by Unknown
We were all there because we had loved him, admired him, been nourished (theatrically speaking) by him. And everyone spoke of him with such terrifically warm pleasure that he HAD to be a decent bloke underneath all the humph and huff and blowing.
That I loved him, and that you loved him, goes without saying but it was a particularly glowing feeling of delight that I got from all those very different people who had come, many of them, from so far.
No weary Knight bleating from a pulpit: no quotes from John Donne, no singing of ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ … none of the crap. Just an end-of-picture-party for a most particular man.
Thats what it was, and how it should have been.
Splendid Miss Bacon,2 and Theo3 and all the others who worked so hard must have been well rewarded, I’d think, by the extreme pleasure that work gave to so many.
And they would’nt have done all that without having loved the chap as we did.
So there we are, dearest Patricia. A chapter closed. But not firmly. The memories are evergreen and cant fade, and love, the love which was engendered that evening, must have reached him; wherever he is.
With all my admiration – & love –
Dirk
In October, Hélène Bordes, Maître de Conférences in the Faculty of Letters at Limoges University, had written to Dirk, seeking his approval for a paper she was preparing on his first three volumes of memoirs. Dirk felt it would have no interest for her students, because his books were not published in France – ‘they are considered “too local” in appeal!’– and his dialogue did not translate well. He did not wish to be involved in any way with her project but thanked her for the compliment and wished her good luck. A few weeks later she sent him an outline of ‘ “Peuple” et “Pays” dans l’Autobiography de Dirk Bogarde’.
To Hélène Bordes [Clermont]
Grasse 06
16 December 1984
Chere1 Mme Bordes –
Thank you so much for your warm and encouraging letter of the 8th December.
I must confess, with my hand on my heart, that I was not able to understand all of it: and I really dont know quite what you are doing with my ‘works’.
I cant believe that they are of any importance to a University.
But I am most honoured that you have chosen to use me as your example!
You are sad that you have no bibliography .. well: there is’nt much to offer you. It could never be as complex and important as my filmography … I have been asked to write for ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Observer’ and the London ‘Times’. And I have done so: they were not very important pieces, but they were published and proved to me that writing books is easier than journalism!
Various magazines have commissioned me to write, and usually I refuse because they take time from my ‘serious’ writing. But recently, for example, I was commissioned to write a ‘life’ of my father who was Art Editor of ‘The Times’ which celebrates it’s 200th Anniversary in January. They have suddenly, almost too late, discovered that Papa was very important to news-papers and made many inventions which are in use today. So the son applauds the father. I found it amusing to do!
My poetry has been published in various literary magazines, and one which I had the temerity to include in ‘Snakes And Ladders’, ‘Steel Cathedrals’, has gone into a third anthology of War Poetry!
‘Postillion’ is now in it’s seventeenth edition and the first part of it is now compulsary at the State Schools for Study! Poor children. What has interested me, and made me happy, is that my writing is now accepted, in England at least, as ‘pure prose’. And that is the most important thing to me.
Sadly my writing, the irony, the wit, etcetera, does not translate well into French. We HAVE very different languages indeed, with different meanings altogether. ‘Postillion’ (in French) was awful! A reve d’enfance or d’enfance reve or something silly.1 And I think that ‘Des Voix Dans Le Jardin’ was the nearest good translation … but it puzzled many of my French readers. The autobiographies, alas, are not translated.
In Greece, South America, America, Finland, Sweden, etc, yes.
But not France. Ah well .. the sixth volume, of romantic-writing, is due to come out, as we say, in France next year. I fear for the translation greatly! It is nearly all dialogue and set in West Los Angeles which is as different to Paris or Limoges as Mars! So what happens I do not know .. in America they hated it! In England it was on the Best Seller lists for weeks and weeks .. but Americans do not like criticism!
Anyway: good luck to you … and thank you for your courtesy and care.
I hope my work has made YOUR work worth all the trouble you have taken.
