Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  With great love. Dirk –

  With Norah Smallwood’s departure from Chatto & Windus, Dirk had acquired a new literary agent, Patricia Kavanagh, who sold West of Sunset to Allen Lane, part of the Penguin group. All his subsequent books would be published under the group’s Viking hardback and Penguin paperback imprints.

  To Pat Kavanagh Clermont

  28 January 1984

  Pat –

  Sweet Heaven! Why! I mean that quite literally. Just why?

  Your letter of the 25th arrived this morning, along with a sodden copy of ‘Country Life’ (It’s been raining for two days and the postman only has a ’bike. And cant be bothered to keep anything dry anyway) plus the local tax demand from Bar sur Loupe. Which sounds, perhaps, glamorous but is not. In the least.

  And I read that you and your husband (I assume it is he? Unless it is your Daily or Secretary? I mean, you DO say we. So it must be.) sit and watch dead TV films!

  Is it a sense of love and loyalty?

  If it is there is no need for flagellation of this kind to prove it. I have a sort-of feeling that we all quite respect, like, care for, each other anyway.

  Is it that you watch because J. has three TV sets running at the same time, and records what he really MUST see?1

  Or is it that I was so bloody to you about green beans that you have entirely given up cooking and sit glued to the TV with a Mars bar and some old Ms? And that you are revengeful?

  Whatever it is, I implore you, dont do it any more!

  I am, seriously, alarmed that I appear to be advancing towards the age of ‘embalment’. The fly in amber. Petrified wood. Fossils. That sort of thing.

  I dont even REMEMBER ‘So Long At The Fair’, except that it was a goodish little book written by Anthony Thorn (e?)2 and is based on a true story.

  So dont go back to Marseilles in a hurry.

  What did I do to poor Jean Simmonds; languishing, I read, in ‘Thorn Birds’, which should’nt have happened to her at all: she is really rather nice. Was. I have’nt seen her for twenty four years!

  I remember that we had to keep our hats on in bedroom scenes until that film .. when I absolutely refused to stalk about in a top hat and dressing gown. That MIGHT have altered the Breen Office Code.3 I dont know.

  But it was’nt worth sitting watching for that.

  The ‘quiff’, as you call it so rudely, (some would call it ‘Hair’) was ‘in fashion’ then.

  But I expect that you were spitting at your poor little black servants and stamping on their voodoo-dolls at that time.1

  I think that I know what J. was doing … up and down that Met. Line2 … but that is altogether different.

  An appalling thought has just hit me, sitting here in bleary rain, and that is that perhaps you WERE NOT EVEN HERE ON EARTH THEN! Wow!

  I really would’nt mind if I got a titchy residual from all this crap which rolls, weekly it seems, onto the Box at tea-time. But I dont.

  Anymore than I get tuppence a year from a Library:3 because I ‘live abroad’. The people who write (the C&A ladies) cheerfully telling me that the ‘list for “An Orderly Man” is still miles long. I think I may be lucky by July.’fill me with rage. Soppy farts. They think I’ll be cheered up by the news that ‘the book’s obviously a success.’

  God. The middle-mind.

  My acid, but clever, French publisher, Mme Chabrier, called [ … ] I HAD a vague hope that she was calling to say that ‘Voices In The Garden’ was breaking all records in Montparnasse.

  ‘Ah no!’ she said. ‘There is only a tremor.’

  So you do get a bit dashed.

  What is the good of being called, by the French Press, ‘Proustian’ if no one buyes your buke.

  [ … ] I am bashing away, very, very slowly, at ‘Closing Ranks’,4 and some of it is funny … some of it good .. However there are another nine [chapters] to go, goodness!

  I am delighted that you have accepted to dine on the 28th .. not my kind of deal: but if I can manage it we wont eat in a basement, a celler, or the Gavroche .. I’ve suggested the Garrick: the Albert Hall: or Derry and Toms Roof Garden. Or a sandwich at the Globe in Covent Garden.

  Fanny B.5 is so burstingly pregnant that she really ought to be close to a hospital. But I don’t know any restuarants near St Thomases …

  I said that I’d bring a plastic bag.

  ‘What for?’ said Fanny.

  ‘The afterbirth.’ I suggested. She gave a little cry and has’nt spoken to me since.

