He felt a strong urge – as indeed who doesn’t? – to write a really good modern novel.
(Of Aubrey Dakers in ‘The Wooden Madonna’)

‘It’s a queer world and no mistake.’
(Aunt Tittie)

‘To Step Aside’ is a collection of seven short stories by Noël Coward, published in 1939. They aren’t great literature, meaning they aren’t notable for style or psychological depth, but they are entertaining enough – amusing, sad, wry, droll – oddly memorable and written in an attractively brisk, crisp, plain style.

List of stories

1. The Wooden Madonna
2. Traveller’s Joy
3. Aunt Tittie
4. What Mad Pursuit?
5. Cheap Excursion
6. The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe
7. Nature Study

Prose style

A commenter on GoodReads said she loved Coward’s ‘elegant’ style but that’s a classic example of people reading what they think ought to be there, based on the author’s reputation, rather than what’s in front of their eyes. In fact I found Coward’s prose more notable for its blank lack of style – the prose’s deliberate minimalism, the sense of looking at scenes through a pane of glass, reminded me of Christopher Isherwood.

Here’s an example of what I mean, from ‘Aunt Tittie’, describing Aunt Tittie’s arrival at a Spanish hospital:

Eventually we got to a very quiet ward with only a few beds occupied. A Sister of Mercy was sitting reading at a table with a shaded lamp on it. She got up when we came in. ‘Then the doctor took me downstairs to the waiting-room and said that he was afraid Aunt Tittie had a very bad appendix but that he was going to give her a thorough examination and make sure and that I’d better go home and come back in the morning. I said I’d rather stay in case Aunt Tittie wanted me, so he said ‘very well’ and left me. I lay on a bench all night and slept part of the time. In the early morning two cleaners came in and clattered about with pails.

See what I mean by minimalist and functional? It’s closer to the conscious minimalism of an Ernest Hemingway than the zippy, flippant style of Coward’s famous plays, and all the better for it.

‘To step aside’

The title of the book sounds innocuous enough but in fact contains a strong moral message. It is a quotation from a poem by Robert Burns, ‘Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous’, which is available online in the original Scots and an English translation:

• Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous

The poem is an attack on the showily religious and morally self-righteous for being quick to judge anybody less high-minded and fortunate than themselves. The relevant lines are:

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may go a little wrong,
To step aside is human…

In other words, the exact same message as the famous couplet from Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem, An Essay on Criticism:

Good-nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
(Part 2, lines 424 to 425)

The Burns poem concludes:

Who made the heart, it is He alone
Decidedly can try us:
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let us be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What is done we partly may compute,
But know not what is resisted.

These are ancient sentiments. The Pope is a literal translation of a well-known Latin tag from ancient Rome, ‘Errare humanum est’, while the idea that God alone knows the secrets of each soul and therefore we shouldn’t judge anyone else, is expressed by Jesus Christ in several places: ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ (Matthew 7:1) which is itself linked to ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ (John 8:1-11 ).

None of which has, of course, stopped the Christian authorities in every country where they had power from being ferociously judgemental – from banning, censoring, persecuting, imprisoning and burning alive anybody who departed from its narrow definitions of ‘normality’ and permissible thought, speech and action.

Coward’s mother was a devout Christian but Noel from his earliest boyhood thought the entire thing was ridiculous, and all his famous plays are mockeries of conventional, narrow and bigoted morality, and spirited defences of non-conformity, defiance and free living. Good for him.

1. The Wooden Madonna (17 pages)

Comic story of a naive young man in Switzerland convinced he is surrounded by spies who fails to recognise a real spy who uses him as an unwitting courier.

Aubrey Dakers, 27, is a former antique shop owner. We get a lot of backstory about his time running this shop with his partner Maurice. They do this very happily for 6 years until a series of unfortunate events puts an end to their happy life, being: 1) a titled lady opens a smarter boutique next door; 2) a fire in the basement destroys a number of their finest treasures; 3) Maurice gets pneumonia and has to go on an extended holiday; and 4) returns with a new Russia lover, announces he’s fed up with his current life, and promptly leaves for America.

Suddenly without a job Aubrey succumbs to a lifelong ambition and writes a play, a very obvious comical play, which a nice young man from Hounslow is persuaded to stage in the local theatre. To everyone’s surprise it becomes a smash hit success and promptly transfers to the West End, its success prompting giddy comparisons of young Aubrey to successful playwriting contemporaries such as Somerset Maugham and a certain Noel Coward.

