"Everything has to come to an end sometime, even pure unadulterated terror--particularly if there is nothing whatever to be done about it."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

This week's New Yorker features a "Talk of the Town" piece about the producers of a new staging of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit asking a group of working mediums to attempt to conjure the spirit of Coward himself as part of an audition for a job as advisor to the actress portraying the medium in the play. The piece reminded me of an odd story I read this fall, when, deep into my annual autumnal ghost story binge, I took James Hynes's advice and bought an old copy of yet another of those Robert Arthur-edited Hitchcock anthologies, Stories for Late at Night (1961). The volume is the usual mixed but very satisfying bag, its handful of truly chilling stories–Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" and John Collier's "Evening Primrose" among them–more than justifying the minimal cost of a used copy.

The story that returned to mind today was "Lady's Man" (1961), by early film actress and novelist Ruth Chatterton, which, from the point of view of Chatterton herself, relates a ghostly encounter that she had at Noel Coward's country house, Goldenhurst. In the story, Chatterton is invited to Goldenhurst for a weekend visit with a few others of Coward's circle, including his longtime close friend Joyce Carey; put up in a first-floor room that she's never seen used as guest quarters before, she senses a male presence enter her room late in the night:

I shut my eyes but they wouldn't stay shut. Even though I tried not to look, they kept wandering to that inky vaccum beyond the wide-open door. That was when the noise began, or when I became aware of it. Tap-tap-tap, as if a fingernail were tapping on the glass of the pictures on the wall, one after the other. Then the floorboards began to creak. Someone seemed to be pacing back and forth beside my bed. I could hear it plainly.

What's most striking about the story is that, rather than a piece of fiction crafted to thrill the readers of Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine or Astounding Science Fiction, "Lady's Man" appears to be a straight-up ghost story. Though it builds to a delicious concluding line, it nevertheless has all the unaffected appeal of a ghost story recounted to a friend over October campfire drinks, its simple chronology and incidental details giving it the casual verisimilitude crucial to such tales–it's the sort of story that, if told by a trusted friend, one would have to file in the "I don't believe in ghosts, but . . . " drawer. In the midst of stories with steel-trap plots and inexorably building tension, it's a breath of fresh–if undeniably creepy–air.

Chatterton died later that same year, 1961, and my relatively cursory searching turns up no other mention of this encounter. Philip Hoare's 1998 biography of Coward, however, does mention hauntings at Goldenhurst, though in a different, newer room:

Here guests–who had included Maugham just a few months before–reported odder events. Lilia Ralli, the Greek-born friend of the Duchess of Kent, had a restless night in the French Room, a new guest room built off the long passage. Coward came to the conclusion, based on other disturbed nights, that local tales of a suicide walking the path over which the room had been built were true and that it was haunted by a lovelorn Kentish lad.

Hoare, understandably, can't resist adding in a footnote:

Subsequent tenants of the house describe a feeling of being watched when playing the piano, which they ascribe to Coward's continuing presence. His ghost has also been reported in more unlikely venues: the bar manager of the Little Theatre in Wells claimed to have seen his spectral form, clad in a smoking jacket during an amateur production of Cowardy Custard.

To return to the "Talk of the Town" piece (in which one of the producers says that the most effective of the mediums, "scared the shit out of me"): I wonder whether the producers' desire for additional coaching for their medium was a result of their having read last year's fascinating collection of Coward's letters, in which he registers vigorous disapproval of the actress who originated the role in the first London run of Blithe Spirit:

The great disappointment is Margaret Rutherford, whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge or resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvelous. I need hardly say she got a magnificent notice. So much for that.

If a producer wants to avoid being haunted by Coward, perhaps it's worth taking a little extra effort over the medium?