  All this is rubbish. But no more rubbish than you and J. sitting watching temps perdue .... and not very good temps at that.

  I’m not, as you could be forgiven for thinking, pissed. It’s just that this machine got ‘mended’ in Grasse and has never recovered from the shock, which is why the words get lumped together. Sorry.

  [ … ] Thank you for […] telling me that Penguin are ‘so enthusiastic’ about ‘WOS’ (They have’nt really said as much to me: but then they are all in different departments now, and dont communicate easily.)

  I’d better go out and get a breath of fresh air: picking bloody olives of which, I may say, we already have gathered over 600 kilos! Not bad as an effort … but bad on the knees and back.

  Love

  Dirk.

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  14th March 1984

  11.30 o’clock – pm

  Norah dearest –

  I have just telephoned the Hospital to make perfectly certain that you were there: and you are!1 So at least a form of contact has been established. A charming sounding girl (Sister?) gave me the low-down on you, and said that you were ‘Cheerful’ (a standard word, I find in Hospital life) and that you could not take incoming calls.

  Now thats going to be a blow. I gather that you can call out but I cant call in, except to Sister. So, for the moment, it must stay like that. Heaven knows when this letter will arrive at your bedside, but I’ll take a chance and write anyway … I am stuck with ‘writers block’ on the final run to the finish of Chapter 3. Which is normal for me, but irritating.

  And in any case I have a hell of a lot of work to do outside before we up-sticks and leave for London.2

  I have cleared, dug and peated, the lower bed at the far end of the ‘lawn’ and bought thirty lavender plants, as I think I have already told you, from my piednoir gardener down the lane. They were rather expensive, but very fine plants. Fat, bushy, and local. By that I mean they are the stock which they grow in the back-country for the scent people. Fat, tight, cushions. I dont think that they’ll smother the weeds .. for a year or so .. but at least the bed wont look neglected and dreary this year. I left it alone, for obvious reasons, all last season .. there was’nt much time for gardening with the fate of the house rather hanging in the balence.

  I am being as optomistic as possible this year: thinking positivly, I am assured, is far better than thinking negativly. But I am a negativly-Thinking person. When I think at all.

  A relic, I fear, which I have inherited from my Ma.

  [ … ] A great deal of bird seed (thrown over the bed during the very coldest period for my birds) has sprouted … and I fear the Police may call and accuse me of growing cannabis! One never knows what is in those packets of seed. Whatever is growing is tough: and wont yank out easily. To my delight this year I have managed to convince a pair of thrushes and a couple of pairs of blackbirds, that it is wiser, and safer, to remain on my land rather than skitter off into the woods which are lethal with young idiots with double-bore rifles, who usually shoot each other, but quite often shoot a bird. And the hen pheasant, seldom seen except at early light, is now to be heard, and seen, scratching away in the thicket down by the cess-pool outlet! I think, from her industry, that she has a mate … and I now spend my time trying to keep Bendo away from the area.

  The pond is burgeoning with mating toads again, and I watch helplessly. The lillies have to be lifted and divided, but I cant face the idea just yet … the water is glacial. I think I’l
l wait until we return, for that job. In any case my thigh-boots, which are essential to this operation, leak.

  Five pm. Done it! Twenty four lavender plants stand witness to my labours. The thing was hell to do: kneeling on a slope, forking in yet more peat, cursing the oxalis which turned up with every trowel of earth .. sobbing with effort (I’m not young any more). So the sedum bed got short shift: I lifted a gathering of seedlings (California p.) and planted those in the bed under the terrace where they will get full sun and where, in a shorter time than one realises, you’ll be suggesting, wistfully, that they were not a good idea.

  Oh well.

  I am reading the Nicholson Book (Milne)1 .. somehow I never got around to it all that time ago. And I so dislike poor Nicholson that I stayed my hand each time it strayed. However, I got so damned bored with Nicholas Moseley .. or however he spells it .. Mosley? .. and his Mum and Dad,2 that I pulled Nicholson off his shelf.

  I am reading him, I confess, because Milne writes SO beautifully. With such ease and amusement. Rather like having the thing read to one, instead of reading it oneself. [ … ] I am not sure that I would have cared for the elegant life of Cimmie and Tom Mosley any more than I would care for Nicholsons. […] I am not at all certain that Nicholas has done his parents a service. But I am certain that he has written with honour. More’s the pity. [ … ] I always rather hope that in retrospect people who have been so mis-treated in their lives for their beliefs, whatever they may be, might be seen to triumph in the end. Not so here.