A Student at Nice University has just written a thesis on my writings so maybe I am not completely crazy after all! I hope that he is not!
With all good wishes, and thanks,
Sincerely,
Dirk Bogarde.
To Kathleen Tynan Clermont
29 December 1984
Kathleen dearest –
[…] I am writing because I nearly did a terrible thing.
Burning a vast box of stuff from the Studio here, old Christmas Cards, gift-wrappings from Ohouah, Queensland, and sundry bits of muck .. including an enormous quantity of cigarette packets (smoked) I NEARLY lost your letter of December 14th.
How it got there I do not know. It wafted away into the long grass just as the flames were about to lick it’s tender edges. And I saved it.
So it seems only right that I should apologise personally for being so crass as to allow a letter of yours to mingle with the Fan-Junk from Queensland, and Oregon, and West Cricklewood.
It was jolly nice to have your letter anyway: so many chums seem to have sold up, divorced, left for Bermuda or whatever, that a familiar hand is deeply welcome on a lonely Christmas Eve; when you arrived.
Actually: hand on heart, it was’nt THAT lonely a Christmas.
I lie.
Naturally.
We had a pair of elegant escapees1 from New York and Jingle Bells who insisted that there should be no reminders of the dreadful day. And there were none. Brilliant sun, cold, ice on the pond, champagne in the flutes, chairs on the terrace, heavy sweaters and someone reading Emerson. Aloud.
So we did sort of obliterate Christmas. Not hard to do on six bottles of Cristal!
She, the lady of the pair, is the highest paid scriptwriter in L.A and manages to remain sane, a lady (in capital letters) and live in Connecticut. He is far too handsome for the Movies of today, struggles hard against ‘The Gremlins’ or Al Pacino, has given in finally and settled down in Connecticut with the Lady Scriptwriter. All of twenty years his senior, but who the hell’s counting if happiness is all?
Anyway, they were fun, and the fearful day faded into a haze of good grub and wine .. we went for a long walk in the mountains along a real Roman road (They dont have them in Connecticut) and crawled in and out of a real neolithic grain store (2.000–4.000 BC. They dont have those in Connecticut either I gather) and came home to tea here with the Lartigues, Jacques is 92 and young with it.
And that was that. Forwood managed the two days very well indeed. His first real ‘throwing to the lions’ bit for a while. And survived it extremely well. But as long as the guests are’nt bores it’s pretty easy, and he forgets that he has’nt read his Guardian.
A little before the Festivities M. Umbrella2 came down and had a happy day with me here, which was GREATLY releiving and comforting, so the rest of the crap did’nt really count. I can eat for a year or two at least. Which, you will admit, is useful to know. The only snag is that I have to work. And I’m fast getting out of the habit. I’m as bankable as Atomic Waste in the Movies, but the book-field is okay. So I have to take the hard road. Since I am a novice, and my beloved Norah Smallwood died in October so that my guide and councillor is no more there to batter me, I feel, I confess, rather lost and not a little cold.
I batter away at a new novel … the autobiography bored me SH
ITLESS. So I turned that aside, after four regurgitated chapters, and bashed into society (with a capital S) in Sussex. I mean, a family of such vast proportions that I keep having to read and re-read the stuff to remind myself who was who and what colour they had their hair … it’s not EXACTLY Proust. But as far as words and characters are concerned it rings bells! Oh Lor’ ...
I was asked to be a soulful monk opposite Robert de N. in some fillum to be made in Brazil.3 But it sounds to me a real ‘toughie’, and I’m not into flying about in single engined planes from Colombia to Peru and back. Especially just at this moment ‘in time’. So that was set aside. Also it meant fifteen weeks in the jungle, or whatever, and at my age I really prefer a glass tank of wax lilies on a grand piano: and one set.
