James Sexton, editor
The Letters of Noël Coward.
Knopf, 800 pages, $37.50

In the very first of The Letters of Noël Coward,
the eponymous epistler writes:

Darling Mother
I hope you are well. Girlie has taught me to row with two
oars and I row her along. I had some little boys over
yesterday afternoon to tea and I dressed up in a short dress
and danced to them and sung to them and we all went round
the lake and on it.
XXXXXOOOOOXO

I am writing this in the kitchen with love from Noël
Coward.

He was seven and already inventing himself. The letters got
longer in the years ahead but the subject matter didn’t
change much: tea, dressing up, singing and dancing, though
not as many boys as you might think. The snobbery was in
place a mere half-decade or so later: Of some blameless lady
in Wolverhampton who gave him tea and indeed the tuppenny
bus fare to get to her house, the child actor sighs wearily,
“I’ve never met anyone so painfully provincial in all my
life.” Which seems a mite affected for a lower-middle-class
boy from one of the drearier outskirts of London. By 1934,
one of his last surviving non-celebrity friends, Esme Wynn,
was warning that the construction of “Noël Coward” was
overshadowing all else:

I wonder if you realize how you, personally, are getting to
dwarf your achievements… . It gets more noticeable every
time I