At first being taken up by the worlds of the theatre and smart London society are exhilarating but after a year Aubrey is feeling the strain, especially the increasingly pressing need to follow up his dazzling success with something equally as dazzling. His new literary agent suggests he should try a novel rather than another play.

He felt a strong urge – as indeed who doesn’t? – to write a really good modern novel.

And so the narrative proper opens as Aubrey arrives in Switzerland, at a quiet hotel where he’s come for a rest cure and to try and figure out his next move. But barely has he unpacked and gone down to the bar than he is buttonholed Edmundson who he goes to great lengths to avoid but keeps turning up, following him, insisting on drinking and dining with him.

Now here’s the joke, the gag, the centre of the story: on the ship and the trains to Switzerland, Aubrey is consciously trying to be a novelist, closely observing everyone around him, his fellow passengers and crew and so on. His agent tells him to copy Somerset Maugham and so Aubrey, with comic earnestness, tries to be like Somerset Maugham, looking for mystery and secret passions everywhere. He takes to heart Maugham’s brilliant collection of spy short stories Ashenden, and looks for intrigue in everyone he meets. The one person he doesn’t look for it in is this tedious fellow Edmundson who keeps buttonholing at the bar, inviting himself to dine with Aubrey, telling endless boring yarns. And yet Edmundson is a spy. That’s the gag. He’s insistently buttonholing Aubrey because he’s going to use him.

Sure enough Aubrey can’t stand him so much that he announces he’s moving on, travelling on to Italy, to Venice. Edmundson asks if he can come with and when told no, insists on buying Aubrey a present from an antique shop they happen to be walking past at the time. It’s a wooden madonna, hence the title of the story and Edmundson forces it onto Aubrey, despite the latter’s misgivings.

Eventually, in a bid to escape him, Aubrey abruptly leaves his hotel and takes a sleeper train to Venice. In the middle of the night he wakes to find someone leaning over his bed and sleepily assumes it’s the ticket inspector. In the morning he wakes to find everything as it should be except that when he picks up the madonna it’s head drops off and he discovers the body is hollow. How odd! What he doesn’t realise but the reader does, is that Edmundson somehow inserted something valuable into the hollow statue, used Aubrey as an unwitting mule to carry it across the border into Italy, where it was opened and the secret contents retrieved by the mysterious figure in the night.

2. Traveller’s Joy (8 pages)

Portrait of a tired old actor and his sad affair with his middle-aged deformed landlady.

Herbert Darrell is a faded old actor, eking out his days at some provincial Theatre Royal. He lives in a room in a house which backs on to the dressing rooms, so he can see into his room when he’s making up. He has a ritual of slowly drinking a pint of Guinness as he applies his slap, and then drinking a few more while he’s waiting in the wings for his scenes. Sounds like an alky. In the early 1900s he was acclaimed as one of the great stage lovers of his time. That was 30 years ago. Now it’s 1934 and he’s old.

The story describes the sense of failure that afflicts him sometimes, in the early hours. Bad notices, being dropped from parts, consciousness of failure which sends him running to the nearest pub.

And moves on to describe the owner of the boarding house, Miss Bramble, in her 40s, who has a humped back and spindly little legs. He likes to reminisce about his many loves, recalling their bedrooms, the beds and furnishings, the funny little sounds they made, Julia Deacon, Marion Cressal, Minnie who he married.

It was while married to Minnie that his career began to go on the skids, his last part in the West End, coming home early from a party to find Minnie in bed with someone else.

At 7am on Sunday the alarm wakens Miss Bramble. Coward devotes a lot of time to a detailed description of what she sees when she opens her eyes, her sad bedroom. It is implied that she slept with Herbert Darrell the night before, before coming back to her bedroom. Apparently they have a routine where she gets up and makes his breakfast and takes it into his room as if nothing had happened.

She boils his egg and makes some toast and totters up to his second floor room but then puts the tray down and stares out the window at the churchyard not far away and feels sad how her aunt, whose house this used to be, would disapprove of how she’d let herself be seduced by a sad old has-been actor.

