The Masquerade — Noël Coward, the man and the mask

He wrote 50 plays, nine musicals, at least 400 songs and some of the world’s cattiest one-liners. (In a retort to the news that a dim acquaintance had “blown his brains out”: “He must have been an incredibly good shot.”) By 1928, Noël Coward had arrived. He was not yet 30. That year, he produced a musical revue of song and dance numbers, titled This Year of Grace.

Four years earlier, Coward’s play The Vortex had rocked London with its depiction of a sexually voracious mother in a neurotic relationship with her drug-taking son. Both characters have been read as ciphers for the era’s marginalised gay men, whose number included Coward. Everyone in London was scandalised. Everyone in London, therefore, had seen it.

“The play deals with a section of society for which no right-thinking man or woman can have the slightest pity or sympathy,” roared The Telegraph. Nonetheless, the Prince of Wales was in the audience one week; the Queen of Norway the next. The Times, in a review that has endured better, wrote that The Vortex “has wit, observation, and a sincerity, leaping out between flippancies”, but warned of the bright young playwright: “He should choose quietness where cleverness tempts him.”

Since childhood, as Oliver Soden states in this substantive new biography, Coward had eschewed quietness whenever cleverness might offer a louder option. Yet he wore his cleverness as a mask, his quietness in hiding beneath it — or such is Soden’s thesis.

Soden is the first to admit that if you search for Coward’s earnest expression of authentic feeling, you’ll search in vain

This Year of Grace proved another hit, coming as it did on the back of The Vortex and the farce of manners Hay Fever. As Soden notes, it showcased Coward “as a one-man band”, creator of sketches, lyrics, music and even choreography. It also encapsulated the darkness that Soden detects threading through Coward’s nihilistic veins.

“Dance, Little Lady” was perhaps the show’s most popular number. It depicted an adolescent girl losing herself in the vacuity of London’s nightlife; the role was danced by a flapper, while the crooner Sonnie Hale sang to her as if in warning. The lyrics are sinister: “Laughter some day dies / And when the lights are starting to gutter / Dawn — through the shutter — / Shows you’re living in a world of lies.” As Soden notes, the number is “a tarantella, to be performed with a frenzy and hysteria designed to ward off horror”.

That horror — the void beyond the dance floor — was expressed by a chorus looming around the leading lady, wearing papier-mâché masks reminiscent of Greek tragedy. Rather than eye holes, the masks had painted eyes, giving a clownish, drugged or ghostly appearance. As Soden points out, masks were not entirely unfamiliar to London audiences in 1928. In the aftermath of the first world war, they littered the faces of disfigured soldiers, masking battlefield scars too grotesque to be seen in public.

Masquerade runs to well over 500 pages. Soden presents Coward as having nine lives, like a cat — among them the child actor, the King of Camp and the patriotic dealer in wartime intelligence. Yet he keeps returning to this one musical revue, this one particular number and its masks. Following the deaths of Coward’s partner Graham Payn and his secretary Joan Hirst, Soden has had access to far more of his subject’s correspondence than any previous biographer but is the first to admit that, if you search for Coward’s earnest expression of authentic feeling, you’ll search in vain. “What matters in Noël Coward is not what lies beneath the mask,” he opines “but the mask itself.” Oscar Wilde’s maxim on masks, predictably, is quoted at this book’s conclusion. “Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Soden’s mask-themed biography forms the latest in an emerging style of “biographical reading”. Katherine Rundell’s hit biography of John Donne, Super-Infinite, and Joe Moshenska’s Making Darkness Light, on Milton, are pioneers of the genre: biography as critical memoir, where the biographer guides the reader through their own experience of encountering the artist. This is biography as idiosyncrasy.

When “biographical reading” works, as it does here, it is because there is enough scholarly research to justify the fashionable flights of structural fancy. Soden has both the research chops and the flights of fancy. Each section opens with a semi-fictional vignette written in one of Coward’s own genres. (Hence a scene in which Coward is interrogated about his wartime activity, written by Soden as a screenplay.)

At the book’s climax, Soden imagines himself on stage in combat with different Coward scholars, “trying to keep a note of smug correction from his voice” as he imagines scoring points off Philip Hoare, his subject’s most significant previous biographer. If you can handle such self-indulgence, there’s a captivating biography here, by an emerging literary star.

The timing feels apt. Coward triumphed in “periods of frenzied social change and liberation achieved against a backdrop of potential destruction”. Oliver Soden offers us Noël Coward for an online generation, to whom a precarious life of permanent self-performance should feel familiar. We never quite find the man behind Coward’s mask, but that is somewhat the point.

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward by Oliver Soden Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £30, 656 pages