Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  She, being Russian and speaking fluently, was in a far better, or worse, position to know just what was going on, and how completely they had been ‘bugged’… which was a startling realisation for two refugees from Doheny!1

  [ … ] Boaty says [ … ] that you are the only woman in N.Y who can make a grand entrance into a room with absolute silence and the minimum of fuss .. and leave the ‘whole fuckin’ place stunned’ … which is still a nice, and clever, thing to be able to do! [ … ] It is comforting that one still has friends who come so far to hide away. And seek comfort. Rare and rewarding …

  Tote hobbles about on a sort of arthritic-foot … and gets fed up because he cant work on the land. The grass is as high as that fucking elephants eye already with all this rain .. and I can only manage a little mowing on my own in between table-laying, washing lettuce, bouts.

  So you see: not much news really. Almost none. But this was just meant to be a Keep In Touch Letter [ … ]

  Off to book a table for tomorrow at the Colombe. Boat has never, oddly, been there and longs to. I ruefully count my small change from the Housekeeping .. it wont go far tomorrow. But it’ll at least save me a washing up and a laying.

  And for that I am deeply grateful. Even at 250 francs a head … sans the wine. I’m off … pressing a kiss upon you …

  With devoted love

  Dirk

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  27 June 1980

  Dearest Norah –

  Pretty exhausted I am. Chapter 8 packed up and stuck into it’s envelope for the mail tomorrow.

  It seems to me, that with real hard-slog, six to eight hours per day, I can get one Chapter done in a full week. Saturday to Saturday. Without rushing, that is.

  But I am not sure that I could keep it up over any great length of time. My eyes, at the end of the day .. about seven, have sunk into wells!

  Poor little creature.

  Australia:2

  I really DO detest Australia. I dont care what they say, I dont think going there, at this stage, would sell sufficient books (which ones anyway?) to make the sheer hell of it worth while.

  Amsterdam is one thing .. and not over exhausting. Bad enough, but not a killer. Australia would be. I would’nt do the trip in ‘easy stages’, it takes far too long … I know! And it is the perepheral things which are so frightful. The Talk-Shows, the lunches, the bloody old Mayors, the Press in general and the wholesale swamping of ones privicy. Monstrous. I’m too old now. At thirty, maybe .. and even then I detested it all.

  Provence Book. Well: thats a bit more interesting.1

  Although God knows I am not the right chap to do it. I am most woefully ignorant of my history, my Arts, and all the other things which go up to the making of that kind of book. Durrell is a scholar. I am an amateur-actor-writer. There is a difference. It would take a hell of a lot of time. Travelling all over the place … and at what seasons I ask? All? And who’se to look after my land and the damned house all that time I ask fretfully.

  And what happens to Bio. 3 … which I do want to tackle next.

  However: let me get this present oeuvre off my shoulders, it is a strain to carry about with me all day … and then I’ll have a bit of a think. About Provence, I mean. Would it be a Travel Book? Or simply a ‘lyrical set of essays about’ things generally?

  You know all about me and my adjectives. Golly! What a risk ..

  All those ‘shimmering’ ‘glinting’ ‘satin smooth’ ‘veridian’ seas … How could you BEAR it!

  Had a short break yesterday afternoon. A fine, clear, warm day .. a bit of a Mistral. Up to the Valley we went armed with baskets, boxes and utensils for wrenching roots out of rocks.

  Cowslip hunting. I am determined to try here, although I KNOW the soil to be wrong. However I stood in the silence of the hills yesterday surrounded with literally billions of the seeding plants. Scooped out, very difficult, long roots, about eight clumps … and then dug like a Jack Russel to fill three plastic bags with the soil.

  Extraordinary stuff. Lovely. Cocoa red-brown, moss, little shards of limestone, pine cones, humus .. sweet smelling and unclinging. Brought it all back and packed one big bowl with half a hillside, or so it seemed, and the others (roots) I huddled about the edge of the pond by the water channel. In pits filled with the earth from up top. They looked a bit wilted after the trip back in the heat .. but are amazingly perky and spiky today. I wonder if it’ll work?