3. Aunt Tittie (27 pages)

Charming fictionalised account of young Noel’s induction into theatre life, but transposed from London to Edwardian Paris and beyond, full of bright colours until it ends in tragedy.

First-person narrative by a boy named Julian describing his ramshackle boyhood in south London. His mother, Amanda, had him out of wedlock and died in childbirth, at which point he passed to the care of his two aunts, Aunt Christina and Aunt Titania, the Aunt Tittie of the title.

The two women are diametrically opposite characters, Christina is a religious bigot while Titania is more free-spirited. Julian lives under the religious tyranny of Aunt Christina for years and records significant incidents from his boyhood and early adolescence. At last she dies, a sudden attack of pneumonia. Aunt Tittie’s estranged husband, Jumbo, takes him in for a day or two, thus giving a vivid insight into his life as a stage performer, before packing him off on the boat train to his Aunt Tittie in Paris.

And it’s here, after this very enjoyable pen portrait of an Edwardian boy’s upbringing, that the story really starts. For Julian discovers that his aunt works as an entertainer in a rough Paris club, the Café Bardac, populated by prostitutes male and female. She doesn’t have much money and so moves to get the club owner to pay the boy to become an assistant in her act with her partner Mattie Gibbons. Enough time is spent on all this for us to be introduced to all aspects of a cheap performer’s life in such a place, including the revelation that Aunt Tittie allows the club owner, Monsieur Claude, to take liberties with her.

But then one drunken night Tittie has a massive fight with Mattie which results in blows and blood and throwing up and next day she packs up and leaves. This inaugurates an epic odyssey across the continent of Europe and even across the sea to Algiers, which last for years and years, as kind Aunt Tittie gets jobs at numerous clubs in numerous cities, always on the lookout to hook up with a man who’ll look after her, which she succeeds in doing with a married man, Mr Wheeler – till his wife tracks him down and drags him home – and, elsewhere, with a rich old boy who keeps them in wine and roses for a while before he dies.

All this goes on for 6 long years packed with colour and incident, from Julian’s 11th to his 17th birthday, until there’s a disaster at a theatre they’re playing in Barcelona. It catches fire while a conjuror is doing a trick onstage, with the woman he’s going to ‘saw in half’ trapped in her cabinet. Julian runs round to find Tittie and they flee through the flames and smoke and screaming crowds, though she gets knocked to the floor and kicked by a fleeing stagehand.

It’s a disaster in which they lose much of their belongings but much worse, it exacerbates the pain Tittie’s had in her side for some time. Julian gets her to a hospital where the doctors find she has a burst appendix which has infected her abdomen. They put her on painkillers, she drifts in and out of consciousness, and then dies, leaving Julian, aged 17, all alone in the world.

There’s nothing modernist or avant-garde or experimental about the story at all. It’s just a rather exaggerated but straight-talking account of this fictitious boy’s life. And yet the feeling between him and his aunt, the closeness, her protectiveness, her honesty and love for him, all this come over and make it very memorable.

4. What Mad Pursuit? (39 pages)

Very funny satire about a successful English novelist, Evan Lorrimer, who travels to New York to start a series of lectures to promote his latest work.

At a penthouse party given by his American publisher, he meets a sensible-sounding American woman, Louise Steinhauser, who asks if he’d like to come and stay at her place in the country, with her and her husband, Bonwit Steinhauser, far from the city, with only one other guest, it’ll be lovely and quiet and he can rest and prepare for his lectures. Evan needs complete peace and quiet to do his work, in fact he makes a fetish of having the full eight hours sleep back in England, and so is easily persuaded and accepts a lift from the party to their tranquil house by the sea.

The comedy comes in when it turns out that this woman, Louise’s, idea of a quiet weekend is inviting loads of friends for lunch, preceded by umpteen cocktails, then insists they all pile into several cars and drive over to some neighbours who have even more guests staying, and many more drinks, until Evan is completely plastered and completely bewildered by the sheer number of strangers he’s being introduced to and their insistence that he join them in one more drink, play any number of games, strip and come swimming in an indoor swimming pool, and in general drive him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

It’s a humorous and sometimes very funny depiction of that time-honoured subject, the innocent Englishman at sea in America.

Incidentally, the title is a literary quotation, from John Keats’s 1819 poem, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, where he describes the scenes of ancient Greece painted on the side of the Greek urn.

