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  Alexander Woollcott, the New Yorker writer and Round Table wit who touted Groucho to the highbrows, was so fat it seems wrong to call him brittle. But brittleness was his trademark mode, so much so that a reader of Woollcott’s letters will be rather stunned by the thoughtfulness of one that he wrote in 1928, at the age of forty-one, to a close friend of his sister, who had just died. He wants to make Julie Woollcott Taber’s deathbed as consolingly vivid as he can for the friend, Lucy Christie Drage, who was unable to be at it. Woollcott’s descriptive success is extraordinary:

  She just lay there at rest in a room that somehow began to look like her, with the yellow roses on the table and the blue silk shawl thrown across the foot of her bed. Day by day the years seemed to fall away from her, cast off like garments she no longer needed … If you bent close, you could hear her say “Sweet, sweet.” The lines went out of her face, the gray out of her hair, the pain out of her eyes … One of her last commissions to me was to write you the birthday letter for which she could no longer hold a pen.

  Even in his prime—let alone our fading memory of him—Woollcott’s enormous person had been swallowed by his even larger persona, the acerbic reviewer and know-it-all broadcaster who inspired the title character in The Man Who Came to Dinner and then went onstage to play it himself. If Groucho’s epistolary stock-in-trade was the seemingly inadvertent insult, Woollcott’s was mock rage: “Listen, you contumacious rat” is how he begins a letter to Ira Gershwin when they’re having a dispute over the proper use of the word “disinterested.”

  Woollcott strongly preferred typed letters to handwritten ones, and generally dictated to a stenographer. Filtration was part of the fun. At his remote country place in Vermont, he explained, “I get news of the outside world in the form of telegrams which are telephoned from Rutland to a boatman living on the shore who takes them down in a firm Spencerian hand and gives them to his son to bring over to me in a motor boat. This makes my favorite occupation guessing what the sender really intended to say.”

  Compliments were best applied with a backhanded slap to the face. In January 1940, while gloomy over England’s wartime plight, he sent this inverted tribute to Beatrice Kaufman: “From sundry sources I hear an echo of your reproaches about my shortcomings as a correspondent. On this subject I never want to hear a peep out of you again. In times like these it is quite impossible for me to write a letter to anyone to whom I have so much to say. So shut your trap, dear, and let me hear no more from you.” A few years later, following Woollcott’s death from a heart attack suffered in mid-broadcast, Kaufman would be co-editing his letters. While he was alive, any burst of tenderness they contained had to be packed in the ice of exasperation: “I can’t believe I’ve known you less than thirteen months,” Woollcott wrote to Dr. Gustav Eckstein in November 1937. “It’s ridiculous.”

  Back in this period when popular culture actually had some, Noël Coward seemed to create about half of it. He put his own lyrics to his own music, and on the London stage sometimes acted the lead in the comedies he’d written. In gossip columns and on the town, he was so much the apex of sophisticated wit that not having been to “a party where they honored Noël Coward” was one reason, according to Rodgers and Hart, that the lady is a tramp. And yet, Coward’s sophisticated wit had a peculiar come-join-us quality. Even when heard from the second balcony, the high-life repartee of Design for Living made the listener feel he was third-row center—and actually belonged there.

  Any chance to unpack what Coward described as his “fluffy little mind” reveals, beneath all the brightly colored excelsior, an assortment of sharp and steely tools, a first-rate intelligence that received only the peculiar education to be had while touring the English provinces as a child actor before the Great War. His glamorous adult success sprang from excellent theatrical instincts and a lot of bloody hard work. If love really were all—well, then there wouldn’t have been time for so much of everything else. Coward generally kept his romantic affairs and disappointments within the well-regulated limits he set for his plays, and built up a devoted, long-serving “family” of secretaries and majordomos who kept his spirits high and his show going decade after decade, through the chromium brilliance of the thirties (Private Lives), the butched-up patriotism of World War II (In Which We Serve) and the mixture of hits and nostalgia-soaked flops from his long last act, which ended only with his death in 1973, three years after a scandalously delayed knighthood.

