by Unknown
And speaks, I imagine, perfectly ‘a la mode’ … ours does’nt.
Ustinov, Rampling, Huppert and I were the representatives of the UK-French Brigade. I floundered badly at first. Not a single word of French could I utter! Not a word! I was in agony … but very gradually my courage returned and very gradually I tried the water. I managed.
You will never know how glorious it was to hear French all round me.
[ … ] Our hooligans have returned from … where? .. cant remember. Ah! Hong Kong, where they were beaten at football and they then got drunk and wrecked the plane: in flight. It really is amazing how angry and frustrated the British Young are. No war to clean them out .....
I am going to do one final concert for something called The Last Word. It’s rather boring. I agreed to do it in December, June seemed so far off. Now it’s next week. I shall read to them .. and answer questions. We are sold out. I always am. The ageing residuals of my Film Audiences. Very nice and loving. And they dont destroy airplanes in full flight.
I have been asked to do the ‘Diary’ for The Spectator. Not the Economist. I like the Spectator, it’s rather less ‘intellectual’. Otherwise I am sure I’d not have been asked. I can do it whenever I like, so I am not tied to a weekly deadline. Which I normally have been when reviewing.
Now I am off. I have to draw a map, or plan, of the setting of the last book. Where the House is, the orchard, the Home Farm, the stream etc etc … if it works out I may suggest it for the cover. Or the fly-leaf?
If she likes what she reads flying on her broomstick to New York …
That is your ration … sorry about the errors and the machine.
I wonder where I can buy a new machine? One that does’nt frighten my wits out of me. People always say, Ah! You MUST get a Word Processor … but I can hardly open a tin of sardines, let alone use a machine with buttons to press and green letters everywhere. And, in any case, they can always be read as mechanical. Or electrical.
No effort has been taken … Dont care for that …
Voila –
DB.
To Dominique Lambilliotte Cadogan Gardens
28 June 1996
Good Friday 5th.1
Dominique –
‘It must be a sign of madness ..’ means just that.
I NEVER capitulate to ladies since the death of Mrs X ages ago.
So, I suppose I went raving mad and wrote to you .. which gives me infinite pleasure. You must understand that although you have a firm idea of who I am, I am probably much nastier! I have one other friend in France. A Professor at Limoges.2 I love her very much. We write as often as we can be bothered to. It’s that sort of relationship. She braved the journey and came to Paris when I was staying once at the Lancaster. Brought me a tin of cèpes in oil. I forgot them for so long that they turned into brown glue. She has now lost her whole family, is deeply religeous (which I am not) and goes giving very complex lectures to Students everywhere. In the U.S at the moment I think. But she has no illusions about me .. having met me in the Lancaster (what HAS happened there?) she got a pretty clear idea of who, what, I was! I call her my plank .. planche. Once I had a very bad attack of writers-block and she, strangely, managed to break it.
She, as it were, threw a plank across my ravine.
All that sort of nonsense.
I have sent the MS off to my publisher. No response yet. I dont think they will like it much. Or at all! It is not entirely about the exchange of the Cossacks. Thats a tiny part, but I had to read a thousand papers to digest it all. They, the publishers, are giving me a party (God help me!) on the 3rd to celebrate the fact that I have sold over one million copies of my works in six years in Penguin. Apparently only the writers we call ‘Airport Junk’ sell so many. Oh well. No intellectual am I: I dont really mind. I meet less boring people that way. I did a show (one of my readings) for the National [Royal] Geographical Society last week. They usually have Professors or Very Clever People who discuss the heavens, or just space, or the effect of copper on zinc. That sort of thing. God only knows what I was doing there. But I sold out (800 +) and we all had a very jolly time. No one else has EVER sold out at the Institute before. Well: are you facinated by ‘space’ or the effect of copper on zinc stuff? At lunchtime? However it was a triumph, and I enjoyed myself and every one else did too. So. Modest? Non – pas de tout – pas moi. We are a benighted nation here. We lost at football1 (thank the Lord) the papers were so viciously anti-German that it seemed as if we were fighting a war again, not just playing a game. The nation was terribly shocked. Our age, who had endured the war, were angrier than the youth who had’nt an idea. But the blatent spreading of hatred against ALL foreigners by the Tabloids is monstrous, and worrying. WE are gradually being taken over by Japan, you, and Germany .. and very few of Tout Le Mond have the least idea. Craven idiots.
