‘Dance, dance, dance, little lady,’ sang Noël Coward in This Year of Grace, in 1928.
Youth is fleeting – to the rhythm beating
In your mind.
Time and tide and trouble
Never, never wait:
Let the cauldron bubble –
Justify your fate.
Dance, dance, dance, little lady
Leave tomorrow behind.1
It’s a migraine of a song, whose speed and rhythm are doubly menacing when sung by Coward himself. It was a decade of wonderful songs – ‘Ma, he’s Making Eyes at Me’ (1922), ‘Yes We Have No Bananas’ (1923), ‘California, Here I Come’ (1924), ‘Tea for Two’ (1925), ‘Valencia’, ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’, ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ (1926), ‘Chinatown’, ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ (1927), ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’ (1928), ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee’, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (1929).2 We are singing them still. This was because so many people had gramophones, and increasing numbers had wireless. (But gramophones remained expensive. A table gramophone with a pleated diaphragm instead of a sound-box or horn cost £22.10s. in 1924, when a stock-broker’s senior clerk earned £4.15s. a week.) On 15 June 1920, Dame Nellie Melba sang from the Marconi station at Chelmsford, Essex, at the invitation of the Daily Mail, which paid the singer the colossal sum of £1,000. Her voice was clearly heard in Berlin and Paris. By the end of 1921 more than three thousand wireless amateurs had asked the Post Office, who controlled wireless telegraphy in Britain, to provide regular programmes. In America, over a million people now had receiving sets on which they could ‘listen in’, as the phrase went, to concerts, market prices, weather reports, sermons and speeches.
After considerable deliberation, the Post Office entrusted the task of entertaining the nation to a single company, the British Broadcasting Corporation. By December 1922 the BBC was broadcasting for forty hours a week. Listening in was a solemn ritual. Long poles for aerials had to be erected at the end of your garden. At first you had to listen on headphones to a crystal set, but soon devices were contrived in which the coils, wireless, loudspeaker and controls were contained within a single box or cabinet, and some advanced households even concealed their aerial in the attic. In 1924 the king acquired a set. ‘How soon shall we be able to see by radio?’ asked a newspaper correspondent in 1925. J. L. Baird had demonstrated that a still photograph could be transmitted and received by radio, and on 27 January 1926 in an upper room in Frith Street, Soho, he demonstrated ‘television’.
But although serious-minded people hoped the wireless would be a means of improving the populace, it was inevitable that its most popular programmes should have been dance bands such as Jack Hylton’s orchestra, playing the latest foxtrot, or comedians developing the unique opportunities for humour which radio offered: Tommy Handley, Stainless Stephen and Vivian Foster (the Vicar of Mirth) became household names, and more people listened in to them than to the real clergy, such as the bishop of London, who was cut off in mid-sentence from the Savoy Hill Studio, as listeners heard him remarking: ‘I don’t think that was too long, do you?’3
Cinema added a new imaginative dimension, not only to people’s lives but to their shared inner lives. 1920–29 has been called the Golden Age of Hollywood. The truly remarkable thing about this was that, especially since it was also the last decade of the silent film, America for the first time became the centre of the cultural world. You did not need to know a language to sit enthralled by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Ronald Colman, Greta Garbo, Harold Lloyd and Clive Brook. Chaplin seems eerily unfunny today, as do back numbers of supposedly funny magazines like Punch. But what survives is his extraordinary mimetic, almost tragically mimetic, gift. Rudolph Valentino, born Rodolpho Alphonso Guglielmi di Valentino d’Antonguolla, settled in America in 1913. He began playing bit parts in Hollywood in 1918, but it was in the 1920s that he rose to glory. Perhaps aptly, his first big role was as one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in Rex Ingram’s film of that name in 1921. His face, twice or thrice life size, stared over towns all over Europe from placards and posters. Animated, on the flickering black and white screen of darkened cinemas, he led men and women into realms of new fantasy in such popular works as The Sheik (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), The Young Rajah (1922) and Monsieur Beaucaire (1924). When he visited England in 1925 for the premiere of The Eagle, he was mobbed. The Second Coming could hardly have attracted more hysterical attention, and when he died the next year, thousands attended his funeral, openly weeping.