  Coming after many volumes of his diaries and autobiography, The Letters of Noël Coward turned out to be a bit of a swindle, containing as it did about as many letters to the maestro as from him. Such an arrangement may have biographical potential, but the results can be a terrible jumble; the star seems thrown into a revue that needs lots of cutting and clearer direction. Still, time and again Coward steals back the scene, whether he’s assessing a performance by Deanna Durbin (“she sang ‘There’ll Always Be an England’ with tears rolling down her face as though she were bitterly depressed at the thought”); asking his new fan and correspondent, T. E. Lawrence, Aircraftman #338171, “May I call you 338?”; or defending his latter-day tax exile to a fatuously scolding Laurence Olivier: “I also know, darling, that the best way I can serve my country is not by sitting in it with a head cold grumbling at the climate and the telephone service …”

  For all his verve, Coward’s chief epistolary gift turns out to be for careful truth-telling, for giving actors and intimates the firm correction they require, in a manner that risks, but almost always retains, their affections. His audience for this human and literary artfulness includes a deludedly grand Mary Martin: “Please believe that your future career depends on your throwing away your, and above all [your husband’s] exaggerated and grotesque conception of ‘Stardom’ and concentrating on learning, diligently and painstakingly, to be the fine artiste your potential talent entitles you to be.” Marlene Dietrich, lovesick over Yul Brynner, comes in for the same combination of velvet and sandpaper—“Stop wasting yourself on someone who only really says tender things to you when he’s drunk”—and John Gielgud, upbraided by Coward for “overacting badly and using voice tones and elaborate emotional effects,” takes it like a man: “I think it was like you to write like that and I do appreciate it.”

  This talent to disabuse is in large part the obverse of Coward’s capacity for shrewd self-assessment. He had a firm sense of his professional skills (“my facility for writing adroit swift dialogue and hitting unimportant but popular nails on the head”) and usually took care not to overreach with them. The letter-writing showman sometimes gets his best effects playing against type, as when in the midst of an ill-fated musical adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan, he reports to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne that the voice of the leading lady “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.”

  It was always important to make an impression and then get off. He wrote his biggest hits very quickly (Hay Fever, in three days), and he liked them played the same way; in his correspondence, he sometimes reminds one of Balanchine, wishing that the wretched actors and directors and mixed-up friends would take things faster, faster. When he crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth in 1932, the ship’s bandmaster delighted him by playing only songs composed by the most famous passenger on board. Even so, Coward borrowed the baton and upped the tempo.

  FITTINGLY ENOUGH, on this side of the Atlantic, much of Coward’s epoch was presided over by a president whose cigarette holder often clicked against the stem of his champagne glass. A brilliant radio performer, Franklin Roosevelt, during one first-term broadcast, asked his New Deal constituents to write him with their troubles—a suggestion that wound up sorely taxing the White House mail room, which took to measuring the results with a yardstick. The president’s love-him-or-hate-him personality assured a yield as varied as it was voluminous. One White House secretary culled a list of thirty-one different salutation
s from the arriving letters. They ranged from “Franklin Dillinger Roosevelt” to “My Pal!”

  The variety contrasts with FDR’s own consistency of tone. His policies may have made him a traitor to his class, but his epistolary style betrays only his birthright. Nearly every one of his letters, no matter the recipient, brims with the effervescent serenity of the country gentleman and clubman. In May of 1943, when the time has come to arrange a face-to-face encounter with Stalin, Roosevelt suggests they meet “either on your side or my side of Bering Straits.” Instead of being ranted over in the Jeffersonian manner that we’ll see a couple of chapters from now, enemies are merely diminished, into “that Goering person,” and the “silly Congress,” and, in the case of Thomas E. Dewey, “the little man.” Critics, even the most tormenting, are responded to with an understanding, seigneurial scold: “So, my dear friend,” he writes America First’s General Robert E. Wood, “stop being disturbed and get both of your feet back on the ground.” It helps that the domestic enemy is what his own set would call “people like us.” When a Mr. Alexander Forbes writes The Boston Herald to recommend evasion of taxes earmarked for New Deal boondoggles, Roosevelt remonstrates: “My dear cousin and old classmate, that being your belief, I do not hesitate to brand you as one of the worst anarchists in the United States.”