  Also gathered (oh! how you would have cried out in wonder!) a mass of wild flowers .. fat yellow renunculas, double buttercup things, Ox eye dasies, clovers, Thrift, or is it Sea Pinks? Fat pink buttony things on long sturdy stems? Meadow sweet, corn-cockles, Feverfew, Angelica, Harebells, Scabious, Great Burnet and on and on .. never seeming to repeat.

  The fields up there were literally carpets of colour. One is reduced to such a cliché … none other will do. Stirred by the softest mistral .. bending and waving .. swaying, rippling .. row upon row of blending colour, with the great hills rising still and somber behind, and a sky as clean as a scrubbed pan … sparkling, winking .. not a cloud.

  Summer has finally, finally, arrived. I am working as hard as I can at the book, but have to get the hay raked … not so awful if one does it with a pitch fork I find .. pulling towards one and then pitching it into big piles. But it has to be done ..

  […] One time .. I know it’s impossible .. but one time .. you really should chuck the May Visit and come in June. I know that it would thrill you to the heart: it is so staggeringly calm and lovely; before anyone sets foot up there with a haversack or a pair of walking boots … and leaves litter …

  Now I am off to get lunch … I rather think Forwood has made a fish pie … from yesterday’s supper-Cod-Left-Over.

  And it’s steadily marching into the eighties … oh well …

  As ever, my love,

  Dirk

  P.S. Naturally – naturally – I left the forks & trowels up on the hills – I can never do anything properly! Maddening really – I’d had the silly old fork ever since 1950! – fool. D.

  Kenneth Tynan died on 26 July 1980

  To Kathleen Tynan Clermont

  6 September 1980

  Dearest Kathleen –

  Dont know where you are at this moment; shant risk a letter to Beverly Hills … so this can wait … if it gets there, on your front door mat. Basement mat?

  Thank you, in all your misery and ‘bereftness’ (what a word!) and hustle for writing. One tried to telephone you immediatly we heard the news on the BBC World Service (naturally) but got a very different lady from you in California who was sympathetic but said I was a ‘digit’ short. Which worried me a bit.

  Then called London as usual for your number from lady secretary: and she’d gone too. So to the village and a telegram which may, or may not, have got there. Saga ends.

  I dont believe in writing ‘sorrow letters’. And I’d hate to read one. So this is’nt that sort of thing. But I might just as well say, here and now, how very much I have admired your strength and your love for K. and how much I know others have envied it.

  It is something NOT given to us all. And once you have it nothing on God’s earth, or in his Heaven come to that, ever quite matches it again. Ninteenth Centuary or not .. it smells very much of today to me. A rare, potent, thing. To be cherished in remembering, and to be grateful for having all your life.

  I have a particular feeling, that is; it is particular to me only, that it is a ‘once off’ job. I dont think it happens again … but I have no interest in the testing of such a theory.

  It would help a deal if I could spell and punctuate … but perhaps you are just skip reading this anyway. So it’s not a matter of much concern.

  I am sad that you have to go through all the mummery of a Memorial Service. They have become so singularly ‘fashionable’ … and I have insisted […] in my Will that there wont be any of that nonsense when I go … on the other hand perhaps K. would have liked it. I am certain he�
�ll have a hell of a house!

  And you’ll be reduced to sobs again, and smile bravely at Sir John G. or Larry and old Blowright.1 But I suppose it is what one should do as a sign of respect … even love I suppose? Just seems un-K.ish and v. expensive. A damned good dinner and a super bottle or two of his favourite wine … now thats different. But not my business.

  I am glad that you’ll stay where you are (U.S wise) for the time, and gladder that you’ll go to N.Y. I think Valium Land is fine.

  But unconstructive now.

  And as soon as all this nonsense is over you can get down to work for yourself and for the best things that K. could possibly have left in your care … his children. Or, rather, your children.

  And thats important and vastly comforting. You wont exactly be alone, you see. Ever. Or not AS alone.