The politicians and aspirant politicians of the new era could not fail to notice the hypnotic effects of the new technology. The endearing amateurism of real bishops and politicians could only send listeners to sleep, but it did not take much imagination to see how demagogues could use radio and film. When the facetious Punch humorist and detective story-writer Father Ronald Knox broadcast in 1926 an account of an unemployment riot in London, hundreds telephoned Savoy Hill in alarm. They had believed his description of mobs attacking the Houses of Parliament and people being roasted alive in Trafalgar Square.4 The mass media increased levels of public credulity. The world awaited leaders who could combine the bloodcurdling imagination of Knox and the hypnotic appearance of Valentino. No human being, even Napoleon, had been idolized as Valentino was. The new Napoleons could become faces staring from every cinema, voices yelling from every wireless set.
I’m so ashamed of it,
But I must admit
The sleepless nights I’ve had about the boy.
On the Silver Screen
He melts my foolish heart in every single scene.5
One of the things which cinema and radio could accomplish was the illusion that purely passive viewers and listeners were somehow sharing in the action of a new age. Tuning in on the crystal set to the Savoy Orpheans, broadcast from 10.30 to 11.30 each night, you could imagine yourself a flapper in the heart of London, even though you were a factory girl in Bootle or a secretary in Wolverhampton. Purchasing the Melody Maker (founded 1926) you could read all about the latest jazz bands, and buy their records, even if you lived miles from anywhere that they might have been performing. The agitated sense that everyone was having, or meant to be having, a good time in the aftermath of war added, presumably, to the gloom of those who were not, and increased the frenzy of those who were. People became obsessed by speed. In 1926, the land speed record was gained by Parry Thomas on Pendine Sands, Carmarthenshire, at 178 mph. On 3 March of the following year, he was killed in his Thomas special when the driving chain broke and he was decapitated.6 Pleasure itself had to be dangerous, and harder work than work. The nightclub, that self-punishing institution for the hedonist, flourished as never before. Alec Waugh in his novel Kept (1925) described them as ‘second-rate places for third-rate people’.
Queen of the third-raters, if this was true, was Kate or ‘Ma’ Meyrick, born in Dublin, who married a medical student in England, lived in Brighton and bore him four children. In 1919 the Meyricks separated, Ma Meyrick came up to London and her jollities began. After a police raid on Dalton’s Club, next to the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square, Ma Meyrick protested strongly, both at having to pay £25 fine and at having her ‘innocent venture’ described by a magistrate as ‘a den of iniquity’. She moved over the Charing Cross Road and started another club, Brett’s, which she sold after only a year for £1,000. Then she started the ‘43 club, which was raided after only two months. Ma Meyrick was fined for selling drinks after closing hours. The ‘43 became a cult, with such illustrious clients as King Carol of Romania, the Crown Prince of Sweden, Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead having been seen there at least once. Alas for Ma Meyrick, she was eventually sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labour for bribing a policeman, Station-Sergeant George Goddard. His pay was £6 a week, but he was found by investigating officers with £12,000 in cash in one of his residences. He owned a house in Streatham, a car and two safe-deposit accounts, stuffed with notes. Several of the notes could be traced to Ma Meyrick and her girls. Goddard did eighteen months with hard labour. When Ma Meyrick was released, the Bright Young Things sang:
Come all you birds
And sing a roundelay.
Now Mrs Meyrick’s
Out of Holloway.
