by Unknown
I went up to London for two days to see Mum and sign my contracts. And got bronchitis. From which I am slowly recovering. London was exceptionally seedy and sad and desperatly expensive. The Connaught, thank God, restores a little of what once was … at a price. Saw no one … it was a family ‘do’ really, and had to trail down to Sussex for a ‘seperate tables’ existance with my Mum, as I said, which was not exactly gay. Age, lonliness and slow death. If loneliness is terminal then my mother will be dead next week. But it is not, I gather, terminal. Lingering for ever and ever ..
And that was that. England, the part I saw in the car to Plumpton, was very pretty and smug and green and Brookish … but Brixton and Tooting were quite suddenly Port Antonio or Watts. Unattractive: but for the brilliance of the colours and the variety of the fruits in the street markets!
But it was not a London I ever knew. Even in the halcyon days .... and I was jolly glad to get back here and fold up with bronchitis.
I read your bit in the Observer (?) did you read mine in the Guardian?1
I think I’d quite like to go to Cuba. It is the new Soviet Russia for the Intellectuals. Rather as Stalin-Time was for the bright-eyed in the early thirties … or Spain was with the Franco Lot and Bullfighting …
Now that I seem to be writing rather more frequently than filming I think I OUGHT to travel about a bit more and see things for myself. Sensible?
But there is still such a lot of Europe I have’nt even set foot upon .. and before it becomes an ash basket I think I’ll go and see things there. Here. I mean, of course.
Filming has faded away, thankfully. I really do detest it and the uglies who surround it … the last thing I was asked to do .. a week or two ago .. was the ‘Emperor Of Iran’ or ‘The Shah’s S[t]ory’ … unbelievable.
A sort of ‘Flight To Entebbe’ thing. With Claudia Cardinale as the ruddy Empress .. I went through the whole thing in tight bandages, as far as I could see, and when they were finally removed, in the last ten minutes of the script, guess what? It was just me, all the time underneath.
I ask you.
And now that I seem to be making some loot from sitting up here on my arse and bashing away at this machine, I really, on the whole, prefer it all. I dont have to trail about from Hotel to Hotel … or fuss about a ghastly script .. or the New Young Director .. or the New Young Leading Lady or, finally, the critics. I know we have critics for books .. but it is a bit different. A bit.
Attenborough is breathing fire about his forthcoming ‘Ghandi’ and I walk in dread that he’ll ask me to read ‘the first draft’. I know there is a middle aged clergyman lurking about in the pages which is ‘a simply marvellous part, Dirkie’… the idea of India, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Attenborough all beating it up for Ghandi makes me ill.
How to avoid reading and passing comment? Or accepting! By getting on with the second ‘buke’. The second ‘buke’ is two chapters long and reads like sub Evelyn Waugh. So THAT wont do. I search desperatly for an alternative plot .... thats the hardest part. Every time I think I have a perfectly super original idea I read a cross review for it in the Sunday Observer. And have to start again. Ah well …
[ … ] Tote is well … after HIS bout of ’flu. (The air up here is too rarefied I think.) .. and is busy writing his memoirs.1 Having seen how I can make a bit of scratch from just sitting up here for the day he has reverted to his machine. At lunch time he arrives at the bar staggering, glassy eyed, and reaches a trembling hand out for the Campari … it is beginning to dawn on him that it aint so easy!
I have just corrected my ‘proof’ … and finalised the cover, which I did all by myself, as I always do … and there it all is .. practically 400 pages of stuff waiting for the printer. I can rest up for a while: until the thing goes off in March. And then the Tour! God help me. Knopf want me to come out to the U.S and do a trip there. Cincinatti, Pittsburg, Johnny Carson and the Today Show et all.… I DREAD the idea. But am assured that you have to go and ‘sell’. Well, I’ve been doing that all my working life. So I suppose it wont be strange. Just exhausting as one reaches Old Age.
I think I’ve said all there is to say on this dullish day … rain and low cloud and ham and mushrooms and eggs and baked beans for lunch.
That do? Wish you were here to share them really. There is a lot of chat we have’nt had. Anyway this is just a restoring-of-contact-type of letter [ … ]
Do write. Fully. Not about your teeth, but about your travels and your new house in Havana .....
