The appeal of The Letters of Cole Porter,the first collection of his correspondence, is the chance to experience his effervescent life, sometimes day by day, the way Porter himself experienced it ... The book is most revealing about Porter’s working habits—and most entertaining ... the book’s editors...stretch the bounds of what belongs in a volume of correspondence. For this, they deserve profound thanks. They were remarkably resourceful in finding both letters and supplemental materials, and admirably thoughtful in selecting, arranging and explaining them ... They write in their introduction that the book does not aspire to be another biography of Porter: The goal is to present as much of his correspondence as possible. Yet they’re so thorough about the job that they leave you feeling that you’ve had a full and satisfying account of Porter’s professional and personal lives all the same...

... an intimidating marvel of scholarship, though editors Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh weave his correspondence into a mostly tidy account by adding diary excerpts, newspaper clippings and plentiful commentary of their own. There are Cole Porter biographies already (as well as two biopics, nearly 60 years apart, with Cary Grant and then Kevin Kline playing the composer), and another seems unnecessary. Considering all the connective tissue, The Letters of Cole Porter amounts to the last word, a work as disjointed and delightful as any of Porter’s unforgettable songs.

Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in The Letters of Cole Porter ... Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote. The editors have also included some secondary material that is not, strictly speaking, correspondence at all ... As an artist’s letters, they are, truth be told, disappointing. There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porter’s writings to friends—for such a famous wit, there is remarkably little wit. The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than in letters-to ... Yet a reader, without learning much directly about Porter’s art, comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before ... Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that [Porter's] letters would be a riot of sensuality and insider gossip. Far from it. This 660-page collection, which also includes some brief diary entries, often makes Broadway’s master of the louche and the risqué sound like a soda water-sipping Rotarian accountant. Most of them are, to be absolutely frank, maddeningly, stunningly dull ... Porter scholars may find useful titbits here, but for the general reader it’s a forced march through the social calendar ... All that’s missing are his gas and electric bills ... We get only glimpses of his inner life from his letters ... It’s in the occasional extract from a newspaper or magazine article that you come closest to the wit and waspishness that are such an essential element of the songs ... If only the letters themselves could have been so droll.

Cole Porter’s admirers will approach this collection of his correspondence eagerly, anticipating the same sophisticated wit that sparkles in the lyrics of Anything Goes or Let’s Misbehave ... Those elements are all there in The Letters of Cole Porter, but in fairly small doses substantially supplemented by other people’s words ... There aren’t many long, gossipy letters of the sort that make fellow composer/lyricist Noël Coward’s published correspondence such a delight. Porter’s letters mostly buttress the reputation he acquired early in life of being difficult to know, despite his affable manner and nonstop socializing. The collection’s editors, two British musical scholars, compensate with extended commentary giving biographical context, some contemporary press coverage, and a considerable number of letters from friends, collaborators, and business associates. The result, appropriately published by a university press, is an informative but patchy volume that will appeal more to scholars and extremely dedicated fans than to casual readers ... It’s possible to wish that Porter had been a more loquacious and self-revealing correspondent, but his editors have done their best to provide a framework that enables readers to appreciate the letters we do have as intermittent glimpses into the life and craft of a legendary American songwriter.

What these letters really reveal is not Porter’s process or his productions but his longing – the underground stream that fed the flow of song. Porter was at his most effusive and uninhibited before fame found him ... Recent years have seen the publication of important collections of theatrical letters; those of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, for instance, brilliantly illuminate their personalities, their times and their artistic struggles. The Letters of Cole Porter, for all its piquant tidbits, is not in that league. Part of the problem is that the editors have been dealt a thin hand of documents, a pair of twos which they try to make into a full house. The other issue is the editors themselves, both British academic musicologists, who know the music but whose knowledge of the Broadway scene is from the reading room not the green room ... Again and again, like pedantic waiters spieling about the food while keeping you from it, they intrude on the pleasure of discovery ... The playfulness they admire in the writer they refuse the reader.

Mr. Eisen and Mr. McHugh maintain that Porter was a voracious reader. Porter’s letters, however, are silent about what he thinks about the books he’s read. Other than a passing reference to his preference for Republicans, Porter is silent about American culture and politics. The volume documents Cole Porter’s passionate affair with Boris Kochno, the lover of Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, in 1925, but sheds no further light on his homosexuality ... According to the editors, Cole Porter’s 'depth of feeling' for Linda Thomas Porter, his wife, 'is striking.' It is difficult, however, to find it in his correspondence ... Fortunately, The Letters of Cole Porter are filled with insights about the craft of songwriting and the business of show business in Hollywood and on Broadway.