They were a long way from the struggles of the working classes in the big industrial towns, from the growing pains of the incipient League of Nations, from the agonized inhabitants of the occupied Ruhr, from the warring Irish and the oppressed Indians. And yet, the noise of young people partying, dancing their Charlestons and singing their songs seemed emblematic of their times. There was a palpable sense of self-conscious decadence in the air, as on the airwaves; decadence in the most literal sense of things slithering downwards. When, in June 1922, the Leeds choral society gave a superb performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s The Apostles at the Queen’s Hall, according to George Bernard Shaw there were only Princess Mary, Viscount Lascelles and about four other people in the stalls. ‘The occasion’, said Shaw, ‘was infinitely more important than the Derby, Goodwood, the Cup Finals, the Carpentier fights or any of the occasions on which the official leaders of society are photographed and cinematographed laboriously shaking hands with persons on whom Molière’s patron, Louis XIV, and Bach’s patron, Frederick the Great, would not have condescended to wipe their boots.’7
Shaw was giving expression to a widespread view among intellectuals that something had happened, not just to concert audiences in London, and not just to England, but to Western civilization in general. Whether the war had caused or promoted or only reflected this something was incidental to the fact that it had happened: Western civilization had gone down the drain. Shaw’s invocation of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great resonates with the idea, which many of his contemporaries shared, that they had moved into a new era altogether. It was possible to imagine Frederick the Great holding a conversation with Tennyson or Carlyle, but not to imagine him (much as he might have enjoyed it for all sorts of reasons) sitting through Rudolph Valentino’s Monsieur Beaucaire.
The arch-exponent of the idea that the twentieth century marked a new era, the end of a culture, was Oswald Spengler in his immensely long Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline of the West.
One day in the early 1930s, after his return to Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived at the rooms of his friend Miles Drury looking distressed. ‘I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.’ Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, sees the anecdote as what amounts to ‘a pictorial representation’ of one of Wittgenstein’s favourite books, The Decline of the West.
Spengler does not offer any arguments to substantiate his vision of history. His book, rather like the lectures of Hegel on the Philosophy of History, which it copied, or Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, which it influenced, is one of those catch-all visions of human things which irritate the empirical, and delight a certain type of Idealist, mind. Using an analogy of Goethe’s quasi-scientific work Die Metamorphose der Pflanze, Spengler saw cultures as evolving like plant-forms, flourishing and then atrophying. In a huge schema, he classified and categorized nine cultures, to which he gave arcane names – the Egyptian culture was ‘Magian’, the Russian culture ‘Flat plane’, the ancient Roman and Greek world the Apollonian. Modern culture was Faustian. Whereas the culture of Apollo conceived of man as living in an enclosed, finite space, the Faustian sees humanity as belonging to infinite space. So Western painting develops perspective, Gothic spires soar upward and Cecil Rhodes dreams of further dominions and conquests for the British Empire.
Each culture has a cycle of four seasons. In the spring, there is the time of seminal myths – for our culture this was the High Middle Ages, for the Apollonian it was the Homeric age. Then comes summer – for the Faustians, the growth of cities, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Galileo and the triumphs of the uncorrupted intellect. Autumn is the time of ripening, with hints of exhaustion, heard by Spengler in the philosophy of Kant and the music of Mozart. Finally comes winter, the time of the world city, a rootless proletariat, plutocracy, imperialism, tyranny. Culture ceases to be culture and ossifies into mere ‘civilization’. The highest works of the imagination are achieved not by artists but by scientists.
Spengler’s book was enormously widely read and discussed on the European mainland, as well it might be after a destructive war. When he finished it before the war he could not find a publisher. In 1918, it exactly suited the pessimistic mood of the German-speaking world and it became a bestseller – not published in English until 1923. It was inevitable that Spengler was seen as a proto-Nazi, since, like Carlyle before him, he saw the only possibility of salvation in the rise of a new hero to visit and redeem his people. In fact, he did not see Hitler as that hero at all, his works were not admired by the Nazi ideologues, and when he died in 1936, Spengler was bitter and resentful that his work was not any longer appreciated in the land of his birth.