  But he would prefer to congratulate, buck up and enthuse. “Thrilled” and “grand” are favorite words, the exclamation point as much his characteristic punctuation as the question mark was Lincoln’s. If that predecessor’s self-deprecation often has the feel of sincere self-appraisal, Roosevelt’s put-downs of himself are a pick-me-up, a delightful little dividend atop the day’s cocktail of events. He mocks his own “well known voice—the voice that Wall Street uses to inculcate fear in the breasts of their little grandchildren,” and complains to James Farley, the postmaster general, that if recovery depends on women like the overly robust one on the NRA stamp, then “I am agin recovery.” (Even so, “it is a grand stamp,” probably worthy of inclusion in a collection he’s “tickled to death” to be offered by a voter.)

  Ever the squire, while in office he continues his interest in the activities of the Dutchess County Historical Society and the landscaping to be done at Warm Springs, Georgia. Roosevelt has the outlook of the generalist, which is what he seeks in others. In appointing a reluctant James Couzens to the Maritime Commission, he assures him that “One of the many good reasons that makes me want you for Chairman is that you do not know the first thing about water shipping, naval construction or design!” Whatever self-doubt he had at the beginning, and whatever weariness toward the end, the written evidence of all the long years in between points to a man who enjoyed being president more than anyone except perhaps his distant cousin, Theodore.

  Unlike TR, who could get rather monomaniacal in what he called the “arena,” one part of FDR always seems to be smiling from the box seats at this fellow so busily engaged below. His correspondence offers fewer surprises, fewer contradictions to the popular image, than any other important president’s. Hidden depths and dark corners are so absent that his enjoyment of the job becomes, like his indiscriminate cheer, something dubious. There are moments when his presidency seems to be an avocation, the desktop puttering of the same gentleman hobbyist collecting stamps.

  In his memoirs, de Gaulle referred to Roosevelt as “this artist, this seducer.” The quick note was his means of turning on the charm. In talking Harold D. Smith out of quitting as budget director, Roosevelt tells him: “I would no more accept your resignation than fly by jumping off a roof.” He convinces Harold Ickes not to leave the administration by saying that they have been “married ‘for better or worse’ for too long to get a divorce or for you to break up the home.” Such cozy expressions give a kind of rhetorical ballast to all his snazzy epistolary sailboats.

  Beyond the immediate demands of the in-basket, Roosevelt likes to maintain genuine, ongoing correspondences: with his old Groton headmaster, Endicott Peabody; his childhood friend, now Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King; and his new close associate, Winston Churchill, to whom letters, before mixing business with pleasure, sometimes begin “Former Naval Person.” If the president’s faceless bonhomie toward Stalin looks naïve or just plain silly, Roosevelt’s natural informality acts, in the case of Churchill, as a sort of wartime crash-construction program, speeding up the relationship’s development at a pace beyond the natural. As the editors of their correspondence note, “the two leaders did not really know each other at all at the time the war broke out.” Their single meeting, which Churchill could not even remember, had been at a London dinner in 1918, which FDR had attended as Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy.