You are missed, you know … and loved. So be good and pen to paper soon.
As ever, in every way –
Dirk
XXXXXX
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
18 October 1979
Norah dear –
The rains have finally really stopped.
Quite frightful tidal wave at Antibes and 12 or more people washed away … so you see I was not exagerrating. And the drive down to the mail box has quite vanished … or not vanished rather: it is a vast pile of rubble and boulders at the far end, crushed against the gates. However a dim-witted Arab has been digging a way out .. and I managed to find your letter of the 16th with the G.G bit from the Listener.2
Enormously interesting. Deeply worrying.
All those red lines. Silent admonishment?
Adjectives.
Goodness I use them like carroway seeds in German cabbage ..
Adverbs I am not terribly sure about: mainly because I really did not know what a blasted Adverb was. I mean, I know now .. but cant imagine how many I use.
Of course that is why I love reading Waugh … and Green for that matter. The utter simplicity. But who is going to tell me how to eradicate my adjectives? I rather love hunting them out. Thats the rub. I mean, I love hunting them out to USE! Not destroy or discard.
I suppose that will be one of the many knocks I’ll get for ‘Occupation’. It is stiff with adjectives, is’nt it? Even Forwood grumbled …
But I really dont feel, at this moment, that I can write without them. I’ll have to try. I re-read that first ‘chapter’ on the ‘Thunder’1 idea.
And, having spent the last few evenings reading Waugh, realised, to my distress, that it was the sub-subbest Waugh ever. So I have set it all aside in silent despair. Not destroyed it .. there is something there .. but set it apart for a time. It wont do.
That is the grave trouble about reading while working. Influence.
During ‘Occupation’ I read only my newspapers and light stuff which could not, I thought, damage anything I was writing during the day.
But now that I am doing ‘homework’ … and enjoying it .. as I told you in my last Express .. I realise my terrible shortcomings as a writer. I am almost ‘good Isis’ or Student Stuff. Rather a brave, if idiotic thing to do … to ‘practice’ as it were in public. But how else does one learn? And as long as one does learn I suppose it is not so futile. I wrote, the other day, to a lady in Sussex who has been a sort-of pen friend, in the best sense of the word, for quite a while. She writes too, not badly. Thinks that ‘Summer’2 (Postillion) is the best writing on its level, childhood and the child mind, that she has ever read.
And I’d like to go on and do a full book, as you suggest, for children myself … but it would not be about talking hedghogs or dancing mice. I’d do the Cottage-Great-Meadow thing again. I am constantly astonished to get letters from children who have had parts of the book read to them aloud in class at school. Really an awful lot. I cant imagine just WHAT parts are selected by the rather sensible teachers .. but the kids know that the book is, later on, too grown up for them.
Perhaps I should do something on that line. Lots of stuff in the back of my mind. What do you think? Or dont you .. illustrated, of course. Without people?
For the moment I am going on with Bio 3. The Orderly Man stuff.
It is amusing and helps me chuck off this ghastly post-nasel drip which persists from my bronchitis-whatever-it-was.
&nb
sp; It is an astonishing thing to me to find that I am really not a bit happy unless I am writing. Even a letter will do.
As, poor you, have found.
And I must do something about my punctuation!
Learning!
And at my age.
Old dogs and new tricks.
Very difficult if one has the vocabulary of a switched-off Indian bus conductor.
Oh! Very important news. On the day of the tidal wave in Antibes, we braved the torrents and went, not there, but to Cannes and bought, in a wild flurry of extravagance, two brass beds .. new not old, to replace the ones in the Guest Room.
The worried shop keeper wondered what on earth I was doing sitting on each bed in the shop trying to imagine if I could see out of your window any better!
[…] I think you’ll approve of them. Simple, rather like the ones in the Paris Ritz .. not at all bobbles and knobs.
And every two days a white chair arrives and the sitting room begins to glow. Daily Lady is in raptures. The dogs are in the kennels.
And I’m off to set up lunch. Liver and bacon, fresh broccoli and the last of the new potatoes. To give me strength to clear up some of the wreckage on the front terrace .... oh dear ..
With love, as ever,
Dirk.
