing feminist polemic Three Guineas which, among other things, gives a horrible sense of how the Victorian home was a prison and a tomb for countless million unmarried middle class women, a plight dramatised by the case of Eleanor Pargiter in her novel, The Years.)

She then astonishes the others by telling them that the will read out to them that morning, the one which distributed family fortune equally among the five children, was not the old man’s final will. Just a week before he died he had made a new one, leaving the children nothing but dividing his fortune among his three mistresses and the rest to pay for a new church containing a grandiose memorial to himself in black marble.

This will was witnessed by Lavinia and Burrows, but now, she tells the flabbergasted family, precisely seven minutes after the old man expired, they burned it! Flabbergasted Jasper calls Burrows in to ask if all this is true but the deaf old retainer wisely and diplomatically states that his deafness is getting worse so that he will never be able to hear questions about the will.

They all realise what an excellent chap he is and invite him to join them for a (yet another) glass of madeira although it is Burrows himself who has the last toast, drinking to the whole family as, to the tune of the musical box, they dance round him hand in hand.

Comment

Immensely enjoyable because it’s one of the few Coward plays where the characters don’t spend a lot of the time shouting at each other or feeling miserable. It is wonderfully warm and happy and the plot, too, is simple but charming.

8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act

This is the one play in the set which was quickly dropped only being performed once. Maybe this was because it had by far the largest cast, with ten named parts.

It’s set on a West End stage around noon i.e. no question of a performance taking place. Instead one by one the ten or so characters arrive and we learn that they are all members of a ‘committee’ including its secretary. It takes a while to learn it’s the committee of the ‘Garrick Haven Fund’. The characters are:

Jimmie Horlick, stage manager
J. M. Farmer, secretary of the Garrick Haven Fund, amiable looking man between 30 and 40 carrying a briefcase stuffed with papers
Hester More, a vague, absent-minded and fanciful actress, ‘vague to the point of lunacy’
Johnny Bolton, a star comedian, middle aged, of working class origin, outlandishly dressed in ‘plus fours, a camel-hair coat, a check cap and a very bright scarf’
Julian Breed, the leading young actor in London
Violet Vibart, an elderly actress of considerable reputation
Maurice Searle, an exceedingly handsome virile young actor, mortally embarrassed because he’s had to grow long hair for a film role
Dame Rose Maitland, a grande dame of the theatre, majestic and autocratic, a vice president of the committee
Elise Brodie, an actress, pretty and respectable, another vice president of the committee
Xenia James, an actress, president of the Fund

I loved all these caricatures, very enjoyable. I loved Hester’s wild flights of fantasy (flights which I’ve noted running like a thread through so many of his plays), I loved the way the Johnnie character sticks out a mile because of his Cockney accent and the way he keeps trying to tell people long boring scenarios which everyone drifts off and ignores and so which are never finished.

I love the lofty way the grande dame ignores everyone and fails to hear anything she doesn’t want to. It takes a while for all these thespians to arrive and settle down and it’s funny how they’ve just agreed that, in the absence of the chair, Xenia James, Dame Rose will chair the meeting when the very same Xenia James makes a grand entrance dragged along by a vast great Dane, who she’s named after a fellow actor who passed away, Atherton.

Synopsis

Anyway, on the bare stage of a West End theatre the stage manager, Jimmie Horlick, is arranging chairs round a large table in preparation for a meeting of the committee of the Garrick Haven Fund. The committee members arrive in dribs and drabs.

First, Mr Farmer, Secretary of the Fund, briefcase packed with papers, methodical and harassed. Next Hester More, a dizzy young actress; Johnny Bolton, ‘a star comedian of middle age but perennial youthfulness’; Violet Vibart, an elderly actress of great distinction; Julian Breed, a popular juvenile lead; Maurice Searle, a character actor who has grown his hair to shoulder length for an historical role and feels self-conscious about it; the majestic Dame Rose Maitland; the preoccupied Elise Brodie; and finally, and very late, Xenia James, chairman of the committee, with her dog, Atherton.

The whole thing from start to finish is characterised by all the characters’ complete inability to concentrate, focus or obey rules. Instead the continually gossip, talk over each other, interrupt whoever else is speaking, undermine the chair and ignore Farmer’s long boring presentation.

In a nutshell, this is a meeting of the Garrick Haven fund, established in 1902 to provide a home for destitute actresses. The fund is well off, with a balance of £58,000, largely generated by the annual fun fair. Mention of this characteristically triggers all present to wander off into memories of the fair and complaints about all aspects of its management.

With difficulty, Farmer tries to quieten them down and get their attention back onto the issue the meeting’s been called for which is to give formal consent for much-needed structural alterations to the retirement house (notably an extra bathroom and inside toilet).

At this point Atherton starts farting and Xenia gets nice Mr Horlick to take him (very gingerly) off to the props room. Farmer reads a letter from the residents politely asking for the extra loo and bathroom and then proceeds to read out, at very great length, the precise and exact quote for the building works which he’s received from the builders (Messrs Joyce and Spence) and the committee has to sign off on, amounting to £3,082, 17 shillings and fourpence.

The comedy derives from the way it’s like herding cats: the actors are completely incapable of concentrating on anything without wandering off into digressions and lots of private conversations, in one instance a suggestion that the new buildings be decorated with framed posters from old play productions.

Xenia sneaks off to check on Atherton and finds her darling fast asleep and twitching as though chasing rabbits in a dream.

Farmer attempts to read out a further quote for the plumbing work but by now the actors have had it. A press photographer arrives and they are all instantly distracted by this, As Farmer drones valiantly on all the others arrange themselves with much fussing for a group photo.

The actors start to leave in ones and twos as they arrived, Julian and Maurice leaving with the photographer. Xenia makes a speech appealing for donations and promises to give £100 to set the ball rolling not having really grasped that donations are not at all needed, what was needed was attention and responsibility. Then, without formally closing the meeting, she too dashes off, forgetting her dog.

Johnny gets to his feet to second Xenia’s fine sentiments and is droning on about what a worthy cause it is, and how we may all suffer poverty one day etc but he is drowned out by the sound of the remaining thespians all saying goodbye to each other, giving air kisses, promising to meet again soon etc until he becomes utterly demoralised and gives up.

Only valiant Mr Farmer is left to Johnny, with no-one else to snare, invites him to lunch at his club and Farmer is incautious enough to accept. As they walk off he tells Jimmie to turn off the lights, thus providing a mirror of the opening of the play (lights on, enter Jimmie, then Johnny, then Farmer).

