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Kingsley Amis reviews

Sir Kingsley William Amis CBE (1922 to 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism.

His bestselling debut ‘Lucky Jim’ cast him as a comic writer but he evolved to be much more than that, writing many works which depict with real depth the complications of love and marriage and adultery. And his output is more varied than his reputation suggests: most of his novels are realistic depictions of modern life, but alongside them was a strand of soft science fiction (such as the unsatisfying ‘Russian Hide and Seek’ or the brilliantly conceived alternative history, ‘The Alternation’), two detective novels, not to mention the bitter farce of ‘Ending Up’ or the drunken weirdness of ‘The Green Man’.

In the 1980s Amis hit a streak of prize-winning novels about contemporary love, marriage and adultery – ‘Jake’s Thing’, ‘Stanley and the Women’, ‘The Old Devils’ and ‘Difficulties with Girls’ – which defined his later reputation. But there was always a huge problem with his attitude towards women. His philandering middle-aged men generally get their comeuppance but not before behaving appallingly and making grandstanding speeches or snide comments about how awful women are. My girlfriend at the time ran a feminist theory group and had a physical aversion to Amis’s everyday sexism – which in many of these works rises to passages of sustained and revolting misogyny – and who can blame her?

Women are his predominant target but from fairly early in his career, and with gathering venom, Amis turned his withering criticism on every aspect of ‘the modern world’, and this included poisonous slurs against Blacks, Jews, gays, Muslims, foreigners in general, social workers, psychiatrists and ‘political correctness’ in general. His novels contain many passages which are hilarious, and often insightful, and sometimes genuinely compassionate. But I doubt many modern readers, especially young readers, would be prepared to wade through the swamps of toxicity to get to them.

Amis’s novels

1954 Lucky Jim – Jim Dixon is a fraudulent history lecturer at a non-entity college, beset on all sides by problematic relations with ghastly people – with his pompous boss, Professor Welch and his unbearable family, with his clingy neurotic girlfriend, with the shower of contemptuous colleagues he shares a cheap rooming house with. Very funny in a sometimes rather desperate way.

1955 That Uncertain Feeling – Bored, frustrated librarian John Lewis in South Wales finds himself being seduced by the worldly wife of a local industrialist. Some hilarious scenes rather damped down by the wrenching portrayal of his genuinely hurt wife. An intense scene of dissipation and sex on a nearby beach, climax with the mistress’s mad driving home which leads to a sobering crash. Lewis eventually rejects the whole monied, corrupt scene and moves with his wife to a small mining town where he feels more in touch with his Welsh roots.

1958 I Like It Here – Welshman Garnet Bowen, happily scraping a living as a ‘writer’ in London, married to Barbara with three young children, is persuaded by his publisher to go ‘abroad’, to make some money from writing articles and also to check on a long-silent famous author who has resurfaced with a new novel – resulting in an amiable travelogue with comic characters and not much plot.

1960 Take a Girl Like You – the adventures of Jenny Bunn, twenty-year-old northern lass come down south to be an infant school teacher, who is pursued by every man she meets not to mention the lesbian lodger, and falls into a fraught relationship with public school teacher Patrick Standish, who is unforgivably harsh with her and sleeps with a number of other women, before they both rather reluctantly agree they have to get married.

1962 My Enemy’s Enemy – seven varied and persuasive short stories, including three set in an Army unit which anticipate The Anti-Death League and a seventh which is a short, powerful science fiction tale.

1963 One Fat Englishman – Obese, alcoholic, lecherous English publisher Roger Micheldene drinks, eats, insults and fornicates his way around New England, hideously embarrassing himself, his country, and the reader.

1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest) – an intermittently hilarious novel about a ‘society’ of Egyptologists with elaborate rules designed to prevent anyone outside the select few attending its scholarly meetings – but which, alas, turns out to be the front for a group of women-hating adulterers.

1966 The Anti-Death League – A long, convoluted and strikingly unfunny story about an Army Unit somewhere in the countryside which is preparing for an undefined and rather science fiction-y offensive, Operation Apollo, which will apparently have dire consequences for its officers. In particular the male lead, dashing James Churchill, who has a genuinely touching love affair with beautiful but damaged Catharine Casement.

1968 Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure (under the pseudonym Robert Markham)

1968 I Want It Now – The adventures of Ronnie Appleyard, an ambitious and predatory TV presenter, who starts off cynically targeting depressed young Mona, daughter of Lord and Lady Baldock, solely for her money and contacts, but finds himself actually falling in love with her and defying both the dragonish Lady B and the forces of the Law, in America and London.

1969 The Green Man – a short, strange and disturbing modern-day ghost story, told by the alcoholic, hypochondriac and lecherous Maurice Allington.

1971 Girl, 20 – Music critic Douglas Yandell gets dragged into the affair which elderly composer Sir Roy Vandervane is having with a 17-year-old girl and the damage it’s doing his family and grown-up daughter, the whole sorry mess somehow symbolising the collapse of values in late-1960s England.

1973 The Riverside Villas Murder – Detective novel set in the suburban Home Counties where the loss of handsome 14-year-old schoolboy Peter Furneaux’s virginity is combined with a gruesome murder, both – it turns out – performed by the same good-looking neighbour.

1974 Ending Up – A short powerful novel showing five old people, relatively poor and thrown together by circumstances into sharing a run-down country cottage, getting on each other’s nerves, appalling younger relatives when they visit, plotting and scheming against each other, until the bleakly farcical ending in which they all die.

1975 The Crime of the Century – detective serial written for the Sunday Times then published as an entertaining novella, Amis’s style is stripped to the bone in this yarn of a serial killer of women who succeeds in sowing multiple red herrings and false leads, before his melodramatic and implausible attempt on the Prime Minister’s life.

1976 The Alteration – a brilliantly imagined alternative reality in which the Reformation never happened and England is a central part of the ongoing Catholic Hegemony over all Europe, known simply as ‘Christendom’, in a novel which explores all aspects of this strange reality through the story of a ten-year-old choirboy who is selected for the great honour of being castrated, and how he tries to escape his fate.

1978 Jake’s Thing – Oxford don Jake Richardson has become impotent and his quest to restore his lost libido is a ‘hilarious’ journey through the 1970s sex therapy industry although, as always with Amis, the vitriolic abuse and sharp-eyed satire is interspersed with more thoughtful and even sensitive reflections on middle-age, love and marriage.

1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek – Soft science fiction set in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians and in which a hopeless attempt to overthrow the authorities is easily crushed.

1984 Stanley and the Women – First person narrative told by muddling middle-aged advertising salesman Stanley Duke, whose son Steve suffers a severe mental breakdown, thus (somehow) leaving poor old Stan at the mercy of his wife, ex-wife, ex-mistress and the insufferable female psychiatrist who treats the boy. Long, windy, self-pitying, misogynistic.

1986 The Old Devils – A 400-page magnum opus describing the lives, tangled relationships, the endless bitching and phenomenally unhealthy drinking of a dozen or so elderly, grumpy Welsh men and women, the trigger of the meandering ‘plot’ being the arrival back in their South Wales community of professional Welshman and tireless philanderer, Alun Weaver. Long and gruelling until its surprisingly moving and uplifting conclusion.

1988 Difficulties with Girls – A sequel to Take A Girl Like You, revisiting lecherous Patrick Standish (35) and his northern wife (Jenny Bunn) as they settle into a new flat on London’s South Bank, encounter the eccentric neighbours and struggle with Patrick’s sex addiction.

1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill – An amiable look at a cast of characters which rotate around retired librarian Harry Caldecote who lives in London with his sister, worries about his dim brother Freddie, and the rather helpless lesbian Bunty Streatfield (the daughter of Harry’s second ex-wife, Daisy) who he’s found accommodation for, dodges his scheming son Piers and his alcoholic niece-by-marriage, posh Fiona. His most enjoyable novel for years.

1991 We Are All Guilty – A short polemical novella for teenagers in which Amis dramatises his feelings that society has become rotten with do-gooding social workers, psychiatrists and trendy vicars, via the story of Clive Rayner, a teenage tearaway who breaks into a warehouse for kicks but causes an accident in which the night watchman is crippled. Instead of being harshly punished, Clive finds himself being exonerated and forgiven by everyone, which leaves him boiling with rage and frustration.

1992 The Russian Girl – Middle-aged Russian literature expert, Dr Richard Vaisey, has an affair with a talentless young Russian woman poet who is visiting London, which results in his wealthy wife kicking him out of their house, destroying all his books and notes, cutting off his allowance and generally decimating his life. Brutally funny.

1994 You Can’t Do Both – The boyhood and young manhood of Robin Davies who, like Amis, is at secondary school during the 1930s, at Oxford during the war, obsessed with girls girls girls throughout, and completely fails to live up to his responsibilities as a supposed adult, continuing to have affairs behind his loyal wife’s back until his final, humiliating come-uppance.

1995 The Biographer’s Moustache – Literary hack, Gordon Scott-Thompson, is commissioned to write a ‘critical biography’ of super-annuated novelist and social climber Jimmie Fane, leading to a sequence of comic escapades, which include being seduced by his pukka wife and a prolonged visit to the surreally grand home of the Duke of Dunwich, before Gordon’s plans, inevitably, collapse around him. Very enjoyable.

Editor

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis

An essay on Amis’s prose style

How to build a Kingsley Amis sentence

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by Simon on April 7, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel

Tagged adultery, alcoholism, alternative history, Alun Weaver, Bunty Streatfield, Catharine Casement, Christendom, Clive Rayner, Colonel Sun, comic novelist, comic writer, detective novel, detective novels, Difficulties With Girls, Douglas Yandell, drunkenness, Duke of Dunwich, Ending Up, English literature, everyday sexism, Freddie Caldecote, Garnet Bowen, Girl 20, Gordon Scott-Thompson, Harry Caldecote, I Like It Here, I Want It Now, Jake Richardson, Jake's Thing, James Bond, James Churchill, Jenny Bunn, Jim Dixon, Jimmie Fane, John Lewis, Kingsley Amis, Lady Baldock, lechery, Lord Baldock, love, Lucky Jim, marriage, Maurice Allington, misogyny, My Enemy's Enemy, novel, novelist, One Fat Englishman, Operation Apollo, Oxford University, Patrick Standish, Peter Furneaux, Piers Caldecote, political correctness, Richard Vaisey, Robert Conquest, Robert Markham, Robin Davies, Roger Micheldene, Roman Catholicism, Ronnie Appleyard, Roy Vandervane, Russian Hide And Seek, science fiction, sex, sex addiction, sex therapy, short stories, Sir Roy Vandervane, soft science fiction, South Wales, Stanley and the Women, Stanley Duke, Sunday Times, Take A Girl Like You, That Uncertain Feeling, The Alteration, The Anti-Death League, The Biographer's Moustache, The Crime of The Century, The Egyptologists, The Folks That Live on the Hill, The Golden Age of Science Fiction, The Green Man, The Old Devils, the Reformation, The Riverside Villas Murder, The Russian Girl, Wales, We Are All Guilty, You Can't Do Both

Posted by Simon on April 7, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/07/kingsley-amis-reviews/

To Step Aside by Noel Coward (1939)

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

The Wooden Madonna
Traveller’s Joy
Aunt Tittie
What Mad Pursuit?
Cheap Excursion
The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe
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.

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by Simon on June 23, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Short stories

Tagged Address to the Unco Guid Or the Rigidly Righteous, Adela Wyecroft, Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, Aubrey Dakers, Aunt Tittie, Baby Fiat, Bonwit Steinhauser, Boston, Café Bardac, Cape Ferrat, Cheap Excursion, Christianity, Christopher Isherwood, comedy, cruise liner, D.H. Lawrence, Daily Telegraph, Diana Reed, Edmundson, Ellsworthy Ponsonby, Ernest Hemingway, Errare humanum est, Evan Lorrimer, Guinness, Harrods, Herbert Darrell, Hyde Park, infidelity, Java, Jennifer Hyde, Jesus Christ, Jimmy, John Keats, Julia Deacon, lacrosse, Lady Elizabeth, London, Louise Steinhauser, love, Major Cartwright, Manhattan, Marion Cressal, Marion Kershaw, Maud Fearnley, Miss Bramble, Miss Fearnley, Miss Layton, Monsieur Claude, Monte Carlo, Mr Wheeler, Mrs Dalloway, Nature Study, New York, New Yorker, Noel Coward, Ode to a Grecian Urn, Paris, Philip Hoare, Regent Street, Robert Burns, Satire, Scots, sex workers, short stories, Somerset Maugham, Spy Story, Stanley Radcliffe, Suez Canal, Taormina, the Haymarket, The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe, the Strand, The Wooden Madonna, To Step Aside, Tragedy, Traveller's Joy, Virginia Woolf, What Mad Pursuit?

Posted by Simon on June 23, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/06/23/to-step-aside-noel-coward/

Tonight at 8.30 by Noel Coward (1936) – 1

‘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 the first three.

Songs

Four of the plays in the cycle are musical. The songs from ‘Tonight at 8.30’ are:

We Were Dancing – ‘We Were Dancing’
Red Peppers – ‘Has Anybody Seen our Ship?’ and ‘Men About Town’
Shadow Play – ‘Then’, ‘Play, Orchestra, Play’ and ‘You Were There’
Family Album – ‘Drinking Song’, ‘Princes and Princesses’, ‘Music Box’ and ‘Hearts and Flowers’

1. We Were Dancing: A Comedy in Two Scenes

Set in Samolo, Coward’s fictitious country in the South Pacific, which also appears in his play ‘South Sea Bubble’ and is the setting of his 1960 novel, ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.

Hubert and Louise Charteris are at a dance. They have been married 14 years. The plot or premise of this slender 20-page ‘play’ is so bizarrely unrealistic as to be surreal but what happens is that Louise dances with a complete stranger, Karl Sandys, and just on the strength of this one dance, having never met before, they both fall deeply and hopelessly in love with each other. By the end of the dance they are kissing passionately. Several other dancers see them kissing on the club veranda and go off to gossip about it, before Louise’s husband, Hubert, appears, accompanied by his married sister, Clara Bethel.

And from that point onwards most of the play consists of Hubert telling Louise to come along and stop being so silly, and Louise insisting that she has fallen head over heels in love, has been swept away on a great wave of passion. What helps to make it so surreal is she doesn’t even know the man’s name, she has to ask him. It’s nothing to do with their names or histories or even personalities – some force has descended on both of them and transformed their lives.

If you regard this from the strictly realistic standpoint of most of Coward’s works, which is epitomised in the conventional and scandalised husband, Hubert, then the whole thing is preposterous nonsense. But I think that’s the wrong way to see it. It’s better to approach from the other end and see it as more like a symbolist play, or the descent of God’s grace in a religious novel. The advent into a pair of ordinary lives of a force much larger than them. From this perspective its very silliness made it, for me, rather wonderful.

Slowly, by their persistence, the lovers persuade Hubert that they’re really sincere, though his sister, Clara, never stops being outraged and scene 1 ends.

The second scene opens with the same four characters who’ve stayed up till dawn the next morning, are very tired and pecking at some sandwiches. The idea is that, in the cold light of day, Louise and Karl’s wonderful love evaporates. Karl announces that he has to leave for Australia for his work and Louise tells him she can’t go with him (because a couple they know are leaving on the same boat and she doesn’t want to be seen ‘living in sin’) and so, as casually and inconsequentially as they fell in love, they sober up, become sensible again, and she kisses him goodbye. And so, after some regretful chat, in the same unreal dreamlike way that they fell in love, he simply walks out of her life.

I think it was intended to be a realistic vignette and so was criticised for being thin and silly. the introduction says it’s the slightest of the set and quotes Gertrude Lawrence as agreeing. But as I’ve explained, the basic idea is so unrealistic and preposterous as to transport us to an altogether different dimension of fantasy. Which I liked.

It contains one of the set’s most popular songs, ‘We Were Dancing’. This recording of it opens with Coward himself reciting the passage describing how his character has been overcome by love. Hearing him is a reminder of how rapidly he declaimed his lines. Must have been quite hard to follow in the theatre.

We Were Dancing

‘Shut up, Clara!’

Something occurred as I read this short play. I’ve mentioned in other reviews how Coward is famous for or often credited with writing ‘witty’ and ‘sophisticated’ dialogue but how, when you actually pay attention to it, you realise that a lot of his dialogue actually consists of shrill argument, often descending to vitriolic abuse.

The supposedly dapper, sophisticated and witty ‘Private Lives’ actually consists of a couple who spend over half their time shouting poisonous insults at each other, slapping and then assaulting each other, and that’s when they’re not having furious rows with their new spouses, and those spouses aren’t themselves having a furious row with each other. Change the clothes and accents and it could be ‘Eastenders’.

Well, something similar happens here but in a slightly different way which I found thought provoking. This is the extent to which the characters tell each other to shut up:

CLARA: Please be quiet and let me speak.
LOUISE: Hubert, do make Clara shut up.
CLARA: You must be insane.
HUBER: Shut up, Clara.

Not that witty, is it? Or even entry-level polite. And they do it a lot, tell each other to shut up.

LOUISE: Oh my darling–
KARL: Don’t, don’t speak…

KARL: What’s the use of arguing.
LOUISE: Answer me.

HUBERT: Will everybody please be quiet for a moment.

HUBERT: Don’t talk like that…

What all this began to convey was a sense of these four characters clamouring for their version to be heard. It began to feel like the text is a kind of battlefield. I know they say the heart of good drama is conflict but in these Coward plays, quite regularly, this is reduced right down to who has the right to speak. The phrase ‘Shut up’ recurs in so many of these plays that the plays themselves can be seen as created in large part out of the conflict of who will get to speak; a little more widely, the conflict of whose interpretation will prevail. It is a battle of hermeneutics.

CLARA: Rubbish!
LOUISE: It’s not rubbish!… Be quiet!

One a slightly wider level, the plays overflow with orders. The ‘shut ups’ and ‘Be quiets’ are accompanied by plenty of ‘Tell me’s’, ‘Answer me’, ‘Tell him’, do this, that or the other.

LOUISE: Don’t go on evading…

KARL: Don’t, don’t speak…

The characters are like so many automata programmed to say ‘Shut up and do what I say’ and the reason they arguments quickly become so toxic is because they refuse to shut up or listen to each other and so are in almost permanent conflict.

Servants

Most of Coward’s plays feature servants who the posh characters, appropriately enough, order around. Do this, don’t do that. Yes Furby, no Saunders.

I suppose you could see the inability of the posh characters to get along at all without endless bickering and squabbling, as a kind of category error: as characters brought up to have instant and complete control over their servants, mistakenly trying to apply the same spoilt privileged control over people of their own class.

2. The Astonished Heart: A Play in Six Scenes

Concerning a married couple Christian and Barbara Faber. The first scene opens a bit obscurely but slowly you realise that Christian is a distinguished psychiatrist (‘one of the most celebrated psychiatrists in the world’) but is lying very ill in the bedroom, attended by his secretary Susan Birch, his assistant Tim Verney, and his wife Barbara (35).

We learn that Barbara is his devoted wife of many years, but that there has been a rupture in the relationship because Christian, on what we begin to realise is his death bed, has called for another woman to be with him and during this first scene she arrives. She is Mrs Leonora Vail and we realise she has been having an affair with Christian.

Having established that the play very cleverly flashes back to exactly a year ago, when Barbara is meeting an old school friend Leonora Vail née Ames (‘Leonora Ames, terrible at games’ they used to chant at school). After a few pages of reminiscence, which includes reference to Leonora casually divorcing her (much older, rich) husband, Barbara introduces her to her husband, Christian.

Christian, as always in a tearing hurry, is not impressed by her preening personality and passes out of the room again. Leonora jokes that that foils her cunning plan for seducing him before having an ‘old friends’ reunion where everyone behaves jolly decently. But that’s what happens.

Because in scene 3 we discover Chris and Leonora in the same living room, after midnight and they’ve been out together, having a big snog, after which they talk about how quickly they’ve fallen in love etc, filling the space, as lovers in this kind of play do, with chatter about Barbara (she will be terribly hurt, won’t she) and previous lovers etc, all designed to give these mannequins the illusion of depth.

In scene 4 it is three months later, 6am and Chris is sneaking quietly into the house but is confronted by Barbara who has stayed up all night to wait for him. With stiff upper lip restraint she doesn’t scream or shout but just wants to confirm that The Other Woman is Leonora and whether he really loves her, whether he wants to marry her, which leads to an over-civilised exchange about just exactly how Chris has been overcome by passion and yet it doesn’t affect his love for Barbara. She tells him to go away with Leonora for two or three months to get her out of his system. After more chat she says he better get some sleep and he thanks her and exits – all frightfully civilised.

Scene 5 is in the same location seven months later, the night before the opening scene when Chris was lying seriously ill in bed. So we know something bad is going to happen. What it turns out to be is that Chris and Leonora have reached the bickering squabbling stage which is all Coward characters’ habitual state, and are seeking to stop and control each other’s actions and utterances:

CHRIS: For the love of God, stop crying.

LEONORA: Don’t, don’t come near me.

LEONORA: Don’t be such a fool.

CHRIS: Stay still.

Possibly the sense of thinness in Coward derives from the way he conceives of ‘drama’ as simply negation and contradiction. One character wants to do something and the other one tries to stop them. At bottom, that’s it.

Anyway Leonora tries to leave but Chris grabs her arms to stop her, then tells her how she twists and torments him etc, the exact same kind of accusations as in ‘Private Lives’ but played for tears and not for lolz.

CHRIS: Stay still.
LEONORA: You’re mad.

He accuses her of falling in love with – and spending the night with – another man and keeps on badgering her until she finally admits that she doesn’t love him any more, not in the same way as at the beginning etc.

Infuriated he kisses her one last time against her will then shoves her away and she falls to the floor as he delivers a long speech about how it’s all over and he used to have a vocation but now he’s burned out etc. She gets up and exits while Chris goes over to the big window, looks out for a bit, then steps over the ledge i.e. throw himself out the window in a suicide bid.

Ah. Now we understand how the situation in scene 1 came about. And with that we are onto the sixth and final scene, exactly as scene 1 ended, but now Leonora – who Chris has been calling for on his deathbed and Barbara, Susan and Tom have been waiting for – arrives and, after some strained pleasantries, is taken by the butler into Chris’s bedroom.

Now that I’m reading Coward’s plays in terms of characters battling to force each other to their wills, I see added significance in the way Barbara, apparently from good manners, offers Leonora a cocktail, Leonora refuses, but Barbara insists. On the surface all politeness, Coward dramas are in fact a constant battle of wills.