Dear snooping posterity,

{Photo by rocketlass of our niece writing postcards.}

Lest you get the wrong impression from my post the other night in which I quoted Virginia Woolf writing that "the Victorian age killed the art of letter writing with kindness," I thought I should tonight state very clearly my firmly held belief that there can never be too many letters! Never! I want the letters of all my favorite authors published in multiple, handsome volumes! With rich annotations! And while we're at it, let's make them fully searchable on the Internet!

That said, a volume of selected letters is a splendid thing as well, and in a just world great glory would accrue to those patient scholars who winnow down the corpus of correspondence to meet the requirements of both the marketplace and bookbinding technology. Tempting though some of the complete sets may be--I'm looking at you, Lord Byron--a stack of Selecteds around one's laptop exudes a powerful joy of its own, because by dipping in almost at random, one can pluck such gems as this, from a letter Gustave Flaubert sent to Louise Colet on Easter of 1853:

The impression that my travel notes made upon you has prompted me, dear Muse, into strange reflections on the hearts of men and women. Decidedly, they are not the same, whatever people say.

On our side there is candour, if not delicacy; we are in the wrong even so, for this candour is a kind of hard-heartedness. If I had omitted my impressions of women, then you would not have found anything to cause you distress! Women keep everything to themselves. They never confide in your unequivocally. The most they can manage is to set you guessing, and, when they tell you things, it comes with such quantities of sauce that the meat disappears beneath it. But if we allow ourselves two or three delinquent little ejaculations, even though our hearts are not really in it, they start moaning and groaning!

Or this, from a letter Barbara Pym sent to Philip Larkin on September 14, 1964:

Our library has been made slightly more interesting--in a macabre way--by a rather peculiar young man joining the staff. He doesn't come in till 10:35 most mornings and is given to cryptic utterances which one can only half hear. I don't have much to do with him myself but hear all this from the other staff. I find it is pleasanter to observe these things rather than actually participate in them.

As a nod to friends who have recently wrestled with book proofs, I'll pass along this opening to a letter sent by the aforementioned Lord Byron to his publisher John Murray:

Dear Sir--I have received & return by this post under cover--the first proof of "Don Juan."--Before the second can arrive it is probably that I may have left Venice--and the length of my absence is so uncertain--that you had better proceed to the publication without boring me with more proofs--I sent by the last post an addition--and a new copy of "Julia's letter," perceiving or supposing the former one in Winter did not arrive.--Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about indelicacy--there is no indelicacy--if he wants that, let him read Swift--his great Idol--but his imagination must be a dunghill with a Viper's nest in the middle--to engender such a supposition about this poem.--For my part I think you are all crazed.

The next time a deadline looms, you might consider seeing if you can put over that closing line.

Staying with the publishing theme, here's Jessica Mitford, getting right to the point in a letter to a literary agent friend in 1990:

Thanks SO much for yr letter, what a pleasure to get it. PUBLISHING: Too ghastly here, too, as I'm sure you know.

Here's a more circumspect passage from a letter E. B. White sent his editor on May 24, 1952, after first seeing the jacket design for Charlotte's Web:

Thanks for the dummy cuts and the jacket design. I like everything. The group on the jacket is charming. My only complaint is that the goose looks, for some reason, a bit snakelike. Perhaps this is because its beak is open, or perhaps because the eye is round like a snake's. You sound so rushed that I presume you don't want to make any revisions, and I would be satisfied have the jacket go as is, if it seems right to you. But no goose-lover in this house is satisfied.

The web effect is OK for the purposes of jacket design but that type of rather mussy Charles Addams attic web is not right for the illustrations. I'm sure that Garth realizes that. Charlotte weaves quite an orderly, symmetrical web.

Closing this batch of publishing correspondence is Herman Melville, who, in writing to his editor about Moby-Dick, not unsurprisingly brings the spooky:

It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ship's cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.