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

‘What struggle to escape’ is particularly relevant, given Evan’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape the never-ending party which climax with him finally making it back to his allotted bedroom only to find another party guest strewn unconscious across it, at which point he thinks he might go mad with frustration.

Eventually he realises he must leave the madhouse and sneaks out in the middle of the night and walks through the snow, getting lost in the unfamiliar country but picked up by an early morning milkman and taken to the nearest train station and so, finally, exhausted and chastened, back to his hotel in Manhattan where he discovers, amongst his mail… a very polite offer from a lady fan in Chicago, that when he comes to lecture there. he is welcome to stay at her house, which is well outside the city and lovely and peaceful…

5. Cheap Excursion (13 pages)

A powerful journey into the nerve-racked anxious mind of famous actress Diana Reed, just reaching the dangerous age of 40, outwardly successful but lonely and unhappy. Right from the start we learn that she is having an affair with Jimmy the assistant stage-manager and is ashamed of it. It is portrayed as something she can’t help, which she’s ashamed of and desperate to keep from the rest of the cast because then word will spread throughout theatreland and her reputation will be in tatters.

The entire piece is set one evening after a performance, showing Diana arriving home at her flat, and consumed with anxiety, hoping Jimmy will ring, bitterly disappointed when the phone rings and she answers it but it’s just friends. Eventually so on edge that she decides she has to go and see him, at his digs over on the Strand, so she gets a taxi there and makes a complete fool of herself, working herself up into near hysteria, walking towards his flat but then horrified to see two of the other actors from the production she’s in walking towards her along the Strand and so ducking into a shop and in a blind panic buying the first thing she sees.

It is a persuasive study in nerves and anxiety and Coward conveys this by his precise attention to details, the kinds of details which reveal a person’s life or mind or habits:

Someone had once told her that if you sat still as death with your hands relaxed, all the vitality ran out of the ends of your fingers and your nerves stopped being strained and tied up in knots. The frigidaire in the kitchen suddenly gave a little click and started whirring. She stared at various things in the room, as though by concentrating, identifying herself with them she could become part of them and not feel so alone. The pickled wood Steinway with a pile of highly-coloured American tunes on it; the low table in front of the fire with last week’s Sketch and Bystander, and the week before last’s New Yorker, symmetrically arranged with this morning’s Daily Telegraph folded neatly on top; the Chinese horse on the mantelpiece, very aloof and graceful with its front hoof raised as though it were just about to stamp on something small and insignificant.

After getting a cab to his place, then abandoning it and getting a cab back towards Regent Street, she thinks she sees him walking along the pavement, leaps out and chases him into the Haymarket but a fraction before the grabs his arm he turns to look at her and it’s not Jimmy at all. She almost bursts into tears and realises she is overwrought but nonetheless heads back to his flat at the Adelphi but the lights are off there’s no-one home, so she takes to walking back and forth and sets herself a number of circuits before she’ll finally leave. Twenty pacings, back and forth. And she’s just about to finish and in a funny way has almost forgotten Jimmy when he turns the corner and she comes face to face with him.

So it’s Diana’s mad odyssey across central London which is the ‘excursion’ of the title. And the piece is a strange story of very everyday obsession, not Poe or anything baroque or extreme, just a middle-aged woman going almost out of her mind with frustrated love and anxiety.

6. The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe (48 pages)

Mrs Radcliffe is 60-something and a religious prig and bigot. She is the worst kind of self-righteous moraliser, the kind who thinks of themselves as being especially sensitive and forgiving, while in reality being hard and small-minded and intolerant. She is always so ready to forgive those around her who aren’t lucky enough to be as kind and sympathetic and imaginative and artistic and moral as she is, the poor things! She is a martyr to her fine feelings.

It was, she reflected without bitterness, inevitable that a woman of her temperament should feel things more keenly, with more poignance than ordinary people. It was one of the penalties of being highly strung. After all, that awareness of beauty, that unique sensitiveness to the finer things of life, had to be paid for.

It’s not so much a story as a day in the life.

Mildred First she loses her temper at the orphan, resentful clumsy Mildred, who she’s taken into her home to become her maid when the latter spills the cooked breakfast she’s brought her onto the bedroom floor.