The last twist of the knife comes in the last few seconds, as Leonora emerges to say Chris has died but tells the others that he didn’t recognise her, thought she was Barbara and her last word was ‘Baba’ (Barbara’s nickname). You can see how this is intended to wring the last drop of melodrama from the situation. But well before then, I have been reading it in a different way, non-naturalistically.

‘Shut up, Clara’

As usual, the play resounds with the kinds of orders and attempts to shut down the other characters, which I’ve highlighted above:

TIM: Shut up, Susan.

BARBARA: Don’t be unkind.

CHRIS: Stop being quarrelsome, Leonora.

LEONORA: Don’t – please, Chris – don’t.

BARBARA: Don’t be silly… Don’t worry about me…

BARBARA: That’s idiotic, unreasonable and idiotic.

It’s striking how regularly Coward characters tell each other to stop:

BARBARA: Stop trying to balance yourself… Do stop whirling about among fictions…

BARBARA: Stop struggling.

And yet they can’t because they can’t because they are trapped in play where they are doomed to play the same roles and act out the same scenes again and again. Beneath the posh accents and civilised dialogue are creatures tormented in hell. Coward and Jean-Paul Sartre have a surprising amount in common. And this, maybe, explains why so many of the characters express an explicit sense of futility:

KARL: What’s the use of arguing?

LEONORA: Oh what’s the use, what’s the use?

LEONORA: It isn’t any use, you know it isn’t.

3. Red Peppers: An interlude with music

Just 20 pages long in two scenes: in parts one and two we see a second-rate music hall double act, a husband and wife team, George and Lily Pepper, going through their act, combining ‘I say I say I say’ type jokes with musical numbers. In the first scene they are dressed as naval ratings and sing ‘Has Anybody Seen our Ship?’

Has Anybody Seen our Ship?

In the third scene they go back on dressed in white ties and tails. But in between, when we see them in their dressing room, there is – as I’m now expecting of all Coward characters – a great deal of bickering and arguing, both between themselves and with the manager of the theatre.

LILY: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
GEORGE: Oh you don’t, don’t you?
LILY: No I don’t, so shut up.

What triggers it is that as they were trooping neatly offstage at the end of the sailor number Lily dropped the telescope they both had tucked under their arms and had to go back to fetch it, ruining the effect. In their dressing room George is furious and this little mistake triggers all kinds of simmering resentments, the kind Coward is expert at depicting. Lily says the orchestra conductor, Bert Bentley, took it too fast and that made her stumble. George leaps to Bert’s defence but Lily says that’s just because they’re drinking buddies.

LILY: Oh shut up, you make me tired.

Their break is provided by another act, a faded West End actress, Mabel Grace, doing a piece. When Alf the call-boy comes in to provide the costumes for their next number, Lily is tactless enough to criticise Mabel as way over the hill in front of him, while George immediately defends her.

LILY: You make me sick, sucking up to the topliners.
GEORGE: Oh shut up nagging.

And when Lily is caustic about the age of the material and criticises George’s dear old granny:

GEORGE: You shut your mouth…

A knock on the door and enters the theatre’s musical director, Bert Bentley, ‘a flashy little man wearing a tail suit’. He also is pretty dismissive of the serious actress, Mabel Grace – ‘the old cow’s tearing herself to shreds’. When Lily demurs:

GEORGE: Oh dry up, Lil, for heaven’s sake.

When they start arguing about the speed of the music, Lily comes over all sarcastic and George, predictably:

GEORGE: Oh dry up.

But when Bentley is rude to Lily, George comes to his defence and Bentley ends up calling them ‘a cheap little comedy act’ which ends up incensing both of them, and George calls him ‘a twopenny halfpenny little squirt’ while Lily accuses him of drinking i.e. being drunk when her conducts.

They might have come to blows except Alf comes in with the Peppers’ steak and chips and tells Bentley he’s needed back in the orchestra pit. The argument with Bentley has drawn the couple together. They tuck into their steak and pour the Guinness that came with it in a friendly way. Lights down, end of scene 2.

The third scene opens in the dressing room as they’ve finished their dinners and are now getting dressed for their item in the second half of the show. Enter Mr Edwards the theatre manager. He runs everything and is well-dressed and smoking a big cigar. He says he saw their first half performance and was not impressed. They blame Bentley and the conversation takes the same kind of turn as virtually all Coward conversations i.e. turns into a row. Lily is needlessly sarcastic to Edwards so George tells her to cool it.

GEORGE: Shut up, Lil, leave this to me.

Edwards threatens to kick them off the bill but they retort that the theatre’s getting a bad reputation anyway. They’re now shouting at each other so loudly that the faded West End actress Mabel Grace comes in from the dressing room next door to tell them to be quiet.

At the height of the argument Alf pops his head in to say they’re on in three minutes. Sudden panic! and they push Edwards and Miss Grace out and hurriedly finish dressing.

Cut to them onstage performing the second number, Men About Town. Taking his revenge, Bentley the conductor plays faster and faster, until George slips over and Lily furiously throws her hat at Bentley in the orchestra stall, screaming ‘You drunken fool’.

I enjoyed this very much. It has unusual depth and saltiness to the characters and dialogue, unlike most of the Coward plays I’ve read.

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by Simon on June 6, 2025 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on June 6, 2025

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Design for Living: A Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1932)

LEO: It should be easy, you know. The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now!

GILDA: Ernest, if you only realized what was going on inside you, you’d be bitterly offended!

‘Design for Living’ is a comedy play written by Noël Coward in 1932. It concerns a trio of artistic characters, Gilda, Otto and Leo, and their complicated three-way relationship. Originally written to star Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt and Coward, it was premiered on Broadway, partly because its risqué subject matter was thought unacceptable to the official censor in London. It was not until 1939 that a London production was presented.

‘Design for Living’ was a success on Broadway in 1933, but it has been revived less often than Coward’s other major comedies. Coward said:

‘It was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors.’

The play was adapted into a film in 1933, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with a screenplay by Ben Hecht, and starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins.

Background

In the second half the 1920s Coward became one of the world’s most famous playwrights, with a succession of popular hits ranging from the operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) and the extravaganza Cavalcade (1931), to the intimate comedies Hay Fever (1924) and Private Lives (1930). Back when he was penniless Coward had met Lunt and Fontanne Lunt on his first trip to new York and had promised he’d write a play to showcase them as an ensemble. By the early 1930s the time was right for Coward to write their star vehicle.

The play was based on the Lunts’ own marriage. They were a devoted couple but had an open relationship with ‘triangular relationships in their private lives’. Coward wrote:

‘These glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves. Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness but equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising each other’s wings…. The ending of the play is equivocal. The three of them… are left together as the curtain falls, laughing…. Some saw it as the lascivious anticipation of a sort of a carnal frolic. Others with less ribald imaginations regarded it as a meaningless and slightly inept excuse to bring the curtain down. I as author, however, prefer to think that Gilda and Otto and Leo were laughing at themselves.’

‘Design for Living’ opened in New York on 24 January 1933, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. It was such a success that Coward was persuaded to relax his usual rule against appearing in any production for more than three months, and he allowed the play to run for a total of five months. So great were the crowds of fans in the street that special police had to be called in during the last week of the run.

Ménage à trois

A ménage à trois is a domestic arrangement or committed relationship consisting of three people in polyamorous romantic or sexual relations with each other, and often dwelling together.

Cast

Gilda – ‘a good-looking woman of about thirty’, ‘a permanent spectator’
Ernest Friedman – ‘any age between forty and fifty, rather precise in manner’
Otto Sylvus – ‘tall and good-looking’
Leo Mercuré – ‘thin and nervous’
Miss Hodge
Photographer
Mr Birbeck
Grace Torrence
Helen Carver
Henry Carver
Matthew

Plot

Act 1. Otto’s studio in Paris, 1932

Gilda is an interior designer who lives with the painter Otto, who was previously attached to Leo, an author. Ernest Friedman arrives, an art dealer and friend of all three. He is excited about his newly acquired Matisse and wants to show it to Otto. Gilda says that Otto is in bed, ill, has had neuralgia and absolutely cannot be disturbed.

Their conversation consists of classily phrased arguments and insults. ‘Private Lives’ taught me that a good deal of Coward dialogue consists of bad-tempered arguing.

ERNEST: If, in my dotage, I become a bore to you, you won’t scruple to let me know, will you?
GILDA: Don’t be an idiot!

He wonders why she doesn’t marry Otto and she replies because he loves her too much. To be tied legally to him would kill the love. She tells him to mind his own business.

ERNEST: I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why I’m so fond of you. You have such abominable manners.

Ernest tells her that Leo is back in Paris after making a success in New York. They both find it hilarious that he’s staying at the Georges V hotel.

Gilda’s discourse is all on stilts, on a high register of shrill self-awareness occasionally tipping over into hysteria, so much so that Earnest confesses she scares him.

GILDA: I’m yelling! Can’t you hear me yelling like mad?
OTTO: What on earth are you talking about?
GILDA: A bad joke, and very difficult to explain.

For example, she delivers a little speech about how she hates her own femininity, hates being trapped in a woman’s body.

There’s nothing funny in the scenario and few comic lines or jokes. It’s just listening to a posh man being mildly abused by this wilful neurotic. Everything is overdramatised. When Ernest makes the slightest of comments on her claiming to be in love with both Otto and Leo at the same time, she flies into a wild dramatisation of the threesome.

GILDA: Look at the whole thing as a side show. People pay to see freaks. Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living.

To the audience and Earnest’s surprise, Otto – not at all in bed and suffering from neuralgia as Gilda claimed – enters from the street carrying luggage. Gilda lied fluently as so many Coward characters do cf Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’. In fact Otto’s just returned from a trip to Bordeaux where he was doing a portrait for an unknown client who he insulted by telling her she was fat, and got thrown out.

When Ernest tells Otto that Leo’s back from America, Otto insists that they go and see him straightaway and Gild eggs them on so they both depart.

Then Leo stumbles in from the bedroom and we realise why Gilda lied to Ernest about Otto being in bed with neuralgia and he couldn’t go into the bedroom even to whisper hello. It’s because it wasn’t Otto in the bedroom it was Leo. When he says ‘What we did was inevitable. It’s been inevitable for years’ it makes it sound like they’ve had sex for the first time after fancying each other for years. In other words, that the ménage à trois I’ve read about in all the blurbs and summaries of the play isn’t as established as I thought.

Anyway, he’s racked with guilt about it and they spend some time discussing what it means to have betrayed their best friend etc. As usual with Coward this takes the form of an argument or a squabble. His character suffer from an over-articulacy, they are far too fluent and articulate for their own good – which almost guarantees that they pick up on stray words here and there and magnify them into huge arguments. This was Elyot and Amanda’s way in ‘Private Lives’ and the same here. Leo says something sweet and reassuring which Gilda takes to be an appalling cliché and explodes:

GILDA [viciously]: Let’s have some more! ‘Passion’s only transitory’, isn’t it? ‘Love is ever fleeting!’ ‘Time is a great healer’. Trot them all out, dear.
LEO: Don’t try to quarrel with me.
GILDA: Don’t be so wise and assured and knowing, then. It’s infuriating.

The key word here is ‘viciously’. All Coward characters flip from civilised banter to vicious recriminations and insults in a second, and then back again. It makes them all dislikeable. And it gives the plays a constant sense of walking on eggshells, anxiously waiting for the next character to explode. It’s more like living with a wife beater than attending a sophisticated ‘comedy’.

At the height of their discussion-squabble-argument, Otto walks in and discovers them. Ah. He and Ernest got to the Hotel Georges V only to discover Leo wasn’t staying there at all, so he’s come back to his apartment and found…

They come out and tell him that they slept together in his absence. With crushing inevitability they start arguing and finding articulate fluent ways to describe how miserable they are and to accuse each other. Posh people fighting in a Noel Coward play! Yes.

LEO: What right have you to be hurt and grieved, any more than Gilda and me? We’re having just as bad a time as you are, probably worse.

Much like the audience. Coward’s alleged ‘wit’ is only intermittently apparent. Much, much more present in all these plays is the bad-tempered arguing and insults.

OTTO: I’ve seen something in you that I’ve never seen before; in all these years I’ve never noticed it—I never realized that, deep down underneath your superficial charm and wit, you’re nothing but a cheap, second-rate little opportunist, ready to sacrifice anything, however sacred, to the excitement of the moment.

Not that funny. Otto is violently unpleasant and Gilda collapses in tears.

GILDA (collapsing at the table): Stop it! Stop it! How can you be so cruel! How can you say such vile things?

Otto makes clear his contempt and hatred for both of them, wishes they were dead and in hell, and storms out.

Act 2

Scene 1. Leo’s Flat in London, 18 months later

Most of Coward’s plays take place over a few days. A gap of 18 months is a big thing, more like a novel.

Leo and Gilda are now living together and he is writing plays which are being produced and are tremendously successful. The scene opens with Leo reading out the reviews of his latest play, ‘Change and Decay’, to Gilda,

A playwright nervous about his reviews writing a play about a playwright nervously reading his reviews – you could consider this delightfully meta and cleverly postmodern – or tiresomely self-obsessed and narcissistic, according to taste.

Coward does that thing which numerous modern-ish authors do, which is have a character in one of their novels or plays repeat the popular criticism of them: in this case he has Leo read out the Daily Mirror‘s criticism that his latest play is ‘thin’. This exasperates him and stings him to tell Gilda that in future he will write fat plays about fat characters. This is, of course, to ignore the substance of the criticism: Coward’s plays are thin. The basic scenarios are often quite winning, but the characterisation is generally shallow as a puddle and the dialogue is astonishingly lacking in the wit and humour I have for decades associated with Coward until I actually came to read and watch his plays, and be rather disappointed. Instead of genuine wit or comedy you have exchanges like this.

GILDA: Anyhow, you can’t expect a paper like the Times to be really interested in your petty little excursions in the theatre. After all, it is the organ of the nation.
LEO: That sounds vaguely pornographic to me.

Schoolboy humour. Here’s another example of Coward’s shimmering wit, Gilda pretending to be a brainless newspaper interviewer:

Gilda [conversationally]: Tell me, Mr Mercure, what do you think of the modern girl?
LEO: [politely]: A silly bitch.

Not scintillating repartee, is it?

A phone call from some aristocratic inviting them to dinner prompts Leo to say these social situations are awkward when they’re obviously a couple but not married. So he proposes to her but she sagely turns him down and even says it would be against her moral code.

Presumably this kind of suave, sophisticated exchange was designed to shock and outrage the older, Edwardian generation with their Victorian morals.

The phone rings incessantly, a symptom of the modern world. Leo calls their maid or servant, Miss Hodge, in and tells her to answer the phone for him. Next time the phone rings working class Miss Hodge answers the phone with comic ineptness. The working classes, eh, ha ha ha.

What’s obvious is how bored they are. Gilda is bored to death.

GILDA: Perhaps you’re wise about our marrying; perhaps it would be a good thing. I’m developing into one of those tedious unoccupied women, who batten on men and spoil everything for them. I’m spoiling the excitement of your success for you now by being tiresome and gloomy.

Watching posh bored people torment each other, throwing ‘cheap gibes’ at each other, that’s entertainment. ‘Tiresome’ – that’s the key word. And Leo is as irritated and frustrated.

LEO: This looks like a row but it hasn’t even the virtue of being a new row. We’ve had it before several times, and just lately more than ever.

A journalist, Mr Birbeck, and press photographer from the Evening Standard arrive to do a feature on him. After arguing with Gilda Leo is in a bad mood and gives sharp replies to all the questions. Here is an example of his authorly wit:

MR BIRBECK: Do you believe the talkies will kill the theatre?
LEO: No. I think they’ll kill the talkies.
MR BIRBECK (laughing): That’s very good, that is! It really is.

It isn’t though, is it? It’s not in the slightest bit funny. It’s flippant and cynical and sounds like it ought to be a joke, but it isn’t. Leo gives up answering questions and tells him he’s tired and doesn’t he find asking all these stupid questions ‘grotesque?’ and tells him to come back dome other time when he’s less… tired.

Nonetheless he lets the photographer take some snaps and the scene ends with Mr Birbeck tentatively asking whether Leo could, just maybe, possibly, give them a teeny weeny smile? This is one of the few things I’ve found funny so far, these poor professionals trying to do their job in the face of Leo’s self-important moodiness.

Scene 2. Leo’s London flat, a few days later

A few days later Leo is away. After some comic business with the working class character, the maid Miss Hodge (Gilda asks if she minds that she and Leo are not married; Miss Hodge says she doesn’t mind, having herself been twice married and not thinking much of the institution) departs and Otto turns up.

He too is now successful, as an artist. He’s just back from staging an exhibition in New York.

There’s a joke, a joke with a punchline, such a rarity in Coward it’s worth recording.

OTTO: This seems a very nice flat.
GILDA: It is. You can see right across to the other side of the square on a clear day.

Ooh, immediately followed by another one. Otto says he bumped into a woman just leaving. Gilda explains that that was the maid, Mrs Hodge.

GILDA: That was Miss Hodge. She’s had two husbands.
OTTO: I once met a woman who’d had four husbands.

And a little later, after Otto explains that he went away for a while, on a Norwegian freighter:

OTTO: I can say, ‘How do you do?’ in Norwegian.
GILDA: We must get to know some Norwegian people immediately, so that you can say ‘How do you do? to them.—

Noel’s on fire! Maybe you can see what I mean when I say that this kind of thing isn’t really funny in itself. These aren’t really jokes, or barely. What makes them funny (if it does) is how they exemplify the attitude of these posh, superior, self-absorbed arty types. It’s so exactly the kind of flippant throwaway remark that a posh character in a Coward play ought to say.

Anyway, she asks why he’s avoided them for so frightfully long and he says yes, it has been frightfully long, hasn’t it. Did you miss me, darling etc.

Remember I commented on a playwright having a character in his latest play commenting on newspaper reviews of the character’s previous plays which sound very like the reviews and criticism Coward got for his plays? Happens again here. Otto asks what Gilda thinks of Leo’s latest play, prompting quite a serious reply:

GILDA: Three scenes are first rate, especially the last act. The beginning of the second act drags a bit, and most of the first act’s too facile—you know what I mean—he flips along with easy swift dialogue, but doesn’t go deep enough. It’s all very well played.

‘Doesn’t go deep enough’. Well, there’s no point criticising Coward for what he isn’t. No Ibsen or Strindberg, he. He concocted effective and extremely popular entertainments over a career spanning decades. An awesome achievement.

Back in this play, Otto and Gilda have a picnic dinner together: cold ham, salad, cold rice pudding, and slowly revive their friendship turning back into love. Or whatever it is they have. Maybe just opportunity.

Otto jokes about what would happen if they ended up fighting over Gilda, reminiscent of the fight scene between Elyot and Victor which fizzles out in ‘Private Lives’.

The conversation is frequently difficult to distinguish from an argument or row.

OTTO: Shut up! Don’t talk like that…
GILDA [breaking down]: Don’t—don’t laugh at me.

Author’s message

Remember how I’ve pointed out that the fundamental dichotomy in Coward isn’t between the straight and the gay, it’s between what my son calls ‘the normies’ – the normal, everyday people with their conventional beliefs and lives and morality and behaviour – and the Coward characters who proclaim that they are special, different, exceptional, Well, the same sentiment is expressed here in a pat little speech by Otto. For when Gilda has a moment of ‘normality’ and says that their falling in love is sordid and gross, Otto suavely replies that this is only so if measured by other people’s standards. I might as well give the whole speech, as it amounts to a manifesto of sorts.

GILDA: Why should we flatter ourselves that we’re so tremendously different?
OTTO: Flattery doesn’t enter into it. We are different. Our lives are diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions; and it’s no use grabbing at those conventions to hold us up when we find we’re in deep water. We’ve jilted them and eliminated them, and we’ve got to find our own solutions for our own peculiar moral problems.
GILDA: Very glib, very glib indeed, and very plausible.
OTTO: It’s true. There’s no sense in stamping about and saying how degrading it all is. Of course it’s degrading; according to a certain code, the whole situation’s degrading and always has been. The Methodists wouldn’t approve of us, and the Catholics wouldn’t either; and the Evangelists and the Episcopalians and the Anglicans and the Christian Scientists—I don’t suppose even the Polynesian Islanders would think very highly of us, but they wouldn’t mind quite so much, being so far away. They could all club together—the whole lot of them—and say with perfect truth, according to their lights, that we were loose-living, irreligious, unmoral degenerates, couldn’t they?
GILDA [meekly]: Yes, Otto, I expect so.
OTTO: But the whole point is, it’s none of their business. We’re not doing any harm to anyone else. We’re not peppering the world with illegitimate children. The only people we could possibly mess up are ourselves, and that’s our lookout. It’s no use you trying to decide which you love best, Leo or me, because you don’t know! At the moment, it’s me, because you’ve been living with Leo for a long time and I’ve been away. A gay, ironic chance threw the three of us together and tied our lives into a tight knot at the outset. To deny it would be ridiculous, and to unravel it impossible. Therefore, the only thing left is to enjoy it thoroughly, every rich moment of it, every thrilling second.

This is no different from the ancient trope of carpe diem, Latin for ‘seize the day’, which is a literary phrase for the pretty obvious idea that you should enjoy life while you can. (The original Latin phrase comes from Horace’s Odes, which I’ve reviewed for this blog.)

The banter goes on for page after page until they realise they need to go to bed together. They embrace passionately. So it’s partner swapping again, as in ‘Private Lives’.

Scene 3. The same, the next morning

10.30 the next morning. Otto is still asleep when Ernest calls on Gilda. He asks to see Leo but Gilda lies, saying he’s not very well and can’t be disturbed. In reality, as we know, Leo is away at a weekend house party and it’s Otto asleep in the next room. This is quite funny because it mirrors the situation in the first scene, where Ernest arrived wanting to see Otto and Gilda lied, saying he was in bed with neuralgia when it was, of course, Leo who she’d illicitly slept with, who was in the bedroom.

This explains why Gilda is, once again, as in the first scene, slightly hysterical. And in this hysteria liable to sound off and make sweeping statements. For a start she says humanity is a great disappointment, has barely risen above the primeval slime. But this leads onto a more revealing statement.

GILDA: The human race is a let-down, Ernest; a bad, bad let-down! I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed but it hasn’t; it thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime but it hasn’t—it’s still wallowing in it! It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and our eyes and our souls. We’ve invented a few small things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet, endless peaceful quiet—something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—

Coward hated critical analysis of his plays, so I’m going to do something he would have loathed and subject this little speech to tuppeny-ha’penny analyses according to several classical schools of literary criticism.