I've only just begun to flip through the new collection of Noel Coward's letters, but I've already found great pleasures, like this installment, sent from New Jersey in November of 1926, of his weekly letters to his doting mother:

The play, dear, has all the earmarks of being a failure! Gladys and Jack and I sat grandly in a box on the First Night and watched it falling flatter and flatter. And I must admit we got bad giggles! They were all expecting something very dirty indeed after the English Censor banning it and they were bitterly disappointed.

Francine Larrimore was very good an A. E. Matthews, too, tho' he forgot most of his lines.

Speaking of parenting, Lord Chesterfield's cynical letters to his son always reward a browse; here's an entertaining bit from a particularly long one, sent on January 8, 1750:

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurts nobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly: these people deal in the marvellous; they have seen some things that never existed; they have seen other things which they never really saw, though they did exist, only because they were thought worth seeing. Has anything remarkable been said or done in any place, or in any company, they immediately present and declare themselves eye or ear witnesses of it. They have done feats themselves, unattempted, or at least unperformed by others. Thy are always the heroes of their own fables; and think that they gain consideration, or at least present attention, by it. Whereas, in truth, all they get is ridicule and contempt, not without a good degree of distrust: for one must naturally conclude, that he who will tell any lie from idle vanity, will not scruple telling a greater for interest. Had I really seen anything so very extraordinary as to be almost incredible, I would keep it to myself, rather than by telling it give anybody room to doubt, for one minute, of my veracity.

Note that Lord Chesterfield, as is his wont, is not objecting to lying, per se, but to lying for no reason.

I'll close with some top-shelf cruel wit, from some masters of the art. First, a few lines from Nancy Mitford, writing from Paris to Evelyn Waugh on August 20, 1952:

Here we are obsessed by the fate of Sire Jacques Drumont, an English millionaire who has been murdered with his wife & small child while camping out. Though all are very sorry for Sire Jacques, & Lady Ann his wife, it is rather hoped that this will cure English millionaires of their mania for camping, they are a bore & start forest fires everywhere.

Finally, there's this comment from Waugh to Mitford from April 8, 1951:

Everyone I met in London was in debt & despair & either much too fat or much too thin.

Note to today's writers: put down those iPhones and write more letters! I'll want to read them when you're dead and I'm old!

Noel Coward on feline intercourse--and smoking

Having actually left the house tonight, I find myself with little time to write, so I'll just give you a snippet from a letter Noel Coward wrote to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that I found in Daniel Mendelsohn's appreciative review of The Letters of Noel Coward (2007) in the January 17 issue of the New York Review of Books:

I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis's singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat.

If I may be forgiven the pun, that's some first-rate cattiness. With deceptive ease, Coward sets his slagging apart from common lot by the simple replacement of "cats fucking," which we've all heard, with "someone" actively fucking the cat, which, thank god, we've not.

Thinking about Noel Coward reminds me of this passage from Enrique Vila-Matas's Montano's Malady (2002, published in an English translation by Jonathan Dunne in 2007):

To smoke in front of the mirror, as everyone knows, is an intelligent exercise. It is also to know how to confront our most ordinary, considered face.

It's hard for me to imagine Coward--one of the great smokers of the twentieth century, at least to the extent that photographs don't lie--not regularly taking pleasure from smoking in front of the mirror. I'm even willing to believe that he would have agreed with Vila-Matas's sentiments, however tongue-in-cheek, for you never get the sense that Coward is anything less than fully aware of the cigarette and its position in the overall composition of Coward-ness (or is it Coward-ice?). Try to picture him puffing away distractedly like your common mid-century American smoker, who, Luc Sante explains, "often smoked without being aware we were smoking"--you can't, can you?

No, it's always the cigarette (sometimes in a holder, sometimes between two fingers) that pulls the image together, leading the eye to the cool, bemused, oh-so-Coward expression--an expression that you can feel animating this later passage, also highlighted by Mendelsohn:

My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noel Coward.

Since I don't smoke, I think I'll have to do the next-best thing and buy Coward's letters. After all, as a society we've more or less agreed that reflected glory is almost the same as real glory, right?