And, in a last gag, after everyone has exited the bare stage and the lights have gone off, we hear the mournful howling of the dog Atherton, locked up and abandoned in the props room.

Maybe I’m in a relaxed mood today, but I found this as entertaining and funny as Victorian Album.

9. Ways and Means: A Light Comedy in Three Scenes

We are in the South of France, on the fashionable Cote d’Azur. We are in the house of the very well-off Mrs Lloyd-Ransome. The curtain opens to reveal a bedroom and in the bed, having breakfast off a tray, are the unhappy married couple Toby and Stella Cartwright.

Briefly: he has gambled away all their money. They’re in debt to their banks and everyone they know including their hostess in this house. The dialogue mostly consists of despair at being so broke, alternately flippant / humorous and genuinely despairing.

Toby tells their Nanny (‘a capable looking, middle-aged woman’) to pawn Stella’s jewellery and the gold buttons off his waistcoat. They then go back to the casino to gamble with the cash but in the second scene we find them a few hours later, back in the bed, and utterly despairing, since they have lost everything they got from the pawnbrokers in four minutes flat. Toby had got a place at the big table and was feeling lucky when he was asked to give up his place by an American lady, Mrs Irving Brandt. Ever the gentleman, he gave up his place when a lady requested it and Mrs Irving Brandt went on to ‘run the bank’ 17 times and win 175,000 francs. When she had utterly cleaned up she graciously let Toby have the seat and he promptly lost everything.

Angry, he goes into the bathroom where he manages to bang his head on the mirror and cut himself. There’s a big song and dance while Stella tells him not to be such a baby and gets some iodine to dress the wound.

After much more fuss and flippancy and lamenting, they go to bed and put the lights out. This sets the scene for the third and final scene in which they’re awakened by a burglar. When they call out and put the lights on he pulls a gun on them. However, he’s not a very good burglar and they first demoralise him by telling him they have no money and then manage to disarm him, seize the gun and turn the tables.

When they take his mask off they discover it’s the chauffeur of posh people in their circle, a man named Stevens. Now we understand why there’d been some chat in the first scene, among their posh friends, about some scandal involving this chauffeur. He had been dismissed for having a fling with his employer (Mrs Bainbridge)’s daughter, May. Now he explains that, thus thrown out of work, he decided to try his hand at crime.

So, as in these posh comedies, as for example in P.G. Wodehouse, the posh protagonists turn out to be on good terms with their would-be burglar, and have a civilised chat and a drink. Suddenly a plan occurs to Toby. Remember the 175,000 francs won by Mrs Irving Brandt? Toby suggests Stevens sneaks down the hall and into her room and steals that 175,000 francs.

Despite Stevens’ and Stella’s initial objections, this is what he ends up doing, returning five minutes later not only with all the cash but with some diamonds he pinched as well. They secrete the money in their clothes to look like it’s theirs, then get Stevens to tie them up.

The plan is to look like he broke into their room, tied them up, burgled them, then onto Mrs Brandt, before returning to their room and escaping. So this is what he does, ties them to their chairs and finally ties gags over their mouths. Up to that point they’d been conducting a comic Wodehouse-style conversation in which they promised to help him out with his choice of a new career and he answered all their requests with yes sir, yes ma’am.

He bows politely and leaves them tied to their chairs, gagged, and laughing hysterically.

The way the whole thing is a kind of conspiracy or scam which leaves the actors hooting with laughter is identical with the end of ‘Design for Living’ where the more the outraged husband preaches old-fashioned morality, the more Leo, Otto and Gilda fall about laughing.

In one sense his plays are a kind of conspiracy by imaginative tricksters against the conventional values and morality of the older generation and the poor saps among the current generation who still believe them.

Thoughts

His fans and blurb writers endlessly praise Coward for the wit and stylishness of his writing and dialogue. The plays certainly are almost entirely about posh upper-middle-class people, and they contain much 1) posing and prancing and characters drawing attention to their own poshness with their drawling flippancy and ‘wit’. But this summary or cliché ignores two other major elements of his approach or style or schtick, which are 2) arguments and abuse and 3) flights of fantasy.

1. Wit

STELLA: You seem to forget that one a certain bleak day in 1928 I gave my life into your keeping.
TOBY: Marriage is a sacrament, a mystic rite, and you persist in regarding it as a sort of plumber’s estimate.

TOBY: You play bridge too merrily, Stella.
STELLA: My merriment is entirely a social gesture. I loathe bridge.
TOBY: That is no excuse for playing it as if it were lacrosse.

TOBY: From now onwards I intend to live in the past – the present is too unbearable. I intend to go back to the happy scenes of my boyhood.
STELLA: I’m sorry I’m not a rocking horse.
TOBY: You underrate yourself, darling.

2. Abuse

It had previously been axiomatic that a gentleman never lost his temper and was chivalrous and respectful to woman. The Coward male is neither of these things. The Coward male loses his temper all the time, every few minutes flies into a frothing spitting rage, see ‘Private Lives’ or ‘Design for Living’ or Toby, here.

The furious Coward male also doesn’t mince his words, hurling the most astonishing abuse, insults and threats at his woman. The level of hatred, cursing and threats in ‘Private Lives’ staggered me.

The couple at various moments say:

STELLA: Be quiet… Oh shut up!.. Don’t be so idiotic… Don’t be so silly… Don’t be so childish… Shut up… Toby, don’t be such a fool…

TOBY: Shut up!.. Be quiet, Stella… Don’t be an idiot Stella…

A bit more elaborately:

STELLA: You have the moral values of a warthog… You have a disgusting mind, Toby…

3. Fantasy

The really characteristic thing about Coward, I think, is when his lead characters go off on wild imaginative flights of fancy. Mad frivolous fantasies were Elyot’s distinguishing feature in ‘Private Lives’ and all three protagonists in ‘Design for Living’ cook up fantastical scenarios, and it crops up again here, as Toby in particular expresses his unhappiness in terms of far-fetched similes and scenarios.

TOBY: It is possible, in my present state of splendid detachment, that I might go off into a yogi trance and stay upside down for several days.

Or ridiculous plans:

TOBY: Let’s go quietly but firmly along the passage and murder Pearl Brandt.