A Marxist interpretation

Most of Coward’s characters come from the parasite rentier class which doesn’t work for a living. Thus, lacking the purpose given to existence by the need to work, they are often bored to death, as Gilda is. In this particular play, the two male leads do in fact work for a living, after a fashion, as a playwright and an artist.

But the real point is that none of them are aligned with the forces of History, specifically the Proletariat which is, in late capitalism, the embodiment of the spirit of History and which must, as Marx proved with his scientific socialism, soon overthrow the exploitative capitalist system and its imperial extensions, and usher in the triumph of the working class.

So on the Marxist view of his day, it is only by throwing in their lot with people with a cause, committed to the liberation of humanity, that Coward’s characters can discover meaning and purpose to life and stop indulging in their squalid, petty bourgeois intrigues.

Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—’ is the cry of the rootless, aimless, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie adrift from the unstoppable march of History, and for which there is only one cure or solution. Align with the class of the future, the proletariat. See the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre which dramatise just this issue.

A Freudian interpretation

Freud’s first, pre-war model of the mind, developed between about 1895 and 1918, attributed the central driving force of the unconscious to Sex, broadly speaking the Darwinian drive of the human organism to reproduce which, more narrowly, creates erotic drives which had to be channelled ‘correctly’ in order to be socially acceptable. Freud was among the first to discover how easily these drives get blocked and misdirected in childhood and adolescence to turn into the florid array of sexual ‘perversions’, or be stifled and emerge was a wide variety of neurotic and obsessive symptoms, which his patients described when they presented to him.

However, the colossal slaughter and destruction of the First World War persuaded him that his theory was inadequate. Nothing about sex could explain the hecatombs of corpses and entire empires brought to their knees.

Thus in the 1920s he developed his second model of the mind and this time posited that alongside the positive Life Force or Eros, of which reproduction and sex are merely subsets, an equal and opposite drive in all humans, indeed (he speculates) in all organisms, which he called the Death Drive or Thanatos: the widespread wish that the whole wretched business of life, all the anxieties and worries and responsibilities, not to mention illnesses and accidents, would all cease once and for all.

Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions’ is a textbook expression of the deep wish, a key component of all human minds – sometimes buried deep, sometimes (as here) freely acknowledged – for the whole stressful business just to end.

Freud reviews

Anyway, this big speech is all preparatory to Gilda telling Ernest she is leaving. Leaving Leo and Otto. Running away. She feels stifled. She wants to be free. She wants to be her ‘unadulterated self’. She’s going to run away, stay in a hotel, go to Paris, no, Berlin. Explaining all this makes her feel very tender towards Ernest and she throws her arms round his neck. She leaves two letters on the desk and then leaves with Ernest.

The phone rings, Miss Hodge answers it and this prompts Otto to slouch out of his bedroom in his pyjamas and dressing gown. Miss Hodge lets him know she disapproves, and he tells her to go away and mind her own business.

Leo sneaks in through the front door, and for a moment mistakes the back of the head on the sofa and the cigarette smoke rising to be Gilda and shouts Hi honey, I’m home. So is appalled when it’s Otto who turns to greet him.

This turns into a row, with Leo telling him how vile he is, just as Otto told him how vile he was in the earlier scene. As with so much Coward, this is studiedly symmetrical and patterned.

OTTO: I said all that to you in Paris. Do you remember? I thought it was true then, just as you think it’s true now.

They have a long conversation about how they’re doomed to repeat the same situation (infidelity with Gilda). Leo says he needs to be tolerant which Otto, understandably, finds hard.

Then they notice the letters, reading them and concluding that Gilda has escaped. So, rather pathetically, they decide to get completely pissed on brandy and then sherry. Difficult for actors portraying steady descent into quite wild and then tearful drunkenness. Otto delivers a semi-drunken rant:

OTTO (with sudden fury): So many words! That’s what’s wrong with us! So many words—too many words, masses and masses of words, spewed about until we’re choked with them. We’ve argued and probed and dragged our entrails out in front of one another for years! We’ve explained away the sea and the stars and life and death and our own peace of mind! I’m sick of this endless game of three-handed, spiritual ping-pong—this battling of our little egos in one another’s faces! Sick to death of it! Gilda’s made a supreme gesture and got out. Good luck to her, I say!

Apart from the detail of it being a trio, the basic idea of being sick to death of choking themselves with words and dragging their entrails out, this could come from one of Elyot or Amanda’s rants in ‘Private Lives’.

Coward drags out this scene to inordinate length with Leo and Otto arguing at length, though it’s dressed up with fancy ideas, for example:

LEO: Science is our only hope, the only hope for humanity! We’ve wallowed in false mysticism for centuries; we’ve fought and suffered and died for foolish beliefs, which science has proved to be as ephemeral as smoke. Now is the moment to open our eyes fearlessly and look at the truth!

Which might mean something in a more serious play but, spoken by one of Coward’s superficial mannequins, comes over as flippant and inconsequential as everything else they say. For example, increasingly fanciful digressions, for example about the absurdity of the words ‘macaroni’ and ‘wimple’. Eventually they get so drunk that they embrace, sobbing helplessly.

So the act ends with two old friends having got hopelessly drunk and feeling hopelessly lonely and sad. Not immediately comic, in fact quite sad for us…

Act 3

Scene 1. Ernest’s apartment in New York, two years later

Like the gap of 18 months before Acts 1 and 2, two whole years is another long period of time to jump. So we find ourselves in Ernest’s New York apartment. Gilda has married Ernest and become a commercially successful designer. Ernest is away and, on this fine summer’s evening, Gilda is giving a reception for some important clients, namely: Henry and Helen Carver, ‘a comparatively young married couple, wealthy and well dressed’, and Grace Torrence, ‘slightly older, a typical Europeanized New York matron’.

Gilda has grown up. She is elaborately and beautifully gowned. Her manner has changed a good deal. She is much more still and sure than before. A certain amount of vitality has gone from her, but, in its place, there is an aloof poise quite in keeping with her dress and surroundings.

Gilda takes Grace off to show her something and Henry and Helen have an extended argument about the merit of interior decorators, Henry thinking it’s all a racket, Helen defending her. Couples fiercely arguing, it’s Coward’s basic situation.

Doorbell rings and Henry lets in… Otto and Leo, both in fine fantastical moods. They come over as very camp i.e. over self-consciously mocking everything everyone says.

OTTO: There’s something strangely and deeply moving about young love, Mr. and Mrs. Carver.
LEO: Youth at the helm.
OTTO: Guiding the little fragile barque of happiness down the river of life. Unthinking, unknowing, unaware of the perils that lie in wait for you, the sudden tempests, the sharp jagged rocks beneath the surface. Are you never afraid?
HENRY I don’t see anything to be afraid of.
LEO (fondly): Foolish headstrong boy.

This is deliberately aggressively offensive but cast in such suave politeness as to be hard to talk back to. Part of the purpose of camp which is a power play.

Otto and Leo’s fast-talking sophisticated banter startles and puzzles Henry and Helen. This is also a classic scenario – clever, fast-talking smartarses bewildering the normies. Which conceals, not very well, their anger. They are cattily, bitchily angry with Gilda and their anger quickly comes out, constantly teetering on the brink of… yet another argument, a fight, a flaring row. The basic Coward content.

Gilda responds to their aggressive flippancy with bitterness of their own and barely controlled fury. On a general point, lots of twentieth century drama seems to be about people behaving badly on stage. Drunken angry bitterness being the speciality of, for example, Tennessee Williams a generation later.

Their intense, recriminatory conversation drives Helen, Henry and Grace away. Grace recognises boorish behaviour when she sees it. Gilda insists Leo and Otto leave as well but secretly gives them a key and tells them to come back.

After they’ve all gone she compulsively finished one of the other’s drink, with tears in her eyes.

Scene 2. The same, the next morning

Ernest returns the next morning and is greeted by his Black servant who makes him a coffee, he puts down his luggage etc and then… Otto and Leo come down the stairs wearing his pyjamas and dressing gowns.

He is completely flabbergasted and triggers their ‘brazen impertinence’ i.e. more camp flippancy. They tell him they gatecrashed Gilda’s little party the night before, she gave them a key, but when they came back she had gone.

They call him ludicrous for claiming that Gilda is his wife, but they dismiss this as nonsense, claiming she belongs to them just as much as to him (Ernest).

Cue Gilda walking in and explaining that she spent the night at a hotel. Ernest explodes in anger but once again, as in the previous scene, it’s a case of the two tricksters, jokers, sparky and flippant and imaginative people, against the ‘normie’, Ernest, who can’t keep up with their smooth repartee. Just as straight-laced Victor couldn’t keep up with Elyot’s smart repartee in ‘Private Lives’. So:

ERNEST: I think your arrogance is insufferable. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I’m very, very angry.

Of course he doesn’t know what to do. He’s the normie in a play about tricksters.

Now it turns out that Gilda has realised she is bored with her life with Ernest and so she’s going to leave him. She reveals that being her wife has no value to her, it’s been very convenient and comfortable but now she realises she has to go back to the tricksters.

Ernest tries to argue that Gilda knows too much to be taken back by them but she denies it. He thinks she’s gone mad but she declares they are all of a piece, they all share the same ‘difference’ from normal society which I commented on earlier.

GILDA: It’s silly to go on saying to yourself that I’m different from Otto. and Leo just because you want to believe it. I’m not different from them. We’re all of a piece, the three of us. Those early years made us so. From now on we shall have to live and die our own way. No one else’s way is any good, we don’t fit.

‘We don’t fit’, cry of the alienated teenager for at least the last 70 years. And more manifesto:

ERNEST: Your values are false and distorted.
GILDA: Only from your point of view.
ERNEST: From the point of view of anyone who has the slightest sense of decency.
LEO: We have our own decencies. We have our own ethics. Our lives are a different shape from yours. Wave us good-bye, Little Ernest, we’re together again.

Ernest accuses them of wallowing in a ‘disgusting three-sided erotic hotch-potch’. But the more angry he gets – the more he invokes conventional morality – the more flippantly amused the naughty threesome become and, as Ernest stomps to the apartment door, leaves and slams it shut, the threesome collapse into hilarious laughter.

Thoughts

I’ve made my main comments: not many comic lines; thin characters; the whole effect achieved almost entirely by the posh self-centred self-satisfied smug superiority of the characters, which the audience is invited to alternately identify with and/or laugh at.

What impresses, maybe, is the professionalism with which the initial premise or scenario is worked through, with clever structural echoes and parallelism. But it gets pretty monotonous at moments, since the audience quickly develops a strong idea of what’s going to happen.

Is it even a real ménage à trois?

Short answer, no. It isn’t. Our three heroes do not live in a relaxed happy ménage, so they? The opposite. What really happens is Gilda sleeps around, betraying first Leo, then Otto and then, a year or so later, her husband Ernest. It is not a ménage at all but the story of a serial adulteress or promiscuous woman. The idea that the three of them can somehow happily co-exist only really comes at the end, in the Betraying Ernest scene.

But again, as with The Vortex, there’s little point judging the scenario by our own modern standards: in its day, the play’s timid hints at a genuine ménage were enough to cause shock and scandal among the bourgeois newspapers, critics and staid theatre goers.

Mocking the provinces

I wonder how long the English upper classes have been mocking the provinces. Maybe since the Norman Conquest. One of Coward’s other plays mocks Newcastle, and there’s a slight dig here.

GILDA: Have you been married much, then?
MISS HODGE: Twice, all told.
GILDA: Where are your husbands now?
MISS HODGE: One’s dead, and the other’s in Newcastle.
GILDA (smiling): Oh.

More sustained metropolitan snobbery is dispensed by Otto in Act 2.

OTTO [drawing up a chair]: What delicious-looking ham! Where did you get it?
GILDA: I have it specially sent from Scotland.
OTTO: Why Scotland?
GILDA: It lives there when it’s alive.
OTTO: A bonny country, Scotland, if all I’ve heard is correct, what with the banshees wailing and the four-leaved shamrock.
GILDA: That’s Ireland, dear.
OTTO: Never mind. The same wistful dampness distinguishes them both.

A post-colonial interpretation

Hilarious (that’s sarcasm). But if you were an Irish nationalist, an Indian nationalist, any educated inhabitant of one of Britain’s 57 colonies, dominions, territories, or protectorates, you might have read this kind of thing as precisely the kind of ignorant, self-centred, privileged, smug indifference that you had to shoot your way through in order to gain independence.

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Noel Coward reviews

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by Simon on June 2, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on June 2, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/06/02/design-for-living-noel-coward/

Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1929)

ELYOT: Don’t quibble, Sibyl.

AMANDA: What’s so horrible is, that one can’t stay happy!
ELYOT: Oh, darling! Don’t say that!
AMANDA: It’s true! The whole business is a very poor joke!

Ah, les idiots!
(Louise, the French maid’s accurate assessment of the play’s four protagonists.)

Executive summary

‘Private Lives’ is one of Coward’s more popularly and regularly revived plays. It depicts a couple, Elyot and Amanda who divorced five years ago but who have both just remarried and who, on the first evening of their honeymoons with their new spouses (Sibyl and Victor, respectively), discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel.

The play is set on the connected balconies outside their respective hotel rooms where they first realise they’re staying next door to each other. First of all they each have bitter arguments with the new spouses who both leave the rooms in high dudgeon. Then they have the first of many bitter fights between themselves before, improbably enough, deciding to run away and abandon their new partners (on the first night of their honeymoons!).

The second act is set in Amanda’s Paris apartment and consists entirely of the pair alternately being lovey-dovey and trembling on the brink of having sex, then some tiny trifle sparks an argument, and next thing they are screaming abuse at each other and, in climactic moments, slapping and throwing things at each other. At the height of the fiercest argument their estranged spouses, having tracked them down to Paris, enter and witness their latest slanging match.

The third act is set the next morning as the foursome awaken (Sibyl slept on the sofa, Victor in an armchair), Elyot and Amanda treating everything as normal (which is was during their stormy three-year marriage) while the new spouses are puzzled and confused. A lot of banter takes us to a position where the new spouses offer to divorce the central figures but a supposedly civilised breakfast itself degenerates into a fierce argument, this time between Victor and Sibyl. Looking on, for once watching a different couple screaming their heads off, unexpectedly makes Elyot and Amanda feel moony and spoony again and, while Victor and Sibyl come to blows, Elyot and Amanda pack their backs and quietly sneak out the front door.

Act 1

The terrace of a hotel in the South of France.

Onto the balconies outside their rooms come first one couple then the other. First Elyot and his new wife, Sibyl. They’re all lovey-dovey at first but her persistence in asking fairly innocent questions about his first marriage several times makes him lose his temper but they manage to recover and go into their room to dress for dinner.

This clears the scene for the second couple, Amanda and her new husband Victor. Same thing happens. They are all lovey-dovey at first until the subject of her first marriage comes up and Victor dwells on how awful Elyot was to her. But they manage to recover. The parallelism is deliberately emphasised. For example both Sibyl and Victor ask Elyot and Amanda where they went on their first honeymoons and both reply St Moritz.

What for me is the central issue of the play, the conflict between the imaginative and liberated Elyot and Amanda, and the boring Sibyl and narrow conventional Victor, is first sounded.

VICTOR: Well, I’m glad I’m normal!
AMANDA: What an odd thing to be glad about! Why?
VICTOR: Well, aren’t you?
AMANDA: I’m not so sure I’m normal!
VICTOR: Of course you are, Mandy! Sweetly, divinely normal!
AMANDA: I haven’t any peculiar cravings for Chinamen or old boots, if that’s what you mean!
VICTOR: Mandy!
AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal, really… deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances.

Even Amanda’s very mild flight of fancy, mentioning Chinamen or old boots (!) is enough to freak Victor out. He just thinks of it as the kind of thing which shouldn’t be said out loud. ‘All stuff and nonsense.’ Exactly. That’s the mentality that Elyot and Amanda, and even more so the audience, come to realise they’re up against.

Victor goes in to have a bath i.e. give Amanda ten minutes alone on the balcony during which Elyot returns to his side of the balcony, lights a cigarette, waiting for Sibyl to finish putting on her make-up.

The orchestra down on the hotel dining room starts playing ‘Moonlight becomes you’ and Elyot starts humming along. Amanda, sitting on her side of the balcony, hears him and she starts singing along. Elyot hears her and they face each other across the partition of the two balconies. After a few polite remarks Amanda says she must go and goes into her room.

Sibyl comes out onto their balcony and discovers Elyot in a flustered state. With no explanation why he tells her they must pack up and leave straightaway. She absolutely refuses and he goes into one of, what we will come to realise, are his psychotic rages, complete with really startlingly violent exclamations:

ELYOT: If there’s one thing in the world that infuriates me, it’s sheer wanton stubbornness! I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe!

Understandably, Sibyl goes into hysterics as Elyot turns and stomps into their room, and she follows him.

This of course leaves the stage clear for Victor and Amanda to come stomping out onto their half of the balcony. Amanda has clearly made the same demand of Victor, that they leave the hotel straightaway and drive back to her place in Paris.

To persuade him she has concocted an entirely fictitious story about this being the very hotel where her sister committed suicide (!) and her having to accompany the body back to England. Victor sees through this instantly and accuses her of telling a lie to which she straightaway admits.

This, like the passage about the Chinamen, should be flagging to Victor (it certainly flags to us) that Amanda overflows with high-spirited fancies and imaginings and so is a) utterly unsuited to blunt imagination-free Victor and b) addicted to the equally frivolous, fanciful Elyot. It is the quality of their free-associating, untrammeled senses of humour which binds them.

She then lies again, telling Victor they have to leave because Elyot is here but for some reason not telling the truth, that he’s in the next door room, but making up another lie that she saw him down in the street. In a white suit. Running. Victor, reasonably enough, points out that she’s lying again.

Victor refuses to leave and go to Paris, which triggers Amanda to a furious denunciation:

AMANDA: I see quite clearly that I have been foolish enough to marry a fat old gentleman in a club armchair! You’re a pompous ass! Pompous ass! That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant!

Stiff with dignity, Victor says he will be in the bar and stomps out. Over on Elyot’s side of the balcony, he and Sibyl come out just long enough for her to tell him it’s the unhappiest day of her life. She says she’s off to have dinner and Elyot hopes it will choke her.

Not the height of sophistication, maybe.

And so to the final part of the act, with Amanda and Elyot finding themselves alone on the balcony. She asks for a cigarette and joins him on his side of the balcony. At first they have a typical angry outburst, blaming each other for ruining things. But slowly they remember past happiness and end up mocking each other’s partners. The band down in the dining room starts playing their tune, ‘Moonlight becomes you’, and they both soften, and Amanda delivers one of Coward’s most famous quotes.

AMANDA: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

In this mood they remember all the good times and, implausibly but at the same time believably, suddenly admit that they still love each other. They are appalled at the catastrophe they’ve brought upon themselves.

AMANDA: No, wait! This is terrible, something strange’s happened to us, we’re not sane!
ELYOT: We never were.

He tells her to stop shilly-shallying, calls her idiotic and suddenly they’re having one of their rows. She stops it and says they need to have a safe word or phrase, something either of them can say and which will pull them up, make them keep a 5-minute, no a 2-minute silence, while they calm down. Jokingly Elyot suggests ‘Solomon Isaacs’ and a few minutes later when they flare up into another argument, says it, they are silent, calm down and are together again. On one level they think this little device will somehow obviate their addiction to flaring rows but, as the next two acts will amply demonstrate, it won’t.

And so they rush off, grabbing the bags they haven’t unpacked yet, heading down to the garage where her car is.

Leaving the stage empty for Victor and Sibyl to enter, call their partners’ names, look around and be puzzled by their absence. In reality there’d be calling Reception, running round upset. For the purposes of the play they both accept the situation very demurely and Victor invites Sibyl over to have one of the cocktails which he brought out for Amanda 15 minutes earlier.

And with a bitter-sweet wistfulness, he suggests a toast ‘To absent friends’, which is far more for the purpose of theatrical neatness, to neatly round off the act, than any attempt at psychological realism.

Act 2

Amanda’s flat in Paris, a few days later.

Elyot and Amanda have just had a little dinner and ponder their situation. They wonder if they’ll remarry. They agree to shorten their safe phrase from ‘Solomon Isaacs’ to ‘Sollocks’. (The ex-dustman in me thinks ‘bollocks’ might have been better.)

Almost every conversational gambit leads to the flaring of an argument, such as when they stray into listing other people they had affairs with after they divorced.

They have an attractive married habit of inventing surreal nonsense. ‘Did you notice Lady Bumble blowing all those shrimps through her ear trumpet?’ and the like. Or: ‘ It must be so nasty for poor animals, being experimented on! Well, not when the experiments are successful! – Why, in Vienna, I believe you can see whole lines of decrepit old rats, carrying on like Tiller girls!’

They kiss passionately but Amanda tells him to stop because it’s too soon after dinner, at which he breaks off in a huff. And so on. One minute he’s shouting ‘Don’t patronise me’ and they cry the safe word. Moments later he’s playing her favourite song on the piano and she softens etc. It ends for the umpteenth time for a full-throated kiss.

While Elyot and Amanda cannot live without each other, neither can they live with each other. They argue violently and try to outwit each other, just as they did during their stormy marriage.

The phone rings, someone asking for a Madame Duvallon, Elyot answers in his high surreal mode that Madame Duvallon has just left for Madagascar. Amanda is relieved; she thought it was them catching up with them. Who? Oh all the people who pursue you and pull you down. At which point there’s a little author’s message:

AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious!
ELYOT: You mustn’t be serious, my dear one! It’s just what they want!
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant! Laugh at all their sacred shibboleths! Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.
AMANDA: Darling, I think you’re talking nonsense!
ELYOT: So is everyone else, in the long run! Let’s be superficial, and pity the poor philosophers. Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school children.

Trouble is every one of these moments of silliness and closeness spirals, trips a switch, turns on a sixpence about a squabble about something trivial and then they’re in full throttle insulting rage within seconds. ‘You’re quite intolerable.’ ‘Ridiculous ass.’ ‘If you insist on being so boorish and idiotic.’ ‘You disagreeable pig!’ ‘You spiteful little beast!’

She puts on a record, he turns it off saying it’ll wake the neighbours, he turns it off again and scratches it, so she takes it off the turntable and smashes it over his head at which he slaps her in the face making her burst into tears, ‘hate you, I hate you!’ and then slaps him: ‘You’re a vile–tempered, evil–minded little vampire!’