Certainly had he spent any time in England during the 1920s, and chosen for his company either the intellectuals or the supposedly Bright Young Things, Spengler might have found plenty of data for his notebooks, and yet more people whose antics would have baffled or dismayed Frederick the Great or Louis XIV.
The war had been fought and concluded by old men, and the rising generation, looking back on what they had just missed, did not feel inclined to share the values of their fathers. If the Eminent Victorians had bred up mass murderers such as Kitchener, Haig, Asquith and Lloyd George, then Lytton Strachey was surely right to have guyed them? Logan Pearsall Smith saw in Strachey ‘a sense equal I think to Voltaire’s sense of the preposterousness of things, a shining sword of wit equal to or superior to his’.8 Harold Acton, an eighteen-year-old Etonian aesthete about to go up to Oxford, saw Strachey as a literally iconic figure. His first glimpse of him had been at Garsington Manor, Lady Ottoline Morrell’s house near Oxford. ‘An Italian gate and avenue of ilexes led up to the house, an Elizabethan structure in stone which had once been a monastery. Behind it a bank sloped down to a pond with a sculptured group in the middle and statues along the side.’ The pair who next enter the picture might themselves be statues in some pagan reredos, or, as Acton himself saw, figures depicted by Renaissance art. ‘Lytton Strachey was standing beside the hostess, dressed, for all her high stature, in a Kate Greenaway costume of heliotrope silk with white stockings and I thought: What a fabulous couple! They should be painted together, hand in hand, like Van Eyke’s [sic] portrait of John [sic] Arnolfini and his wife in the National Gallery. Lytton Strachey’s beard and Lady Ottoline’s hair seemed to have caught fire from the afternoon sun.’9 Acton himself, when still a schoolboy, had achieved mythic status. One of his contemporaries described going to see one of Diaghilev’s ballets at the Alhambra ‘when Brian [Howard] and Harold [Acton] walked into the stalls, in full evening dress, with long white gloves draped over one arm, and carrying silver-topped canes and top-hats, looking perhaps like a couple of Oscar Wildes. My step-mother was astonished at the sight of them, and thought they must be foreigners. I was much too nervous, at about fifteen, to say that they were two of my very great friends from Eton.’10
Acton had been mortified, on that first visit to Garsington, when Lady Ottoline’s husband, Colonel Morrell, had sat at a pianola, wearing riding-breeches, and rattling out ‘a version of Scheherazade’. It was a blasphemy to attempt a honky-tonk rendition of the most memorable and romantic of Diaghilev’s ballets. ‘For many a young artist Scheherazade had been an inspiration equivalent to Gothic architecture for the Romantics or Quattrocento frescoes for the pre-Raphaelites. But now I put my hands to my ears and fled, as discreetly as I could.’ Evidently not as discreetly as he had hoped, since, on another visit, when someone offered Acton a lift in their car, Ottoline Morrell sharply observed: ‘Mr Acton prefers to hike.’11 Unlike Englishmen of the period, Diaghilev was not in the least furtive about his homosexuality. It was part of his art. He was one of a whole group of gay artists and writers who led the rebellion against the nineteenth century, taking their revenge on the bourgeoisie for the persecution of Oscar Wilde. Proust had been present in 1910 at the opening night of Scheherazade in Paris in 1910, accompanied by his close friend Reynaldo Hahn.
