Coward
I knew Noël Coward as a playwright, even though I've never seen or read more than the odd snippet of Hay Fever or Blithe Spirit. And I knew him as a songwriter and actor. I hadn't known, however, that he'd also written a novel and a four volumes of short stories. It wasn't until I caught sight of his Collected Short Stories at Stephen's Bookshop in Monmouth the other month that I was put right on that account. It's a volume that brings together a dozen tales from his first two collections To Step Aside (1939) and Star Quality (1951). The copy I bought (Fig. 1) is a 1980 reprint of an edition first issued in 1962. I finished reading it on Friday.
It gets off to a rather chilly start with “Traveller's Joy”, an account of a one-night stand in a provincial town between a past-his-prime actor & his landlady; and “Aunt Tittie”, a coming of age story about an orphaned boy joining his wayward aunt in her peripatetic & precarious life as a performing artiste. Although there is affection in these stories too, it's not so hard when reading them to imagine why a contemporary wrote of Coward being “one of the saddest men I've ever known”. In some of the later stories there is more warmth, and a few dabs of sentimentality, as in “Mr. and Mrs. Edgehill, a tale based on an ex-pat couple Coward took a shine to while travelling in the South Pacific.
In his introduction, Coward describes the short story as demanding “perhaps a little less rigid self-discipline than a play, and a great deal more than a novel”. There are occasional lapses in this rigidity, such as in the digression about gossip columnists in “A Richer Dust” (a story set in Hollywood). In “The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe”, meanwhile, the protagonist's un-self-aware hypocrisies are perhaps catalogued at more meticulous length than was strictly necessary. It is nevertheless a book whose considerable charm outweighs its flaws. Coward was evidently an attentive student of human nature, and had both a sharp ear for dialogue & a keen eye for a telling detail.
Today I undergo the rigours of another birthday: my fifty-seventh. I gave myself the gift of the day off work, and have made use of the time, in none-too-celebratory fashion, to get a flu shot. With none of the pharmacies where my workplace insurance would cover the cost located close to home, I drove to Caerleon to get it done, afterwards taking the opportunity for another look around the National Roman Legion Museum there. I happened to be perusing a map on the wall of early Roman sites in Britain when the clock struck eleven, and two minutes' silence for Remembrance Day were announced.
The cheese of the week has been Cornish Blue. While standard Cornish Blue (which I haven't yet tried) is supposedly a mild cheese meant to be eaten relatively young, they also sell a “tasty blend of our most mature blue cheese pressed into a ceramic pot” (Fig. 2). I picked up one of those at Tesco on Saturday. Here, once one has extricated the thickish plug of wax used as a sealant, one finds mild creaminess has given way to a crumblier texture, and a very satisfying savoury piquancy.
