New-York tribune., 1922-07-09
TERRIBLY INTIMATE PORTRAITS. 3,
Noel Coward Boni &, Liveright.

Noel coward. Boni & Liveright
TN A PERIOD when under the divine
inspiration of Mr.. Strachey's many
editions authors are returning
more and more to biography and
so much might, in the light Of our
newer conceptions of the art, be done
with it by the younger men, it is dis
couraging to see SO promising youth
as Noel Coward falling at the outset
OF his career into the very worst habits
of biographers. His weakness is espe-
clally apparent when his subject is
some lady Of past and freer age, when
he is lamentably apt to emphasize,
with callous indifference to his effect
upon unwarned readers, the more dubi-
GUS phases Of his subjects character.
For example, in his otherwise up
lifting sketch Of the beautiful Blanca
dl Pianno-Forti. that significant figure
of medieval Italy, he eagerly describes
the occasion when, stopping with her
brother Pizzicato at an inn, Blanca
"was struck with the arresting looks
Of the ostler who was tending their
steaming steeds. Reckoning to him,
she asked of him his name; 'Cres-
cendo.' he replied. Bianca's eyes
flashed fire. 'Accelerato!' she cried
imperiously, and, hypnotized into sub
mission, the scared man fed upstairs,
Blanca following"
Mr.. Coward also dwells unduly upon
numerous other unsavory affairs Of
Bianca's, as we'll as her wholesale
murders-thus missing the opportunity
of pointing, as he might, noble lesson
from this woman's evil life by develop
ing instead of dismissing with line
the theory that her mistakes were all
due to her never having known par
ent's guidance, that "the nuns at the
convent wherein she spent her ripen-
ing childhood were kind, but, alas!
they were not mothers--at least not
all Of them"
Again, writing Of Sophie, uncrowned
Queen of Henry VIII, how brazenly he
recounts that one portentous meeting,
on secluded country road, Of that
simple maiden and the King. "History
tells US little about that interview" he
writes. "Suffice to say that later on
Sophie walked gravely back to Eshcr,
carrying proudly in her hand brooch
cunningly wrought into the shape Of q
. raspberry" And with what unwhole-
some freedom is described the first oc-
casion on which the amorous French
monarch observed the beauty Of Julie
| de Poopinac!-how, walking at Ver-
sailles, the King dropped behind the
Jealous Du Barry to tie his shoe laces,
SO that Julie, running girlishly along
. the moonlit path, bumped violently
into his arched back and q
few days later changed her apart
ments for some on a higher landing"
II
| 4 MOTHER weakness which Mr.. Cow
IA ard shares with his brother biogra-
piers, photographers, memoirists and
literary portraiteurs, is the practice Of
quoting witticisms and celebrated bon
mots. As all readers know, there is
nothing which makes more difficult the
realization of we'll known man or
woman's greatness than the quoting of
his or her verbal felicities, prepared by
assurances Of the subjects keenness
and flexibility Of mind. Yet every new
biographer, learning nothing from his
predecessors, will persist in scattering
such quotations through his work. And
Mr.. Coward is no exception to the rule.
OF ola Bibi," the dancer, for example,
one reads that, summoned to the Kings
opera box, "she curtsied low and,
glancing up at him coyly from between
her knees, gave forth her world re-
nowned epigram, Comment va, papa 2"
King Louis might, indeed, have been