Diaghilev was a sort of homosexual-aesthetic missionary, bringing to the new generation the message that Beauty and Love mattered more than the hateful values which had destroyed, and were destroying, bourgeois Europe. His ballets, choreographed by Michel Fokine, were a vehicle for his lover Nijinsky, and the sublime Pavlova. He also organized art exhibitions, and concert performances of great opera singers. It was Diaghilev who introduced the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin to the West. He came to London in 1911, the year of George V’s coronation. Osbert Sitwell wrote in his autobiography that the Ballets Russes’ performance of Stravinsky’s Firebird changed his life. ‘Now I knew where I stood. I would be for so long as I lived, on the side of the arts.’12 It is a strange expression, suggesting that by liking ballet, Sitwell was taking sides – which of course he was. Stravinsky took sides when he composed The Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and his early symphonies, in two very courageous senses: he was on the one hand bravely innovative in orchestration, richly, flamboyantly demonstrating that Romanticism and Modernism need not be opposed; and he was forced to take sides politically. Stranded in Switzerland during the First World War, he made the tragic choice made by so many of his countrymen after the Revolution, not to return to Russia. So it is clear enough what ‘sides’ Stravinsky was forced to take.
For the English aesthetes, the battles were a little less dangerous, which perhaps explains why they so often resorted to silliness as a weapon against a disapproving bourgeoisie. You certainly could not get much sillier than the Sitwells. Indeed, they could be said to have taken silliness beyond the art form and made it a whole way of life. (When his colonel, in the 4th Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, suggested that the young Osbert Sitwell should smarten himself up by growing a moustache, Osbert replied: ‘What colour sir?’13)
Edith (1887–1964), Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell (1897–1988) Sitwell were the children of an eccentric Yorkshire baronet. When travelling on the train in the 1860s, their father had been asked his identity and replied: ‘I am four years old and the youngest baronet in England.’14 ‘Sir George is the strangest old bugger you ever met,’ his butler, Henry Moat, told the composer Constant Lambert.15
The children made a career out of their father’s and mother’s ‘strangeness’, mocking and lampooning them to their friends and in their books. Their childhood was divided, enviably, between three splendid houses. Renishaw was Sir George’s great seat near Sheffield, which served D. H. Lawrence as the model of Wragby in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Montegufoni was a villa in Tuscany with over a hundred rooms, which Sir George had bought at the beginning of the century. And Scarborough was the beautiful seaside resort where both sets of grandparents resided. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ a friend of her mother’s asked Edith, to receive the inevitable reply: ‘A genius.’16 Such is the human capacity for self-deception, that all three Sitwell siblings believed in their collective and individual genius, though neither Edith nor Sacheverell (‘Sachie’) left anything behind them in written form which was evidence of any particular talent. Edith wrote what she thought were poems, as did Sachie, who also indulged in travel-cum-art books in purple prose, of which Southern Baroque Art was the most popular. Osbert was no genius, but by contrast with his siblings he was a supremely gifted writer of autobiography, and his Left Hand, Right Hand! sequence is a wonderful, sub-Proustian compilation of anecdote and observation. Sir George is, of course, the hero of the story, with his desire to tell everyone their business – whether it was Sargent, painting their group portrait, or telling a knife-maker to soak the handles in condensed milk. ‘Unless you learn to play ping-pong properly, you can never be a leader of men,’ he once told his elder son. And, a good piece of advice for an artist, but of course ridiculed by his children: ‘Such a mistake to have friends.’
Edith’s greatest work of art was her Plantagenet-style appearance. Elizabeth Bowen once likened her to ‘a high altar on the move’. Harold Acton saw her in 1922 as ‘a rare jewel, a hieratic figure in Limoges enamel … Clamped in some tin biscuit box, but rarer, more hieratic against this background. The pale oval face with its almond eyes and long thin nose, had often been carved in ivory by true believers. Her entire figure possessed a distinction seldom to be seen outside the glass cases of certain museums. Physically, she was an extraordinary survival from the Age of Chivalry.’17 Her most famous piece, Façade, was first put on in 1922, in the siblings’ drawing room in Carlyle Square, Chelsea. It consisted in a series of her nonsensical ‘poems’, set to quite spirited music by Sachie’s young protégé William Walton, and declaimed by Edith and her brothers through a megaphone, or Sengerphone, a papier mâché instrument acquired from a singer called Senger. T. S. Eliot particularly cringed at the Sitwells’ ‘poems’ since, somewhere in the minds of the public, or the Sitwells themselves, there existed a false syllogism. Deep, modern or high-falutin’ verses which mean nothing at all are ‘difficult’. Eliot’s poetry is difficult. Therefore the Sitwells are in the avant garde with Eliot and Pound.