Stella’s suggestion that maybe she could do a little light prostitution to earn the money they need. Or her absurd exaggeration:

STELLA: We’ll deliver ourselves over to Olive bound and gagged in the morning.

Coward’s imaginative characters are always overflowing with absurd and fantastical scenarios. It’s this, I think, the vein of fantasy which pops up, a smaller or larger ingredient of each play, much more than the alleged ‘wit’, which makes his plays so entertaining. (Cf ‘Shadow Play’ which is one big fantasy.)

10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

Executive summary

The play portrays the chance meeting at a suburban railway station, the subsequent love affair and eventual parting of a married woman, Laura Jesson, and a doctor, Alec Harvey. The sadness of their secretive affair is contrasted throughout the play with the boisterous life of the tea shop and station staff. ‘Still Life’ differs from most of the plays in the ‘Tonight at 8.30’ cycle by having an unhappy ending. It was also, of course, the basis of the 1945 film, ‘Brief Encounter’, directed by David Lean and starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, which is regularly cited as one of the top ten British films of all time.

Synopsis

The five scenes are set in the same location, namely the tea room at Milford Junction railway station, which is dominated by the elaborate refreshments counter / station buffet, overseen by the strict Myrtle Bagot who bosses around her downtrodden assistant Beryl Waters, and flirts in an imperious dismissive way with Albert the ticket inspector. The action takes place in five scenes across the span of a single year, from April to March.

Scene 1 5.30 on an April afternoon. Myrtle’s character is established as she bosses around her assistant Beryl and rebuffs the attempts of Albert, the ticket-inspector, to flirt with her. Laura is waiting for her train home after shopping. She goes out onto the platform as an express races by with an enormous noise and re-enters moments later complaining of having a smut of grit in her eye. Myrtle gets some water and Albert offers advice but it’s the handsome young Alec introduces himself as a doctor and uses his hankie to remove it for her. She thanks him and goes to catch her train, he goes back to his cup of tea.

Scene 2 Three months later, in July. The ‘rude mechanicals’ i.e. the working class characters provide a foil or backdrop for the main love story. (The phrase ‘rude mechanical’ comes from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ where it refers to the working class artisans who have their own farcical love story which parallels the love story of the main protagonists who are lords and ladies. Three hundred and forty years later Coward is still using much the same device.)

And so the scene opens with Myrtle telling Beryl about a fortune teller who told her love life accurately before Albert breezes in wanting tea and cakes for some travellers on the platform. Against this bright and breezy background, enter Alec and Lara together. He buys two teas and two bath buns.

It becomes clear that after their first meeting they encountered each other a second time by chance and like each other’s company and have had lunch and gone to the pictures together. He took an afternoon off work. Now he’s praising her as ‘awfully nice’, but she feels guilty. When she was a girl living in Cornwall, she and her sister used to sneak out the house at night to go swim in the sea but always felt guilty. Now she feels the same. She’s ‘a respectable married woman with a husband and a home and three children.’

They ask each other to describe their spouses, as people having affairs often do, out of guilt and also to make it seem more homely, more real. She gets him to talk about his work and he explains his passionate interest in preventive medicine, and then goes into more detail about his interest in lung diseases. She sits entranced until it’s time for his train. Suddenly he wants more than to bump into each other by accident but begs that she’ll meet him the following Thursday, in a week’s time, and after initial reluctance, as he takes his hand and prepares to run for his train, she agrees.

Scene 3 Another three months have passed so it’s October. As usual the scene opens with the proles, Albert and Myrtle, flirting. They seem to have reached a new level of intimacy, as he asks her for a kiss over the counter and, on entering, slaps her behind as she’s bent over. She scolds him but permits it. In his tussle to get a kiss they know some cakes on the floor and are picking them up when Alec and Laura come in.

As usual, Alec buys two teas and takes them to their usual table. From their conversation it becomes clear that they have seen a good deal more of each other and have fallen in love. He accepts it and wants her to but Laura is fighting against it, says it’s wrong, ‘dreadfully wrong’. He wants to arrange an afternoon at a friend, Stephen’s, house, presumably to have sex. She, of course, thinks it’s horrible and squalid and will be spoiled by the fear hanging over them. He tells her they’ve both been in love before but neither of them have known this ‘something lovely and strange and desperately difficult’ and, as usual, when she listens to him she is entranced.

As with so many of these Coward plays it’s a question of hermeneutics, of clashing and competing interpretations. They both feel a tremendous attraction to each other but whereas Alec argues strongly for giving into it, Laura bridles and argues against it. She vividly describes going home after their Thursday meetings, and feeling adrift and alien in her house, weirdly detached from all the humdrum objects of her normal domestic life. He becomes more ardent and passionate, holding her hand, saying how he counts the hours till Thursday comes round again.

This intense conversation is completely overshadowed by two loud soldiers entering the room and asking Myrtle for some alcohol. She can’t serve it because it’s out of hours and this develops into an extended argument with them making all kinds of reasons why they need a nice drop, why can’t she put it in the tea etc, while she absolutely refuses to break the law. Eventually she tells Beryl to fetch Norman who takes charge of the situation and tells the two squaddies to ‘op it, before saying he has to return to his gate. Myrtle asks Beryl to get her a glass of brandy for her nerves and tells Beryl that Norman Godby may be on the short side ‘but ‘e’s a gentleman.’

After this extended interruption we return to Alec and Laura at their table. He delivers a speech about how they have to be strong enough to live up to their love, ‘clean and untouched’ by other people’s knowledge, ‘something of our own forever’.

He scribbles the address of his colleague’s flat on a piece of paper for her, says he’s going to miss his train and go to the flat and he’ll be waiting for her and leaves. Laura stares at the paper, then we hear a train steaming in and Myrtle comments on the time, making it quite clear that it’s Laura’s train. Laura gets up, goes to the platform door, pauses, the whistle blows and the train starts to puff out, while she slowly exits the tea room.

I.e. she is going to keep her rendezvous with Alec at his friend’s flat. Presumably to have sex and thereby break her fidelity to her husband, and also the law.

Scene 4 It’s December. As usual the scene opens with comic business among the working classes. If tea room boss Myrtle is carrying on with Norman the ticket collector, Beryl is continuing to be wooed by the man who carries a tray of refreshments round the platforms, Stanley. He asks if he can walk Beryl home, asks her to lock up early, so they can have an extra five minutes, presumably for snogging. Thus the mating game, played at every level of society. In all three relationships, it’s the men who are constantly pushing for more, and the women who, in their various ways, are reluctant or refuse. Is that true of ‘real life’? Or just the convention of the time, and of many times, but not of our modern liberated age?