  Keep me in touch as to where you are and why … Knopf have taken my second novel. (Romantic I fear) And I now languish after a years flogging … awaiting the correcting-period and the cover-designs and all … God knows what I think I am doing in the Literary World!

  I do find it tremendously exciting and challenging … and very worrying.

  But the Movies are really a drag now. Locations, Scripts and ALL the players … and in a pleasant way I like sitting up here in my own world at my own behest and on my own conditions inventing my own people and situations.

  And of course, if all falls down, I only bring [sic] myself really … not even the poor silly Publishers really. Although mine ARE rather terrific, and Mrs Smallwood extraordinary indeed and to be loved.

  Going into Chatto and Windus today is rather like going into Dickens. Elderly people scuttle about, the wood crumbles, the paint falls from cracks, books lie stacked in odd piles, and the lift is worked by a rope and pulley.

  But they publish some pretty erudite ladies and gentlemen … and I am utterly amazed that I am now allowed to be among them.

  I’ll stop this … it’s boring me too …

  To say only that one loves you. Deeply. And that you are to remember that … and act upon it when you need … As ever – always –

  Dirk.

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  28 November 1980

  My dear –

  This really IS a NTBRT letter. Not even by very expensive telephone call disguised as ‘business’.

  [ … ] Crisp, clear, golden day today and the fig leaves scattering in shoals. The first touch of frost in the air and down they all clatter. But the recent rain has bogged the land badly .. and I cant dig or anything. I can only imagine what dreadful things this rain, torrential, has brought to poor ravaged Italy.1

  All the people dead is one separate thing. But all the lost beauties in architecture and age is another. Naturally here our local paper is very angry. Most people in this area are Italian .... many have families who lived in the zone.

  It’s very saddening.

  We felt nothing here oddly enough, although after the last quake in Algeria the whole house creaked and trembled and my bed, I was reading, shook so violently that the book fell from my hands. ‘Whats that?’ I stupidly yelled down the corridor to Mr F’s room … ‘Earthquake: I think’ he said. The lights flickered, failed, went on. I opened the shutters. A clear, starry night. Very still. Except for a thousand dogs. Howling in the valley and from the hills. Odd. And that was all.

  [ … ] My dotty lady from Bromley has started up long screeds again.2 I am still, according to her, positivly bombarding her with secret messages in the ‘Telegraph’ and ‘Times’ ..... after very careful checking with her dates and the calander it is clear that this madness happens just before the full moon, and lasts until it wanes .... over a period, now, of three years. I am at a loss. Solicitors, threats of the Police, nothing puts her off.

  And she is as mad as a snake … but I imagine that her family, for she certainly has one and I know all their names, has not the least idea that she has this secret. How rum it is. Deeply boring too. But offending when she takes flights from London and arrives in Chateauneuf! I have told all the shop people and the Post Master that if a middle aged, very respectable looking, not to say almost affluent, English woman asks where I live they must immediatly send for a representative from Lady Yules Animal Sanctuary. She’d be happy there with all the bloody doggies and pussies, as she is predisposed to call them. I think I told you my last gift, in September, was a huge gift wrapped packet of hand picked Kentish Cob Nuts full of mould and earwigs.

  I paid £1 Duty on the damn thing, and even Lady refused them for her ravenous Spanish litter.

  You think you have problems, girl!

  Dirk XXX

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  18 December 1980

  Norah dear –

  Quite mad to send that telegram by Express. You must have seen it was’nt, as you thought anyway, a chum or, thank God! The Menace!1

  But thank you anyway.

  Two anyways.

  It’s that sort of morning.

  What is funny, talking about Menaces, was that I got in the mail yesterday the very first ‘Hate-Tape’ I have ever received in my life.

  Staggering.

  I get quite a number of these things, ordinary tape cassettes which people send as presents. Usually greetings from them and their families, a bit of their favourite Music, (Nutcracker and Sylvia) or the Beatles. That sort of thing.

  But this was different.