Eliot appears, in his ‘four piece suit’, at the parties of those who had friends – at Lady Ottoline’s, Virginia Woolf’s, the Sitwells’. But one senses him holding aloof. For Osbert, Edith and Sachie, as for Virginia and friends in the so-called Bloomsbury set, having the idea of oneself as an artist was an illusion which friends were perilously good at fostering and encouraging. That is the peril, for an artist, of ‘sets’. When Tennyson read some of Maud aloud in Benjamin Jowett’s drawing room at Oxford, the Master of Balliol said, in his high squeaky voice: ‘I should not publish that if I were you, Tennyson.’ No such voice in the early decades of the twentieth century was ever heard in the Sitwells’ drawing-room, nor over the other side of London in Bloomsbury. Such a mistake to have friends. The second performance of Façade was held at the Aeolian Hall in the Chenil Galleries, King’s Road. Harold Acton took a boyfriend, Evelyn Waugh, then an undergraduate at Hertford College. All the handpicked audience roared and cheered. On another occasion, Mrs Robert Mathias, patron of the Ballets Russes, had a performance in her drawing-room in the presence of Diaghilev. What can he have thought?
Of course, as soon as Façade appeared on a public stage it was lampooned and condemned by all the critics. The Sitwells took this as evidence of the philistinism of the bourgeoisie. The British tradition had been firmly established, of talentless ‘arty’ people convincing themselves that exhibitionism was a substitute for talent. It could be said that this had been going on in the nineteenth century to some extent, but in the twentieth century, there came a parting of the ways in England, especially in London, between good popular books, art and music, and ‘highbrow’ versions which only the initiated could appreciate. Within this veiled holy of holies, the initiates could learn to mouth the names of composers or artists they were supposed to admire, without actually possessing any discernment at all. True artists found themselves either alone, or being patronized by those who were ‘on the side of the arts’, a concept which would surely have been alien to Beethoven or Wordsworth.
One of the first to mock the Sitwells (as ‘two wiseacres and a cow’) was a truly brilliant young man called Noël Coward (1899–1973). A child prodigy, born in the suburb of Teddington to musical parents, Coward had started his professional career aged ten, playing Prince Mussel in The Goldfish alongside the infant Micheal Mac Liammoir (then Alfred Willmore) and Ninette de Valois (then Ninette Devalois). His favourite stage performer at the time was a stand-up comedian called Phil Ray (‘I always abbreve, it’s a hab’). At thirteen he played Slightly in Peter Pan, with Pauline Chase. The Observer noted: ‘The immortal Slightly as acted by Master Noël Coward, is quite a young boy and his grave pretence at wisdom is all the funnier.’ A voracious reader and playgoer, Coward wrote two novels by the time he was eighteen, as well as three plays, and some lyrics and songs. The first play of his own in which he appeared on the West End stage in London was I’ll Leave it to You; it got good notices, but closed within five weeks. In 1922 he wrote a play called The Young Idea, and sent the script to GBS. Shaw wrote back a detailed critique, but concluded: ‘unless you can get clean away from me you will begin as a back number, and be hopelessly out of it when you are forty’.
That was not part of Coward’s ambition at all. Already he had developed his highly distinctive, clipped manner of utterance (he said it was to make his deaf mother hear what he said), but it was more brilliant than that. Cruel, cold and oddly toneless, the voice was the perfect vehicle for the words. He was the greatest cruel-verse genius in English since Alexander Pope. With his sleek, immaculately combed hair, bony face and sardonic mouth, he could have had an unkind expression, but there was a sense of the tragic in his large eyes. He was relentlessly ambitious, keen to improve his work, and to make contacts in the world. One of his earliest friends was Gladys Calthorn, who was to work with him as a designer for dozens of shows. Stranded in Naples together with no money in 1922, they had to go to the British consul, who agreed to cash them a cheque. ‘Who shall I make it payable to?’ Noël asked. ‘Somers Cox.’ ‘And some ‘asn’t,’ said Gladys.