Laura comes in looking pale and anxious, asks for a brandy, and a pen and paper, which Beryl reluctantly gives her, then sits down to write – presumably an important message to Alec – but breaks down in tears and then Alec comes in anyway. We quickly learn that they were together (presumably for the umpteenth time) at this friend of Alec’s flat, when he came home unexpectedly early and caught them. At least, Alec darted out to chat to the fellow while Laura had to get dressed in a hurry and nip out the back, feeling like a prostitute. She bets they chatted and had a good laugh about her, like men of the world.

He apologises then we get to the heart of the matter, the clash of worldviews or values. Because Alec claims that nothing else matters except their love, except their knowledge that they love each other. But Laura says that other things matter too, such as self respect and decency. So he is the voice of unbridled passion, she, as so often, embodies the weight of social convention, conventional morality etc.

Alec walks over and faces a picture on the wall because he can’t face her as he agrees that this thing will have to end: not their love, he will go on loving her to the end of his life; but their being together. He returns to the table and tells her he is going away. He’s been offered a post at a hospital in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s a golden opportunity. He’s been agonising for weeks but now he can see this thing is ending and so… Should he go or should he turn it down? This, of course, is cruel of him, handing the whole responsibility of ending the affair to her, specially as she’s shown how vulnerable and conflicted she is. Of course she tells him to go.

He asks her to meet him one last time. Not at the flat, that’s now out of bounds, but at a café in town and they’ll go for a drive in the country. His train chuffs in and he has to go. He apologises for ever meeting her, falling in love with her, for causing her so much misery and she apologises back.

Even this scene, obviously designed to be heart-wringing, is interwoven with comedy from the proles because, before the moments, Alec has to bribe stroppy surly Beryl not to close the café at 10pm as she ought to do, but leave it open for just a few minutes more, so that he can have these final words with Laura.

In other words, this device, of paralleling the main love affair with the shenanigans of the rude mechanicals does a number of things: it provides comic relief for the high emotion of the central couple; but it also sets off and heightens their emotional moments; and it creates a vivid sense of the pressure and constraints under which an affair is carried out. The mechanicals are emblematic not only of society’s moral constraints but of the busyness of life, all the timetables of work and spouses and children and responsibilities and duties which any affair has to find time amid, stolen moments, always limited, which eventually come to seem sordid and sneaky, and make the protagonists, like Laura, feel cheap and miserable.

Scene 5 The fifth and final scene is set in March. Albert is more cocky and confident with Myrtle and sends Beryl into the back room ready to steal a kiss, when Alec and Laura enter. It’s a lovely touch that the station staff have, of course, noticed their romantic trysts, and have taken to calling them Romeo and Juliet. To ourselves, in our own minds, we live intense and tragic lives. To other people, we barely register or only as comic figures of fun.

Obviously this is the last scene between Alec and Laura and meant to be intensely moving but it is typical of the play that almost half of it is taken up with a great palaver among the proles. Mildred, who keeps the newspaper and bookstall comes running in to bring the message that Beryl’s mum’s been taken ill again and they’ve rushed her off to hospital. This leads to a cascade of consequences as Beryl is told, gets in a fret, Myrtle says she’d better go to the hospital straightaway, Mildred better go with her for moral support, she (Myrtle) will stay till locking up time (10pm). Which irritates Albert because he’d bought them tickets to see a show, Broadway Melody of 1936, and he slams his teacup down in exasperation.

Only after this extended palaver do we get to Alec and Laura. This is the last time they’ll meet before he leaves for South Africa and she has come to see him off. He asks if he may write but she says no, better not.

He tells her he loves her with all his heart and she quietly whispers that she wants to die. God. Tortured illicit love.

It is their last few minutes together and they are utterly ruined by the entrance of a friend of Laura’s, the fussy and talkative Dolly, who is overjoyed to bump into her old friend, joins them at their table, and sets about telling her all about her day’s doings, while Laura and Alec can only stare into each other’s eyes.

With the result that their last few minutes together before his train arrives are completely swamped and their goodbye is cruelly limited to a formal handshake. And so Alec goes out while Laura remains, trapped listening to prattling Dolly, who now whitters on about a couple they know who are getting divorced because he had a mistress up in town, the wife spotted it then it all came out etc.

You can imagine how this is daggers to the heart of Laura who has always been more conscious of how society sees these things i.e. crudely, dismissively, heartlessly.

They all hear the express through train approaching and Dolly goes to the counter to buy some chocolate for her son, when Laura suddenly snaps and rushes out onto the platform. Dolly turns and notices her missing and Myrtle says she didn’t see her go.

For a moment there is the strong implication that Laura has run out onto the platform to kill herself by throwing herself in front of the train. For a minute. But then the café door opens and she comes back in, looking ‘very white and shaky’.

Solid practical Dolly asks if she’s alright and when Laura says she feels a bit sick, persuades Myrtle to pour some brandy for Laura (tenpence). They hear the sound of their train, the stopping suburban train coming, Dolly gathers up her parcels and accompanies Laura out as the curtain falls. Masterpiece.

Brief Encounter

Various of the plays were adapted for TV or cinema. Coward himself adapted ‘Still Life’ for the screen as ‘Brief Encounter’, one of the most famous British films of all time.

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews

Journey To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)

When we awoke early next morning the train was crossing a wide valley of paddy fields. The rising sun struck its beams across the surfaces of innumerable miniature lakes; in the middle distance farmhouses seemed actually to be floating on water. Here and there a low mound rose a few feet above the level of the plain, with a weed-grown, ruinous pagoda, standing upon it, visible for miles around. Peasants with water-buffaloes were industriously ploughing their arable liquid into a thick, brown soup.
(Journey To A War, page 191)

Collectively, perhaps, we most resemble a group of characters in one of Jules Verne’s stories about lunatic English explorers.
(p.104)

The Sino-Japanese War

In July 1937 – exactly a year after the start of the Spanish Civil War – Japan attacked China. It was hardly a surprise. Back in 1931 the so-called ‘Mukden Incident’ had helped spark the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (the large area to the north east of China, just above Beijing). The Chinese were defeated and Japan created a new puppet state, Manchukuo (setting up the last Qing emperor, Pu Li, as its puppet ruler) through which to rule Manchuria.