They throw things at each other and roll around on the floor hitting each other with pillows, shouting this is the end and ‘I hope I never see you again in my life’, before storming off to their separate rooms.

For some unexplained reason, it is at precisely this moment that the spouses they abandoned in the South of France, Sibyl and Victor, walk in.

Act 3

Amanda’s flat the next morning.

Next morning the French maid arrives and is appalled by the mess everywhere, then discovers Sibyl on the sofa and Victor sleeping in a chair.

Once woken up, Victor and Sibyl agree they must see this thing through. They have somehow tracked the errant couple to Amanda’s flat in Paris. Amanda emerges from her room fully dressed, calmly accepts their presence and announces that she’s leaving immediately. When Sibyl knocks on Elyot’s door he tells her to go away and she bursts into hysterical wails.

Elyot evades the situation with studied flippancy, while Amanda brightly behaves as if they’re welcome guests on a lovely Paris morning. When Elyot speaks Amanda tells him to shut up and accuses him:

AMANDA: I have been brought up to believe that it’s beyond the pale for a man to strike a woman!
ELYOT: A very poor tradition! Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.

Amanda takes Sibyl off to a bedroom to freshen up and Victor challenges Elyot to a fight. But Elyot manages to outwit him with his flippancy, ending up by accusing Victor of not being a proper man.

Sibyl and Amanda emerge from the bedroom and themselves have a fight ending with insults.

AMANDA: Heaven preserve me from nice women!
SIBYL: Your own reputation ought to do that!
AMANDA: Oh, go to hell!

If you enjoy watching middle class people argue and insult each other, this is the perfect night out for you.

Victor and Amanda squabble about whether they’re in love with each other. The real issue here, the dichotomy, isn’t between men and women, it’s between the imaginative – those who enjoy absurdist flights of fancy (Elyot and Amanda) – and the dim and unimaginative (Victor and Sibyl).

It’s the same basic dichotomy as between Larita and the dim Whittaker family in ‘Easy Virtue’ in fact Sibyl ends up hurling exactly the same accusations at unimaginative Victor as Larita does in the earlier play, they read like leftover lines from the earlier, far more powerful, play.

VICTOR: Making stupid rotten jokes!
SIBYL: I thought what Elyot said was funny!
VICTOR: Well, all I can think is, is that you must have a very warped sense of humour!
SIBYL: That’s better than having none at all!
VICTOR: I fail to see what humour there is in incessant trivial flippancy!
SIBYL: You couldn’t be flippant if you tried until you were blue in the face!~
VICTOR: I shouldn’t dream of trying!
SIBYL: You must be awfully sad, not to be able to see any fun in anything!

The end of the play portrays a stiff and tense breakfast, as Louise brings in a tray with coffee and brioches. Predictably this also degenerates into an argument, surprisingly, between Victor and Sibyl as Elyot and Amanda look on in silent astonishment. It brings them together to watch another couple behaving like them, and they kiss and canoodle and then agree to sneak out while the other pair are distracted.

And so they sneak out while the other couple are completely absorbed in their fierce arguing, which reaches the same level as theirs the night before, the play ending with Sibyl slapping Victor and screaming at him.

She slaps his face hard, and he takes her by the shoulders and shakes her like a rat.

THE END

Thin

Like all his early plays Coward wrote it at lightning speed, sketching the plot in two weeks and actually writing it in four days. The result is entertaining but, as countless critics observed at the time, thin.

It has been described as ‘tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent and delightfully daring’. Allardyce Nicoll called it ‘amusing, no doubt, yet hardly moving farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub’. The Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Mr Coward certainly had not flattered our intelligence. The play appears to be based on the theory that anything will do provided it be neatly done.’ The Observer also thought that the play depended on brilliant acting but thought the characters unrealistic.

When the text was published, The Times called it ‘unreadable’ and The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘inexpressibly tedious’ in print but acknowledged that its effectiveness on stage was ‘proved by the delight of a theatrical audience.’

You’d have thought none of them had seen or read a Noel Coward play before. Surely they’re all like that, aren’t they?

Mirrors and pairs

I’m starting to notice Coward’s recurring techniques. An obvious one is structural pairing or doubling. All I mean is that ‘Fallen Angels’ portrays two couples, as does ‘Private Lives’. ‘Fallen Angels’ has two almost identical scenes where the naughty women tell the other’s husbands that the other has gone off to have an affair with the mystery Frenchman. In ‘Private Lives’ the doubling or mirroring of scenes between each of the divorced pair and their respective spouses is obvious.

This mirroring or patterning is pretty obvious. You can see how it helped Coward organise and construct his entertainments, and also how it provides pleasure to the audience, consciously or unconsciously savouring the comic patterning. (Probably consciously, it’s pretty damn obvious.)

(Incidentally, Elyot claims to have a ‘presentiment’ of disaster, which echoes the way Julia and Jane at the start of ‘Fallen Angels’ claim to have had presentiments.)

And Elyot and Amanda sneaking out at the end is the same as the four guests sneaking out of the Bliss house at the end of ‘Hay Fever’. The ‘sneaking out’ theme.

Shouting

Coward has this reputation for sophistication, and his characters are certainly pukka middle class types, they dress for dinner and drink cocktails. But one of their most striking features is how quickly the characters all resort to shouting. The climax of ‘The Vortex’ is an extended confrontation between mother and son packed with tears and shouting and recriminations. The two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ get drunk and shout and accuse each other. I was surprised that the alleged comedy ‘Hay Fever’ consists of quite so many arguments between the misnamed Bliss family and their disconcerted guests.

And frankly shocked that, after a deceptive opening five minutes, this play consists of two couples having extended filthy shouting matches, first with their new spouses, and then the two protagonists getting locked into this pattern of lovey-dovey kissy-kissy which every time degenerates into another shouting match, a grim cycle which lasts for the whole of the rest of the play.

ELYOT: If you don’t stop screaming, I’ll murder you.

Shouting and screaming abuse, threatening to kill your new wife… that’s pretty much the opposite of sophistication, isn’t it? Quite a few of these scenes could come out of Eastenders at its chavviest.

Wife-beating, battery and assault

If this was a new play being touted around now, in 2025, I doubt if it would find a backer. Nowadays we call things like this ‘domestic abuse’, ‘wife-beating’ and ‘assault’. The neighbours would call the cops to the scene of a ‘domestic’ and both parties would be arrested. Not so easy to make a comedy out of that. And yet the play is as popular as ever and celebrated for its light, charming wit.

1976 TV version

Starring Penelope Keith and Alec McCowen as the leads.

I don’t like Alec McCowen, he’s ugly isn’t he, in no way the stylish, debonair figure you associate with Coward and cocktails? And creepy. When he’s being lovey-dovey to Amanda I could feel my flesh creep. Although I suppose his jokey, tricksy manner suits the character of Elyot, with his mad flights of fancy and his imaginative subversion of pompous, unimaginative Victor.

Penelope Keith isn’t really an actress, more a cartoon caricature of herself. My generation entirely associate her with the sitcom ‘The Good Life’ in which she was always prim and controlled, so it’s disconcerting to see her a) shouting her head off and b) planting big-mouthed kisses on ugly Alec. Both are rather disgusting and certainly not entertaining. It felt like watching your parents smooching at a party, toe-curlingly embarrassing.

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews

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by Simon on May 26, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on May 26, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/26/private-lives-noel-coward/

Fallen Angels by Noel Coward (1925)

WILLY: The car’s downstairs.
FRED: How very thoughtful of you not to bring it up.

JANE (writing a note to Maurice): ‘C’est amusant, n’est-ce pas’ – but it isn’t, particularly.

JULIA: It’s all such ridiculous nonsense.

Twitter-length executive summary

Two rich married women get roaring drunk while planning adultery with the same French lover.

Slightly longer summary

Julia and Fred Sterroll and Willy and Jane Banbury are happily married and the best of friends, until a postcard arrives with news of the imminent arrival of a handsome Frenchman who both women had affairs with years earlier – which throws the two wives into a tizzy of expectation.

Or:

Two married women, living a life of passionless boredom, whip themselves into a state of sexual excitement over the return of a former lover. In the play’s celebrated central act they get riotously tipsy as they await the nocturnal arrival of the Gallic Romeo. But, having stoked up the sexual fires, Coward banks them down again in the finely symmetrical final act as each woman falsely believes the other has had a secret assignation with the Gallic intruder.

Or:

Jane and Julia are happily married to pleasant if boring husbands when a message arrives from a former flame of both of them, sending their staid lives into a tizzy. It appears a man with whom they’d each had a passionate tryst in the past is planning a visit, which sets them both questioning whether they can – or want to – withstand his charms.

While the husbands are off playing golf, the ladies plot and plan over copious glasses of champagne (with some help from their worldly housekeeper, Saunders) while awaiting the arrival of their former lover.

A more woke/progressive summary

‘Fallen Angels’ is a biting and hilarious comedy about the rivalry between two bored married women as they await the arrival of their exotic former lover. Dramatising female sexual desire and frustration, the play’s first performances in 1925 outraged the critics, who claimed to find it shocking and obscene. But rather than insulting British womanhood (as its scandalised opponents asserted) Coward’s sharp, entertaining script incisively draws attention to male sexual hypocrisy, while probing the vacuous lives of the play’s privileged protagonists.

Plot summary

Act 1

We are in the living room of Julia and Fred, happily married for five years. We are introduced to Julia and Fred’s newly employed maid, Jasmine who, however, they agree to call Saunders. Saunders is disconcertingly well educated e.g. knows more about golf than Fred, can play the piano better than Julia, can speak French better than Jane.

Fred is packing his stuff ready to go off for a golf weekend with Willy. Willy arrives to collect him and they depart. After being humiliated by Saunders’ superior piano playing, Julia is forced to answer the door herself and let her friend Jane in.

(The trope of the clever servant who knows more than and outsmarts his masters and mistresses is a very ancient one, that goes back through Restoration comedy and Shakespeare, to ancient Rome – where the role was called the servus callidus or clever slave – and, before that, back to ancient Greek comedy, and flourished as a stock character in comedy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. What’s amazing is that the notion of Saunders being smarter than her employers still gets a laugh two and a half thousand years later. Human nature, human relations, and the comedy of human relations, doesn’t appear to change much.)

Jane bursts in with appalling news: Maurice, a lovely Frenchman they both had a passion for in the days before they were married, has sent a postcard saying he’s coming to London, arriving any moment. This triggers panic mixed with nostalgia and giggling memories of their naughtiness. They agonise a bit, not much, about what to do to avoid him: should they leave London, leave the country?

Julia in fact quickly gets dressed and packs a small suitcase to run away but as the two women approach the apartment door to exit, the bell rings and they freeze! Dramatic end of act 1!!

Act 2

I was expecting the dashing Frenchman to stride in and create havoc. Instead there’s a powerful sense of anti-climax because Act 2 opens with the two women lounging around on sofas, bored, and asking Saunders to fix them drinks. What happened? Who rang the doorbell so dramatically?

A few minutes into the act the ladies reveal that the fateful ring at the bell was… the plumber! And then a friend, Lady Coswick, arrived for a visit – in other words, they’ve experienced a series of disappointments which have only built up the latent frustration we are about to witness…

This act consists of 15 minutes of watching two posh 1920s ladies not only getting drunk but showing theatrical symptoms of sexual arousal and frustration.

JANE: You know what we’re doing, don’t you? We’re working ourselves up. We have been all day. Oh, I should like to scream and scream and scream and roll around on the floor.

Jane goes on to say, with comic bathos, that it must be… lack of food getting her so worked up. Yes. That’s what it is. Not lack of ****. Moments later Saunders calls them for dinner which consists of oysters, the famous aphrodisiac, and as they continue troughing, Jane declares:

JANE: Oh I adore this little sausage with my egg.

Coward was doing as much as the censor allowed to portray two married women on heat. Surely it’s this, not the pair’s drunkenness, which outraged the savvier moral critics.

As they get really plastered the two women’s sexual rivalry comes out (as so often with Coward characters) in a sustained and furious argument, and Act 2 ends with Jane storming out, claiming that she is going ‘straight to Maurice’, while Julia collapses on her sofa in hysterics.

Act 3

Next morning, Julia is painfully hungover, as Saunders serves her a hard-boiled egg.

Willy (Jane’s husband) arrives unexpectedly and tells Julia he had an argument with Fred (as Coward characters so often do) and so abandoned the golfing weekend early, leaving Fred at the hotel at Chichester. Willy asks where Jane is and Julia is shocked to learn she isn’t at Willy’s house, immediately leaping to the conclusion that she really did storm off and spend the night with the legendary Maurice. She’s so furious at her rival stealing a march on her that she angrily tells Willy everything. Bluff old Willy can’t believe it.

JULIA: She’s gone off with a man.
WILLY: What?
JULIA: A Frenchman.
WILLY: Nonsense. She can’t have. You’re unhinged.
JULIA: I’m perfectly hinged…

That’s as good as the jokes and the punchlines get i.e. weak. It’s the basic situation and the permission it gives the actors to go way over the top which provides most of the entertainment. Compare the flaring shouting matches in ‘Hay Fever’ or ‘Private Lives’ or ‘Design for Living’. I don’t think characters in Oscar Wilde‘s plays shout because they don’t need to, they dispense withering barbs and witty ripostes. Whereas most of the characters in the three Coward plays I’ve read so far quite rapidly resort to insensate, furious shouting and abuse, and this is supposed to be funny.

Anyway, Julia yells at Willy that he must leave and that she’s coming with him in order to track down Jane and they exit leaving the stage empty.

A few moments later the phone rings and Saunders the servant enters to answer it. It is ‘Maurice’, the man Julia and Jane has spilled so many furious words waiting for who has, ironically, rung when neither of them are around. Farce.

Fred (Julia’s husband) unexpectedly arrives and moments later Jane (Willy’s wife) arrives, in obvious evening dress. When Fred asks where his wife has gone, the maid says she just left with a man (not knowing Willy’s name) and Jane leaps to the conclusion that she’s left with Maurice. And, exactly as Julia told Fred that his wife, Jane, had left him, now Jane tells Fred that his wife, Julia, has run off, with a Frenchman, and abandoned him.

Jane explains that both Julia and Jane and had an affair with the same man and Fred reacts exactly as Willy did i.e. accusing Jane of telling lies and being a depraved monster. He is just dragging her to the door so they can go and find Julia and this Maurice fellow when they bump into Julia and Fred coming the other way i.e. the two women confront each other.

At which point they both quickly clarify that neither of them have been off with Maurice. When their husbands confront them with what they’ve said, the women realise that in their anger they’ve given the game away and so gotten each other in trouble. Now they close ranks and rack their brains for some way to talk themselves out of it and… have the inspiration to declare it was all a joke. They were making it up. it was a practical joke ha ha ha. They are in the middle of trying to sell this implausible story to their sceptical husbands when…

Saunders announces a visitor and the legendary Maurice sweeps in!

He straightaway kisses both ladies but the husbands are understandably disgruntled. Julia and Jane quickly explain the situation to Maurice – i.e. only 60 seconds earlier they told both their husbands that they’d had affairs with him and ‘Oh my God, what are they going to do!?’

Thinking quickly on his feet, Maurice comes up with a solution and turns to the husbands. He has come up with a solution which suits the limited mentality of these two boringly conventional men, and now delivers a thumpingly clean and impeccable moral point. Maybe, he says with a great flourish of moral concern, maybe Englishmen take their wives a little too much for granted; maybe they should pay more attention to their wives!

And he goes on to concoct the (truly ridiculous) idea that he and the girls are simply old friends and concocted the story of them having had affairs with him back in the day as a joke, a contrivance, a scheme to shock the husbands out of their complacency.

Even more ridiculous than this hastily cobbled-together excuse, is the way the two dim husbands believe him, and promptly apologise to their wives, promising to love them better in future. I know it’s a farce, but the men are portrayed as unbelievably dim. This is only a fraction above the tradition of Whitehall farces.

At which point Maurice makes the genuine revelation, which takes everyone by surprise, that he’s come to stay in London and has rented the flat directly above Julia and Fred’s for a year! Jane collapses in hysterical laughter.

Maurice goes on explain that the flat needs furnishing and decorating and asks the girls if they will come and view it for him. And so, before the husbands can stop them, Maurice sweeps the two glamorous wives out the front door and away to his place…

Very dim Fred is just saying how much he likes this French chappy to Willy’s scornful scepticism, when they both hear a piano playing from the flat above. Going out onto the balcony they listen and (in the TV production I watched) we cut to Maurice sitting at a piano, playing beautifully and singing the same sentimental love song which captured the girls’ hearts all those years ago, while they sit either side of him, mooning and spooning and swooning on his shoulder. Boom boom.

Thoughts about comedy

As I noted in my notes on ‘The Vortex’ and ‘Hay Fever’, there is a general tone of amusement and some of the characters’ behaviour in those plays is actively funny (like Judith Bliss’s taking every opportunity to play a Grand Scene in ‘Hay Fever’) but one of the most striking things about Coward’s texts is the paucity of actual jokes. There are many lines which gesture towards being jokes, which sound like jokes, with punchlines and everything, but which aren’t actually funny.

At the start of Act 2 Julia and Jane ask Saunders to make them strong cocktails, which triggers her (Saunders) to give a little speech:

SAUNDERS: If you’ll allow me to say so Madam, several drinks never did any harm, it’s only the first drink which is dangerous; after that the damage is done.

It’s sort of amusing but very slight, not laugh-out-loud funny unless you have a very low threshold for humour. Its sententious quality makes me expect an Oscar Wilde type of unexpected reversal, a genuinely clever paradox. But Coward rarely rises to that level. Something similar with the unhinged/hinged line I quoted earlier. Fairly good. Sort of funny. Not a real gutbuster, though.

These kind of ‘jokes’ are severely rationed with only about three gags per play.

The critics

Feminist

Earnest modern critics have to say that it’s a penetrating study of female sexuality and desire, that the play interrogates gender roles in a patriarchal society, and generally trot out all the other clichés of progressive critical theory, because it’s what they’re paid to teach and write.

To the unprejudiced eye it could easily be read as the exact opposite: as a comically exaggerated caricature of two middle-aged sex-starved matrons who display a shopping list of caricatured behaviour (champagne, oysters), panting and flushing with arousal, then over-dressing and overdoing their make-up in a pathetic attempt to outdo each other in attractiveness to a man; generally acting out every sexist stereotype. The opposite of feminism.

Take your pick which interpretation you prefer.

The continental cliché

If anything, the entire thing conforms to and shouts to the rooftops another hoary old stereotype, which is that English men are jolly decent but extremely boring chaps, whereas Continental men, especially French men, have a ‘je ne sais quoi’ which dull practical golf-playing Englishmen will never have. That foreign men are sexy in a way few British men can match. This perception was still as widely held in the 1970s of my boyhood as in the 1920s when the play was written.

Contextual

Taking a more historical approach, we read that:

Fallen Angels was produced the stage at a time when alcoholism was barely mentioned onstage. Therefore its portrayal of two middle class ladies getting plastered (the second half of the play is entirely taken up with an alcoholic duologue between the two women) was decried as ‘degenerate’, ‘vile’, ‘obscene’, ‘shocking’.

As I mentioned, I would have thought it wasn’t so much the drinking as the two women being so evidently aroused that would have caused scandal. But maybe that only comes over in the post-permissive 1970s production I watched and was toned down to invisibility in the original productions.

Contemporary critics

The Wikipedia article quotes a variety of contemporary theatre reviews of which I thought The Observer one was most apt, both for this and the other Coward plays I’ve read and watched: the Observer critic thought it was ‘neither a great nor a good play’ on account of its overt theatricality and lack of depth, but nonetheless declared himself ‘vastly amuse[d]’ by it. Coward in a nutshell.

The Lord Chamberlain’s view

The Lord Chamberlain was the official censor for plays on the British stage. Apparently one of his staff thought the sight of two married women getting drunk on stage was immoral so argued that the play shouldn’t be given a licence to be performed. The Lord Chamberlain sagely overruled him, stating: ‘I take the view that the whole thing is so much unreal farcical comedy, that subject to a few modifications in the dialogue it can pass.’

‘Unreal farcical comedy’ is as good a summary as any.

1974 TV production

I’m watching the best modern Coward productions I can find on YouTube. For this I watched the 1974 TV dramatisation starring Joan Collins as Jane (married to Willy) and Susannah York as Julia (married to Fred) and the impossibly dashing Sacha Distel as Maurice.

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews

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by Simon on May 21, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on May 21, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/21/fallen-angels-noel-coward/

Hay Fever by Noel Coward (1925)

JUDITH: You must forgive me for having rather peculiar children.

SOREL: We’re a beastly family, and I hate us… we’ve spent our lives cultivating the Arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners and things.

MYRA (furiously): Well, I’m not going to spare your feelings, or anyone else’s. You’re the most infuriating set of hypocrites I’ve ever seen. This house is a complete feather-bed of false emotions—you’re posing, self-centred egotists, and I’m sick to death of you.

SIMON (over his shoulder): Ha, ha!—very funny.

Executive summary

In a country house near Cookham live the Bliss family, father, mother, young adult son and daughter. Without telling the others, they each invite a guest down for the weekend, but behave so selfishly and rudely that after an embarrassing Saturday afternoon, and excruciating Saturday evening, on the Sunday morning all four guests run away while the Blisses are so busy having a massive family row that they don’t notice their departure.

More froth. Having come across the word ‘flippant’ to describe Coward it’s stuck in my mind as the best word to describe his approach. Flippant, sarcastic, lofty, dismissive, it may well have captured the cynicism of the younger generation of upper-middle-class families he portrays, but it makes for tiresome reading.

‘Hay Fever’ is said by some to be Coward’s most perfect comedy. In my opinion a comedy has to be funny, or it at least helps. Coward characters overflow with deliberately silly and frivolous comments which aren’t funny in themselves, but continually signal the facetious flippant mentality which is his schtick.

SOREL: Everybody’s heard of Richard Greatham.
SIMON: How lovely for them.

That strikes me as being schoolboy level and indeed a lot of Coward’s characters behave like children, like spoiled adolescents, have the psychology of sarcastic teenagers. When Sorel (a young woman) tells her sarcastic brother, Simon, that she’s invited a guest to come and stay, Richard Greatham, a chap who works in the Foreign Office, Simon says:

SIMON: Will he have the papers with him?
SOREL: What papers?
SIMON (vaguely): Oh, any papers.
SOREL: I wish you’d confine your biting irony to your caricatures, Simon.