The next year, 1923, Coward formed another of his great collaborations, this time with Gertrude Lawrence in a revue of which he was composer and part author called London Calling. Just as the show was in rehearsal, Coward was lunching at the Ivy Restaurant. It was a favourite haunt of his from the days when it had linoleum on the floor, two waitresses and paper napkins until, as happened rapidly in the early Twenties, it became a haunt of famous actors and of le monde. Its inspired owner Abel Giandolini hired an expert cook, and the tables soon filled up not only with famous theatre people, but with Winston Churchill, the Aga Khan, Duff and Diana Cooper (who came for the spaghetti) and Jacob Epstein, all to be seen there regularly. One day Osbert Sitwell stopped at young Coward’s table and suggested he came to Façade. The invitation led to one of the Sitwells’ silly carefully orchestrated feuds. Coward did come to Façade, and instantly added a sketch to London Calling about the Swiss Family Whittlebot. Miss Hernia Whittlebot, says the stage direction, ‘should be effectively and charmingly dressed in undraped dyed sacking, a cross between blue and green, with a necklet of uncut amber beads in unconventional shapes. She must wear a gold band rather high up on her forehead from which hang a little clump of Bacchanalian fruit below each ear. Her face is white and weary, with a long chin and nose and bags under her eyes.’18 ‘Life is essentially a Curve,’ says Hernia, ‘and Art is an oblong within that Curve. My brothers and I have been brought up on Rhythm as other children are brought up on Glaxo.’19 The Sitwells took umbrage and refused to speak to Coward for forty years.
In 1924 he staged his play The Vortex, about an embarrassing society lady who has much younger lovers, and her son, a drug addict. The first night, cleverly talked up by the fashionable, was in a tiny, hard-seated theatre in Hampstead, the Everyman, attended by Eddie Marsh, Edwina Mountbatten and others of comparable fame. Stella Gibbons wrote:
I was present at the very first performance of The Vortex in a little kind of converted drill-hall in Hampstead and I remember how shocked I was at the drug-addict boy (he would have been called a Drug Fiend in those days by ordinary people) and ever since I have had such enduring pleasure and laughter from his songs and jokes. He seems to me to incarnate the myth of the twenties (gaiety, courage, pain concealed, amusing malice) and that photograph … with poised fingertips held to hide the mouth, with the eyes delightfully smiling, is an incarnation in another form, even to the extreme elegance of the clothes.20
The Vortex still ‘works’ on the stage today, especially since they often now include in it his 1930s hit ‘Mad about the Boy’.
But it is in his lyrics that Coward lives for ever. Throughout the Twenties, a series of revues and plays poured from him. He could be funny, harsh, naughty. He could also get away with being sentimental. ‘I’ll See You Again’ from Bitter Sweet must be one of the most beautiful songs written in that song-filled decade. He could also, without heaviness or pretension, offer haunting commentaries on his times. ‘What’s going to happen to the children, when there aren’t any more grown-ups?’ seems as good a question as any to ask of the decade in which Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Sitwell, Brian Howard and Peter Quennell whooped and roared. ‘It’s very hard on nature when she’s made a lot of plans/To have them all frustrated by a lot of Peter Pans.’21 Or, from the slightly later ‘Bright Young People’ (1931):
Look at us three,
Representative we
Of a nation renowned for virility.
We’ve formed a cult of puerility
Just for fun.
You may deplore
The effects of war
Which are causing the world to decay a bit.
We’ve found our place and will play a bit
In the sun.
Though Waterloo was won upon the playing fields of Eton,
The next war will be photographed, and lost, by Cecil Beaton.22