  I liked Nicholas M. very much when we were working on ‘Accident’, which as you know he wrote, and I am astonished to find that he is my age!

  [ … ] Anyway I read on with Milne … I just wish that he had not had to write about such a potty person. Forwood is reading, with certain interest for his own work the Edwina Mountbatten book1 … and she was no better than she should have been! But amazing in later life. I think the agony of NOT being ‘the Queen’ (after India) and having to bang about in a tiny house in Chester St must have been most irritating! And she showed it too.

  I met him when I was in Java and he was the Supremo. He had a very odd collection of people with him. And I was not, as an ADC, deeply taken with his ADC who should have been wearing a crinoline. At least.

  But he [Mountbatten] was enormously glamorous: and I was aware, even at the tender age of twenty four–five, that he had an amazingly mesmerising effect on the Lower Orders, or Other Ranks. However, it did’nt last for much longer than his visit. As soon as he had left the Island they soundly abused him for being a ‘bleedin’ aristo .. we’ll get that lot out when we get back’.

  That was, at that time, the most popular remark. And of course, to all intents and purposes, they did. Churchill went, Attlee came in .. and so on, in a slow, downward, spiral.

  Someone locally has a friend in London who has ‘taped’ almost all of ‘Jewels In The Crown’,2 and has been generous enough to loan them to me before sending them back. Forwood and I, bug eyed, hollow eyed, bleary eyed, unable to go to bed. Three or four episodes in a go .. NO commercials! Dame Peggy fills my heart with wonder and joy. How marvellous to watch such precision and care in a performance. The slightly ‘off’ accent, the busy walk, the inner despair and loneliness .. amazingly beautiful, because it is so true and so felt. We have, alas, finished our ration for the time being: maybe I can pick up the final chunk in London.

  [ … ] Oh dear. Foyles.3 How I dread it. And it clashes, most dreadfully, with the service in the Abbey for Noel Coward, who, quite correctly, is being honoured with a plaque. So everyone will be there and no one but the merangue-hats will come to luncheon. Except Peter Hall. Who has accepted probably not realising the importance of the event down the road!

  The sky is getting loomy-looking. Grumpy clouds drift in from Corsica, which is always a bad sign, and the bitter wind has dropped … a three quarter moon tonight, so a weather change is due. I hope not snow. We are in danger until the 16th … after that Spring OUGHT to be on it’s way … so they tell me.

  [ … ] I’m off. My little owl is calling up above the top terrace: so thats where he is this year. His wife makes a very disagreeable sound. I’ll wander up there, if my legs will take me after this afternoons labour, and spy out their nest: which will allow you to set this down and rest.

  & remember that I love you greatly –

  XXXX Dirk

  To Dilys Powell Clermont

  27 April 1984

  Dilys dear –

  I think that the word you want is ‘crock’! A cracked crock cant hold milk … something like that: and I am steadily advancing towards that state myself! Flu is over .. just .. a really loathsome attack which caught quite a number of my ‘retinue’ who accompanied me on the ‘Promotional’. One enchanting lady was v.v. ill and is only recovering now!

  We think that we ‘got it’ in Oxford at Blackwells Literary Luncheon. Millions, it seemed, of vicars and merangue-hatted ladies sneezing cheerfully over the Dry Fly Sherry. Ghastly!

  I was so sorry not to have had a longer moment with you at Foyles that day … it was such a terrific birthday, and so splendidly fitting that so many of my dearest, and oldest, friends were there to share it.1 P. Hall DID read my obituary, which shattered me, but I just sat there in deep embarressment pretending that he was speaking about someone quite other: that helped. Anyway: you did have E. [Edward] Fox and he is a man of infinate manners and courtliness .. I also think he is a splendid actor, so does he. But gets terribly frantic when his younger brothers get the best parts! I cant say that I blame him.2 We, like you I gather from the family at home, have had the most glorious weather: golden sun, shimmering sea, hazed mountains and a great deal of work already to do on the land. Mainly weeding and cutting the first hay! Amazingly summer just arrives here. A very short spring of great beauty and bounty and then, wham! summer is upon us. So flu has had to be overcome, it’s silly to mope about in deep depression in the middle of all this ravishing light and beauty. So up one gets and staggers about with a hoe; or paint brush to tart-up the garden furniture.

