PRESENT INDICATIVE

by Noel Coward ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 1937

First and foremost, don't sell this as a wise cracking autobiography of a leader of the younger generation. It isn't --and anyone who expects the barbed and near-malicious pen of Noel Coward's plays will be disappointed. But for those who want a thoroughly entertaining, honest and original inside picture of the upward struggles of one generally assumed to have born with the dramatic silver spoon in his mouth, here it is. Not a personal autobiography but as revealing a picture of the theatre with its glitter and tinsel, its seamy and tragic side, its fascination and its generosity and its bigness, as I have chanced to read. In his picture of his youth, a small boy pushed as a prodigy by an ambitious mother, making himself thoroughly and detestably obnoxious, a youth playing juvenile leads, or understudying them, poverty, disillusionment, hardship, almost never achieving a goal -- and through it all sustaining himself with faith that somewhere in the world he loved there was a place for him and that it was all worth while -- this part is perhaps the finest in the whole, for there have been other pictures of success (though few that tell the story of success depict also the setbacks and failures in the midst of success, the weaknesses in self that occasioned them). Rather surprisingly, the autobiography ends on the Royal attendance at Cavalcade. Throughout, fine and generous and ungrudging tributes to his friends and to those who helped him in a thorny upward climb.

Pub Date: March 26, 1937

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday, Doran

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1937

Categories: NONFICTION