Clemence Dane - The ‘Invisible Woman’
GUEST POST: Rose Collis
Clemence Dane is the ‘invisible woman’ of British 20th century culture. Between the First and Second World Wars, she was Britain’s most influential, versatile and successful female writer and arguably the most complete and versatile female creative force: novelist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, sculptor, painter, broadcaster, lecturer and pioneering feminist. Her works includes novels, stage plays, screenplays, detective novels, libretti, stage and literary criticism, plus countless articles, short stories and poems, and she was the first British woman screenwriter to win an Oscar.
And yet she remains a woefully neglected — an almost spectral figure found in so many cultural corners. So it’s rather apt that the medium Madame Arcati should have been inspired by her.
She met and became friends with Noel Coward in the 1920s, when she was already more famous and successful than he, following the successes of her controversial first novel, Regiment of Women (1917) and her first play, A Bill of Divorcement (1921). Dane became one of four women — the others were Gladys Calthrop, Lorn Loraine and Joyce Carey — at the heart of what Coward and his companions called ‘the family’. As Graham Payn explained, ‘The “family” was our support system. And we were family. Not your conventional Victorian family, but in many respects something better, more alive, because we chose each other. We got together and stayed together because we wanted to be together.’
In other words, an early 20th century version of the ‘logical family’ ethos exemplified in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels.
Coward was the only person who was allowed to call Dane ‘Winnie’. In many ways, if anyone was Coward’s muse, Dane was. He said he ‘…never published a book or produced a play since I have known her without first indulging myself in the warming radiance of her enthusiasm and the kindly but nonetheless perceptive shrewdness of her criticism. She has enriched my life with her warmth, her vitality, her knowledge and the unfailing generosity of her loving heart…She loves me dearly and so everything I do has a glow for her…’
He was a frequent visitor to her Covent Garden home, 20 Tavistock Street, especially during the Second World War. As Richard Huggett, biographer of Binkie Beaumont, observed, there she ‘held court to a colourful circle of authors, poets, playwrights, musicians, painters and film producers, thus giving London in the thirties and forties its only real artistic salon…there were musical evenings, poetry recitals, play-readings, film conferences, and endless fascinating talk augmented by quantities of delicious food prepared by Olwen [Bowen-Davies, Dane’s secretary/companion]. It was so much more fun than the Bloomsbury Set… Winifred’s circle laughed at everybody and everything and actually got things done. Plays were written, novels completed, poems published, paintings finished and production deals finalised. Winifred’s friends were real artists. They didn’t just talk about doing it, they did it.’
This ‘Tavistock Set’ included not only Noel Coward, but other members of the Coward ‘family, including Constance Collier, Joyce Carey and Gladys Calthrop.
In 1941, Coward created the role of Madame Arcati, the eccentric medium in Blithe Spirit, inspired by Dane and originally intended for her, as she had indicated she might want to make a return to the theatre (prior to WWI, she was the stage actress ‘Diana Cortis’).
It was, in my opinion, a huge shame that audiences were denied her interpretation — for, as Graham Payn said, ‘She could have played it to perfection for precisely the same reason that Margaret Rutherford eventually did: neither of them realised that what they did was funny.’
And for those of us more familiar with the quirkiness of Clemence Dane’s character, the other similarities between her and Arcati are screamingly obvious: the eccentric manner of dress; the unwavering self-assuredness; the indomitable sense that she was always right, about everything; and, as alluded to by Payn, her genuine obliviousness to her own comedic value.
But there were also more obvious, spiritual connections: for more than 30 years, she lived above a greengrocer’s in Covent Garden, and believed it to have a resident ghost (she would often ask friends to ascend the steep steps before her). One of her relatives was Edmund ‘Teddy’ Bentley, a once-famous spiritualist and her 1947 play, Call Home the Heart combined the themes of love during wartime and clairvoyance. Noel himself thought the play ‘completely scatty with all values, both psychologically and theatrically, wrong’, but it ran at St James Theatre for several months.
Alas, this verdict didn’t differ greatly from Dane’s opinion of Blithe Spirit, as expressed in this unpublished poem she sent to Noel:
‘Imagine that her wit’s dispersal
When she attends the dress-rehearsal
Of Noel’s latest burst of laughter
To find it deals with the hereafter
That he by methods rather coarse
Manipulates odyllic force;
And that – for this has hurt her most –
His heroine is just a ghost!
Oh Noel, think what you would say, if it had been poor Winnie’s play!’
This was one of many disagreements the two friends had during the war years, but they always managed to patch things up, and Noel was devastated when she died in March 1965, after several long, painful illnesses.
He wrote to Olwen from Jamaica: ‘As she was a woman of such tremendous courage and gallantry, she wouldn’t want us to grieve too much, although I must admit I am having a bad time at this very minute. We shall of course miss her to the end of our days’.
Rose Collis is a writer, performer and historian. http://www.rosecollis.com