Going further back, in 1894 to 1895 China, then still under the rule of the Qing dynasty, was defeated by Japan in what came to be called the First Sino-Japanese War. China had been forced to cede Taiwan to Japan and to recognise the independence of Korea which had, in classical times, been under Chinese domination.

In other words, for 40 years the rising power of militaristic, modernising Japan had been slowly nibbling away at rotten China, seizing Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. Now the military junta in Tokyo decided the time was right to take another bite, engineered an ‘incident’ at the Marco Polo bridge on the trade route to Beijing, and used this as a pretext to attack Beijing in the north and Shanghai in the south.

Thus there was quite a lot of military and political history to get to grips with in order to understand the situation in China, but what made it even more confusing was the fact that China itself was a divided nation. First, the nominal government – the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang under its leader Chiang Kai-shek – had only with difficulty put down or paid off the powerful warlords who for decades had ruled local regions of China after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911.

But second, Chiang faced stiff competition from the Chinese Communist Party. The two parties had lived in uneasy alliance until Chiang staged a massacre of communists in Shanghai in 1927 which brought the tension between Chinese nationalists and communists into the open.

It was the three-way destabilisation of China during this period – warlords versus Nationalists versus Communists – which had helped Japan invade and take over Manchuria. Prompted by the 1937 Japanese attack the Nationalists and Communists now formed a very uneasy alliance.

Auden in Spain

Meanwhile, back in Europe, the great political issue of the age was the Spanish Civil War which began when General Franco led a military uprising against the democratically elected government in July 1936. Like many high-minded, middle class liberals, Auden and Isherwood both felt the time had come to put their money where their mouths were. Auden did actually travel to Spain in January 1937 and was there till March, apparently trying to volunteer to drive an ambulance in the medical service. Instead, red tape and the communists who were increasingly running the Republican forces apparently blocked him from getting a useful job. He tried to help out at the radio station but discovered its broadcasts were weak and there were no vacancies.

Frustrated and embarrassed, Auden was back in England by mid-March 1937. The long-term impact of the trip was his own surprise at how much it upset him to see the churches of Barcelona which had all been torched and gutted by a furious radical populace as symbols of oppression. Auden was shocked, and then shocked at his reaction. Wasn’t he meant to be a socialist, a communist even, like lots of other writers of his generation? The Spain trip was the start of the slow process of realisation which was to lead him back to overt Christian faith in the 1940s.

Also Auden saw at first hand the infighting on the Republican side between the communist party slavishly obeying Stalin’s orders, and the more radical Trotskyite and Anarchist parties who, later in 1937, it would crush. Later he paid credit to George Orwell’s book Homage To Catalonia for explaining the complex political manoeuvring far better than he could have. But watching the Republicans fight among themselves made him realise it was far from being a simple case of black and white, of Democracy against Fascism.

So by March 1938 Auden had returned to Britain, where he was uncharacteristically silent about his experiences, and got on with writing, editing new works for publication (not least an edition of his play The Ascent of F6 and Letters From Iceland).

Meanwhile, Christopher Isherwood was living in Paris managing his on-again, off-again relationship with his German boyfriend Heinz. And although he had accommodated Auden on an overnight stop in the French capital and waved him off on the train south to Spain, Isherwood hadn’t lifted a finger for the Great Cause.

Then, in June 1937, Auden’s American publisher, Bennet Cerf of Random House, had suggested that after the reasonable sales of his travel book about Iceland, maybe Auden would be interested in writing another travel book, this time travelling to the East. Isherwood was a good suggestion as collaborator because they had just worked closely on the stage play, The Ascent of F6 and had begun work on a successor, which was to end up becoming the pay On The Frontier. The pair were considering the travel idea when the Japanese attacked China, quickly took Beijing and besieged Shanghai.

At once they seized on this as the subject of the journey and the book. Neither had really engaged with the war in Spain; travelling east would be a way to make amends and to report on what many people considered to be the Eastern Front of what was developing into a worldwide war between Fascism (in this case Japan) and Democracy (in this case the Chinese Nationalists).

China also had the attraction that, unlike Spain, it wouldn’t be stuffed full of eminent literary figures falling over themselves to write poems and plays and novels and speeches. Spain had been a very competitive environment for a writer. Far fewer people knew or cared about China: it would be their own little war.

And so Auden and Isherwood left England in January 1938, boat from Dover then training it across France, then taking a boat from Marseilles to Hong Kong, via Egypt, Colombo and Singapore.

Journey to a War

Journey To A War is not as good as Letter From Iceland, it’s less high spirited and funny. There isn’t a big linking poem like Letter To Lord Byron to pull it together, and there isn’t the variety of all the different prose and verse forms Auden and MacNeice cooked up for the earlier book.

Instead it overwhelmingly consists of Isherwood’s very long prose diary of what happened to them and what they saw in their three months journey around unoccupied China.

The book opens with a series of sonnets and this was the form Auden chose to give the book poetic unity – sonnets, after all, lend themselves to sequences which develop themes and ideas, notably the Sonnets of Shakespeare, or his contemporaries Spencer and Sidney. There’s a collection of half a dozen of them right at the start, which give quick impressions of places they visited en route to China (Macau, Hong Kong). Then, 250 pages of Isherwood prose later, there’s the sonnet sequence titled In Time of War.

But instead of the bright and extrovert tone of Letters From Iceland, Auden’s sonnets are often obscure. They are clearly addressing some kind of important issues but it’s not always clear what. This is because they are very personal and inward-looking. Auden is clearly wrestling with his sense of liberal guilt. The results are rather gloomy. Spain had disillusioned him immensely. He went to Spain thinking the forces of Evil were objective and external but his first-hand experience of the internecine bickering on the Republican side quickly showed him there is no Good Side, there are no Heroes. History is made by all of us and so – all of us are to blame for what happens. Travel as far as you want, you’re only running away from the truth. If we want to cure the world, it is we ourselves that we need to cure first.

Where does this journey look which the watcher upon the quay,
Standing under his evil star, so bitterly envies,
As the mountains swim away with slow calm strokes
And the gulls abandon their vow? Does it promise a juster life?

Alone with his heart at last, does the fortunate traveler find
In the vague touch of a breeze, the fickle flash of a wave,
Proofs that somewhere exists, really, the Good Place,
Convincing as those that children find in stones and holes?