Is this biting irony? No, it’s a mildly amusing bit of banter. And this is characteristic of the way all the characters, and by implication the author, talk themselves up, make grandiose gestures out of what are, in reality, very mundane arguments and misunderstandings. Which is why Coward’s plays have this peculiar quality of making quite a big impact at the time and then later, in memory, feel so empty.

Or else the tone is just camply bitchy. When Sorel asks the maid, Clara, whether she’s put flowers in the Japanese room, where he’s going to be put up, Simon, having taken against this chap Greatly, bitchily comments:

SOREL: You haven’t forgotten to put those flowers in the Japanese room?
SIMON: The Japanese room is essentially feminine, and entirely unsuited to the Pet of the Foreign Office.
SOREL: Shut up, Simon.

This could be delivered as camp bitchiness, but is really teenage sarcasm. It’s mildly distracting but not funny. As the play progressed I realised the most important bit was Sorel’s immediate anger. The point of the play is how quick each member of the Bliss family is to get angry with any of the others. Very self-absorbed argumentative family, that’s the point.

Then there’s the comedy of snobbery pure and simple.

SOREL: Clara says Amy’s got toothache.
JUDITH: Poor dear! There’s some oil of cloves in my medicine cupboard. Who is Amy?
SOREL: The scullery-maid, I think.
JUDITH: How extraordinary! She doesn’t look Amy a bit, does she? Much more Flossie.

This is the familiar caricature figure of the loveably out-of-touch parent or posh bourgeois who has no idea about their own servants. Hilarious.

Act 1. Saturday afternoon

All three acts are set in the same scene, the living room of the Blisses’ house at Cookham, in June.

Simon and Sorel are brother and sister (19), young whimsical and self-absorbed. Just like Florence and Nicky Lancaster in The Vortex, they consider themselves ‘abnormal’ and lament how they suffer for their ‘difference’.

SIMON: It’s no use worrying, darling; we see things differently, I suppose, and if people don’t like it they must lump it.

This is just another way of saying they’re special, which is, of course, what all narcissistic self-absorbed people think. And it is, notoriously, what self-involved theatre people, or ‘luvvies’, think about themselves. Different, special – more sensitive, spiritual, artistic and aware than ‘normal’ people.

And theatre audiences who have paid to attend the theatre have made a fairly obvious agreement that they will find the people on stage in some sense ‘special’, participants in a shaped narrative, otherwise why bother going to the theatre at all?

Actors on stage playing actors claiming the narcissistic attention which (some) actors notoriously think due to themselves – it’s like watching a baby or child in an adult body – this genre or trope has entertained audiences for over a century, and Simon and Sorel’s mother Judith is a prime example. She claims to have retired from the stage, though her children suspect it won’t be long before she takes it back up, because of the addiction to feeling special, to being in the limelight and the centre of attention. She tells us she’s invited a friend to stay this weekend, and goes on to explain:

JUDITH: He’s a perfect darling, and madly in love with me—at least, it isn’t me really, it’s my Celebrated Actress glamour—but it gives me a divinely cosy feeling.

An actress on stage describing how wonderful it is to be adored as an actress on stage. This is what the kids call ‘meta’, meaning ‘self-referential, referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre.’ I think Oscar Wilde’s characters, in plays and stories, constantly refer to playing a part, acting a role, posing, but do it as part of a consciously worked-out attitude to life, explained in great depth in his long essays. In Coward it just feels like a trick and a mannerism.

Anyway, brief summary: Simon is allegedly an artist, Sorel is his quick-tempered sister, mother Judith affects the absent-minded self-importance of a Grande Dame of the theatre, and the father, David, hides away in his study finishing his novel.

The four guests they’ve invited arrive, being:

Sandy Tyrell, a sporty young chap invited by Judith – ‘He’s a perfect darling, and madly in love with me’
Myra Arundel, sexy and strong-minded, invited by Simon – according to Judith ‘She’s far too old for you, and she goes about using Sex as a sort of shrimping net’ and calls her a ‘self-conscious vampire’ or vamp – a word just coming into common usage
Richard Greatham, an older man, iron-grey and tall, ‘a frightfully well-known diplomatist’, invited by Sorel
Jackie Coryton, small and shingled, ‘a perfectly sweet flapper’ invited by David – ‘she’s an abject fool, but a useful type, and I want to study her a little in domestic surroundings’

The Bliss family have a disconcerting habit of, without warning, dropping into a team performance of plays their mother once performed in. At several points during the weekend they suddenly drop into acting out one of Judith’s great hits, ‘Love’s Whirlwind’ and they’re acting out the climactic scene when the first of the guests arrive.

The guests arrive and are disconcerted to be very cursorily greeted, almost ignored by the Blisses.

MYRA: It’s useless to wait for introductions with the Blisses.

There are various moments of embarrassment. For example Sandy is taken aback when Judith tells him her husband is upstairs. He thought she was a widow. Simon fancies Myra like mad but she’s suave and standoffish. Soon after they’ve arrived urbane Richard and dim Jackie find themselves abandoned by their hosts, and left alone find they have nothing to talk about. Slowly they all realise they’re all there for various types of misunderstanding.

The casual rudeness of the Bliss’s, leaving various guests to work out where to go or try and make conversation, leads up to tea for everyone served by Clara the servant, at which conversation fizzles out as it starts to rain and they’re all stuck indoors with each other.

Act 2. Saturday evening

Everyone’s dressed for dinner. The first half of the act is taken up with an enormous squabble about which party game they should play, with the Blisses snapping at each other while the other guests try to understand what’s going on.

The game breaks up amid recriminations and arguments with David and Judith blaming each other from bringing up the children so badly. The characters break away, David going to his room, the others into the library or out into the garden. This leaves Judith the theatrical mother alone with Richard the mature diplomat and it turns out Richard doesn’t like Sorel at all, it’s Judith he’s in love with. There’s lots of flirting which leads up to him kissing her.

At this she leaps to her feet and melodramatically behaves as if they are having a torrid affair and agonising over how to tell her husband that their life together is over etc. This, I grant you, is very funny. Telling him she needs space to compose herself she pushes Richard out into the garden and preens in the mirror before going into the library. But here she discovers young Sandy the sportsman, who she invited down, locked in an embrace with Sorel.

Once again Judith switches into the role of the betrayed woman, making a Grand Scene.

SOREL: Mother, be natural for a minute.
JUDITH: I don’t know what you mean, Sorel.

Comically, Judith says she will make the Great Sacrifice of giving up Sandy and letting his and Sorel’s love prosper. As soon as she’s swept out, Sorel lights a cigarette and tells Sandy she doesn’t love him. But what about the scene they just had?

SORE: One always plays up to Mother in this house; it’s a sort of unwritten law… her sense of the theatre is always fatal.

They go back into the library leaving the stage empty. This is the setting for the third love scene, this time between the father, David, and wilful Myra. Note how the Blisses are pairing off not with the guests they invited. Musical chairs.

An enormous long scene as they flirt leading up to his taking her hand. She repeatedly tells him to let go and then slaps him. With sixpenny psychology, this leads them to suddenly fall into a passionate clinch. And with arch contrivance, this is precisely when Judith re-enters from her bedroom, coming down the stairs and capturing them in mid-kiss.

Obviously David and Myra are embarrassed but once again this is the pretext for Judith to play the Grande Dame, this time not with a florid burst of hysteria but with quite the opposite, an exaggerated display of Noble Restraint.

JUDITH: Life has dealt me another blow, but I don’t mind.

Cold-eyed Myra sees that this is all part of their family dynamic:

MYRA: You’re both making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

But Judith sweeps on in the part of Noble Self-Sacrificing Wife, saying she will leave the house now it has become too full of painful memories.

JUDITH: October is such a mournful month in England. I think I shall probably go abroad—perhaps a pension somewhere in Italy, with cypresses in the garden. I’ve always loved cypresses.

This is funny, as is the way David completely forgets that he’s supposed to be ‘in love’ with Myra in his admiration for Judith’s performance.

At the height of her display Simon comes running in from the garden and, in the fourth and final reshuffling of the characters’ initial allegiances, announces that he and the brainless flapper Jackie are engaged. And this triggers what, by now I’ve realised, is yet another performance from Judith, this time as The Mother Whose Children Are Growing Up And Leaving Home.

JUDITH (picturesquely): All my chicks leaving the nest. Now I shall only have my memories left. Jackie, come and kiss me.

There’s only one snag, which is that Jackie in no way loves Simon and eventually gets to explain that they had one little kiss then he leapt up and ran off to the house to tell his family. What you realise is that they’re all acting, all the Blisses seize on mundane events and blow them up out of all proportion in order to feed their own sense of the theatrical. Against this Myra is the voice of clear-eyed realism (as Helen is in The Vortex), and angrily tells them the truth:

MYRA: Don’t speak to me—I’ve been working up for this, only every time I opened my mouth I’ve been mowed down by theatrical effects. You haven’t got one sincere or genuine feeling among the lot of you—you’re artificial to the point of lunacy.

So that’s the key to the whole thing. It’s a group portrait of a family who live in their own incestuous over-dramatic theatrical reality.

And to seal the point, as all the characters descend into a huge bickering squabble, Richard the diplomat innocently asks ‘Is this a game’ without realising this is a line from the play the family often perform, ‘Love’s Whirlwind’ and, at a drop of a hat, Judith, Simon and Sorel drop into a performance of the melodramatic final scene while David enthusiastically applauds – leaving the four invited guests puzzled and aghast.

Act 3. Sunday morning

First thing in the morning in the dining room. Clara the servant has set the breakfast things in warming dishes on the side table. One by one the guests come down, Sandy, Jackie, Myra, Richard.

There’s a lot of comic business with Sandy developing hiccups and dim Jackie clumsily trying to help cure them, and then a comic thread where Richard taps the barometer in the hall and it promptly falls off the wall onto the floor and breaks and, mortified, he tries to hide it…

But the thrust of the scene is simple: all four guests agree the Bliss household is a madhouse and they can’t get away soon enough. They agree to pack their bags in a hurry and sneak out to Richard’s car, and this is what they do.

Once they’ve left the Blisses arrive one by one for breakfast. In a minor way they each do something symptomatic of their interests. Judith is gratified to find that she’s mentioned in a newspaper gossip column, Simon has drawn a new caricature which he shows the others to admire, and David comes downstairs excited because he’s completed the last chapter of the novel he’s writing (titled ‘The Sinful Woman’).

Excitedly he starts reading this final chapter to his family. It opens with a description of the heroine (Jane Sefton) driving her car (a Hispano cf Iris Storm’s car in The Green Hat) round Paris. Except that his family interrupt him to point out he’s got the geography of Paris wrong. To be precise they deny that the Rue St. Honoré leads into the Place de la Concorde, while David insists that it does. This escalates into a full-scale shouting match and it is during the family’s flaming argument that their four poor guests, unseen, sneak down the stairs carrying their bags, and out the front door.

The family argument is reaching a climax when the front door slams shut loudly which shuts them up. After a moment’s silence they then fall to criticising their guests and their extraordinary behaviour in leaving without even saying goodbye or thank you.

DAVID: People really do behave in the most extraordinary manner these days…

Thoughts

Taken for what it is, ‘Hay Fever’ is an affable evening’s entertainment, clocking in at an hour and a half, leaving plenty of time for drinks beforehand and supper somewhere nice afterwards. It is a perfect example of theatre as harmless entertainment and part of a charming night out, civilised and amusing.

It’s a kind of standing reproach to all those critics and intellectuals who want theatre to tear the mask off bourgeois society in the manner of Ibsen and Shaw or any of the post 1960s playwrights who see it as their task to question society’s values and address Big Issues. I can see how Coward fans see his work as a welcome antidote to all that, and his frothy emptiness as a statement in its own right.

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews
The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (1924)

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by Simon on May 19, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on May 19, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/19/hay-fever-noel-coward/

The Vortex by Noel Coward (1924)

‘Oh, my God, look at that lampshade!’ (Pawnie is camp)

‘It’s never too early for a cocktail.’ (Florence is sophisticated)

‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ (Nicky is neurotic)

‘Mother’s impossible.’ (the crux of the play)

Executive summary

A self-centred mother and her spoilt unstable son are both jilted – she by their toyboy lover and he by his unsuitable fiancée – and, in a blistering final act, spend twenty minutes blaming each other for their failures and neuroses, amid tears and breakdowns.

Noel Coward

Obviously I’ve known the name Noel Coward for decades and seen a couple of his films, but never actually read any of his plays. So I was astonished, on reading this his breakthrough play, to discover the limits of its wit, that most of it is not funny at all, and that all attempts at comedy are swept away by the tsunami of overwrought melodrama in the third and final act.

Even in the earlier, lighter scenes, instead of wit it has posh upper-class attitude – ‘Oh darling, it was simply too super for words!’ This attitude is exaggerated for comic effect, exaggerated to make the characters seem absurd, exaggeration which passes for wit but isn’t actually witty.

To this end the dialogue is packed with too’s and perfectly’s and divine’s, and stuffed with exclamation marks! which largely only make sense when read on the page. How should an actor speak an exclamation mark, especially when the next sentence ends in an exclamation mark, and the one after that, and after that?

Too’s:

It’s too marvelous for words.
She’s too divine to be in any marked category.
She ought to have been a flaunting, intriguing King’s mistress, with black page boys and jade baths and things too divine—
Isn’t it too awful for him?
Oh, you’re really too tiresome for words!
she’s too, too marvelous.
Isn’t it too divine?
How too divine!
It’s too wonderful.
How too intriguing.

Perfectly’s:

How perfectly marvelous!
How perfectly sweet of you!
How perfectly fiendish!
Take off that perfectly divine cloak and have a cigarette.
How perfectly heavenly!
I adore her—she’s a perfect angel.

Divine’s:

He’s divinely selfish; all amusing people are.
You’re smelling divinely, Florence. What is it?
Isn’t it too divine?
Good-bye, Helen. It’s been divine—
You’re a divine creature, Florence.
Oh, is she coming down to the house? Divine!
What a divine thing to say!
She does say divine things—she’s supremely intelligent.
How too divine!

Somewhere regarding Coward I read the word ‘flippant’ and yes, that’s the word: ‘The Vortex’ betrays an attitude of sustained flippancy to everything. There are some lines which distantly echo Oscar Wilde but without the bite of his astonishing paradoxes. Instead all the supposed jokes build up, not to a punchline, but to the revelation of the same flippantly superior attitude.

PAWNIE: Oh, my God, look at that lampshade!
HELEN: I gave it to her last Christmas.
PAWNIE: Wasn’t that a little naughty of you?
HELEN: I don’t see why; it’s extremely pretty.
PAWNIE: Too unrestrained. Such a bad example for the servants.

Six lines to deliver what? A titter. Almost any modern sitcom you can possibly think of is better written.

Comedy is often triggered by unexpected reversals (such as Wilde’s paradoxes). In the discourse of this play this tone, this superior flippant attitude, is what you very quickly come to expect from the characters and so it comes as no surprise – there are no surprises – all the characters radiate the same smart-alec flippant attitude, with the result that it is all sort-of amusing without ever becoming actually funny.

Coward titled one of his later plays ‘A Talent To Amuse’ which Sheridan Morley then picked up as the title for his biography of Coward, and the phrase perfectly captures the way Coward was consistently amusing but gave few if any belly laughs, the kind of laugh when you are suddenly tricked into delighted hilarity and explode with laughter.

‘The Vortex’ contains a few sort-of bon mots or up-to-a-point words of wisdom – but no really shrewd insights, no real zingers, and so nothing very memorable. This is one of the most quoted insights from the play.

‘The great thing in this world is not to be obvious, Nicky—over anything!’ (Helen to Nicky)

I’m remembering now that maybe I did read some Coward when I was at school and just found him to be a cut-price Wilde, a supermarket Oscar.

(In Philip Hoare’s excellent 1995 biography of Coward I was amused to find that the office of the Censor, the Lord Chamberlain, agreed with me. Its reader, George Street, commented: ‘The theme of this play is grimly serious and painful in an extreme degree. Until the end, however, the atmosphere is that of frivolous people who speak in a tiresome jargon – everything is “too divine” etc – and attempt wit with rather poor results.’ Exactly. (Hoare, p.133) And so did Cecil Beaton. He saw the play on New Year’s Eve 1924 and wrote in his diary: ‘I thought the first act was amusing but very ordinary – it’s so easy to write those flashy remarks that are not absolutely brilliant’: (Hoare, p.137))

Cast

Preston – Florence Lancaster’s female servant

Florence Lancaster – mother to Nicky, about 40: ‘David’s always loved me and never understood me—you see, I’m such an extraordinary mixture. I have so many sides to my character’ — took me a while to realise that she is the ‘vortex’ of the title, everything caught up in her stormy narcissism, :

‘I can’t help having a temperament, can I?’

‘Thank God I’ve got instincts about people.’

David Lancaster – Florence’s husband, Nicky’s father – ‘an elderly gray-haired pleasant man’, manages a farm in the country (actual manager is a man named Peterson); doesn’t like dancing to beastly modern music.

Nicky Lancaster – their son, 24, classical musician, just back from Paris – ‘extremely well-dressed in traveling clothes. He is tall and pale, with thin, nervous hands’ – according to Tom, ‘up in the air—effeminate.’

Helen Saville – friend of Florence, bit critical. At first you think she’s needlessly critical but come to realise she’s a voice of common sense, for both Florence and Nicky. The understander. As she tells Nicky:

‘I’m one of the few people who know what you’re really like, and you won’t give me the credit for it.’

Pauncefort ‘Pauncie’ Quentin – friend of Florence, older and effeminate, camp, bitchy.

Clara Hibbert – friend, soprano i.e singer.

Tom Veryan – Florence’s boyfriend, ‘the very nicest type of Englishman’, in ‘the Brigade’.

Bunty Mainwaring – Nicky’s fiancée – ‘very self-assured and well-dressed. She is more attractive than pretty in a boyish sort of way’.

Bruce Fairlight – dramatist we meet in the second act.

Act 1

The scene is the drawing-room of Mrs Florence Lancaster’s flat in London.

Mrs Lancaster is an upper class lady who has tried her best to remain young at heart while her devoted husband, David, has let himself age.

‘I’m devoted to David—I’d do anything for him, anything in the world—but he’s grown old and I’ve kept young.’

David devotes a lot of energy to running their place in the country and its farm. Florence goes there for the spring and summer, enjoying the tennis parties, local cricket week etc.

Florence still loves London, with its high society parties and first nights at the theatre. And she has taken a young lover, Tom Veryan who is pretty much the same age as David and Florence’s son, Nicky.

The play opens with Florence at home to a rather effeminate male friend her own age, Pauncefort ‘Pauncie’ Quentin, and a woman friend, Helen Saville, ‘a smartly dressed woman of about thirty’.

Pleasant conversation turns a bit nasty when Helen is cynical about the lover, Tom, saying Florence loves him more than he loves Florence. Whereas Florence thinks that she has ‘awakened’ Tom and, as a result, he is devoted to her. Helen thinks he was infatuated but it’s starting to wear off. Florence says Helen is unsympathetic, in fact wonders whether they’re friends at all.

Enter Nicky, Florence and David’s son, a musician, who has been away in Paris. He’s surprising her by arriving a day earlier than he’d said. They chat, Florence shows him the latest photos she’s had done of herself. Narcissism.

They talk about friends then Florence tells Nicky about Tom; explains she and Tom are going out tonight, for dinner and then to see this new play, ‘The New Elaine’, then onto the Embassy (nightclub?). They slightly bicker about the actors in this play, more tiny examples of how Florence hates being contradicted.

Florence puts a record on the gramophone and invites Nicky to dance with her which is, maybe, the first sign of their unorthodox relationship.

Enter David who, seeing Nicky, gives him a hug and a kiss and invites him to his room for a chat (because he can’t stand the gramophone), goes out.

Nicky surprises his mother by announcing that he’s engaged to be married, to a lovely gel named Bunty Mainwaring. She’s come over from Paris with him, staying at her mother’s place round the corner, is going to call by any minute because Nicky wants to introduce them.

It becomes clear that Florence’s main reaction to the news is not that of a detached, objective parent, but of a middle-aged woman trying to hang onto her youth and disconcerted; her son’s engagement with marriage behind, makes her realise she is no longer young.

When Florence says she has to go and dress because Tom is picking her up at 7.30 Nicky replies ‘Damn Tom.’ He is nettled, jealous?

The doorbell rings and Preston the butler shows in Bunty. She is ‘very self-assured and well-dressed’ and ‘more attractive than pretty in a boyish sort of way.’ This boyishness, is it a reference to the play’s gender fluidity or simply reflecting the style of the 1920s was for slender boyish women?

Florence and Bunty shake hands and kiss and gush etc until Florence mentions that she’s going out tonight with Tom Veryan, which makes Bunty start a little. She knows him. Florence shows her a photo on the piano, which confirms it’s the same man. Aha. Do they have a history?

A friend phones for Florence, an Elsa who tells her she’s having a party, and Florence asks if it will be OK to bring Nicky and Bunty. She hands the phone to Nicky and exits to get dressed.

Only in the staged production do you realise how the several phone calls – five in all – add to all the banter in the first act designed to bring out how Florence keeps herself at the centre of her hurricane of activity and socialising.

After a bit of chat with Elsa Nicky ends the call and he and Bunty chat, reminiscing about how they first met. Nicky wishes they could do something romantic like elope. Bunty tells him he has so much temperament, and ‘so much hysteria’, and he agrees that ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy…’

They’re almost arguing when Preston announces Tom Veryan who has arrived to collect Florence. It immediately becomes clear that Tom and Bunty knew each other, at Sandhurst, during the war. Nicky is nettled and Bunty tells him to calm down and has to explain away his ‘nerves’ to Tom. Nonetheless, he announces he’s going to take up his father’s offer of going to his room to chat and so exits.

This leaves Bunty and Tom alone together. He is astonished when Bunty tells him she and Nicky are engaged. Tom doesn’t think Nicky is her sort at all, far too ‘effeminate’.

The butler brings cocktails and Bunty meaningfully says she’s just realised that they’ll both be going down to the Lancaster place in the country for the weekend. And with that, end of Act 1.

Act 2

The scene is the hall of Mrs Lancaster’s country house, about forty miles from London.

The Sunday of the weekend party, after dinner, the gramophone playing and a bunch of house guests. Florence, Helen, Pawnie, Nicky, Tom and Bunty and two new characters: Clara Hibbert, ‘an emaciated soprano’ and ‘Bruce Fairlight, an earnest dramatist, the squalor of whose plays is much appreciated by those who live in comparative luxury.’

Everyone is dancing and talking at once, though we only hear what they’re saying as they dance to the front of the stage. So the effect is a very modernist one of lots of fragments of speech.