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
26 December 1979
Norah dearest –
Well: that part is over .. I mean The Day.
Perfectly horrid season I always think. Now we steam towards the great Fete of St Sylvester … and when that is over I suppose the place goes slowly back to normal. At last.
[ … ] It rained dreadfully. All the time. Except for Christmas Eve which was golden, warm and full of promise. I went off and olive-d, and pruned five whacking great fig trees … and coming up to the house to get the dogs supper saw a line of cloud creeping in from the West.
By nightfall the rain lashed the house like steel rods beating.
And so it remained; and still continues, and is cold and turns to snow on top of the ridge. [ … ] We did nothing much. There is nothing much to do on ones own thank God. A luncheon party earlier in the week for Jacques Lartigue and his wife,1 and a novelist and his wife, who spoke perfect French fortunatly … because although Jacques (85, but looking 15) and Florette speak faultless English they do not care to. So we stumbled about from one thing to another over an enormous fresh Loire Salmon and potato salad. Jacques is an extraordinary man, and incredibly young … the youngest 85 I have ever met I think. Frightfully ‘chic’ white jacket from Lanvin, a pink silk shirt, impeccable white pants from Laurent … and gay as a cricket.2
Brilliantly clever, he is the Pappa of French Photography .. and gave me the most ravishing calender which he had published, of his own pictures, but which were ordered only for the French President’s personal Gifts … so I got a spare. Enormous. Far too beautiful to use just in the Studio.
On Christmas Eve our annual party, tea, for our ex-Staff.3 In their seventies and getting on a bit, as you might say. Cadbury’s chocolate wafers, a large Fauchon Fruit Cake, Earl Greys tea … presents to unwrap, dogs to pat and exclaim over, a fractured conversation in French about gall-stones, siatica, and a Roumanian neighbour of theirs who has diabetes but wont do anything about it, so Marie is terrified that she will find her flat on the floor in a coma one day. They left at six thirty and Tote drove them to Mass in Grasse Cathedral. The early house. Not midnight.
You see: nothing very exciting. Except that we had survived another Christmas Day. I was remembering the Christmas Days past. Inevitable at my age: from the earliest ones in Twickenham when I was, I suppose four or five … to the glamourous ones in Rome, in Beverly Hills, in New York, in Paris. And friends arriving from, literally, all over the globe, at my expense, to join and celebrate together. Madness!
It was the stock-taking part that I did’nt care for this year.
The faces which are no longer about.
The marriages which have foundered.
The children who have now become adults and faded into their own life.
One is glad to have survived at least.
Added to this Daily Lady is still in Spain either with the corpse of her mother-in-law or a mended one. I dont know which. But I do know that eight bloody weeks without her is getting a bit boring. And I see no sign of a speedy return, for even if the old one did snuff it, or get better, they will surely stay there for the New Year.
I hate washing the kitchen floor, and I detest polishing, and I’m fed up with dusting! There is almost no clear time to come up here and get on with my work.
My Muse is pissed of: and sulks in the shadows. No sign of her coming out to play again until she is certain that I am there to stay.
[ … ] Reading, because I missed it when it first came out, the Evelyn Waugh Diaries1 which I find interesting but irritating. As I suppose was he.
Tiresomly snobbish, and as far as I can tell constantly drunk.
However one cant quite put it down … as I did with Mr Millar and his very long, but lazy, bit of writing.2 Tote, on the other hand, rather likes it because he knew so many of the people mentioned from Rosa Lewis to Diana Cooper … and it mentions many makes of motor cars too: which always goes well with Mr F. (I mean the Millar book.)
I think that this must be quite the dullest letter I have written for a long time. Symptomatic of this wet Holiday!
About a hundred and something cards to deal with. People write notes in them which cannot be totally ignored. A rather pleasing habit, but at the same time annoying too .. because they must be replied to.
Then, aside from personal cards, masses from Fans of ‘P’ and ‘S&L’ .. which is heart warming indeed. I think that I shall have to get down to another book on the Lally-Sister-Cottage thing. Clearly this is the bit that has sold ‘P’. It is a sort of nostalgia naturally. School Teachers, in America even, are reading bits to their Classes … but it has not appealed because it is a childrens book. I cant quite put my finger on it … it is having very much the same ‘reaction effect’ as ‘Death In Venice’ had … touching some silent chords somewhere in people. It is greatly interesting to me.