No, he discovers nothing: he does not want to arrive.
His journey is false, his unreal excitement really an illness
On a false island where the heart cannot act and will not suffer:
He condones his fever; he is weaker than he thought; his weakness is real…

(from The Voyage by W.H. Auden)

‘An illness on a false island’ which is clearly England, a place ‘where the heart cannot act’. The traveller is trying to escape himself but cannot and glumly realises ‘he is weaker than he thought’. Or the thumping final couplet of the sonnet about Hong Kong:

We cannot postulate a General Will;
For what we are, we have ourselves to blame.

Isherwood’s diary

Luckily, the prose sections of the book are written by Isherwood and these are much more fun. He keeps up the giggling schoolboy persona of the novel he’d recently published, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), he notes the way the Chinese pronounce their names Au Dung and Y Hsaio Wu, he sounds wide-eyed and optimistic. He hadn’t seen what Auden had seen in Spain and so wasn’t struggling with the same doubts.

On February 28 1938 they leave Hong Kong by steamer for Canton and Isherwood finds everyone and everything hilarious. Look a Japanese gunboat! Listen, the sound of bombs falling! He has same facility for the disarmingly blunt image which he deploys in the Berlin stories. The mayor of Canton (Mr Tsang Yan-fu) is always beaming, has a face like a melon with a slice cut out of it. After dinner the Chinese general entertains them by singing Chinese opera, showing how different characters are given different tones and registers (‘the romantic hero emits a sound like a midnight cat’).

Isherwood refers to the whole trip as a dream and as a landscape from Alice in Wonderland – they expected Chinese people to behave as in a Gilbert and Sullivan opera and had rehearsed elaborate compliments, and are disarmed when they’re much more down to earth. The train journey on through Hunan province is boring, the tea tastes of fish, they amuse themselves by reading out an Anthony Trollope novel or singing in mock operatic voices.

But this sense of unreality which dogs them is simply because both of them didn’t have a clue what was going on, what was at stake, the military situation, had never seen fighting or battle and weren’t proper journalists. They were privileged dilettantes, ‘mere trippers’, as Isherwood shamefacedly explains when they meet real war correspondents at a press conference (p.53).

In Hankow the Consul gives them Chiang, a middle-aged man with the manners of a perfect butler to be their guide. They attend the official war briefings alongside American and Australian journalists, they meet Mr Donald, Chiang Kai-shek’s military adviser, the German adviser General von Falkenhausen, Agnes Smedley, Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself, and with delight are reunited with Robert Capa, the soon-to-be legendary American war photographer who’d they’d met on the boat out. They attend traditional Chinese opera, which Isherwood observes with the eye of a professional playwright.

They catch the train to Cheng-chow which has been repeatedly bombed by the Japanese, capably looked after by their ‘boy’, Chiang. They are heading north on the train when they learn that Kwei-teh has fallen, nonetheless they decide to press on to Kai-feng. With them is an exuberant and seasoned American doctor, McClure, who takes them to watch some operations. They walk round the stinking foetid town. They go to the public baths which stink of urine. Then they catch a train to Sü-chow. And then onto Li Kwo Yi where they argue with Chinese commanding officers (General Chang Tschen) to allow them to go right up to the front line, a town divided by the Great Canal.

If you’ve no idea where any of these places are, join the club. I was reading an old edition but, even so, it had no map at all of any part of the journey, which is ludicrous. The only map anywhere appears to have been on the front cover of the hardback edition, replaced (uselessly) by an anti-war cartoon on the paperback editions, and even this doesn’t show their actual route.

First US edition (publ. Random House)

With no indication where any of these places are, unless you are prepared to read it with an atlas open at your side, Isherwood’s long prose text becomes a stream of clever observations largely divorced from their context. Even an atlas is not that useful given that Isherwood uses the old form of the placenames, all of which, along with most people’s names, have changed. Thus Sian, capital of Shen-si province, is now Xian, capital of Shaanxi Province, Sü-chow is now Suzhou, and so on.

We are intended to enjoy the surreal aspects of travelling in a deeply foreign land – the village restaurant which was papered entirely with pages of American tabloid magazines, and so covered with photos of gangsters and revelations about fashionable divorcees (p.126); or the expensive hotel in Sian whose menu included ‘Hat cake’ and ‘FF potatoes’ (p.141). Beheading is a common punishment because the Chinese believe a body needs to be complete to enter the afterlife. They meet lots of tough and brave American missionaries, mostly from the American south.

Finally, back in Hankow (Hankou) they become part of polite society again, are invited to a party of Chinese intellectuals, a party given by the British admiral and consul where they meet the legendary travel writer Peter Fleming and his actress wife Celia Johnson, the British ambassador Archibald Kerr, and the American communist-supporting journalist, Agnes Smedley (p.156). Fleming pops up a lot later at their hotel in Tunki, and is too suave, handsome and self-assured to possibly be real.

Militarily, Journey To A War confirms the opinions of the modern histories of the war I’ve read, namely that the Nationalist side was hampered by corruption, bad leadership and, above all, lack of arms and ammunition. When they retook cities which had been under communist influence Chiang’s Nationalists realised they needed some kind of ideology to match the communists’ emphasis on a pure life and so, in 1934, invented the New Life Movement i.e. stricter morals, which Madame Chiang politely explains to our two gay writers.

Isherwood notices the large number of White Russian exiles, often running shops, come down in the world. This reminds me of the Russian nanny J.G. Ballard had during his boyhood in 1930s Shanghai, as described in his autobiography Miracles of Life.

From pages 100 to 150 or so our intrepid duo had hoped to approach the front line in the north and had crept up to it in a few places, but ultimately refused permission to go further, to visit the Eighth Route Army, and so have come by boat back down the Yangtze River to Hankou. Now they plan to travel south-east towards the other main front, where the Japanese have taken Shanghai and Nanjing.

On the Emperor of Japan’s birthday there is a particularly large air-raid on Hankow and they make themselves comfortable on the hotel lawn to watch it. The Arsenal across the river takes a pasting and they go to see the corpses. 500 were killed. Nice Emperor of Japan.

They take a river steamer to Kiukiang and stay at the extraordinary luxury hotel named Journey’s End and run by the wonderfully eccentric Mr Charleton. They catch the train from Kiukiang to Nanchang, stay there a few days, then the train on to Kin-hwa (modern Jinhua). Here they are horrified to discover their arrival has been anticipated and they are treated like minor royalty, including a trip to the best restaurant in town with 12 of the city’s top dignitaries.

