SOME CRITICAL ADVICE TO MR. NOEL COWARD

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 11, 13 January 1945, Page 4

SOME CRITICAL ADVICE TO MR. NOEL COWARD

ONE day when Mr. Noel feels that, having put the British Empire on strong foundations, he can safely relax, I hope he will sit down and write another play. If he wants a theme I'll suggest one—how success, flattery and a little petting by the "right people" can make a clever man behave ridiculously, wrote John Gordon in the London Sunday Express.

If he wants ideas upon which to build it I'll suggest where he can get them also —in his own experiences. If he wants a title for it, I'll suggest that, too—"In Which We Swerve."

Now let me say frankly that I like, and in many ways admire, Coward. I always admire achievement. He has become rich and successful early in life, and he has deserved the success and the rewards.

But with success and the flattery that is the inevitable consequence of success, a very odd thing has happened. He seems to have ceased to consider himself an entertainer. He has developed instead an amusing— perhaps I ought to say pathetic— complex that he is one of our elder statesmen, privileged to hector and lecture us. "Pompous Importance" He is becoming so portentous that at times he gives the impression that he regards himself almost as the invisible man beside the "Big Three" in this war. A few nights ago he took it upon himself to reprove newspaper editors. Perhaps he will permit me, as a newspaper editor, to say something in return. Opening his broadcast with the solemnity of a Churchill, "The last time I spoke to ycu over the air was in November, 1943," he went on to say with the same air of pompous importance: "Since then I have visited America, the West Indies, Colombia, Brazil, West Africa, the Sudan, South Africa, Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Kenya, Ceylon, India and Burma." Who Sends Him? Now, I do not know whether he pays for these flutterings about the world, or you and I as taxpayers. Nor do I know the purpose of them, for it is difficult to gather whether Coward is one of our extra ambassadors, an emissary of the High Command, or merely a wandering minstrel. Whether, indeed, he belongs to the Foreign Office, the British Council, or Ensa. If he is an ambassador, to judge from the turmoil he so often leaves in his wake, he is not a very good one. In evidence I quote, with my fervent approval, this recent comment from America's Washington Post:—

"It would be profitable for our British friends to put Coward on the official payroll and give him a fat salary just to keep quiet and keep himself out of print. It would be wrong to say that Mr. Coward is much too clever for his own good, but it might be accurate to say that he is much too clever for the good of his country."

That's what an Allied country—a very important Allied country so far as we are concerned —thinks of Coward's visitations. But what does he imagine the people at home—the people who have sat and stuck it out like heroes for five long years—think when they listen to his annual travelogue? I'll tell him what they think. It is this: "Considering that most of these pleasant lands seem to have a very remote connection with entertaining troops on the battle-fronts, were these journeys really necessary?" Or alternatively, as the Army would put it, "Nice work if you can crpt it ** Now I don't dispute for one moment that Coward did some service entertaining the troops waen he eventually reached the battlefields via Brazil and the other delectable places, but if he gave them the pompous Mr. Coward instead of the witty Mr. Coward, I would not be surprised if a good many of them preferred Vera Lynn. I would myself Protest in South Africa I receive a fairly regular correspondence from the 14th Army, for which Coward seems to have appointed himself Crusader in Chief, and if he will-not mind my saying

so, my impression of his visit to and his standing with that army isn't quite the same as his. If he will permit me to be as frank with him as he was with newspaper editors, I'll tell him just what they tell me. From officers to privates they are as puzzled about his exact place in the scheme of things as you and I.

For some inexplicable reason, while all other entertainers have to travel rough, Mr. Coward moved in Burma by private aeroplane—piano, accompanist and all. Wherever he goes some mysterious power high in the background sets him on a magic carpet and whisks him where the whim takes him. In the South African House of Assembly there was a protest because Coward travelled to Capetown in a special railway coach, while Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor of Southern Rhodesia, travelled in the ordinary coupe like any other passenger. "It is high time we put an end to this tomfoolery at the State's expense," said one M.P. very properly. "Very Important Person" Now aeroplanes are very sorely needed in Burma. Very few soldiers, even of high rank, can have one of their own. And certainly no other wandering minstrel. So naturally the troops ask who provides all this —and why. The only answer would seem to be that to some people Mr. Coward is a very important person. But who these people are is an impenetrable mystery. And sometimes in Burma I fear that Coward's artistic temperament rather led him into exaggerating his importance. As it did on the radio the other evening.

For if Coward had taken the trouble to understand what he was talking about he would have found that the reason the 14th Army is the Forgotten Army, the reason its most tremendous deeds have not rung round the world as they should have done, is not that newspaper editors prefer to print trivialities instead, but because his powerful friends, the pre-war blimps in control in India, the same type that cost us Malaya and Burma, and may, if they are not rooted out, eventually cost us India as well, regard the war in Burma as their private business in which we at home have no right to be concerned or considered. If Coward, instead of blathering about his own travels, had set himself to tell some, of the deeds of that great army, which, as he himself said, ought to be told, he would have found, as every newspaper editor has found, that there is a censorship in operation in India which would very quickly have put a gag in his mouth. . He would have found, also, if he had troubled to inquire, that the reason the world regards the Far Eastern war as an American war, although the 14th Army has, as it happens, so far met and killed more Japanese than all the American forces put together, is that the Americans know their business when it comes'to publicising their troops. He would also have found that the reason the best Eastern war filni yet issued has only Americans in it is that Mr. Coward's friends keep

the films of the 14th Army—perhaps the finest films of this war—hidden away in their lock-ups. As a Soldier The business of a playwright like Coward is to fictionise. The business of a newspaper editor is to deal with facts. Wnen Coward gets the two mixed the results are sometimes rather odd. Take the case of Coward's own life before the days when, with "Cavalcade,". he discovered that there was something in this patriotism business. He wrote a biography in the years when it was fashionable to be cynical about things like that. The other night I re-read his own version of his first days as a soldier, . : Coward found himself in the Artists' Rifles O.T.C. About this episode he wrote with candour: "I was tortured with the thought that I was wasting time. The needs of my king and country seemed unimportant compared with the vital necessity of forging ahead with my own career. It was a matter of pressing urgency to me that I should become rich and successful as soon as possible." Luckily for him, a severe bump on the head soon solved his problems. After a spell in hospital he found himself on the way back to civilian life, success and fortune "in a state of indescribable happiness." I have no doubt many of us when we joined up felt a little lonely and as if the bottom had been knocked out of things. But we did not get leave to straighten our affairs out and use the time pulling strings to get out of it. We made up our minds to stick it out and go through with it. And even if we had got out I think most of us would have hesitated before reciting over the radio, as Coward did, to younger men of his profession facing the same problems 25 years later:— Soft hysterical little actors, Ballet dancers, reserved musicians, Safe in your warm civilian beds, Count your profits and count your sheep— Life is passing over your heads, Just turn over and try to sleep. I think in the general interest it would not be a bad thing if Coward took his own advice—turned over and tried to sleep.