  A lady (sic) who is, she tells us, ‘a single parent family’ .. with two sons, one fifteen (six O levels. The other 17, four A’s) and who lives in [Sussex] saw fit to make a personal tape of her fury and rage after the TV Show2 which, unhappily for me, she saw ‘by accident, I was just getting the Take Away Chicken Maryland ready for supper that evening and YOU invaded my kitchen, Mr Bogarde.’

  I, you will note, invaded her kitchen.

  Then follows a continious, one hour exactly, stream of invective, fury, sneers, sarcasm, rage and envy. Above all envy.

  Oh how sad it all is. How stunned one was to listen.

  The bitterness, the warpdness, the snidery .. but oh! the envy.

  Something I dont honestly remember that we were well known for in my day. I suppose we had such a vast Empire that we had no need to envy anyone?

  But this, of course a sick creature, made one hide with horror.

  The misunderstanding! She was convinced, for example, that when I spoke about wearing ‘shoes’ to try and ‘find’ the person I was playing that I was in fact insulting her personal feet!

  ‘I looked down, and there I was in my muddy wellies .. I’d just been to feed the chickens, we are’nt all millionairs living off the money good, loyal, British people, have been forced to pay to see your work, as you call it, or buy your sneaky books … oh no! I have four Bantams, and I’d just been out to feed them, and thats why I was wearing my wellies. And you! So high and mighty about knowing people by their feet! What were you wearing may I ask?’

  There is a long pause here. Then.

  ‘Sneakers!’ in tones of disgust and triumph.

  And so it goes on. She finally ended up by saying that she too had a view from her house. When she sat on her ‘loo seat’, she was able to ‘look right across the house, through my eldest sons bedroom door, to the channel. With my binoculars.’

  How about that?

  She works in [… a] Hospital .. and that ‘gives you a real insight into true life.’

  Well.

  I suppose, if one ever saw the creature, she was, or would be, a perfectly ordinary ‘normal’ looking woman. She has been to France, she says, many times on holiday. Hates the French, though, because they are sneaky and underhand and let us down ‘in our hour of need.’ But she hates me far more!

  Saluatory to hear I suppose. Shameful too. Hearing oaths used normally by Dockers .. twisted hate, fury, resentment.

  God help the sons.

  A thoroughly nice middleclass English woman […] who can work a tape recorder, apparently, and is as vici
ous and ugly in mind as one could imagine.

  I would’nt be a [patient] in her hands for anything. Think of the power she must weald!

  I must go out and get some air: digging over the pond-bed and setting that to rights for summer. Five more roses. Tote chose them, so I dont honestly know what we’ll have. Rasberrries I should’nt wonder.

  Is it the New Year yet with you?

  If it is, Happy one …

  and love

  Dirk

  Saturday 20th.

  I had sealed this missive yesterday, and was about to mail it off to you today, but by complete chance, turned the Hate Tape over as I was removing it from the machine … and found that there was more to come!

  On the second side she had recorded I suppose about half an hour of the TV Programme … which sounded perfectly sensible to me, and not bad at all! I cant now recall what my last words were … something about hoping that I had been some use to somebody somewhere in earth in my life … then a nice swell of pretty music, and that was the end I thought. But NOT SO. She had her last word!

  ‘Christ!’ she said in a scornfull voice, ‘Think your bloody God!’

  So … however what was absolutely facinating was the fact that she had recorded me and herself OVER a tape which she had addressed to a brother [abroad] .. And so she went on for hours talking to him in EXACTLY the same way that she had addressed me!

  Facinating.

  ‘[ —— ]’! she said severely. ‘That was’nt a tarantula you found in your shower! Good grief! Not in your part of the world. Back to your books my boy …’ and so on.

  We still sit waiting for Labbo to Go. But he wont. Although his back legs are paralysed now. So I fear that Monday will have to be decision date.

  I dread taking a life. But what else.

  Delicious cards from you this morning … and a pile of hideious ones from ladies in merangue hats who send me bunnies and doggies and Dickens Inn’s .... or even worse, Piccadilly in Snow.

  Christ.

  D.

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  27 December 1980

  Norah –

  … Then, quite suddenly, it was Christmas Eve and the Mail Box bulged.