Matron Then she takes the train into London to see her semi-estranged grown-up daughter, but stops off at the orphanage she’s a vice-chairman of, to have a flaring argument with its matron, who she leaves in tears.

Marjorie and Cecil This daughter, Marjorie, ran off to marry a most unsuitable young man, Cecil who, although very handsome, is a complete failure of an artist, having sold one painting in the last 18 months. The couple live in a small house entirely funded by Mrs Radcliffe’s husband, Stanley.

An uncomfortable lunch (badly prepared and cooked) leads into a full-scale argument. Mrs R thinks it behoves her to tell Cecil some home truths i.e. isn’t it time he got a proper job? which in turn triggers Marjorie to tell her mother just what she thinks of her. At which point Cecil is wise enough to step in and shush her but then politely escort Mrs R off the premises.

Marion She has one more appointment, to meet a friend, Marion, at Harrods and walks there steaming with rage and resentment of her rude, unmannerly, ungrateful daughter. (With all these people – Mildred, Matron, Marjorie – Coward gives us quite a lot of backstory, which explains why this is the longest story in the collection.)

The Marion section describes how she and Mrs Radcliffe met at school when they were plain Adela Wyecroft and Marion Kershaw, the latter weak and silly and hero-worshipping tough Adela, star of the school lacrosse team. Now they meet in Harrods, wander round Knightsbridge when Marion remembers she promised to take Mrs R to the shop of a friend of hers, who turns out to be a wan and mousey loser, Maud Fearnley.

Maud Here Mrs R conceives the notion that Marion has brought her to this sad woman’s shop to get a commission and when she tries on a hat that actually does suit her very well, and spots feeble Maud giving Marion a triumphant glance, she becomes convinced of it and denounces the pair for setting her up like this. Of course she is completely wrong, mortally offends her old friend and reduces Miss Fearnley to tears but doesn’t give a damn and stalks haughtily out of the shop.

Lady Elizabeth Next scene is set in Hyde Park where she is sitting quietly reflecting on the perfidy of her friends and how difficult it is to be such a rarefied, sensitive and spiritual person, when a posh lady comes and sits on the bench opposite, who she recognises with a start to be Lady Elizabeth Vale.

Now Mrs Radcliffe is a snob, as we know from an earlier incident when a rough working class family insisted on invading her first class compartment on the train up to London until she intimidated them into getting out at the next stop. And so now we are treated to Mrs R’s having a comically pompous fantasy, as she imagines some charming little incident such as a little child falling over and Mrs R leaping to sweetly pick them up and dust them off, and how this earns the respect of Lady Elizabeth who just has to thank her, and who invites her for dinner and how they become firm friends and how this allows Mrs Radcliffe to everso casually show off her acquaintance with such refined company to the other female members of the orphanage committee, with whom she has a fierce but suppressed rivalry.

In the event there is comic bathos, because of a sweet little child to help Mrs R suddenly realises a smelly, ragged old beggarwoman has arrived at her bench wheedling for money. By the time she’s given this human wreck half a crown and got rid of her, Lady Elizabeth has risen and walked away without sparing her a second glance. Damn!

Dinner At the start of the story Mrs R had argued with her husband because he insisted on inviting a couple he likes to the dinner that evening which Mrs R had invited another couple to. Cut to after the dinner (which mostly went OK, apart from Mildred spilling custard on Mrs Duke’s dress) and the guests have departed, as Mrs R changes into her nightwear, puts curlers in her hair and face cream on, thinking her usual captious, uncharitable thoughts about the evening’s guests.

Stanley’s reproach Her husband appears. She expects him to kiss her goodnight and then go to his own room but to her surprise he tells her off for talking all the time one of the guests, Miss Layton, was playing the piano. She noticed and it upset her and made her cry.

Miss Layton we know is just the last of a list of people Mrs R has made cry today, starting with Mildred and including Matron, Marjorie, Marion and Maud. (I assume it’s a joke that their names all start with M.)

Mrs R now calls her husband idiotic, and he replies he may be idiotic but at least he’s not unkind and exits, slamming the door on the way out.

Mrs Radcliffe is left, not for the first time, trembling with fury. Oh! How everyone has had it in for her today! She kneels to pray to the good Lord but it takes her some time to get into the right frame of mind. But then she remembers giving half a crown to the beggar woman earlier in the day and that (although we saw that it was largely motivated by a snobbish desire to suck up to a watching aristocrat) reassures her that she is a kind woman, no matter what anyone says.