Auden and I developed a private game: it was a point of honour to praise most warmly the dishes you liked least. ‘Delicious,’ Auden murmured, as he munched what was, apparently, a small sponge soaked in glue. I replied by devouring, with smiles of exquisite pleasure, an orange which taste of bitter aloes and contained, at its centre, a large weevil. (p.195)

They are taken by car to the town of Tunki. They try to get permission to push on to see the front near the Tai Lake, They have to cope with the officious newspaperman, A.W. Kao. This man gives a brisk confident explanation of what’s happening at the front. Neither Auden nor Isherwood believe it. Isherwood’s explanation describes scenes they’ve seen on their visit, but also hints at what Auden might have seen on his (mysterious) trip to civil war Spain. Auden is given a speech defining the nature of modern war:

War is bombing an already disused arsenal, missing it and killing a few old women. War is lying in a stable with a gangrenous leg. War is drinking hot water in a barn and worrying about one’s wife. War is a handful of lost and terrified men in the mountains, shooting at something moving in the undergrowth. War is waiting for days with nothing to do; shouting down a dead telephone; going without sleep, or sex, or a wash. War is untidy, inefficient, obscure, and largely a matter of chance. (p.202)

Peter Fleming turns up looking gorgeous, professional, highly motivated, speaking good Chinese. He attends briefings, manages the locals with perfect manners. They organise an outing towards the front, with sedan chairs, bearers, two or three local notables (T.Y. Liu, A.W. Kao, Mr Ching, Major Yang, Shien), Fleming is indefatigable. On they plod to Siaofeng, Ti-pu and Meiki. Here the atmosphere is very restless, the miltary authorities are visibly unhappy to see them, half their own Chinese want to get away. The spend a troubled night, with people coming and going at the military headquarters where they’ve bivouaced and, after breakfast, they give in to the Chinese badgering, turn about, and retrace their steps. Twelve hours later the town of Meiki fell to the Japanese. On they plod up a steep hillside, carried by coolies, and down the precipitous other side, down to Tien-mu-shan and then by car to Yu-tsien (p.229).

We stopped to get petrol near a restaurant where they were cooking bamboo in all its forms – including the strips used for making chairs. That, I thought, is so typical of this country. Nothing is specifically either eatable or uneatable. You could being munching a hat, or bite a mouthful out of a wall; equally, you could build a hut with the food provided at lunch. Everything is everything. (p.230)

Isherwood hates Chinese food and, eventually, Auden agrees. At Kin-hwa Fleming leaves them. It’s a shame they’ve ended up getting on famously. It’s interesting that both Auden and Isherwood initially were against him because he went to Eton. The narcissism of minor differences knows no limits.

They say goodbye to all the people they’ve met in Kin-hwa and set off by bus for Wenchow. They take a river steamer from Wenchow to Shanghai.

Arrival in Shanghai on 25 May signals the end of their adventures. They stay in the chaotic, colourful, corrupt city till 12 June. Fascinating to think that over in his house in the International Settlement, young James Graham Ballard was playing with his toy soldiers, dreaming about flying and laying the grounds for one of the most distinctive and bizarre voices in post-war fiction.

And Isherwood confirms the strange, deliriously surreal atmosphere of a Chinese city which had been invaded and conquered by the Japanese, who had destroyed a good deal of the Chinese city but left the International and the French Settlements intact. They attend receptions at the British Embassy, are the guest of a British businessman hosting high-level Japs.

There is no doubt Auden and Isherwood hate the Japanese, can’t see the flag hanging everywhere without thinking about all the times in the past four months when they’ve ducked into cover as Japanese bombers rumbled overhead and fighters swooped to strafe the roads.

This is the only section of this long book with real bite. Isherwood interviews a British factory inspector who describes the appalling conditions Chinese workers endure and notes that they’ll all be made much worse by the Japanese conquerors.

Schoolboys

It’s a truism to point out that the Auden Generation was deeply marked by its experience of English public schools, but it is still striking to see how often the first analogy they reach for is from their jolly public schools, endless comparisons with school speeches and prize days and headmasters.

Under the camera’s eye [Chiang kai-shek] stiffened visibly like a schoolboy who is warned to hold himself upright (p.68)
Mission-doctors [we were told] were obliged to smoke in secret, like schoolboys (p.88)
They scattered over the fields, shouting to each other, laughing, turning somersaults, like schoolboys arriving at the scene of a Sunday school picnic (p.142)
The admiral, with his great thrusting naked chin… and the Consul-General, looking like a white-haired schoolboy, receive their guests. (p.156)
[Mr A.O. Kao] has a smooth, adolescent face, whose natural charm is spoiled by a perpetual pout and by his fussy school-prefect’s air of authority (p.201)
Producing a pencil, postulating our interest as a matter of course, he drew highroads, shaded in towns, arrowed troop movements; lecturing us like the brilliant sixth-form boy who takes the juniors in history while the headmaster is away. (p.200)
The cling and huddle in the new disaster
Like children sent to school (p.278)
With those whose brains are empty as a school in August (p.291)

The photos

At the end of the huge slab of 250 pages of solid text, the book then had 31 pages of badly reproduced black and white photos taken by Auden. In fact there are 2 per page, so that’s 62 snaps in all.

I don’t think there’s any getting round the fact that they’re average to poor. Some are portraits of people they met, notably Chiang kai-shek and Madame Chiang, Chou en-lai of the communists, and celebrities such as Peter Fleming the dashing travel writer and Robert Capa the handsome war photographer. A dozen or more named people, Chinese, missionaries and so on. And then lots of anonymous soldiers and scenes, the dead from an air raid, the derailed steam train, coolies in poverty, a Japanese prisoner of war, a Japanese soldier keeping guard in Shanghai, Auden with soldiers in a trench and so on.

Remarkably, few if any of these seem to be online. I can’t imagine they’re particularly valuable and their only purpose would be to publicise the book and promote Auden and Isherwood’s writings generally, so I can’t imagine why the copyright holders have banned them. If I owned them, I’d create a proper annotated online gallery for students and fans to refer to.

In Time of War

The book then contains a sequence of 27 sonnets by Auden titled In Time of War. In later collections he retitled them Sonnets from China. They are, on the whole, tiresomely oracular, allegorical and obscure. The earlier ones seem to be retelling elements of the Bible, Genesis etc as if recapitulating the early history of mankind. These then somehow morph into the ills of modern society with its bombers and machine guns.