We overhear Pawnie and Helen. Helen laments that Florence is so sharp about her husband in front of everyone at dinner. Pawnie calls Bunty ‘at stupid little fool.’

Nicky plays the piano to give the gramophone a break. Helen sits next to him on the stool and reaches into his pocket to find cigarettes. When she draws out a little box he leaps up and over-reacts, shouting, making everyone momentarily stop.

Moments later Florence is telling Tom off for dancing so badly, he tells her not to nag and she stops at once: ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

Old Pawnie tries to break the tension by suggesting they play a game and after some debate they settle on Mah Jong and Clara, Bruce and Pawnie exit. But others are still bickering. Florence accuses Tom of being ‘exceedingly rude’ to her at dinner, which is revealed to be jealousy of when he talks to other women, and paranoiacally claiming that ‘everyone’ is setting him against her.

They manage to recover, he tells her her dress suits her, she forgives him, they remember first meeting at Oxford. But when she invites him to another theatre first night he says he can’t come, and hesitatingly says he’s promised to dine with his mother.

David enters and Tom makes the excuse of wanting to see how the others are getting on, to exit. Uneasy conversation with David then he exits and Nicky comes in to find his mother with her head in her hands.

Florence is temperamental, changeable, paranoid, unhappy. She tells Nicky to tell Bunty to stop contradicting her. He finds her unbearable, they argue, she storms off.

Enter Helen, the voice of reason. Slow beginning builds to her saying she realises that he takes drugs. He furiously denies it, she tells him to give it up, he says he only takes it once in a blue moon, but they’re interrupted by Nicky’s harmless old dad entering. When he asks why their voices were raised, Nicky says:

‘Helen and I have just had a grand heart-to-heart talk; we’ve undone our back hair, loosened our stays and wallowed in it.’

This is a good example of what I mean about the thinness of the play’s comedy. It’s not a joke, it’s not very funny. What it is capturing the exaggerated, mock heroic, over-dramatic pose of all the characters and by extension, of this class.

His Dad kindly asks after his health, says he looks worried, invites him to come down and stay quietly in the country and Nicky takes him up on it. David goes to bed and Nicky sits tinkling at the piano (remember all the other characters are in the other room playing games).

Bunty emerges and tells him she thinks the engagement should be broken off. She thinks it’s silly. She thinks he doesn’t love her. They argue about Florence who Bunty says hates her but Nicky insists that deep down she’s marvellous ‘in spite of everything’. He gives the longest speech in the play so far about how ghastly it must be to grow old, but Bunty thinks he’s being sentimental, maybe also unnerved by the depth of worship of his mother he reveals.

At this point their argument is broken up by Clara and Bruce entering from the back room where they’ve been playing Mah-jong, and then all the others including Florence who appears drunk. Nicky, mortally upset, listens to all their stupid banter until someone asks him to make the gramophone slower and he turns it down to crawling pace, makes some bitter remarks and storms out.

The others are all commenting on this when Bunty steps forward to explain that she’s broken off the engagement. That puts the dampeners on everything and the others all declare themselves tired and head off for bed, leaving just Tom and Bunty. Aha.

They clearly have some understanding. Tom knew she was going to break it off. They both agree they hate the atmosphere in the house and can’t wait to get away. He didn’t realise how much he hated it till she arrived, and she didn’t realise she didn’t really like Nicky till Tom arrived. They have triggered each other.

But he is ahead of her in his dislike of the Lancasters. Also he’s a dim soldier. He says Bunty is worth ten Nickys, how he’s useless, can’t play games, can’t be funny. Bunty tells him to stop then bursts into tears. He holds her then passionately kisses her.

It is, of course, at this moment that Florence has appeared on the gallery above leading to the stairs down to the lounge. She calls Tom’s name and demands to know what this means. Tom apologises but says he loves Bunty. Florence is outraged, tells Bunty to leave her house immediately – she says it’s too late and goes upstairs to bed.

At this point Nicky bursts in wondering what all the shouting is about and concerned that someone is hurt. He doesn’t understand why his mother is so furious but as the arguing continues sits at his safe space, the piano, and plays classical music while Florence has a massive showdown with Tom, you don’t know what love is, you lied to me all these months, get out of my sight etc while Nicky plays, rather madly, through it all.

Act 3

The scene is Florence’s bedroom 2 hours later the same night.

Florence is lying on her bed crying her eyes out, ‘I wish I were dead’ etc. Helen, the voice of reason, is with her, trying to comfort her. This goes on for some time, as Florence finally gets up, goes to her dressing table, sprays on some perfume. When Helen goes to the window she joins her and they admire the view.

Helen shrewdly points out that Florence is draping her feelings in her usual ‘worthless attitude of mind’. Nicky knocks and enters and Helen is relieved to get away.

There follows Florence and Nicky’s big scene. Nicky wants to know the truth about his mother’s life and reveals himself to be pretty dim when he says Tom Veryan has been her lover. She goes mad, wailing and begging him to stop. The reader/audience wonders what all the fuss is about – of course Tom was her lover!

Nicky makes a big claim that they’ve arrived at a crisis of their lives, and need to face it. He says he’s noticed lots of things about her but always suppressed them, heard lots of slander about her but always denied it etc.

The melodrama detector goes off the scale as Nicky warns that if they’re not careful something terrible might happen? What exactly? Finally, Nicky bullies Florence into admitting that Tom was her lover. And there were others before him. She’s in tears, he’s yelling. But she pleads that she’s different from other women, she has a ‘temperament’. But he says that’s just self-serving flannel.

‘You’re deceiving yourself—your temperament’s no different from thousands of other women, but you’ve been weak and selfish and given way all along the line—’

He blames her for the fact he’s ‘grown up all wrong’ and it’s all her fault. When she claims she’s provided him with a safe home he laughs bitterly and says it’s just a den for her endless amusements and distractions.

‘You’ve given me nothing all my life—nothing that counts.’

He in turn says that finding out about her philandering has all been a great shock (really?), but now he knows the truth he ‘means to get it right’. The speeches suddenly become substantial.

I’m not angry a bit. I realize that I’m living in a world where things like this happen—and they’ve got to be faced and given the right value. If only I’d had the courage to realize everything before—it wouldn’t be so bad now. It’s the sudden shock that’s thrown the whole thing out of focus for me—but I mean to get it right. Please help me!

You’ve wanted love always—passionate love, because you were made like that. It’s not your fault—it’s the fault of circumstances and civilization; civilization makes rottenness so much easier. We’re utterly rotten—both of us——

How can we help ourselves? We swirl about in a vortex of beastliness. This is a chance—don’t you see—to realize the truth—our only chance.

He accuses her of narcissism and delivers some withering home truths:

‘It isn’t that you love him—that would be easier—you never love anyone, you only love them loving you—all your so-called passion and temperament is false—your whole existence had degenerated into an endless empty craving for admiration and flattery.’

And then hits her where it really hurts: pointing out that she is no longer young or beautiful but a painted lady with fake blonde hair. She collapses and says she can’t bear it any more and tells him to leave.

At which point he produces the little box and confesses that he takes drugs. He doesn’t even specify which ones though everyone assumes the little box has cocaine in it. Florence hysterically over-reacts, as if it’s the end of the world. She tosses the box out the window and warns him to stop taking drugs now, at which he breaks down in terrible tears and begs her to be different, begs her to be his mother for the first time in his life. And they find themselves in an embrace, telling each other they love each other. He has become her little boy again as she calms and comforts him, stroking his hair. And that’s their position as the curtain comes down.

Thoughts

And this was the hit which made Coward’s name, his breakthrough work which led theatres to reconsider earlier plays he’d submitted and had rejected? Wow. I watched the Granada TV production (see below) and was embarrassed for all concerned. Fancy having to make a living performing rubbish like this! What a mad farrago of over-wrought melodrama.

Maybe it has Freudian, Oedipal undertones. Maybe the portrayal of a boozy washed-up adulterous alcoholic mother defied all the moral values of the older generation. Maybe it was shocking to make one of the characters a cocaine addict (if that’s what Nicky truly is). Maybe, as I’ve read in numerous places, the entire schtick of Nicky’s cocaine addiction was in fact a metaphor for Nicky’s homosexuality. Yes, I’m sure articles and reviews can be written to expand on these obvious interpretations at tedious length.

But the actual experience of either reading or watching ‘The Vortex’ is to submit to a farrago or overwrought tripe! My heart was with Tom and Bunty. Pack up and leave this house of madness and go and live happy well-adjusted lives together somewhere else, anywhere else.

Michael Arlen

The Wikipedia article tells us that most West End theatre managers considered the subject matter too controversial to handle and so Coward:

abandoned attempts to convince West End managements, and arranged to stage the play at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, a fringe venue in north London. When the money for the production threatened to run out during rehearsals, Coward secured the necessary funding from his friend the author Michael Arlen.

Arlen had had a tremendous success earlier the same year (1924) with his bestselling novel The Green Hat, which is also about the scandalous goings-on of the upper classes, and which also contains references to cocaine. The difference in the two works is instructive. Arlen’s novel builds to an equally if not more melodramatic climax than the Coward play but, before it gets there, it contains numerous vivid and brilliant sentences, and is often very funny. It also takes a relaxed and humorous attitude to drugs:

She never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach. (The Green Hat, chapter 7)

Coward has neither of these attributes; neither really well-turned phrases nor real humour. Just a snappily modish attitude which, during the first two acts often makes you smile, but which in the final act degenerates into hysteria.

Cocaine

I’m still reeling from Florence’s hysterical over-reaction to Nicky’s production of his little box of drugs in fact to the issue of drugs in the play. Whenever you read about it, on the cover, in online summaries, in reviews of productions, they often refer to it as a daring play about drug addiction, but it simply isn’t. It’s a play about two hysterically self-involved narcissists. The cocaine connection – if indeed it is cocaine – is peripheral to the hysterical accusations which mother and son fling at each other in the final act. It is emphatically not a work about drug addiction, but in which the cocaine thing seems bolted on as a transitory extra.

And why the hysterical over-reaction? In his long, detailed and extremely enjoyable biography of Coward, Philip Hoare makes two points: 1) cocaine and heroin use was surprisingly common in the theatrical-arty-Bohemian circles Coward moved in in the early 1920s, and had leaked out into parts of wider society. So much so that an author like Michael Arlen could conisder it a subject for jokes (see above) rather than hysterical over-reaction.

2) And The Vortex wasn’t even the first play to address the subject. The sensational death from a drug overdose of the starlet Billie Carleton in 1918 was not only front page news in all the newspaper, and triggered a moral panic about drugs, but also a little wave of plays including Dope by Frank Price, Drug Fiends by Owen Jones, and The Girl Who Took Drugs by Aimée Grattan-Clyndes (Hoare, p.75).

1964 Granada TV production

This production comes with an affable introduction by Coward himself in which he makes clear how transformative this, his breakthrough play, was for the young actor and playwright. It also demonstrates what I’ve realised, that nothing he says is particularly funny in and of itself, in fact some of it would sound sad if voiced by a normal person. What is funny is his entire attitude, the wonderfully flippant persona he invented, the verbal trills and flourishes which make everything he says amusing, because of the way he says it, and his droll attitude towards himself, the theatre, the whole world. The works are a triumph of attitude over content.

Philip Hoare’s view

In his biography Philip Hoare writes:

The Vortex is simplistic, naive and shallow but it is also entertaining and well written, albeit with the facility and brilliance of effect which often disguise a slight work. The play also evinced his increasing economy of language which, as with Hay Fever, he had come to recognise as essential. It was a reaction, whether conscious or not, against the flowery, polysyllabic language of the previous generation. Verbose Edwardian and Victorian speech and prose had been replaced by short abbreviations. 1920s slang worked on such principles (the dialect of youth, to confuse the elders) and Coward assimiliated it. The result was a dramatic language drawing on Wilde, Pinero and Shaw, but his own. Noel had found his voice, one which became recognisable as ‘Cowardian’. (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, page 131)

As usual with Hoare, good interesting points. It was the discovery of the voice which mattered, not the ludicrously over-the-top subject matter. And yet, for all that it appears a strange combination of under-cooked comedy in the first two acts, topped off with ridiculous melodrama in the third, it defined the era.

For the younger generation, the 1920s was a period of neurosis; lthey saw a foreshortened future and the search for new sensation – whether through dancing (as new and faster steps succeeded one another), alcohol (ever nore sophisticated cocktails) or drugs – induced a frenzied hedonism in poor little rich girls and boys for whom ‘the craze for pleasure’ steadily grew. The Vortex is more than a nod at this culture; it defined it. (p.130)

That’s the point. There had been previous plays on the subject of drugs or Oedipal themes. The nervy, thin, wired over-the-topness of The Vortex, the very qualities that make it seem ludicrous today, were the qualities which touched umpteen nerves at the time and propelled Coward to fame and notoriety, as the authors of works which crystallise the feel and anxieties of their time so often do. Overnight it became the talk of the town. Everyone claimed to have been at the first night (24 November 1924) or to have attended the after-show party. He had arrived.

Meeting the Lord Chamberlain

Hoare recounts the amusing story that the Lord Chamberlain’s office was on the verge of not giving the play a licence to be performed but when Coward heard about it he insisted on a face-to-face meeting with the Lord Chamberlain (Lord Cromer), where he gave a reading of key scenes and explained that the play delivers an extremely moral message: both the dissolute mother and the drug addict son are shown to be utter wrecks. In fact claimed it was ‘little more than a noral tract’.

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by Simon on May 16, 2025 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on May 16, 2025

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Stories of the East by Leonard Woolf (1921)

Leonard Woolf’s first novel, the brilliant evocation of peasant life in Ceylon, ‘The Village in the Jungle’, was published in 1913. His second novel, the more conventional ‘Wise Virgins’, a thinly disguised account of his and Virginia’s Bloomsbury friends, was published the following year. There then followed a seven year hiatus while he concentrated on publishing the serious political and sociological works he wished to be remembered by:

International Government – 1916
The Future of Constantinople – 1917
The Framework of a Lasting Peace – 1917
Cooperation and the Future of Industry – 1918
Economic Imperialism – 1920
Empire and Commerce in Africa – 1920
Socialism and Co-operation – 1921

Then, in among all these serious works about international affairs and the future of imperialism (of which he was a fierce critic) the Hogarth Press, which he had set up with Virginia in 1917, published a slim volume titled ‘Stories of the East’. There are just three stories:

A Tale Told by Moonlight
Pearls and Swine
The Two Brahmans

1. A Tale Told by Moonlight

The setup

This has the influence of Joseph Conrad all over it, from the narrator within a narrator structure, through to the pretty insignificant story itself, which is jazzed up to try and make it about treatment and atmosphere which, in my opinion, doesn’t come off.

The narrator is staying somewhere in the English countryside with Alderton, the novelist. The other house guests are Pemberton the poet and Hanson Smith, the critic. The fourth member of the party is Jessop who the narrator starts the story by telling us is generally unpopular for his habit of being blunt to the point of rudeness and incivility.

After dinner these chaps stroll down through the fields to the river and lie around chatting as dusk falls. When it’s dark they hear footsteps coming along the river and realise it’s a young couple out for a stroll. Concealed in the darkness and on a bank over the riverside path, our chaps hear the young couple murmuring sweet nothings then the sounds of kissing, before they stroll on.

This puts our chaps in a sentimental mood and they share stories about first loves and wooing. All except Jessop who hears the others out then weighs in with his unsentimental withering opinion, which is:

‘Think of it for a moment, chucking out of your mind all this business of kisses and moonlight and marriages. A miserable tailless ape buzzed round through space on this half cold cinder of an earth, a timid bewildered ignorant savage little beast always fighting for bare existence. And suddenly it runs up against another miserable naked tailless ape and immediately everything that it has ever known dies out of its little puddle of a mind, itself, its beastly body, its puny wandering desires, the wretched fight for existence, the whole world. And instead there comes a flame of passion for something in that other naked ape, not for her body or her mind or her soul, but for something beautiful mysterious everlasting—yes that’s it the everlasting passion in her which has flamed up in him. He goes buzzing on through space, but he isn’t tired or bewildered or ignorant any more; he can see his way now even among the stars. And that’s love, the love which you novelists scatter about so freely…’

So Jessop ridicules all the soppy talk about love and moonlight and says real love is strange, uncanny, unpredictable, makes no sense, is the rarest thing in the world. He’s knocked around the world and only ever seen two cases of it, and he’s now going to tell us about one of them.

So all this has been by way of introduction and this it is so redolent of Conrad: the all-male company; after dinner, in the dark; all described by an unknown narrator who then introduces one of the party telling a story-within-a-story. Structurally, it’s identical with the famous setting of Heart of Darkness.

The story

Among Jessop’s many friends and acquaintances was a man named Reynolds, a novelist. They were at Rugby (public school) together. Jessop was living ‘out East’, in Ceylon, in the capital Colombo. Reynolds and he exchanged occasional letters until Reynolds announced he was heading in that direction and it was arranged he’d come and stay for a week.

He was a thin, weedy man who’s ‘stood aside’ from life, out of nervousness, a legacy of being bullied at school, knew all about people’s little tricks and mannerisms but didn’t know how they felt because he’d never felt anything except fear and shyness. So Jessop took him to all the expat clubs and they sat and talked about love and life and Jessop realised he’d never actually lived a day in his life.

So he determines to show him a side of life he hadn’t seen before, and takes him in a rickshaw out into the seedy, native part of town, to a dingy house which is a native brothel. Here they are greeted by ten or so beautiful young scantily-clad women, laughing and giggling. Poor Reynolds is terribly embarrassed at the bare boobs and golden bodies and doesn’t respond to their kisses or caresses so most of them gravitate over to Jessop who can speak their language and is prepared to listen to their stories about the native villages they come from and the arduous lives they’ve escaped to come to the big city. All except one.

She was called Celestinahami and was astonishingly beautiful. Her skin was the palest of pale gold with a glow in it, very rare in the fair native women. The delicate innocent beauty of a child was in her face; and her eyes, Lord, her eyes immense, deep, dark and melancholy which looked as if they knew and understood and felt everything in the world. She never wore anything coloured, just a white cloth wrapped round her waist with one end thrown over the left shoulder. She carried about her an air of slowness and depth and mystery of silence and of innocence.

Long story short, they fall in love and, Jessop insists, it was the real thing not the milk and moonlight version of English poets and novelists. It was something deep and inexplicable.

He looked into her eyes that understood nothing but seemed to understand everything, and then it came out at last; the power to feel, the power that so few have, the flame, the passion, love, the real thing. It was the real thing, I tell you; I ought to know…

So Reynolds becomes hooked and goes back to the brothel night after night in order to see Celestinahami. But Reynolds becomes so unhappy at the impracticality of the whole situation that he makes a feeble attempt to shoot himself. He buys a revolver but Jessop burst into his room to find him struggling with the mechanism which clips chamber shut and seized it out of his hands.

Then Jessop read him the riot act and this is the bit I didn’t really understand, or thought contradicted itself. Because Jessop tells Reynolds that the girl is nothing like he imagines:

not a bit what he thought her, what his passion went out to—a nice simple soft little animal like the bitch at my feet that starved herself if I left her for a day

BUT, at the same time, acknowledging that what Reynolds feels for her IS the real thing:

You’re really in love, in love with something that doesn’t exist behind those great eyes. It’s dangerous, damned dangerous because it’s real—and that’s why it’s rare.

So it’s real love, one of the only two times Jessop has seen ‘real’ love – and yet he’s perfectly aware that it’s love for something which doesn’t exist. Reynolds is utterly projecting something onto this girl which simply isn’t there. And yet this is what Jessop calls real love. See why I’m a bit confused?

Anyway, Jessop roughly tells Reynolds to either get on the next ship home or ‘practise what you preach and live your life out, and take the risks.’ So for the first time in his life, Reynolds takes a chance on life. He buys the girl out of the brother (for the bargain price of 20 rupees) and Jessop fixes them up in a nice cottage by the sea.

At first they were happy. He taught her English and she taught him Sinhalese. He started to write a novel about the East. But pretty quickly he comes to realise the truth. He comes to realise the vast difference in intellect and education and culture between them.

He couldn’t speak to her and she couldn’t speak to him, she couldn’t understand him. He was a civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she—she was an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful.

He loved her but she tortured him. She got on his nerves.

But the cruellest thing of all was that she had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her master.

Because:

There’s another sort of love; it isn’t the body and it isn’t the flame; it’s the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed women of the East. It’s the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami for Reynolds. But it wasn’t what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more than anything which got on his nerves.

So, the story tells us, there are two types of love: the big visionary type which, it has been clearly explained, Reynolds projected onto Celestinahami; and the dog-like, slave-like master-love of Celestinahami. Neither sound to me like ‘the real thing’, which Jessop set out to describe.

She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. And when he looked into her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in love with, what he knew didn’t exist. It began to drive him mad.

And so the story hurtles to its inevitable, Conradian end. She takes desperate steps to try and keep his ‘love’, the most florid being to dress up like the white women she sees in Colombo, in stays and white cotton stockings and shoes. But the more she tries, the more she destroys the image Reynolds had of her, the more angry he becomes, the more wretched she.

Eventually Reynolds realises he has to leave and carry on his travels. He swears to Celestinahami and Jessop that he’ll be back, he considerately makes over the house to Celestinahami’s ownership, then one fine day sails away on a P&O liner.

I never saw Reynolds again but I saw Celestinahami once. It was at the inquest two days after the Moldavia sailed for Aden. She was lying on a dirty wooden board on trestles in the dingy mud-plastered room behind the court… They had found her floating in the sea that lapped the foot of the convent garden below the little bungalow—bobbing up and down in her stays and pink skirt and white stockings and shoes.

I suppose this is all very well done, but very much in the manner of Conrad even down to the punchline. Just as in one of Conrad’s classic tales told by his sailor-narrator Charles Marlow, the storyteller ends his tale, there’s a pause, and then one of the company of listeners brings us back to reality with a down-to-earth comment.

Jessop stopped. No one spoke for a minute or two. Then Hanson Smith stretched himself, yawned, and got up. ‘Battle, murder and sentimentality,’ he said. ‘You’re as bad as the rest of them, Jessop. I’d like to hear your other case—but it’s too late, I’m off to bed.’

Commentary

The feel and structure of the thing are, as pointed out, very Conradian, from the double narrative structure through to the deliberately throwaway ending, designed to evince that mood of cynical, jaded, man-of-the-world indifference to what is, in essence a tragedy (reminiscent of the plot of Puccini’s opera ‘Madame Butterfly’).

