Future Indefinite, Signed by Noel Coward
[Signed by Noel Coward] Coward, Noel. Future Indefinite. First Edition. 1954. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is signed “Noel Coward” on the blank page preceding the half-title page.
Noel Coward was one the 20th Century’s great diarists, which is evident from this lengthy and detailed memoir of his activities during World War II in which he traveled the globe on behalf of Great Britain and wrote one of his most durable plays, Blythe Spirit. Prior to Pearl Harbor, he was secretly involved in the British effort to convince the United States to join the war, and in that position, he met several times with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, both of whom he writes of admiringly in this book. He also writes of traveling to Hollywood, where he stayed with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott and was feted by Marlene Dietrich and other celebrities of filmdom. This is a serious book, unlike like one might expect from Coward, but alas, these were serious years, and it is a fascinating depiction of the twilight years of the British Empire, detailed by Coward as he traveled to such far-flung colonies as Egypt and New Zealand.
“The evacuation of Dunkirk evidently had moved [President Roosevelt] profoundly and he spoke of it at length, on the epic quality of the whole operation; this quality, he said, lay deep in the British character and was compounded of diverse ingredients; stubbornness, gallantry, refusal to envisage the possibility of failure, lack of imagination, vision, and an inherent genius for improvisation. None but the British, he said with a faint smile, could transform a full-scale military defeat into a shining spiritual victory.”
--Noel Coward