Volume 55, Number 1 · January 17, 2008
His Design for Living
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The Letters of Noël Coward
edited and with commentary by Barry Day
Knopf, 780 pp., $37.50
'Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time,' Kenneth Tynan wrote a little over fifty years ago, 'exactly what we mean by 'a very Noël Coward sort of person.'' Tynan himself was just twenty-six when he made this confident pronouncement, and although it's possible if not indeed probable that 'a very Noël Coward sort of person' doesn't signify a great deal to most twenty-six-year-olds today, some of them—and certainly most people twice their age—would know precisely what kind of person Tynan was talking about. That person, we know, would be witty and amusing, with an epigram on his lips, a cocktail in one perfectly manicured hand, and a lighted cigarette in the other; he would, moreover, be impeccably and elegantly dressed, and would always manage to be just as impeccably, and perhaps a trifle theatrically, posed whenever he appeared in public.
Review, 4410 words
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