Even if you have doubts about Chirac you should be glad that you do not suffer our despair over Major! Actually that day was fun, but we ALL spoke English! There you are! Rampling was very shocked to hear how incomprehensible Huppert had become … Ustinov bumbled away, as usual. I have known him since we were sixteen!
Going back to this xenophobia business: I reviewed four books on the Holocaust some time ago, for my paper (Telegraph) I headed the piece WHY? meaning why did these hideious things happen … and it was the first time in my life that I ever had ‘Hate Mail’. It is a very, very disagreeable feeling. Always written in red or green ink .. always anti-semetic, violently so, and screaming ‘Jew Lover’ or ‘Jew Boy’ at me as many times as possible .. with chunks of the Bible underlined in red and green ink. For good measure. I was appalled. So was the paper.
A good, conservative, almost dull, paper hiding such hatred. Goodness.
You just never know, do you?
[ … ] By the way, I have, today, decided NOT to do the piece in the old Spectator. Something is going wrong there, and I dont much like it .. good people are leaving quietly. So I dont think I’ll join the team that exists. Unsubscribe yourself immediatly! Oh. I re-read your letter. I read bits from my own work at ‘The Last Word’. Bits which readers seem to appreciate greatly, and which, for some reason, make them weep silently! I think that the ‘blurb’ on the hardback of ‘Short Walk’ is particularly thought provoking.
Also an Auden poem, ‘Tell Me The Truth About Love’ which I read quite sickeningly well! Then some Belloc, for laughter, and a piece of old rubbish by Alice Meynil2 which I used to read aloud to my brother soldiers in our hut during the first weeks of ‘Call Up’. Most of them, to my shock, were illiterate. I used to help them to write to their mothers and sisters and, of course, wives and mistresses … or girl-friends as we would have it in those far away days. I was amazed that even though there was such illiteracy among them, their vocabulary was astonishing! I dont suppose many of the girl-friends knew what the hell Albert, John, or Dennis, was talking about … even if they could read … but we sent them off, they signed their names after I had read the stuff over to them. Some in masculin tears even … ah, well … not many made it back. I have never heard that any of them did, and only ever got one Question (I take Questions at the end) from one of the men who had been with me in Yorkshire (I think) and remembered and said how happy he was to say thank you at last. His wife was beside him! She beamed and the audience, at that concert, 1.300, applauded.
The telephone rang just then. Viking have accepted my MS and like it and the title, ‘Closing Ranks’. Thank God for that. Two years slog. They think it is a somber book. They are damned right … and want just ‘one or two tiny cuts and trims … nothing serious’ .. we’ll see!
So that is 14 books altogether. I rather hated having 13 .. a sort of Bakers Dozen. Unsatisfactory, it irritated me greatly. But now all is done and I am completely empty. Vide. Is this what it is like having a baby? Well … I have a large family, at rather a mature age!
So. That is all. I hope you can read this … I keep the old machine, I detest all that green lett
ering flying about on a screen … I loose contact with my reader that way. This way is laborious but far better and, apres tout, personal. I hope you agree …
Dirk
To Dominique Lambilliotte Cadogan Gardens
25 July 1996
Dominique –
I hasten to reply to your salmon-questionair.
I have been rather mucked about recently. It has been discovered that I have two blocked arteries in either leg and an operation is the only way out. I detest hospitals, especially after the grim weeks of the stroke, but I fear that the pain now stops me even going to our local Hediard or Fauchon,1 which I live in and have loved for eight years. (The ONLY place I can get a decent camembert, or my A La Perruche (sucre de canne) and various other delights which keep me in a French habit) and that is only a few steps away. So .. I’ll have to go in at the start of the Fall .... when my doctor (doctor to the Royal Household and adorable)2 returns from his holiday in Sousse.
It’s a bloody bore. But I am editing fast (very little as I was assured), bits and pieces, a sweet, tough, Editor, and I am re-writing a couple of pieces (which will change the ending greatly) and wont have that to fuss me.
I mean, of course, I have ONE artery in each leg. Not several!
