Waiting for the Barbarians (45 page)

Indeed, he was just as self-aware with respect to his strengths and his weaknesses as a writer. As early as his earliest successes he knew perfectly well where the former lay. As his letter to T. E. Lawrence demonstrated, he understood that he was above all an entertainer, and no matter how jagged with sophistication he would get, he was never ashamed of the “popular nails” that he kept hitting on the head with such great accuracy. That he understood there was a flip side to this is already evident in a 1928 letter to the critic St John Ervine: “my imagination doesn’t feel strong enough to reach things which have not actually happened to me.” (And, more tellingly, “constant repetitions of Parisian coquettes having cocktails at the Ritz bar are
apt to become a bore.”) Still, as he rather startlingly wrote to his mother in 1926 after one of his plays flopped, he found

What’s remarkable is that you believe it.

Coward’s sense of the theater came to seem increasingly old-fashioned as the years passed. After World War II he had greater and greater difficulty creating the kinds of hits that seemed to have flowed so effortlessly in the 1920s and 1930s. His horror of what he thought of as the ugliness of the postwar British theater brought “the Master” into conflict with the new generation of playwrights whose work, as he put it in a diary entry about John Osborne (who eventually warmed up to Coward), was characterized by a “destructive vituperation” that was “too easy.” No one would accuse Coward of being a theatrical visionary.

Yet as wrongheaded as his judgments could be, they bear witness to a dogged, almost moving belief in the value of pure entertainment that, even late in life, betrayed an underlying identification with the ordinary men and women who saved up each week for their tickets—the kind of people his parents had been. In a letter from the 1960s addressed to Arnold Wesker, the young author of plays about working-class life such as
The Kitchen
, with whom Coward was to become unexpectedly close in an almost paternal way, the Master indignantly defended the value of the theater as he saw it:

The pride that resonates in that first sentence—the artisan’s, as it were, rather than the artist’s; certainly middle rather than upper class—is hard to miss.

And yet, a fascinating 1965 exchange shows Coward reaching across the generations to the young Harold Pinter after reading
The Homecoming
—twice. “You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in,” the sixty-five-year-old icon of sophistication wrote, “except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second.” Here again, the bottom line was entertainment. And, come to think of it, there may have been more of a connection between Coward and Pinter than meets the eye. As Day reminds us in his comment on this exchange, Coward was the man who insisted that “suggestion is always more interesting than statement”; a line from his own
Shadow Play
(1935) brings Pinter’s work powerfully to mind: “Small talk, a lot of small talk with other thoughts going on behind.”

“Small talk” is, of course, what Coward has been reduced to by now in the minds of so many readers and theatergoers, for whom “a very Noël Coward sort of person”—brittle and brilliantined, crackling with Roaring Twenties sophistication, sleek in smoking jackets and bristling with cigarette holders—is the only person Coward ever was. In this regard I should say that a few (exceedingly few) editorial choices in this otherwise splendid collection might inadvertently suggest to some readers that its subject is indeed rather “small,” rather dated. Among other things, you wish that Day had included more of the correspondence between Coward and his various lovers, which, you can’t help thinking, would have shed even more light on Coward the refreshingly humane man. The decision not to publish them seems to stem from a reticence that belongs as much to Day himself as to Coward, who was famously cagey when it came to questions about his private life. “The thread that goes through this life in letters is, indeed, love,” Day writes in his introduction; “not the homosexual definition of love that can now not only speak but positively shout its name,” he goes on to sniff. These and a few other editorial comments—“One wonders what history will make of the present illiterate e-mail era,” he writes, apropos of letter collections—will do little to alleviate the sense that many younger readers already have of Coward as hopelessly dated and beside the point.

But this collection of
Letters
overwhelmingly points to a Coward well worth knowing, particularly for a generation nourished on a notion of celebrity—“well known for being famous and famous for being well known,” as Day summarizes it—that the hardworking Coward himself would certainly have despised. Indeed, it is surely wrong for Day to claim that Coward was an “early role model” for this brand of celebrity: Coward became famous for having done something substantial extraordinarily well—that is, writing very successfully for the popular theater. If what he considered to be “entertainment”
now seems a little narrow to us, we cannot fault him for that. And if some of the values he championed both in his work and in his life—discretion, a gentle self-awareness, the importance of gaiety (that old-fashioned word) and a forgiving humor as weapons in life’s conflicts—seem a little quaint today, those very values allowed him to observe the decline of his moment with a rare equanimity.

Indeed, Coward more than most would have appreciated, now, the wisdom of something that Max Beerbohm wrote to him in 1927 apropos of the “operette”
Bitter Sweet
, a work already nostalgic for the past and one that gave us the line most often used to describe Coward’s own gift: “a talent to amuse.” “Sentiment,” Beerbohm wrote,

—The New York Review of Books
, January 17, 2008

AT THE BEGINNING
of a 1953
New York Times
review of a memoir by Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, Leo Lerman—identified as “contributing editor of
Mademoiselle
,” a description that hardly did justice to the thirty-nine-year-old’s already significant social and cultural influence in New York City during the midcentury—expatiated on the pleasures of reading other people’s autobiographies. “The most delightful thing about reading a book of recollections,” he wrote,

The book in question, entitled
Period Piece
, was hardly the only autobiography that Lerman reviewed for the
Times
. He seemed, if anything, to have taken special pleasure in reading and reviewing memoirs and autobiographies, and he reserved his highest praise for those who are able to conjure the lost past in minute detail—an unsurprising enthusiasm from someone who had a lifelong reverence for Proust. In his review of
Period Piece
he approvingly quotes, verbatim, a list of the fourteen items worn by a female houseguest; elsewhere he praises the “documentary” quality of a memoir by a minor European royalty.