But one of them stands out from the rest because it reports real details and rises to real angry eloquence.

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.

(Sonnet XVI from In Time of War)

Those last lines have stayed with me all my life. Nanking. Dachau. The darkness at the heart of the twentieth century.

Commentary

The last thing in the book is a long poem in triplets, from pages 289 to 301 and titled simply Commentary.

It’s a sort of rewrite of Spain, again giving a hawk’s eye view of history and society, the world and human evolution. It starts off describing what they’ve seen in Auden’s characteristic sweeping style, leaping from one brightly described detail to another, before wandering off to give snapshots of great thinkers from Plato to Hegel.

But at quite a few points voices emerge to deliver speeches. Then, on the last page, the Commentary becomes extremely didactic, ending with a speech by the Voice of Man, no less, the kind of speech he turned out by the score for his plays and choruses and earlier 1930s poems.

But in this context it seems inadequate to the vast and catastrophic war in China which they have just glimpsed, and which was to last for another seven years (till Japan’s defeat in 1945) and was itself followed by the bitter civil war (1945-48) which was only ended by the triumph of Mao Zedong’s communist party early in 1949.

The Japanese invasion of 1937 turned out to be just the start of a decade of terror and atrocity, and Auden’s response is to have the ‘Voice of Man’ preach:

‘O teach me to outgrow my madness.

It’s better to be sane than mad, or liked than dreaded;
It’s better to sit down to nice meals than nasty;
It’s better to sleep two than single; it’s better to be happy.

Ruffle the perfect manners of the frozen heart,
And once again compel it to be awkward and alive,
To all it suffered once a silent witness.

Clear from the head the masses of impressive rubble;
Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will,
Gather them up and let them loose upon the earth,

Till they construct at last a human justice,
The contribution of our star, within a shadow
Of which uplifting, loving, and constraining power
All other reasons may rejoice and operate.‘

It yet another of his prayers, deliberately personal in scale, addressed mostly to chums from public school, fellow poets, friendly dons and reviewers. It is calling on people who are already well-fed, well-educated and mostly decent chaps to be a bit more decent, if that’s alright. But ‘ruffling up your perfect manners’ wasn’t going to stop Franco or the Japs, Hitler or Stalin.

It is ironic of Auden to ask people to remove from their heads ‘impressive rubble’, which I take to mean the luggage of an expensive education in the arts – as that is precisely what he was going to use to make a living out of for the next 35 years and which was to underpin and inform all his later works.

And there are numerous small but characteristic examples of learnèd wit it here, such as when they light a fire which is so smokey that it forces them out of the room and Auden wittily remarks, ‘Better to die like Zola than Captain Scott’ (i.e. of smoke asphyxiation rather than from freezing).

In this respect the Commentary is another grand speech which, like the grand speeches in the plays he’d just written with Isherwood, was, in the end, addressed to himself. Once again, as with Spain, Auden has used a huge historical event to conduct a lengthy self-analysis.

Auden’s contemporary readers were impressed, as ever, by his style and fluency but, as ever, critical of his strange inability to engage with anything outside himself and, specifically, to rise to the occasion of such a massive historical event.

Half way through the text Isherwood tells a story about Auden’s complete conviction that the train they’re on won’t be shot at by the Japanese, whose lines they are going to travel very close to. Sure enough the train emerges on to a stretch of line where it is clearly visible from the forward Japanese lines, which they know to contain heavy artillery, and so they pass a few minutes of terror, petrified that the Japanese might start shelling any second. In the event, there is no shelling, and the train veers away to safety. ‘See. I told you so,’ says Auden, and Isherwood reflects that there’s no arguing with ‘the complacency of a mystic’.

It’s a joke at his old mate’s expense and yet I thought, yes – complacency – in Auden’s case complacency means undeviating confidence in his own mind and art to hold off, inspect and analyse. He creates a rhetoric of concern but it is nothing more than that, a poet’s rhetoric, fine to admire but which changes nothing.

And he knew this, had realised it during the trip to Spain, and had lost heart in the political verse of the 1930s. The pair returned from China via America, where all mod cons were laid on by his American publishers and Auden realised that here was a much bigger, richer, more relaxed, open, friendly and less politically pressurised environment in which to think and write.

He returned to England just long enough to wind up his affairs, pack his bags, then in January 1939 he and Isherwood sailed back to the States which would become his home for the next 30 years, and set about rewriting or suppressing many of his most striking poems from the troubled Thirties, trying to rewrite and then censor what he came to think of as his own dishonesty, pursuing a quest for his own personal version of The Truth.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Celia Johnson

Tonight at 8.30 by Noel Coward (1936) – 3

Background

Ten plays

7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music

Comment

8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act

Synopsis

9. Ways and Means: A Light Comedy in Three Scenes

Thoughts

1. Wit

2. Abuse

3. Fantasy

10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

Executive summary

Synopsis

Brief Encounter

Related links

Related reviews

Journey To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)

The Sino-Japanese War

Auden in Spain

Journey to a War

Isherwood’s diary

Schoolboys

The photos

In Time of War

Commentary

Related link

Related reviews

1930s reviews

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Celia Johnson

This Happy Breed by Noel Coward (1939)

Title

Class

Synopsis

Act 1

Scene 1: June 1919

Scene 2: December 1925

Scene 3: May 1926

Act 2

Scene 1: October 1931

Scene 2: November 1931, midnight

Scene 3: May 1932

Act 3

Scene 1: December 1936

Scene 2: September 1938

Scene 3: June 1939

Thoughts

Bickering

Caveat

Patriotism

Movie version

Or… is bickering actually a form of love?

Philip Hoare’s view

Related links

Related reviews

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Tonight at 8.30 by Noel Coward (1936) – 3

Background

Ten plays

7. Family Album: A Victorian comedy with music

Comment

8. Star Chamber: A light comedy in one act

Synopsis

9. Ways and Means: A Light Comedy in Three Scenes

Thoughts

1. Wit

2. Abuse

3. Fantasy

10. Still Life: A play in five scenes

Executive summary

Synopsis

Brief Encounter

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Journey To A War by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (1939)

The Sino-Japanese War

Auden in Spain

Journey to a War

Isherwood’s diary

Schoolboys

The photos

In Time of War

Commentary

Related link

Related reviews

1930s reviews

Share this:

Follow

Topics

Categories