The party of ‘celebration’ was elegantly done. My ‘Team’, even the mail girls, and large portraits of myself all over the walls, with huge ‘Congratulations’ on them. Then there was a presentation of a modest, but enchanting, snuff or pill-box in gilt and enamel with the details beautifully written and the date. It was very touching and good of them. Then we all (twelve of us) went to a delicious restaurant and I was so moved etc that I could’nt eat a morsel but drank a deal of champagne and agreed that the new book would be published, and ready to be published, by March. So .. (God it is so hot today! I drip over this machine.) The next thing that faced me was the National Geographical Society business, which was packed out, adult, and rather fun to do. I have just changed the cartridge in this elderly machine. Not very well. Anyway, that is the sum total of my summer adventures. Apart from the awful Wellington Hospital built by, and for, Arabs and the only doctor who can do the delicate X Ray and injections for the veins works there. It is like a Holiday Inn in St Etienne, crammed with vast rich Arab ladies in total black with gold bits dangling and Chanel Shoes peering out under their chadors .... marble, rosewood, great bowls of flowers, richness beyond dreams. They made me pay my cheque BEFORE I had even removed my tie … maybe not St Etienne? Perhaps somewhere ruined by the blight on the South near Jean les Pins somewhere .... anyway, awful.
I am so sorry about the Spectator. I just suddenly got a feeling that things there have changed and not for the better and that my name would not enhance it’s chances. I have not been forgiven here for my ‘popular’ films in the 40’s and 50s .. for my ‘foreign name’ and worst of all for leaving the UK to ‘avoid taxes’. It was NEVER for that reason .. but they loathe the real reason far more. My feeling for France and all things French. Un-allowable. Odd [ … ]
I have been reviewed patronisingly. And brutally by women authors. Is’nt it odd? I dont know any of them. Never reviewed them either. But I have stopped doing that for good .. I told the truth, as I saw it, delighted the readers and enraged the writers. All too small a world, so I pulled out. I only began writing at home for the simple reason that the days in winter were short, the evenings long, and after the logs had been split, the sheep seen to, the mowers covered, the hay gathered (for fear of fire) there was nothing to do. So I wrote. Having sold ‘in excess of one million’ I consider myself very fortunate.
Yes: indeed I got your p.c view of your pretty terraces … the mail has been all over the place and the strikes continue spasmodically. We never quite know when they’ll hit us. And now the Metro has joined them … it’s July, the place is crammed with Americans and Japanese, the heat is quite dreadful and the IRA chuck their bomb[s] about like apple cores.
I dont understand any of it. Except that I wont fly again! And I shant go NEAR Atlanta after last nights caper.1
[ … ] I get so many letters from young people who wonder how I have survived, how I am so honest and brutal with myself (!) and can I advise them? Well: I cant really, I try to ease their burden by writing, in hand, a short card of encouragement … one letter which arrived this morning ended … ‘Your lack of confidence is your strength. Where did you find the courage to show it? PLEASE keep talking and writing.’ I cant understand this really, the poor fellow (it IS a fellow) is in a bad way I fear … being forced to write to a stranger or a writer cant be easy, can it? And how the hell do I reply? I’ll think of that later.
[…] I am horrified to think that you have bought all those video’s. Bertrand Tavernier did that on a London trip and was astonished when I removed his bulging plastic sack at the Connaught and gave it to the Porter. You are not allowed to carry umbrellas, sacks, or anything like a camera or a telephone. That is absolutely forbidden. And ladies can now wear trouser suits so long as they match! It is wonderfully, and correctly, Victorian … Edwardian really. De Gaulle used it as his H.Q during the war so the restaurant is one of, if not THE, best in London. Michel Bourd[a]in runs a superbe kitchen … why have I wandered? Ah yes! Your video’s. You know I have never seen any of them .. there is a new story which I read for Reed International, same ones who did ‘Death In Venice’. It’s charming. Called ‘A House In Flanders’ by Michael Jenkins.2 I loved it when I read it, and gave it a rave review and accepted instantly when I was asked to read it. See if you can find it with your boys-team!
I stopped there to listen to the radio News. Another bomb in Spain at a tourist site, and the Atlanta games are to continue inspite of the blast yesterday … the Americans are so hysterical, poor dears. I remember that when the Gulf War broke out London emptied, you could’nt get a seat on any flight to the U.S.A .. but any table you wanted at the Savoy, the Connaught, L’Escargot, and etc … hotels were empty in a trice.