In a piece of literary journalism of which he was particularly proud, a front-page article for
The New York Times Book Review
in 1960 about the newly reissued three-volume edition of Francis Kilvert’s journals, Lerman was ecstatic about the way in which the Victorian vicar’s keen eye for detail and sense of “wonder” about the world seem to bring him to life before our eyes:

At the time he wrote those words, Lerman was famous less for being an “editor of
Mademoiselle
”—he would go on to become features editor at
Vogue
(where he published Rebecca West, Milan Kundera, and Iris Murdoch), briefly editor in chief of
Vanity Fair
, and, finally, editorial consultant to all of Condé Nast—than for having made himself the center of a kind of a celebrity Who’s Who of his age. People like Marlene Dietrich and Maria Callas (his two closest girlfriends), Lincoln Kirstein, Philip Johnson, Carmel Snow, Noël Coward,
Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Indira Gandhi, Henry Kissinger, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Luise Rainer, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, and many others seemed happy to crowd into his various apartments over the years so that they, too, might be included in the haute and heady fun—happy despite not only the fact that (in the case of his first apartment, on upper Lexington Avenue) there were five flights of stairs but also that the fare often consisted of nothing more glamorous than jug wine and rat cheese.

A sense of what it was they were coming for may now be gleaned from
The Grand Surprise
, a massive and engrossing collection of Lerman’s own autobiographical writings. “Writings” is an awkward term, but one that must suffice here. Although Lerman published three books during his lifetime (biographies of Michelangelo and Leonardo, and a hundredth-anniversary commemorative volume about the Metropolitan Museum of Art), he was never able to surmount a plaguing anxiety about writing his memoirs—a book that he had long planned (and was under contract) to write. Equally anguishing was the thought of the grand novelistic
recherche du temps perdu
he had conceived, which, increasingly poignantly, this worshiper of Proust continued throughout his lifetime to claim that he was preparing to compose, long after it was clear that he was incapable of doing so.

The Grand Surprise
is a selection from the journals that he kept for more than half a century, from 1941 until eight months before his death, at eighty, in August 1994—they were discovered and transcribed only after his death—as well as from hundreds of letters to his many friends, lovers, and ex-lovers. There are also sharp-eyed “vignettes,” as the editor of this volume describes them, recounting this or that episode, some written toward the end of Lerman’s life as part of the unfinished memoir, others adapted from eulogies or
tributes that he gave, still others inserted into the journal to amplify various entries long after the fact.

These have been ingeniously braided into a persuasive whole by Stephen Pascal (working closely with Gray Foy, Lerman’s partner for forty-seven years), who for twelve years served as Lerman’s assistant at various Condé Nast postings. As such,
The Grand Surprise
, a compendium of essentially casual records of Lerman’s extraordinarily rich life, will have to stand in for the polished literary work he was never able to commit to paper. But then, Lerman himself, who consistently deprecated both his journalism (“the emptiness, the waste”) and his journal-keeping (“scribbling”), had always suspected, and indeed predicted, that his life was going to crowd out whatever art he was capable of. “I realize that the novel I have wished to write, I have written. My life is that novel. I have been writing it all my life.”

The Grand Surprise
certainly possesses the qualities that its author so lavishly praised in other autobiographies. The least significant of these, to my mind, is the one that has drawn so much attention to the book: the glittery ubiquity of what Lerman, in his review of
Period Piece
, called “engaging persons”—the bold-faced names whose presence on every page is bound to suggest that his life amounted to little more than one long soiree. (The front-page
New York Times Book Review
article on the book was called “Life of the Party.”) To be sure, Lerman’s tenacious adherence to the worlds of theater, glossy magazine publishing, dance (a friend to Balanchine and Kirstein both, he was a regular contributor to
Dance Magazine
), art, music (for years he wrote for
Playbill
and wrote the program notes for the Young People’s Concerts at the Philharmonic), fashion, and society ensured that his journal entries would read like a guide to fashionable New York culture from the 1940s straight through to the 1990s. This, along with his knack for quickly making friends with the celebrated
and the talented whom he met seemingly every night (Judy Garland in 1954, at the party she threw to celebrate the premiere of
A Star Is Born
: “a warm and loving girl with devastating charm”), makes
The Grand Surprise
a useful resource for those interested, as many now are, in the Manhattan midcentury, with its giddy vitality and its sense (so it seems now) of boundless possibility; a period from which we are now as distant as Lerman was from the gaslight era, which he so fondly romanticized.