Coward and Christianity

Coward loathed organised religion, religious cant and moralistic humbug, all of which are repeatedly mocked by the smart young protagonists of his subversive 1920s plays. Rather than a head-on critique of Christian pride and hypocrisy, this story dramatises it in the shape of the sanctimonious and pompous believer Mrs Radcliffe, who makes everyone around her unhappy, with her bullying and superiority and snobbery, and yet has erected around herself an impenetrable wall of Christian bigotry which makes her incapable of even seeing the misery she causes wherever she goes.

This is a story and a character to be referenced whenever anyone is discussing Coward’s skewering of conventional ‘morality’ in his radical plays.

Mrs R and Mrs D

Mrs Radcliffe’s snobbery, self-righteous high-mindedness and lack of humour, combined with all this rambling round central London and episodic encounters, specifically sitting on a bench in the park, all these elements reminded me very much of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway but with all that book’s consciously experimental avant-gardeness completely removed.

7. Nature Study (19 pages)

1

The unnamed first-person narrator is a playwright and writer on a cruise liner returning from the East towards the Suez Canal and the Med. One of the loudest of his fellow passengers is a Major Cartwright returning from India. When most of his cronies get off at Marseilles, Cartwright is at a loose end and buttonholes the narrator who is too kind to say no and so gets lumbered with this windy old bore.

At one point Cartwright invites the narrator to look through his old photo albums and there, amid pictures of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ parties, he spots someone he knows, Ellsworthy Ponsonby. Cartwright is excited to learn they have a mutual acquaintance and tells the narrator about meeting Ponsonby and being shown his fantastically luxurious yacht, out East, near Java. But he’d barely been shown round the yacht than Ponsonby told him the great tragedy of his life, that his adored wife left him for his chauffeur, and burst into tears. Damn sad thing!

2

At which point the narrative cuts suddenly, cuts back into the past to tell the story of how young Ponsonby met his wife-to-be, the fresh and lively Jennifer Hyde in a smart hotel in Italy just after the war. She is there with cousins and her aunt, he is there with his hawk-like scheming mother who, after doing research into Jennifer’s background, contrived to bring them together. They’ve just had some nice lunches and walks together when Ponsonby’s mother suddenly died.

3

The scene then cuts, just as abruptly, to 1933 when the narrator meets her, in the gambling rooms at Monte Carlo. The narrator reveals a very world-weary soul, familiar with all the best resorts in Europe and on familiar terms with all the best people, in fact bored of them. He hails Jennifer, gambles with her a bit, shares a drink, asks after Ponsonby (who he doesn’t like) who, she tells him, is away in Taormina. Suddenly, from her sharp movements and her overloud laugh, he realises she is wretched.

He remember back to when he first met her, young and fresh, in 1920 or 1921, just married to her rich American, and ponders how she has changed. He’s walking back to his hotel when a little Baby Fiat comes to a screeching halt right by him and it’s Jennifer. She tells him to jump in and drives him to his hotel but then, when they’ve parked, bursts into tears. He hugs her and tries to cheer her up and suggests they drive up to a local beauty spot and she tells him all about it.

Here, sitting by the woods and looking out over Cape Ferrat and the sea, she recapitulates her meeting with Ponsonby, how his mother schemed to bring them together then, when she died suddenly, how Ponsonby went to pieces and clung on to Jennifer who didn’t know what to do. She was only 19. He invited her for a long walk by the sea and spent hours telling her about himself, about how lonely and confused he was, about his teenage conversion to Catholicism and how he’d been offered a role in the Church by the family priest but it didn’t feel right, and how difficult life was for people like him, for ‘misfits’, on and on about all his problems, and then he asked her to marry him. They’d only known each other a week. And like a fool, she agreed. Why? Out of a naive sense of duty, she felt she was doing her good deed for the day, so they were quickly married in a registry office in Nice.

And then the problems began. His family disapproved. They had to eat humble pie and have a proper Catholic wedding in Boston. Some of his relatives were unpleasant. Sex turned out to be a big disappointment. He took her round the world, sure enough, to loads of glamorous destinations, but because things weren’t right with them, nothing was enjoyable. And so to her meeting with the narrator in London, by which time she’d already become experienced and hardened.