A far more relaxing way of spending an evening was with Princess Alx. who came down here to celebrate the 150th year of Lord Brough[a]m finding Cannes. I rather think he’d have been better off not doing such a rash thing: however the Consul ordered me to attend a private supper party in the Royal suite and it really was fun, mainly because we were only twelve at table and she is devine, as always. I almost gave her a socking fat kiss when we parted, and she was about to do the same, when protocol slipped between us, thankfully. There is, after all, a limit!
I drove home in a haze of pleasure and a torrential rain storm which had washed away a good deal of the road. Forwood was a little worried sitting on his tod with the roof leaking and the thunder roaring and me lost, so it appeared, for some hours. But I got back, leaving my shoes somewhere between Cagnes sur Mer and Le Rouret. It was that kind of storm.
Then there was an enormous hommage to Visconti in Nice one night, and we all got given gold leopards for some reason.1 But it was fun .. even though I had to make my speech in Frog which always worries me.
So, you see, we manage […]
Off to London for a week or so (if I can buy the Connaught) at the end of Feb. I to do a big TV Show, Forwood to have his check. The Connaught is now so costly (unless your money is in dollars) that I cant swing it longer than a week .. the TV pay for one week, which is’nt bad … but it adds up to 2.000 quid a week WITHOUT breakfast: but I cant face service flats and hate the Dorchester and why ever not anyway?
I’m getting choked off splitting logs and laying tables and de-freezing some disgusting packet of Cantonese Rice or whatever. So a bit of a spoil is in order.
This then, to wish you happiness and success in this worrying New Year, and to bring you great love from here. Forwood is trailing about down on the lower terraces with his grass machine, otherwise he’d stick his name to this as well as mine .... but, no doubt he’ll write you: one day!
All love, all safety, and good work …
Ever Dirk XXX
P.S. Saw a creepy-sad TV programme here, Hommage to Deitrich. She would not appear (naturally) but spoke by telephone. It was deeply sad and almost exactly as you describe her to be. Petulant, flirty, and a bit pissed. Oh shit .... D
P.P.S. Telephone call from Glenda J. to say she arrives Tuesday. For a week. Back to splitting logs and Cantonese Rice. Double Shit! D
To Hélène Bordes Clermont
14 February 1985
Dear Madame Bordes
Lord! You say this often enough, so I might as well use it also! I am overwhelmed by the amount of work you have had to do, and the great generosity of spirit towards my humble efforts which you show.
I really only wrote the autobiographies because the first one was a success and people, it appeared, wanted me to write more.
So I did!
But I had no idea that I would end up being so beautifully dissected by such careing hands in the University of Lovely Limoges.
If I say ‘Thank you’ you must forgive me. I have always been told, by Lally! that to say ‘Thank you’ was ‘good manners’ and, anyway, the least that one could do. I cant do more because I am far too stupid to understand ALL your writing, and, as I have said, overwhelmed by your interest.
That my works, such as they are, should have given you interest enough to spend so much effort and time, amazes and delights me. It almost manages to explain my own book to myself! How about that? I wrote, as I always write, ‘off the cuff’ without very much literary pretensions, as you will know .. and I was, at first, worried that writing at all about oneself was a very concieted thing to do. The pronoun ‘I’ has not been my favourite one.
However Norah Smallwood, my original, glorious, publisher, made me realise that I had, after all, led an extra-ordinary life, as opposed to a quite ordinary one, and that, historically, one day, my comments on the period in which I had lived might be of some value to a researching writer.
We neither of us expected success: just a well done job.
However she lived to see that we had worked together and had made a success of the job at the same time. This pleased her more, I believe, than almost anything she had done in her publishing life … and it was a remarkable one, with her ‘personal’ writers such as Iris Murdoch, Lawrens van der Post, Huxley, V.S. Prichart and .. shall I tell you this? PROUST himself! She was the one who got him properly translated into English twice. Thank God, and Norah!
So you see I was in good hands: her pushing paid off, even more than the inspiration and bullying offered me by Mrs X. Alas! both are now dead and I am left with an immense hole in my capabilities, afraid to try anything without their criticism.
Your generosity has done a great deal to throw, as we say, a bridge over that hole of despair. So ‘Thank you’ is really NOT enough!