[…] This is, as you know, a NFR3 letter … it is just me filling in a loose hour before starting up the lunch and laying the fire. We have to go and have a Christmas Tea with a vastly rich Jewish family in a HUGE apartment in Cannes. I really dread it but cant get out of it: ponsiettas everywhere, bowls of wilting Cyclamen, a plastic tree with all the lights on, and a marzipan cake with robbins. Really.…
Love, love,
Dirk.
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
30 January 1980
Norah my very dear –
Absolutely real violets from just under the walnut tree where the grass is hazed with blue. I am delighted that you got them as soon as you seem to have done. Wilted, of course, but they were the first.
Stocks brilliant and smelling lovely, if you like the smell of stocks .. wild daffodils on the bank all out and jonquils too, and the first of the almond .. it was so warm on Thursday that we lunched outside.
We’ll pay for this in Febuary, be sure of that.
[ … ] Into Lanvin for suit-looking. The prices were so utterly wild, six hundred pounds give or take a franc or two .. and so DULL and the athmosphere was so over elegant that I went away with murmured promises and went straight to a sort of Marks and Sparks shop in the middle of rue d’Antibes where I purchased TWO suits in English tweed for £70 each!
I bought two because they wont last long .. a week at most .. but look very good with buttons altered, (I found the Palais des Boutons just up the road and bought two new sets ..) and a few minor, but essential, adjustments. I cant, of course, sit in the things .. but they look splendid standing up.
So I’ll travel in old Huntsman and walk about in Marks and Sparks.
Since I never wear a suit from one years end to the other in the normal course of events it seemed foolish to spend so much money. I
have’nt had a suit, a new one, since 1962 .. and I cant believe that the Booksellers will notice any difference anyway. And these are for the dreaded ‘Promotion’1 only.
I expect that by now [ … ] you will have had the MS pieces2 [ … ] I read the first three pages yesterday and found them rather common. Oh dear [ … ] I have a frightful feeling that it is most wonderfully un-original.
Cliché after cliché tumbles from this machine, just as if I were writing mottos for Christmas Crackers.
I was perfectly pleased with it a week ago. Stuck it aside while I got on with unanswered mail and a desperately bad (cancelled now) piece for the ‘Evening News’ … and lo and behold when I picked it up again only yesterday gloom came down like a Welsh mist .. a salutary thing to do: put something in the drawer so to speak and THEN look at it with a fresh but, in my case, jaundiced, eye. I dont mean that I have given in, as I confess I HAVE with the ‘E.N’ bit … that simply was awful .. and after three or four brave attempts I came to the conclusion that writing a novel is quite one thing and writing a column for a newspaper is quite another. And one I have not yet mastered. Madness to go and do something mediocre and poor for a large scale readership. Even if they are all dummies and sitting in the Underground on the way home to Purley East.
So I have written a charming note of apology and admitted defeat.
Better to have no ‘puff’ in the Evening News than a damned poor one under my name.
[ … ] Had a long telephonic wrestle with Losey this week. Huffing and puffing about a script which he thinks ‘brilliant’ by Dennis Potter1 and wants me to do it with Alec Guinness and Tom Conti .. it is on it’s way down by special Courier today and my heart sinks. I pray that I wont like it.
Alec called last night to ask if I had read it yet. Said no. Ah, he said worridly. Well, it’s all very curious and brilliant and odd, but I confess I dont altogether understand it. I told him that I had NEVER understood any single script sent me by either Losey or Resnais but that it all came clear in the end. He sounded very fretful and very doubtful: but obviously intrigued. It keeps nagging in my mind, he said. Well .. thats not a bad thing for a script to do … we’ll see. It is to be made in some vast house in Derbyshire I gather in mid April for six weeks. QUITE the worst time for me to be away from here what with the garden the greenhouse and so on … hell take it. But if it is good, and if they pay, then I must I suppose. And Cuckoo, Marcus and the rest must wait for me .. unless they go back to the drawer for a long rest …
