Sir Noël Peirce Coward

From Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of The Letters of Noël Coward:

"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.

[...]

(Coward himself understood the way in which, just below the dazzlingly urbane repartee, there lurked the Teddington native’s unerring sense for what ordinary people were interested in: "I know all about my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head," he wrote to T.E. Lawrence, one of his many illustrious correspondents, in 1931.) Among the greatest pleasures of this collection are, if anything, those moments when we get to see Mrs. Violet Veitch Coward’s son intersect with that "very Noël Coward sort of person," as for instance in this 1954 letter to the Lunts about a production of his new musical version of Lady Windermere’s Fan:

I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis’s singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat. I know that your sense of the urbane, sophisticated Coward wit will appreciate this simile.

Coward very rarely confused himself with "Coward."