Because she had discovered that Ponsonby, despite all his money and perfect manners, was ‘mean, prurient, sulky and pettishly tyrannical almost to a point of mania’. By contrast Jennifer says, being much more innocent, and poor, and a woman, she prefers naturalness and kindness. Ponsonby and his kind are expert at identifying ancient paintings or sculptures as being of this type or that school, but:

‘I don’t believe it’s enough, all that preoccupation with the dead and done with, when there’s living life all round you and sudden, lovely unexpected moments to be aware of. Sudden loving gestures from other people, without motives, nothing to do with being rich or poor or talented or cultured, just our old friend human nature at its best. That’s the sort of beauty worth searching for; it may sound pompous, but I know what I mean. That’s the sort of beauty-lover that counts. I am right, aren’t I?’

This is placed in the mouth of a fictional character but it repeats the carpe diem theme repeated throughout the plays, and the worldview which is against stifling convention and in favour of life life life, as evidenced in a story like ‘Aunt Tittie’.

Anyway, the marriage deteriorated steadily, climaxing in some unpleasantness in New York wherein Ponsonby was blackmailed. Jennifer claims not to know the details but says she was forced to tell all kinds of lies (is this a hint that Ponsonby is gay? ‘He distrusted me, principally I think because I was a woman’?).

They sailed for Europe to get away from it all but he became steadily sarcastic and insulting, both in private and in public. Finally in Paris they had a blazing row. She told him she wanted a divorce but he went berserk, pointing out they were both Catholics so it was impossible. At which she told him what he really thought of him, that he was a terrified spoilt little boy who had used his mother and Catholicism as shields against the world. She stormed out and fled to London. He followed her and begged for her to return etc etc.

And this brings her up to date. This is her life, now. Ponsonby goes off now and then and does his own thing for a while, then comes back and they then entertain in Paris, or undertake Mediterranean holidays or cruises or whatnot, like everyone on their wealth bracket.

And that’s about it. They walk back to the car and, as dawn breaks, she drops him back at his hotel. On the way she says she’s thought about having an affair but never found anyone worth the risk and sacrifice. She’s everso grateful to him for having listened to her etc, gives him a nice peck on the cheek, and drives off.

4

And so the story cuts back to the present, four years after that conversation by the sea, and the narrator is sitting next to Major Cartwright with his photo album still open and he’s still in mid-stream, telling the narrator how Jennifer ran off with the chauffeur and how poor Ponsonby was gutted by it. Except that now we have a vastly bigger sense of who Ponsonby and Jennifer both were and why their marriage failed. And the narrator’s ghostly role as witness of various parts of the story. Very similar in structure and feel to many Somerset Maugham stories.

The final scene is simple. Cartwright packs away his photo albums and the two chaps go up on deck. It’s night-time, they see of a lighthouse on the French coast. The Major calls a steward for drinks. He says he can’t forget the memory of poor Ponsonby breaking down in tears. And imagine, he says, leaning forward, running off with a chap’s chauffeur! And the payoff, if that’s what it is, is the narrator quietly pointing out that that – i.e. the social humiliation – is what Ponsonby was really crying about.

The structure of the tale, with its big flashback in the middle, is hardly original, but it just worked very well, and I found this a deeply satisfying story, of its type.

Philip Hoare

In his excellent 1995 biography of Coward, Philip Hoare opines that the stories consistently succeed because the scene-setting and the characters are so well observed. The plots are less substantial. ‘The effect is all’ (Hoare, p.289).

Thought

In his own way, Coward’s insistence that there is no God and so we have to live for the moment and damn all the stupid restrictions of society, the way  his characters flout traditional morality and the narrow conventional lives so many people lead and want to impose on others, in order to live, now, to the maximum, to rejoice in the day – well, surprisingly maybe, I can see a secret brotherhood between the flippant, superficial, snobbish, gay Noel Coward and the aggressively heterosexual, anti-high society, anti-fashion and anti-jazz prophet of sex and the spontaneous life, D.H. Lawrence. In their different ways, both defied their native society and promoted life life life. And both could only do so, by moving abroad.

Related links

• To Step Aside online (PDF)
• Noel Coward works

Related reviews

• Noel Coward reviews