  So far the new book is selling well and I’m number 2 on the Best Seller list in the ‘Bookseller’ (Which sounds an odd sentence.) So I dont complain, but do wish that a good film would emerge for me before age really pulls me into Grandfather roles! But nothing seems to be worth the doing: and I wont play bits and pieces after the excellent roles I have once played. Pride? Maybe … but I have set a standard, for myself, and wont fall below it.

  Ahead is the horror of the Festival. I cant imagine WHY I agreed to be President. Maybe because it IS an honour and because I live in France, and what the hell … why not? I seldom see a Movie, I do hate dubbed versions of things. So now I shall watch two a day in shaking despair. Oh! The miseries of the Czheck, the Russian and the Bolivian entries … and those interminable Chinese bits! However my Jury is distinguished and sounds as if it will really be serious … and we have no idiot American writer to hinder us this year! They get so dreadfully drunk, cast the wrong vote, and insist that as America is spending so much money in the Town they HAVE to win the Palme d’Or. But this year things will, I hope, be different. We’ll see!

  […] This letter is NOT for answering … it is to thank you for your note, and to remind you that ‘crocks’ are all the same … it comes to us all: and very boring it is!

  I am now going to write off for your book, ‘An Affair Of The Heart’1 to the wonderous, if hefty, Miss Parker at Hatchards .. she manages to get me things here in days only … and I’m just about ready for ‘you’. I’ve finished, for the second time, Enid Bagnolds autobiography2 … and I am at a loss. You’ll make it up for me … as ever.

  Your devoted Dirk XXXXX

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  3 June 1984

  Most dear Norah –

  From the date above one would think, would’nt one, that the day was golden, that the sun beat down through the tender leaves of the vine, that lizards scurried across the hot tile
s and the ice clinked softly in a tall glass of white wine?

  Surely? The roses must be turning face-wards to the light, the pots and tubs must be garlanded with flowers.

  But not so.

  It rains. Torrentially.

  Spills down the walls, courses down the drive, roars into the pond and sends the goldfish in tumbling, flapping, breaks of colour, into the cess-pit overflow.

  All most romantic. June in the south of France.

  Do you suppose it is because we have altered the balance of the weather by chucking all those dreadful satalites into the heavens? Or are we in for a New Age of dire summers? Yesterday I might have been persuaded that the weather had been as it always was, the first-weekend-in-June of so many idiotic songs of the ’twenties. When Roses Are In Bloom, Tra Laa .. I painted most of the garden chairs, the table tops, the spindley little iron chairs which are so peculiarly French and have’nt altered since before Proust set them about in Swann’s garden. And now they stand idle and drenched, the red dust from the Saraha speckeling the pristine surfaces … for I painted carefully and with a new brush which did not leave hairs on the expensive plastic-based paint.

  The wisteria blossom hangs wanly; wet handkerchiefs … the splendour of Grandmere Jenny is all spilled open, the petals falling into the drooping fuchias below.

  At least, thank God, I have not invited ten for luncheon!

  That has been known to happen before: at least one has some frozen veal rissoles (rather scrumptious!) and spring greens and new potatoes for lunch. Which will be eaten by electric light in the dark dining room. No lobster salad! No crab mousse! No shrimps in ‘sick sauce’ and delicious gulls eggs .... not a summer lunch, just a nourishing ‘Nursery’ one. For a wet, cold beastly day in Kent or Westmorland or anywhere you like.

  [ … ] Anyway: contact has been re-established. And you have no possible idea how important that is. I dont wish you to feel that you are burdened by your writer! Not at all .. but he is burdened by the need for your comforting voice and assurance. So there! Goodness! How I wish that you were still my Managing Director! That I could discuss, worry, fret about how to next go about a book. Being free-lance, so to speak, has great advantages … but equally it has disadvantages. One misses the closeness of ones Publisher? Editor? whatever role you played. The advice, the council, the rejection, even, of material … it is all so greatly needed, and now, alas! I must find the way myself more or less.