This is a mammoth letter about nothing … but it may be added to the pile you are accumulating in lavender under your bed. Or wherever you keep your mail. I must get on with the rewrites .. and wash my arms. I stick to the papers on my desk. It is most disagreeable .... to end, I am so happy that you have found a private happiness .. one must have courage always, I think that is what I shall write to my mournful young writers. NEVER give up the fight … after all I only started writing for something to do in the long evenings and I have sold in excess of a million! At seventy five that HAS to be courage.
Or idiocy?
Ever DB
To Helen Osborne Cadogan Gardens
27 August 1996
Helen –
I have had a bloody sort of summer. Not swank. Fact. I have to go and have my legs dealt with at Edward VII .. the arteries have, what they cheerfully call, ‘furred up’. I cant begin to tell you how painful it is. So since I can no longer walk, even across to Europa Foods in Sloan Strasser, I sit here in a heap and batter away at this. I’m perfectly comfortable: unless I walk. Fuck.
Loved your (slightly) incomprehensible letter, which made me feel, once again, how much I miss your laughter. Never mind. If I am legless when next you come you can push me about in a chair. That’ll be the day. Would’nt J.O be AMAZED! Dainty little me.
Robert [Fox] sent me a copy of his fillum1 on tape … and was a tiny bit worried that I had nothing to say about it when he last called. Merely because I had’nt even looked at it. Was’nt it rotten of me? Problem was that I could’nt work the bloody machine-thing .. but dont tell him that. I whinnied on about Editing the book (I was, and it’s sold and all wrapped up) because they want it for March .. so I had to be quick. See? Then off to the Wellington I sped to be dealt with by a terribly nice Arab gent (he was. Actually) who is the only man in London who does the operation. Shoving needles into your groin and watching how the colours race (or dont) through your veins.
Mine did’nt. All that much. But I scarpered from that place because
the Sister, Lourdes Marie Louise (Do you believe?) said I must lie flat for six hours after the operation, and I MIGHT be kept in overnight which would cost me another £480 quid. So when she was’nt looking I called my car and fled. When we got to Selfridges (on the journey) my driver asked if I was bleeding? I said no. And we got back here, un-bloody, by six of the clock, with an Evening Standard and a triple Scotch. They asked me for the cheque before I’d even taken off my tie, and then offered me the menue (I chose steamed plaice) and then got wheeled down to X.ray. I cant tell you the fuck-up it all was. But then you must sort of know that route anyway .. well: sort of.
Anyway. Roberts fillum. Well. Yesterday being the Bank Holiday and not a soul alive, I put it on and managed to get it working. It really was rather a long time since I’d been sent it. It was rather a long film. Too. Apart from the staggering Miss V. who could make a menue from Macdonalds sound magical and looked more beautiful than I can tell … there was’nt much else to see. And Ed. has got to go to a dentist and lower his voice. I was’nt quite certain who, or what, he was playing. Far too short for V … which was a bit cruel of Robert .. but nepotism2 is never good, do you think? I was staggered at the sight of Alida Valli … I remember the glory of her so well .. and evenings with Losey and that School all sitting about in the Roman heat. How glorious she was. How naughty …
Ghastly Sheridan Morley HAS done his book. Lawyers have been assured it is a ‘picture book’ .... due in October.1 I long to sue him .. I did sue the last fucker who tried a ‘picture book’2 and sent the money to the Marsden. So lets try the dreadful Morely … poor Larry O!3 One is never safe. Never. David Caute carved Losey into segments. All ugly … oh dear …
All my love – Dirk XXXX
To Dominique Lambilliotte Cadogan Gardens
3 September 1996
D –
No. I have not gone into hospital yet.
Everyone is on holiday .. all the medical world that is to say. The Proles are back. Their wretched children litter the streets and scream and fight and are generally repellant. Why is it that we, the English, have become so foul? Viscious, loud, swigging from cans in the street, chewing gum and spitting it out in disgusting lumps that avoiding is essential, but very difficult for one like me, hobbling about like something out of Grimm clutching my black cane. Ah me … I really do thank God that my Papa is no longer about to be humiliated, he’d have had a seizure at the street behaviour and, more than that, at the general behaviour of people in the streets all around him. This area, once so elegant and peopled by what we called the ‘Gentry’ is sadly sliding into decline. It looks alright, very attractive, but the quality of the people who are moving into the flats which are being hacked out of the great mansions (like mine, I confess!) fill up with BMW’s and the younger glitterati who are almost as awful as they are across the river! God! What a snob I am today .. well: I am.
