Is it politics or art that sustains some literary reputations?

I was banished to our bedroom for a few days in February as I recovered from the flu, taking with me a stack of recently acquired books and our dog who companionably served as a four-legged hot water bottle. I read for the first time Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley's wonderfully chatty 1982 selection from the Diaries of Noel Coward (1900-73), and that prompted me in turn to revisit favourite scenes from certain of Coward's plays. I emerged from this pleasant exercise marveling once again at the stinginess with which the academic establishment insists on underrating Coward's work.

In a reference book such as The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, for instance, Coward's incredibly prolific lifetime output that included some 50 plays and more songs than could now be counted, is dispatched with a miserly 135 words. And many of those words--"precious but witty," "successful in their time but somewhat excessive in retrospect"--are frankly dismissive and even contemptuous.

Setting aside his now rarely produced musicals, I would say that in the best of his narrative plays such as Blithe Spirit, Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Design For Living, Coward is a master at portraying some of the furious ambiguities of marital and familial life. I also hold in similarly high regard two of his screen adaptations of earlier stage scripts, Brief Encounter and This Happy Breed.

With crisp wit, an eye for the telling detail and an unerring gift for sketching coherent yet complex characters, Coward shows how elusive stability and happiness can be in modern primary relationships. There's a neurotic paradox that Coward explores again and again in his tales. It seems that we no sooner fulfill our desire to love and be deeply known by another, than we start to become exasperated at the apparent predictability of the other person. That exasperation, of course, can be a two-way street as we start to chafe in turn at the restrictions and assumptions that the other person's knowledge of us seems to impose on us.

In that same Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, the currently over-celebrated Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) nets five times more words--virtually all of them complimentary--for a lifetime's theatrical output of about one-tenth that of Coward's. What gives here? The only one of Wilde's plays which is universally regarded as a classic is his last, The Importance of Being Earnest. In its dazzling display of epigrammatic virtuosity, Earnest is a heroically sustained frolic of polished witticisms lampooning the proprieties and conventions of class.

Wilde creates a topsy-turvy, funhouse reflection of the upper crust Victorian world worthy of W.S. Gilbert or even Edward Lear. But over the play's three long acts (in Stratford five seasons back to mark the centenary of Wilde's death they presented an interminable four-act version) a kind of frantic fatigue sets in. Like eating a sumptuously prepared dinner comprised of course after course of nothing more substantial than frothy meringues, by play's end one's mind, one's intellectual molars, are left positively throbbing for something meaty to bite into.

How to explain the disparity of critical reputation for this pair of hugely popular playwrights? I believe it all has a lot more to do with modern sexual politics than what either of them actually wrote. It so happens that both writers were homosexuals. Coward was born 11 months before Wilde's death in Paris, where he'd been lying low following two years' brutal incarceration at Reading Gaol. Wilde's jail term had been brought about by a disastrous series of trials he instigated against the unhinged father of his young male lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.

Wilde recklessly initiated the first court action, suing the Marquess of Queensberry for spitefully (but accurately) identifying Wilde in public as a sodomite--which the Marquess spelled "somdomite." Wilde withdrew his prosecution when his own cross-examination started to go badly. The Marquess had raked up plenty of dirt on Wilde confirming his original charge, and once the scandal was plastered all over the newspapers, it was the government that then launched the counter-suit against Wilde, charging him with homosexuality, then a punishable offence.

In comparison to all that, Noel Coward's was a charmed life. A mere 30 years after Wilde's downfall, the much more discreet but equally homosexual Coward was hobnobbing with royalty and high society. He never flaunted his orientation but neither was it ever in doubt. Coward was a favoured guest of the late Queen Mom (whom he adored in return) and a good friend of Winston Churchill's. When the tide of the Second World War finally turned Britain's way, Coward was brought to Chequers specifically so he could teach the Prime Minister how to play his new song, Don't Let's Be Beastly to The Germans. The two of them sat together at the piano pounding out this wickedly funny song, raucous tears of laughter streaming down both their faces.

There's no question Wilde suffered more but I'm unconvinced that made him the better writer or the wiser man. On the contrary, I quite agree with Coward when he writes a quick journal entry in 1946: "Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod."

Herman Goodden is a full-time journalist. He writes from London, Ontario.