Your splendid package arrived only an hour or so ago, so I have not had the time to digest it carefully. I shall do so this evening when the house is still and the chores are done, and then I will write to you again.
One tiny item: ‘Derek’ is the English for ‘Dirk’ … which is Dutch, and which I greatly prefer, although my Mama wanted me to be ‘Derek’ because it was, she insisted, a French name! Perhaps it was in 1921? I dont know, but I dislike it .. and the other thing, for your eyes only, is that it is quite impossible to obtain a copy of ‘Postillion’ in French because the lady who published this in Paris was furious with me because I would (COULD) not go on ‘Apastrophe’1 … so she said that she would send all the unsold books back to me here at Clermont in a truck: or burn them.
Well: they did’nt arrive here, So .... no one can find a copy in French.
That, I think, is madness!
Our Simone [Signoret] … OF COURSE we share her. I love her deeply, and respect her for all her wild, marvel ous, determined ideals … as well as for her determination to write. We started to write a book for the first time on the same day!
‘How far have you got?’ she would ask me.
‘About fifty pages.’ I would reply.
‘Pooh! Bof! Me? I have seventy two …’
It was fun, and we both ‘worked’.
[ … ] The young student from Nice sent me his thesis yesterday.
Okay. An interview, not a thesis at all .. questions and answers, and dull ones at that. Sometime I will be asked an original question and then I will not be able to answer it!
I am so weary when people say that actors cant write. Or should NOT write. Some of us, of course, are idiots. I know that. But many of us are not. If we understand Shakespear, Pinter, Molier, Racine, Webster, Mann, and so on, it does not mean that we may write like them but it DOES mean that we can interpret what they mean, which is more than a critic can, and it would follow that with a deep love, and understanding, of words, one might be able to write a little more than an autograph! Ah well … This is all for the moment, apart, that is, from the phrase which you so dislike .. ‘Thank you’.
And my most sincere admiration …
Dirk Bogarde
à bientôt
To Hélène Bordes Clermont
19 February 1985
Chere HB –
Before I leave for London and all the things which I must face there, a note (on the terrible typing pap
er!) to say simply: Yes. Despair was the word I meant and so was bridge.
I thank you for helping me to cross a little easier.
I write like an idiot: re-write and re-write, page after page, so that sometimes I type one page, or even one paragraph, eight, ten, twenty times. And still I am not satisfied. Do you know that feeling?
I am certain that you do.
So that it is crossing a deep pit of despair, dark and hopeless, so that one KNOWS one will never get ‘it right’ … and that the way across the pit is dangerous because if one falls, from tiredness or from a lack of criticism and council, or even comfort, one could fall for ever. One HAS to get to the other side of the pit: and your letters and your thesis have provided me with the plank and the rail to go ahead. Simple!
When I say ‘only an Honoury degree’1 you must realise that what I mean is that I have not worked for it: like the teachers and students who really have! I have been given it as an honour, that is to say, for all my works … but not because I REALLY studied and sweated at my exams and my lectures! Do you understand that? I feel very humble.
But no more! I shall look very strange in my cap and gown, and the journalists, be sure! will laugh a good deal. But I really dont care.
I AM writing now, another part of autobiography, and today I realised that I have written almost the entire story of the fall of Singapore in 1942 … and it has been written about 6.000 times by far wiser men and it has almost NOTHING to do with my autobiography! How mad one can become. It will all have to go … or almost all .. for I only got to Singapore AFTER the events about which I have the audacity to write!
So: three days of wasted work. Idiot.
That is why I say that I am stupid! You see …
‘West Of Sunset’ is now in livre de poche2 .. and is this week No.3 on the Best Seller lists … Norah S. would have been pleased: she saw every word of the book, it was our last together, and although she said that she did not ‘really care for the ugly people’ she thought it was ‘werry, werry, good.’ She could never pronounce her ‘v’s … but it was high praise indeed!