  Before they meet again, in the North Atlantic during the summer of ‘41, Roosevelt’s side of their exchange has a tentative feel to it. “I wish much that I could talk things over with you in person,” he writes early in 1940; a year later he is dispatching Harry Hopkins to London to “talk to Churchill like an Iowa farmer,” and sending another letter via the just-defeated and newly cooperative Wendell Willkie. Only after their own face-to-face encounter does Roosevelt rise to his usual full epistolary gusto, one ingredient of which is the chance to talk about third parties behind their back. Sizing up de Gaulle and his Free French rival General Henri Giraud, Roosevelt confides to Churchill his “very distinct feelings that we should not send further equipment or munitions to the French Army in North Africa if our prima donna is to seize control of it from the old gentleman.” The casualness of such letters, which did their bit to save the world, can be regarded as one more species of wartime deception.

  When Roosevelt writes to Churchill, a connoisseur of language is addressing one of its princes. In one unsent letter he tries to deflate the prime minister’s interest in Basic English (“I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only ‘blood, work, eye water and face water,’ which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words”), and he learns to ration his own broadcasting partly because he has seen the diminishing returns from “too much personal leadership” by Churchill.

  The president writes a good many letters to European royalty just before and during the war; the recipients are the only people in the world who can leave him a little starstruck. He offers shelter to several sets of royal offspring, and the Nazi invasion of the Low Countries makes him even more conscious of his Dutch ancestry than he had been. There is a familial feel to the letters being sent Princess Juliana (“Affectionately” from “your old uncle”) and her mother, Queen Wilhelmina. With the monarchs of Europe he could now play knight chevalier, and after years of noblesse oblige toward destitute Americans, his fealty must have been a relief. “You do not know it,” he writes Wilhelmina in 1939, “but the only time I have seen you was when we were both children—and you were driving in one of the parks at The Hague.” When five years later things are reaching their victorious conclusion, he expresses a wish to the exiled Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxemburg (“Dear Lottie”) that he “could stand on the street corner to welcome you back to the city.”

  The state of others’ health always offers Roosevelt a chance to display some cheering, if passionless, affection. (Ira Smith, the White House mails chief, never found “anything particularly personal” in Roosevelt’s “almost professional attitude of good-fellowship,” and a reader of his letters may not either.) When any appointee is under the weather, he approaches them as “special consulting physician” with a tip-top bedside manner. In the summer of ‘35, ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long is ordered to “Watch out for that tummy!” while over in Moscow, Ambassador Bullitt is reassured that “the small growth on [his] spine will develop eventually into wings!” One would have thought he was a perfectly well man himself. Writing these letters may have given him the intermittent illusion that he was.

  Roosevelt liked to remember himself as a young assistant secretary, m
ade for merriment and fast on his feet. If years later, as president, he tried micromanaging any part of the government, it was the Navy. Two days after Pearl Harbor, he would be writing Captain John R. Beardall about plans for a ship called the Sea Cloud: “I incline to her use as a weather patrol ship, that her four lower masts be retained and that she be rigged on these masts with two jibs and four trisails.” The Sea Cloud was a yacht, undergoing conversion, as he had so long ago, to more serious uses.

  IN THE LETTERS of Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss is often “Alger,” not “Hiss,” for a reason beyond the two men’s having once (pace Hiss) known each other. After Chambers left the Communist party, even after he exposed Hiss and brought about his imprisonment for perjury, the two men had something fundamental in common, a peculiar position in the world that made them into familiars. Both were creatures of faith, their “case” an article of belief to supporters on each side of it. As Chambers puts it, both men were pursuing “a mystery in the religious sense.”

  Following Hiss’s conviction, Chambers had little taste for combat of any kind. He preferred to remain on his Maryland farm, nursing his deep glooms and “almost incurable wound.” In June 1952, he writes to his fervent supporter, the conservative journalist Ralph de Toledano, about passing “hours of bitterness which can only be called crippling. While they last, and they come unexpectedly and last for long times, half a day, a whole day, I am unfit for any good use. I woke at dawn the other morning, and, half asleep, felt a sense of pain and distress, and slowly realized, as I wakened more, that it’s because I was sorry that another day had come and that I must live through it.”