And you don’t have to be a feminist to find the fundamental structure – or two narrative structures – objectionable. What I mean is the frame story, in which four comfortably-off men sound off to each other about love without much or any admission of the woman’s point of view – and then listen to a tragedy based around the innocence and ignorance of poor Celestinahami. The power imbalances in both these structures are there for everyone to see. And the worldly note of the throwaway ending may be designed to indicate the fundamental heartlessness of the world, but it highlights that none of the listeners has a word of lament over poor Celestinahami.

But what puzzled me, more than anything, was that the story, the first narrator, and then Jessop all promise some great revelation about The Truth of Love, and then it doesn’t arrive. Maybe the narrator and Jessop’s point is that such a thing doesn’t exist, and instead, what actually exists in the real world is more complex, unsentimental, irrational and almost unpleasant, than the moon-in-June sentimental clichés.

In which respect, then, it chimes very much with the heartless worldview which radiates from his wonderful if extremely bleak novel, ‘The Village in the Jungle’.

2. Pearls and Swine

The setting

The unnamed first-person narrator is staying at a hotel in Torquay. After dinner and a game of billiards he joins three other chaps sitting round the fire. They’re talking about India, which reminds him of the 15 years he spent out there. Two of the three – a stock jobber and a clergymen – have never been out East and so sound off with insufferably imperialist cant and clichés: the stock jobber says the Indians must accept our racial superiority; the clergymen says we are undoubtedly raising them up to our level of civilisation, not least through the work of earnest young missionaries, basing his views on:

‘I read the papers, I’ve read books too, mind you, about India. I know what’s going on.’

All this cant goads the third member of the group, a small man with dark skin and wrinkles round his eyes (the narrator recognises a fellow servant of empire) beyond endurance, and he bursts out with a Tamil proverb. When asked to translate he explains that it’s a polite way of indicating the foolishness of earnest young Englishmen who go out to idea full of naive ideas drummed into them by their School Board education and think that somehow, after just 18 months, they understand the place from top to bottom, from ‘Benares to Rameswaram’. Compared to the Tamils who have lived in India for at least 7,000 years, compared to the hundreds of races who share the continent (‘there are more races in India than people in Peckham’).

Mention of views and opinions provides the hinge or pretext for the little Anglo-Indian man to announce that instead of views, he will tell them some facts. And this is what he proceeds to do.

The story

This is the real point of the story. The Anglo-Indian gives a ten-page account of his time serving in southern India as government administrator of a peal fishery. This was based on a God-forsaken stretch of the coast which consisted of nothing but barren sand and scrub for hundreds of miles, without a town or village or river or fresh water. But off this coast were marvellously rich oyster beds and every year, for 6 to 8 weeks between monsoons, thousands of fishermen in hundreds of boats, come to farm the oysters, a varied crew including scores of different races of Indians, plus Arabs and their Black ex-slaves, a multicultural community devoted to one end, diving to bring up thousands of oysters every day, to leave them rotting in the sun for the flies to devour, in the hope they will reveal pearls of great price embedded in their flesh.

The British Imperial government taxes their catch, taking two-thirds of the pearls. And the small, dark intense storyteller once performed this role and now describes, in vivid and powerful detail, what it was like – the heat, the unbearable flies, the nauseating smell of thousands of rotting oysters, the babble of native voices. All the several thousand fishermen had to be confined in a compound for 6 to weeks, creating a madly unhygienic and disease-ridden environment.

So that establishes the ground base of the story. Into this environment come two more white men: one is Robson, a 24-year-old bright spark who passed the Civil Service exams and is overflowing with bright new ideas about reforming everything, who criticises the narrator for giving up on changing the East and instead letting the East change him.

He was too cocksure altogether, of himself, of his School Board education, of life, of his ‘views’. He was going to run India on new lines, laid down in some damned Manual of Political Science out of which they learn life in Board Schools and extension lectures.

Predictably, his body and mind are not prepared for the disgusting conditions of the compound, the heat and the flies, and he ends up vomiting lots of time every day, becoming sicker and sicker.

The other white man is (ironically) named White. He’s a drunk, a rummy, with a pinched face and sharp teeth with gaps between them. But he’s a white man so Robson and the (unnamed) narrator let him eat at the same table. White tells the others he went to public school, which is probable, failed in England and so came out East. But even here he has been bedevilled by ‘damn bad luck’ and tells sob stories about a succession of dubious-sounding jobs.

So that’s the setup: three white men in a huge barren hot inhospitable semi-desert next to the sea, trying to control thousands of native pearl divers from all across India and beyond. We expect trouble, if not tragedy.

Sure enough, things happen. First a fight breaks out between a group of Arabs and one of Tamils over a handful of oysters which fall out of a bag. By the time the narrator separates them one Tamil is dead and ten or so have been injured. Idealistic Robson, for all his fancy ideas of ‘Reforming The Empire’, turns out to be predictably useless, running around like a distracted hen and crying.

But the main event in the story is that White comes down with a severe attack of delirium tremens or DTs. He starts raving and threatening violence so the narrator has to knock him out with a rifle butt. When he comes round, the narrator ties him to his bed. His raving, his tormented hallucinations are a trial for the narrator but tip young Robson over the edge, reducing him to sitting and crying.

All this allows Woolf to write some highly enjoyable bravura passages of the different mentality of the old India hand, of how you come to adopt the native mentality, become more passive, and accept the vast impersonal forces which dictate life, your life, everyone’s lives.

One just did one’s work, hour after hour, keeping things going in that sun which stung one’s bare hands, took the skin off even my face, among the flies add the smell. It wasn’t a nightmare, it was just a few thousand Arabs and Indians fishing tip oysters from the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t even new, one felt; it was old, old as the Bible, old as Adam, so the Arabs said. One hadn’t much time to think, but one felt it and watched it, watched the things happen quietly, unastonished, as men do in the East. One does one’s work,—forty eight hours at a stretch doesn’t leave one much time or inclination for thinking,—waiting for things to happen. If you can prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp, or getting cholera or plague or small-pox, and if one can manage to get one night’s sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied.

And again, a meditation on the profound difference between East and West:

Things here feel so different; you seem so far from life, with windows and blinds and curtains always in between, and then nothing ever happens, you never wait for things to happen, never watch things happening here. You are always doing things somehow—Lord knows what they are—according I suppose to systems, views, opinions. But out there you live so near to life, every morning you smell damp earth if you splash too much in your tin bath. And things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and you—you don’t do things, you watch with the three hundred millions. You feel it there in everything, even in the sunrise and sunset, every day, the immensity, inexorableness, mystery of things happening. You feel the whole earth waking up or going to sleep in a great arch of sky; you feel small, not very powerful. But who ever felt the sun set or rise in London or Torquay either? It doesn’t: you just turn on or turn off the electric light.

This is all rather wonderful. But White won’t stop raving, all through the night. He moves on from hallucinations to describing shocking, immoral, cruel and corrupt behaviour all through his life, which is worse, more demoralising. The narrator moves him from his bed and ties him to a pole near his official desk where he can keep an eye on him. Arabs and Tamils come to watch him silently. The narrator explains that he is ill, the heat has driven him mad, and they accept this as they accept everything and move away with the ‘calm patient eyes of men who watched unastonished the procession of things’.

For one long night White raves and then, as dawn arrives, he cries out and dies. The narrator cuts him down from the pole and lays him out. But at that exact moment he is called by some locals. An oyster boat is coming inshore with a dead body on it, an Arab who died in mid-dive.

Woolf creates a very deliberate and stark contrast between the two dead men: White is a symbolic figure, symbolising the absolute worst of white men in the East, a corrupt drunk and public scandal who dies with horrible indignity.

By contrast the dead Arab is brought ashore by his colleagues, his brother sits by his body quietly weeping, an Arab sheikh comes up, lays his hand on the head of the lamenting man, and quietly and calmly consoles him. He died doing his work, doing his duty as a man. Everyone – dead man, brother and sheikh – are drenched in dignity and honour as the dawn breaks.

At this point the little brown man finishes his story. As with ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ the ending is deliberately dismissive, realistic, indicating the place of this, just one more story among a million stories in the western realm of endless discourse.

There was silence in the smoking-room. I looked round. The Colonel had fallen asleep with his mouth open. The jobber tried to look bored, the Archdeacon was, apparently, rather put out.

This feels much better than the first story for two obvious reasons. The dichotomies or binaries are easy to spot and enjoy, namely: between the shallow pontificating of the stock jobber and the clergyman, and the little brown Anglo-Indian; then between young idealistic Robson and the narrator; and then between the dignified locals and the wildly undignified, drunken White. There is the deeper dichotomy between imperial rules and the ruled to unpick as well, if you want to.

But mostly what makes it enjoyable is Woolf’ couple of paragraph-length descriptions of the mentality of the East, the spirit of the East, so utterly different from the pampered ignorance of London clubland where the frame story is set. All very neat, well constructed and enjoyable.

The Two Brahmans

Description of Yalpanam, a very large town in the north of Ceylon, which always feels abandoned and sleepy as all the living goes on behind the high fences made of the dried leaves of the coconut palms which conceal the compounds in which sit the huts and houses.

In the north of the town is the section devoted to Brahmans, to most senior caste in India’s caste system, who must keep themselves from being defiled, losing caste and face in countless ways. For example they do no work for themselves, all their needs are catered to by lower cast workers devoted to trades such as fishing tending rice, digging wells and so on.

In order to avoid defilement, the 50 or so Brahman families in Yalpanam all live in the same part of town, on the northern edge abutting the big lagoon. And for centuries if not millennia they have all married off their sons and daughters to each other to preserve their purity.

The story spans four generations of two particular families, headed by two fathers Chellaya and Chittampalam whose compounds neighbour each other. To be brief, both Chellya and Chittampalam shame their families by undertaking manual work. They try to keep it hidden but words get out and the other Brahman families cut them off. Among other things, this means their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children, will not be accepted for marriage by anyone in the town. They’ll have to go to distant settlements to find Brahman families which have never heard of their shame.

Chittampalam is a miser. When the water in his well starts to become brackish he should have gotten an earth carrying caste member to dig him a new well. Instead, in order to save, money he dug it and carries the soil away on his head himself. People saw him and he lost caste.

But it’s Chellaya who gets the lion’s share of (this very short) story. He likes to spend his afternoons staring out over the big lagoon and slowly becomes obsessed with the fishermen who wade out into the water and cast their nets. It looks so idyllic, it looks so relaxing. So one day he shamefacedly asks one of the fisherman if he could show him how to cast a net. He comes up with a cock-and-bull story about having made a vow to some god to do it as reward for healing his son but nobody is fooled. So for a small payment the fisherman sells him a net and then on successive days, far away from the village, shows him how to cast it. But someone, inevitably, sees, and he, too, loses caste.

I was wondering how these two bad Brahmans were going to be brought into contact or conflict but they aren’t. Chittampalam dies soon after being discovered carrying earth and Chellaya a few years later. It’s their great-great-great grandchildren who are. Four generations later the male descendants of the two naughty Brahmans bear the same names, Chellaya and Chittampalam.

Everybody’s forgotten which one of them carried the earth and which one cast nets, but they are still shunned by the other Brahman families and still have to marry outside the town.

And so we reach the climax of this little tale. The descendant Chellaya and Chittampalam still live in the same compounds as their ancestors, next to each other. And Chittampalam has a very beautiful daughter and Chellaya has one son unmarried, who one day sees the beautiful daughter through the compound wall, and suggests to his father that he marries her.

So the two fathers meet up and are in agreement that it would be an excellent marriage. However there’s one sticking point, the same sticking point there always is in all these native marriages, the size of the bride’s dowry: the father of the girl wants the dowry to be small and the father of the boy wants it to be large.

Well, the denouement, climax or punchline of the story turns out to be that… each time they meet to discuss the dowry it isn’t long before Chittampalam loses his temper and calls Chellaya a fisher, Chellaya loses his temper and calls Chittampalam a pariah and they both storm off.

Chellaya’s son calms his father down and arranges for the two men to have another meeting a few days later, but the exact same thing happens, with negotiations which start sensibly ending in a shouting match and both men storming away. Oh well, they realise; like their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them, they will have to marry off their children to partners from some distant village which has never heard of their shame.

So the moral of the story, children, is that the sins or errors or mistakes of the ancestors continue to bedevil and stymie the wishes of their descendants. Silly, isn’t it? And yet it’s those values and traditions which give our lives their meaning and aren’t as easy to shake off as glib outsiders think.

In a poignant and symbolic coda, Chellaya’s son, lovesick for Chittampalam’s daughter, takes to going and sitting at the exact same spot where his great-great-great-grandfather Chellaya used to sit and watch the fishermen cast their nets.

Maybe it’s not just social conventions and transgressions which are passed down through the generations, but something deeper; something about gestures and longings and desires which are revived and repeated in every generation…

Thoughts

‘Pearls and Swine’ is clearly the best of the three stories, which is why Eland chose to include it in their paperback edition of ‘The Village in the Jungle’ but not the other two.

‘The Two Brahmans’ is fine as far is it goes, conveying not only the restrictions of Brahman life but, better, the sense of the yearning of the Brahman who wanted to become a fisherman, briefly standing for everyone who has a dream or desire beyond their station in life; but is too short to make a big impact.

‘A Tale Told by Moonlight’ is clearly the worst story, because of the unsympathetic character of Jessop the blunt cynic; because it is based – like so many turn-of-the-century stories, plays and operas – on the immiseration and suicide of an innocent young woman; but most importantly, I thought it didn’t live up to the promise to be some kind of meditation on the nature of Real Love. Didn’t strike me as being that at all, but instead a cliché, and an unpleasant exploitative cliché at that.

Credit

‘Stories of the East’ by Leonard Woolf was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921. I read ‘Pearls and Swine’ in the 2008 Eland Publishing paperback edition of ‘The Village in the Jungle’ which includes it as a kind of bonus. The other two I read online.

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by Simon on May 12, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Short stories

Tagged A Tale Told by Moonlight, Alderton, Anglo-Indian, Bloomsbury, Board School, Brahman, British Empire, brothel, caste, caste system, Celestinahami, Ceylon, Charles Marlow, Chellaya, Chittampalam, Colombo, Cooperation and the Future of Industry, DTs, Economic Imperialism, Empire and Commerce in Africa, English literature, fiction, frame narrative, Hanson Smith, Heart of Darkness, imperialism, imperialist, India, Indian Civil Service, International Government, Jessop, Joseph Conrad, Leonard Woolf, love, Madame Butterfly, marriage, master-love, narrative, opera, P&O, pearl fishery, Pearls and Swine, Peckham, Pemberton, Puccini, racism, Reynolds, Robson, Rugby public school, sex, sex worker, short stories, Socialism and Co-operation, Stories of the East, story within a story, suicide, Tamil, the East, The Framework of a Lasting Peace, The Future of Constantinople, the Hogarth Press, The Two Brahmans, The Village in the Jungle, Torquay, True Love, Virginia Woolf, White, white supremacy, Wise Virgins, Yalpanam

Posted by Simon on May 12, 2025

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Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Why did she suddenly feel, for no reason that she could discover, desperately unhappy?

‘Mrs Dalloway’ feels like a significantly better, fuller, more complete and significant novel than ‘Jacob’s Room’. But maybe that’s because it’s much more traditional and easier to read.

I powerfully disliked ‘Jacob’s Room’ because it felt, to me, packed with barely contained unhappiness and occasional hysteria, which I found badly triggering i.e. triggered the same feelings in me. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ contains some of the same technical tricks as Jacob, but feels much, much more contained and controlled and accessible.

Continuities between Jacob and this include:

it’s set in London with an obsessive attention to the precise geography of the city and the exact routes taken by the main protagonists
a large cast of secondary characters, often passersby or people just on the streets or parks or shops of London who the main characters momentarily notice, who pop up for a brief mention then disappear forever
unexpected segues or jumps between scenes which neither begin nor end in a conventional way

But what makes it significantly easier than Jacob, is 1) there are far fewer lead characters, just 4 or 5 and 2) we get to know them in much, much more detail than in Jacob. Jacob went out of its way to omit any explanation of characters’ backgrounds and relationships to each other, leaving the reader in a permanent sense of frustration and bewilderment. Its extreme fragmentation and continual hopping about from one fragmented scene to another was its main artistic aim. By contrast, in ‘Dalloway’ there’s just a handful of characters and everything about their backstories is explained at great length. We get to know and walk around the characters. In this respect it is a far more conventional, ‘ordinary’ and accessible novel than its predecessor.

Main cast

The action of the novel follows one day in the life of its characters, a Wednesday in June 1923. Each of the main characters has some business to carry out and so the novel follows them going about their tasks, lightly jumping from one to another.

1. Mrs Clarissa Dalloway

Wife of Richard Dalloway, a Conservative MP. Just entering her 52nd year. Has a daughter, Elizabeth, 17 and serious. Lives in a lovely town house in Mayfair, complete with maids etc, notably Lucy. Was raised in a country house, Bourton, in Gloucestershire. When her father, old Mr Parry, Justin Parry, died, the house went to her brother, Herbert. A neighbour sees:

A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. (p.2)

Mrs Kilman sees:

her small pink face, her delicate body, her air of freshness and fashion

She thinks of herself as having:

a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird’s. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing — nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown… (p.7)

When a wave of depression flows over her at not being invited to Lady Brunton’s, she feels ‘herself suddenly shrivelled, aged, breastless’ (p.26). She is essentially talentless: she has no gift for writing or talking, can’t play the piano, doesn’t follow her husband’s political campaigns, is astonishingly ignorant (she doesn’t know what the equator is) (p.107).

She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed…

Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever… (p.66)

She has the frigid anti-passion of her class and gender and especially of her author (I say this having read Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf which shows that theirs was a sexless marriage, probably never consummated, because Virginia became hysterical every time the subject of sex was even raised, let alone moved towards.) ‘Horrible passion! she thought. Degrading passion!’ Her main activity in life is bringing disparate people together at her parties. She really enjoys doing this and enjoys her life.

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June. (p.2)

How unbelievable death was! — that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all!

Bravo to Woolf for not making her heroine a writer, poet, painter etc but a fairly ordinary upper-middle-class woman with few if any talents. She is therefore (in an admittedly narrow, upper class way) a sort of everywoman.

Task: Clarissa is organising things for a big party she’s hosting that evening.

2. Richard Dalloway

Clarissa’s husband is a conscientious Conservative MP, not top drawer material, never likely to make the Cabinet.

He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a spark of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type. He ought to have been a country gentleman—he was wasted on politics. He was at his best out of doors, with horses and dog… (p.65)

He is invited to luncheon with Lady Bruton, along with their old friend, the pompous Hugh Whitbread.

3. Peter Walsh

Clarissa has known since a boy. He’s six months older than her. He was always unconventional, got kicked out of Oxford for being a Socialist. Back in the 1890s when they were young, he proposed to Clarissa who turned him down. Years later he returns from India (where he’s been for 5 years, 1918 to 1923) and turns up unannounced at the Dalloway house. He is back in London to organise a divorce from his wife because he has fallen in love with a major’s wife, Daisy, aged just 24 i.e. less than half his age. Foolish man.

Task: Walsh has an appointment to see the lawyers Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn about his divorce.

4. Septimus Warren Smith

The outsider, completely outside the network of Clarissa’s friends and family which mostly dominates the text. Septimus is aged about thirty, pale-faced, beak-nosed, wearing brown shoes and a shabby overcoat. He is a shell-shocked World War One veteran who talks to himself and threatens suicide to his terrified, long-suffering wife Lucrezia.

Task: at noon Septimus and Lucrezia have an appointment with the Harley Street nerve specialist Sir William Bradshaw.

Lucrezia Warren Smith

Long-suffering wife of Septimus. Looks after him all day and shepherds him to the Harley Street appointment, then back to their rented room.

Secondary characters

Sally Seton

Unconventional woman Clarissa fell in love with and kissed back in the 1890s (p.30). And turns up out of the blue at Clarissa’s party. And is changed utterly. Clarissa compares their youthful hijinks with the plump conventional woman she’s become.

She smoked cigars,… she ran down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, ‘What if the gentlemen had met her?’ But everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the larder because she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality — she would paint, she would write. Old women in the village never to this day forgot to ask after ‘your friend in the red cloak who seemed so bright.’ She accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he was, her old friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of kissing her in the smoking-room to punish her for saying that women should have votes. Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him at family prayers — which she was capable of doing with her daring, her recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre of everything and creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom; instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at Manchester. And she had five boys! (p.161)

Aunt Helena

Old Mr Parry’s sister, so Clarissa’s aunt (p.28), now in her 80s and with one glass eye. A great traveller in India in the 1860s and a keen watercolorist of rare orchids (p.158).

Tertiary characters

Scrope Purvis – neighbour in Westminster.

Sir John Buckhurst – venerable judge, caught up in the traffic jam in Brook Street (p.13).

Dr Holmes – physician to Septimus Smith who insists there’s nothing physically wrong with him.

Large, fresh coloured, handsome, flicking his boots, looking in the glass, he brushed it all aside — headaches, sleeplessness, fears, dreams — nerve symptoms and nothing more, he said.

(Compare and contrast the physician who shows up to pronounce Leonard Bast dead at the end of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, and the useless doctor who misdiagnoses the daughter with terrible consequences in D.H. Lawrence’s story England, My England. Doctors generally get a bad rap in the fiction of this period.)

Mr Brewer – managing clerk at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents, Septimus’s boss.

Lady Millicent Bruton – invites Richard Dalloway to lunch, but not Clarissa, upsetting her.

Miss Milly Brush (40) – Lady Bruton’s secretary, ‘knobbed, scraped, angular, and entirely without feminine charm’ (p.90).

Perkins – Lady Bruton’s servant (?) (p.91).

Miss Pym shop assistant at Mulberry’s the florists, hands always red (p.9).

Edgar J. Watkiss, a workman carrying a roll of lead piping round his arm (p.11).

Mrs Sarah Bletchley with her baby in her arms.

Mrs Emily Coates – passerby in Pall Mall.

Mr Bowley – appears in Jacob’s Room.

Maisie Johnson – freshly arrived from Edinburgh, encounters Septimus and Lucrezia in Regents Park.

Mrs. Dempster – worn-out old lady in Regents Park observes Maisie’s interaction with the Smiths.

The unknown young woman who Peter spots in Trafalgar Square, is suddenly infatuated with and follows north till she disappears into a house in Bloomsbury, leaving him feeling deflated.

The elderly nurse with a pram in Regent’s Park, sat knitting on the bench where Peter comes to rest and falls asleep.

Miss Isobel Pole – lectures about Shakespeare, Septimus attended and developed a crush on her, wrote her letters and poems and stalked her.

Mrs Filmer – older woman living in same boarding house as Septimus and Lucrezia.

Agnes the serving girl in the Smiths’ boarding house.

Sir William Bradshaw – Harley Street physician, calm recommender of a sense of proportion (p.87).

Lady William Bradshaw – wife, fusses about her son at Eton and her hobbies, namely:

Large dinner-parties every Thursday night to the profession; an occasional bazaar to be opened; Royalty greeted; too little time, alas, with her husband, whose work grew and grew; a boy doing well at Eton; she would have liked a daughter too; interests she had, however, in plenty; child welfare; the after-care of the epileptic, and photography… (p.80)

Doris Kilman – Kicked out of her school for her German ancestry during the war, Richard came across Miss Kilman and hired her as a history tutor for Elizabeth. Over 40, embarrassingly poor, ‘heavy, ugly, commonplace’, she had a mighty religious conversion 2 years and 3 months ago (109). Now when she comes Clarissa isn’t sure how much of their time is history and how much is religious zeal.

Rev. Edward Whittaker whose sermon converted Miss Kilman.

Mr Fletcher – retired, of the Treasury, ‘neat as a new pin’, worshipper in Westminster Abbey

Mrs Gorham – widow of the famous K.C., worshipper in Westminster Abbey

Mrs Burgess – a good sort and no chatterbox, who Peter confides in about his affair, advises that while he’s away in England, hopefully Daisy will come to her senses.

Old Joseph Breitkopf – a frequent guest at Bourton who liked singing Brahms but didn’t have any voice.

Events

‘Jacob’s Room’ was divided into 14 distinct chapters. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ doesn’t have any chapters or parts. From time to time there’s just a break in the text, which indicates a new scene or time:

10am

Mrs Dalloway is walking across Green Park towards the florists. She bumps into her old friend Hugh Whitbread. She walks along Piccadilly and into the shop window of Hatchards. She crosses into Bond Street and walks up to her florists, Mulberry’s. A car backfires in the street outside. Various passersby stop and notice. The road is blocked and we meet the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Smith.

Ripple of excitement among passersby about who is inside the car (which has curtains over its windows), the Prime Minister, the Prince of Wales. The narrative takes us down the Mall to the crowd outside Buckingham Palace including, in Woolf’s usual manner, a clutch of casual bystanders who she bothers to name – shawled Moll Pratt with her flowers on the pavement, Mrs Emily Coates, Sarah Bletchley with babe in arms, little Mr Bowley.

All of them then witness something strange which is an airplane flying low over central London and emitting smoke as if writing letters in the air. In classic modernist confusion nobody can agree what the letters spell.

Cut to: Lucrezia sitting next to her depressed husband Septimus Smith in Regents Park. Her feelings of desperate loneliness now her husband is mad.

Maisie Johnson, a young woman freshly arrived from Edinburgh, asks them the way to Regents Park tube and thinks them a very strange couple. Mrs Dempster who has lunch in the park and feeds the squirrels observes their interaction. The plane eventually flies off, giving a few moments thought to a Mr Bentley mowing his lawn in Greenwich. A seedy-looking nondescript man carrying a leather bag hesitates at the entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Woolf’s novels are packed with these inconsequential moments from random strangers’ lives. In fact she theorises it a bit, attributing this affinity with complete strangers to Clarissa:

Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter… (p.135)

Presumably this flitting between snippets of random strangers’ lives was part of the modernism which discombobulated the book’s first readers. All I can say is I took it in my stride and enjoyed this bird’s eye overview of London and random people doing random activities. A hundred years later the technique is thoroughly assimilated.

Clarissa arrives home, discovers her husband has been invited to luncheon with Lady Millicent Bruton, and is jealous. This triggers a wave of memories, her childhood at the family home at Bourton, her wooing by Peter Walsh. But much more she remembers her close friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton which ended with the latter kissing her (p.30).

She is awoken from her revery when the doorbell rings and it’s Peter Walsh, out of the blue. They sit and reminisce. He tells her he’s come back to organise a divorce so he can marry a woman (unfortunately, herself married) Daisy.

Their conversation is just becoming personal, and Clarissa is allowing herself to feel something for this silly loveable man, when the door opens and her daughter, Elizabeth walks in. Walsh had been pacing up and down and now he simply says ‘Goodbye’ and leaves the room, and their densely emotional conversation simply ends.

Reeling, Peter walks along Victoria Street and into Whitehall where he sees a procession of Boy Scouts leaving memorials at the Cenotaph.

11.30am

He is in Trafalgar Square looking at the statues. In a peculiar passage, he sees an attractive woman crossing the road and ends up following her, trailing her, fantasising about starting a completely new life with her, across Piccadilly, up Regents Street, across Oxford Street, up Great Portland Street, and off into a side street where she goes into a house.

The fantasy bursts, and he continues up towards Regents Park, dawdles till he finds a park bench with a nurse sitting on it, knitting, sits down and slowly falls asleep. Starts snoring.

He wakes with a start and painfully remembers the stay at Bourton, in the early 1890s, when he declared his love to Clarissa and she not only rejected him but very visibly fell in love with another guest, simple dashing young Richard Dalloway.

These memories are interrupted when the little girl who’s with the nanny accidentally runs into Lucrezia as she walks miserably with her husband. This takes us into 4 or 5 pages describing Smith’s worsening mental illness, delusions of grandeur (the secrets of the universe), hearing voices, seeing his dead friend Evans in unexpected places.

Peter is now up and walk and walks past the miserable Smiths sitting on their park bench. He is reflecting on the ship journey back to England, being struck that women now openly apply face powder and lipstick, something nobody did in his day.

He remembers how much he dislikes Clarissa’s old friend Hugh Whitbread, an utterly conventional pompous ass who married the Right Honourable Evelyn someone and has a post at Court; how conventional Richard Dalloway is; his disapproval of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for being disreputable etc. How much he still likes Clarissa, her sense of life and comedy, her sense of duty, always running round helping people; how, now into his 50s, he just doesn’t need people any more.

Exiting the Park he hears and sees an ancient crone singing for money. She is a kind of pivot because we also see her through Lucrezia’s eyes and the narrative switches to describing Lucrezia’s story, how she met Septimus. He had fallen in love with the lecturer in Shakespeare, Miss Isabel Pole, working at Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, auctioneers, valuers, land and estate agents. He was one of the first to volunteer and served the full four years. He became very close to his officer, Evans, who was killed just before the Armistice. Now he hears Evans talking to him from behind trees and park benches.

The end of the war found Septimus in Milan, billetted with an innkeeper whose two daughters made hats. Lucrezia was the younger. They fell in love and married and came back to London, took rooms in Tottenham Court Road, and Septimus slowly became more (mentally) ill. He talks openly about killing himself and wonders how to do it most effectively.

Twelve noon (p.82)

The sound of Big Ben (which, I realise, tolls through the book on the hour, every hour). Septimus and Lucrezia have an appointment with Sir William Bradshaw, nerve specialist, in Harley Street. Woolf mocks Bradshaw and his pathetically inadequate advice to Septimus to cultivate a proper sense of ‘proportion’. To achieve this, Bradshaw says he’ll arrange for Septimus to be sent to a rest home, a care home (nobody uses the word asylum). Although presented sweetly, this obviously has a coercive element and leads onto a peculiar couple of pages where Woolf claims that, the (pathetically inadequate) concept of ‘proportion’ is accompanied by a ‘sister’ concept, ‘Conversion’. This is obscure but seems to refer to compulsion, to forcing his patients to acquiesce in his diagnoses, with the implication that he will be forced to go to this home (asylum). This sense of being forced against his will, plays a crucial role in the climax of Septimus’s story.

Like all contemporary physicians, Bradshaw knows nothing about the workings of the brain and central nervous system.

One thirty (p.90)

According to a clock in nearby Oxford Street where is walking Hugh Whitbread, 55, respected holder of a position at Court, ‘unbearably pompous’. He, too, has been invited to luncheon with Lady Bruton and arrives on the doorstep of her house in Brook Street at the same moment as Richard Dalloway.

She talks of this and that and mentions that Peter Walsh is back in England. But it turns out she has invited them both there simply because she needs their help writing a letter to The Times about her hobby horse, encouraging the emigration of the ‘surplus population’ to the colonies, specifically Canada. Hugh is a gluttonous creep in many respects but in this, writing formal letters in the style of the Establishment, he is outstanding and does a great job, developing and refining it at Lady Bruton’s instructions. Then lunch is over and the two men depart.

But a wind is blowing up Brook Street and for some indefinable reason they find it difficult to part and end up together going into a jewellers’s shop where Hugh buys a necklace for his wife, Evelyn. Talk of Peter Walsh has reminded him of his wooing of Clarissa and suddenly he wants to buy her a present. Lacking judgement of jewellery, in the blink of an eye he has bought some red and white roses and strides through Green Park towards their house, intending to give them to her and tell her he loves her.

Scholars think the Dalloways live in Great College Street, Westminster, though this is nowhere made explicit.

3pm (p.103)

Big Ben sounds the hour as Dalloway enters his house, surprising Clarissa. He gives her the roses but can’t quite bring himself to tell her he loves her. He quickly leaves to attend a committee, concerned with Armenian survivors of the genocide though Clarissa, characteristically, can’t remember whether it’s Armenians or Albanians.

Miss Kilman emerges from being cloistered with Elizabeth. She was hired as a history tutor for Elizabeth but during the war had a religious conversion. We get the story of her conversion. Now she and Elizabeth emerge to go shopping. There is a momentary standoff between Clarissa and Miss Kilman which Clarissa ends by laughing. They exit.

3.30pm (p.112)

Clarissa watches the old lady opposite laboriously climb her stairs and thinks that, that is life.

Meanwhile, Mrs Kilman is infuriated beyond measure by the way Mrs Dalloway laughed at her, seething with hatred for her dim, philistine privilege. She and Elizabeth go to the Army and Navy Story (to buy a petticoat) and then have tea and a chocolate eclair. Woolf gives us Miss Kilman’s thoughts which are almost as demented as Septimus’s in her seething anger at being ugly and poor and clumsy.

Miss Kilman goes into Westminster Abbey to share her misery with God and some other sniffling worshippers. Elizabeth, 17, loves being out in the busy streets and takes a bus down the Strand, across into Fleet Street and bravely ventures towards St Paul’s Cathedral, all the way thinking a confused, immature 17-year-old girl’s thoughts about what she might do when she grows up.

The passing backwards and forwards of omnibuses is a link to the Smiths, Septimus lying on the sofa in their lodgings while Lucrezia tries to fix a hat at their table, a hat for Mrs Filmers’ married daughter, Mrs Peters. For half an hour he comes out of his madness and actively helps Rezia design the little hat and she is deliriously happy but then Mrs Filmer’s grand-daughter arrives to deliver the paper, and Rezia gives her a sweet then accompanies her back to her flat, leaving Septimus by himself, and he has tremors of relapse.

When she comes back he suggests she gets out all his mad writings, the letters and poems and diagrams and drawings, and burns them all, but she wants to keep them, sorts them and ties them with string.

At this point the indefatigable Dr Holmes arrives downstairs and Rezia runs down to head him off but he insists on blundering up to see his ‘perfectly well’ patient, which triggers a panic attack. Because Septimus associates the doctors with Sr William’s air of polite coercion, of being confined to an asylum.

So as soon as hears Holmes’s voice, Septimus quickly considers various methods of suicide and, as Dr Holmes enters the room, throws himself out the window and down onto the area railings. So that he is impaled on the railings. Yuk.

What happens next is odd because instead of having hysterics, Rezia is given a sweet drink by the doctor and feels relaxed and has happy visions, presumably a powerful tranquilliser. And it isn’t made clear whether Septimus is dead or badly or lightly injured. Mystery.

The ambulance carrying Septimus whizzes past Peter Walsh out walking and he’s struck by how civilised the notion of the traffic pulling aside to let is pass is, after the chaos of the Orient (i.e. India). Peter reacts a bit deliriously, with a hint of the Woolf madness, which is disguised as his temperamental over-susceptibility.

6pm (p.137)

Peter arrives back at his hotel, a sad sterile place, his mind awash with memories of Clarissa on his many visits to Bourton. He is upset when these fantasies are punctured by a one-line note she’s had sent round which simply says ‘Heavenly to see you!’ So conventional, so middle-aged and disappointing. And he reflects on his affair with Daisy, her mad love for him, his jealousy, the whole thing utterly inappropriate and disreputable, as he gets dressed for Clarissa’s party. No wonder she married Richard.

He goes down to the hotel dining room where he is shy and sits at a table by himself. After dinner he gets into conversation with the Morris family, being old Mr Morris, young Charles Morris, Mrs Morris and Miss Elaine Morris.

Evening falls over the city. Peter realises he’ll go to the party simply because he wants a gossip and to hear the latest talk about the future of India. As night falls the streets light up and fill with lively young people. Peter prides himself at not being at the Oriental Club surrounded by harrumphing old bloaters, but sitting on a cane chair outside his hotel near the Tottenham Court Road enjoying the sense of youth and possibility.

He pays a penny for an evening paper, reads the cricket scores, then leaves it on the table and sets off walking through Bloomsbury, heading south and west to Westminster and a lovely description of people stepping out their houses and into cabs, of windows lighting up, the sound of gramophones through windows on this hot June evening, till he arrives at Clarissa’s house and braces himself.

The servants, Lucy bustling about front of house and Mrs Walker, the very harassed cook and old Mrs Barnett, Ellen Barnett, helping the grand ladies off with their cloaks. Mr Wilkins a sort of butler/announcer, hired specially for parties.

Clarissa is terrified that the party is not going well, people are not mingling, are standing around tutting about the draught (Peter desperately wishes he hadn’t come, he knows nobody). But then more guests arrive and it starts to go. Clarissa stands at the main door to the drawing room greeting them all as they’re announced by Wilkins. Lady Bruton has come and Clarissa is genuinely relieved. Then she is amazed that Sally Seton has gatecrashed, happened to be in London, heard about it etc. She is now Lady Rosseter with five strapping sons!

And then the Prime Minister, an amusingly non-descript little man. Peter Walsh, an outsider from India, is appalled at the snobbery of the English, and then amused to see pompous Hugh Whitbread dancing attendance like a toady. And then he is touched with how old but gracious Clarissa looks in her green dress, effortlessly managing her guests. And there’s pages of her dealing with each of these guests, maybe based on real people (?), certainly an interesting variety.

Coincidentally (it’s a small world; well it’s a big world actually, but fiction is a small world) Sir William Bradshaw arrives, with his wife. He’s the pompously expensive nerve doctor who was so fundamentally useless to Septimus, and who Lucrezia was so relieved to escape. Interestingly, Clarissa once went to him with a problem and had the same experience, being impressed by his tone and dignity, but everso relieved to escape back out onto the street. Lady B explains they are late because they were just leaving when someone rang up Sir William to tell him a sad case of his had just killed himself (p.162).

Aha. So Septimus succeeded in killing himself. I was wondering whether I’d have to look it up on the internet to find out what happened (as I had to Google it to find out what happened at the end of ‘Jacob’s Room’).

News of this death affects her badly and Clarissa withdraws into a little side room. She feels it has a special message, is meant as an act of defiance. (Surely in this we can hear Woolf defending madness and suicidal ideations as something more than just illness, but a rebellion, a defiance, suicide as a kind of treasure).

And Clarissa’s response is to find Sr William somehow, obscurely, evil. When she met him professionally she felt the evil of compulsion in him, forcing his patients at their most vulnerable time. It awakens in her a deep terror:

Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.

Because:

Somehow it was her disaster — her disgrace. It was her punishment… She felt somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. (p.165)

Mad though this sounds, I know exactly what she means. It feels profoundly true.

Meanwhile Sally and Peter sit together and have a long chat about old times. He is 53, she is 55. This I found very moving because I’m about their age and at parties have sat and talked to friends I met at university when we were 20 and full of dreams and now look at each other, grey and middle-aged and worried about our children. That feeling comes over very well indeed.

And Peter confides that he never got over his love for Clarissa, the rest of his life was a throwing-himself-away. Sally sympathises and insists she comes to stay with him in her huge house in Manchester and meet her husband, a vastly wealthy mine owner who started out a working man himself and brought himself up by his shoestraps.

And they both watch young Elizabeth, looking radiant, walk over to her doting father who tells her how beautiful she is. Sally says she’s getting up to go and talk to them. And then the novel ends on a kind of bombshell, which I shall quote in its entirety. Sally leaves him and:

‘I will come,’ said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.

Nothing will happen between them, we know too much about them to sentimentally think that. But it is like colour in the composition of a painting. It ends on a tremendous upbeat of something we have come to realise is much more potent than love or memory, something much deeper.

It really is about as beautiful and moving as a novel can possibly be.

Thoughts

1. ‘Mrs Dalloway’ is not at all the avant-garde, modernist text I’d been led to believe, but a remarkably conventional, normal novel, easy to read and understand.

2. Mrs Dalloway is a posh, upper-class wife of a Conservative MP, a classic lady who lunches, it’s not clear that she’s ever done a day’s work in her life, just orders around her servants and suppliers. As such she has 0% of my sympathy. My sympathies are always with people who work for a living and not the parasitic upper classes which throng so much classic bourgeois fiction. But not having much sympathy for her doesn’t at all prevent me from appreciating the craft and beauty of the novel.

3. As you know I had a severe abreaction to Jacob’s Room, a book which gave me a powerful sense of mental illness barely controlled. It is symptomatic of this book’s greater sense of control and order that the mental illness is still there but has been channelled into just one character, isolated and delimited, as it were. Still that figure is a major player, the opposite pole to Clarissa, Septimus Smith. Into this character Woolf was able to pour all her demons, the voices talking in her head, and the calm and practical planning how to kill yourself.

The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood — by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.

A note in the Oxford University Press edition of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ tells me that Woolf suffered mental collapses in 1895, 1904 and 1913 to 1915; that she tried to kill herself in 1895 (aged 13) and again in 1913 (aged 31). In 1922 when she felt another attack coming on, she went to see a Harley Street specialist who was, predictably, useless.

So the novel dramatises her two states – being a posh sensitive woman in London, and being mentally ill unto making practical plans to commit suicide – in its two central characters. It is a bipolar book.

And the two halves are brought together in the climactic party in a very complex, moving, disturbing, but sympathetic way, as Clarissa sorts through her complex response to Lady William’s mention of Septimus’s suicide. It is really a wonderfully complex working of a stricken subject and her horrible experiences into a beautiful work of art.

Credit

‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in May 1925. References are to the 2004 Vintage paperback edition.

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by Simon on March 26, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged asylum, Aunt Helena, Big Ben, bipolar disease, Bloomsbury, Bond Street, Bourton, Boy Scouts, British Empire, Brook Street, Canada, Charles Morris, Clarissa Dalloway, conversion, D.H. Lawrence, daisy, DallowayDay, Doris Kilman, Dr Holmes, E.M. Forster, Edgar J. Watkiss, Edinburgh, Elizabeth Dalloway, Ellen Barnett, England My England, English literature, Eton, fiction, Fleet Street, Gloucestershire, Great College Street, Great Portland Street, Green Park, Greenwich, Harley Street, Hatchard's, Herbert Parry, Hooper and Grateley, Howard's End, Hugh Whitbread, India, Jacob's Room, June 1923, Justin Parry, Lady Millicent Bruton, Lady Rosseter, Lady William Bradshaw, Leonard Bast, Leonard Woolf, Lincoln’s Inn, London, love, Lucrezia, Lucrezia Warren Smith, madness, Maisie Johnson, Mayfair, mental illness, Milly Brush, Miss Elaine Morris, Miss Isobel Pole, Miss Kilman, Miss Pym, Modernism, Moll Pratt, Mr Bentley, Mr Bowley, Mr Brewer, Mr Fletcher, Mr Morris, Mr Parry, Mrs Barnett, Mrs Burgess, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Dempster, Mrs Emily Coates, Mrs Filmer, Mrs Filmers, Mrs Gorham, Mrs Kilman, Mrs Morris, Mrs Peters, Mrs Sarah Bletchley, Mrs Walker, novel, Old Joseph Breitkopf, Oxford Street, Pall Mall, Perkins, Peter Walsh, Politics, Prime Minister, proportion, Regents Park, Rev. Edward Whittaker, Rezia, Richard Dalloway, s divorce, Sally Seton, Sarah Bletchley, schizophrenia, Scrope Purvis, Septimus, Septimus Smith, Septimus Warren Smith, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets, shell-shock, Sibleys and Arrowsmiths, Sir John Buckhurst, Sir William Bradshaw, St Paul's cathedral, stream-of-consciousness, suicide, the Cenotaph, the Oriental Club, the Strand, The Times, Tottenham Court Road, Trafalgar Square, Victoria Glendinning, Victoria Street, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Society, Westminster, Westminster Abbey, Whitehall, World War One

Posted by Simon on March 26, 2025

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Amis’s novels

Editor

An essay on Amis’s prose style

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List of stories

Prose style

‘To step aside’

1. The Wooden Madonna (17 pages)

2. Traveller’s Joy (8 pages)

3. Aunt Tittie (27 pages)

4. What Mad Pursuit? (39 pages)

5. Cheap Excursion (13 pages)

6. The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe (48 pages)

Coward and Christianity

Mrs R and Mrs D

7. Nature Study (19 pages)

1

2

3

4

Philip Hoare

Thought

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Background

Ten plays

Songs

1. We Were Dancing: A Comedy in Two Scenes

‘Shut up, Clara!’

Servants

2. The Astonished Heart: A Play in Six Scenes

‘Shut up, Clara’

3. Red Peppers: An interlude with music

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Background

Ménage à trois

Cast

Plot

Act 1. Otto’s studio in Paris, 1932

Act 2

Scene 1. Leo’s Flat in London, 18 months later

Scene 2. Leo’s London flat, a few days later

Author’s message

Scene 3. The same, the next morning

A Marxist interpretation

A Freudian interpretation

Act 3

Scene 1. Ernest’s apartment in New York, two years later

Scene 2. The same, the next morning

Thoughts

Is it even a real ménage à trois?

Mocking the provinces

A post-colonial interpretation

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Executive summary

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Thin

Mirrors and pairs

Shouting

Wife-beating, battery and assault

1976 TV version

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Twitter-length executive summary

Slightly longer summary

Or:

Or:

A more woke/progressive summary

Plot summary

Act 1

Act 2