A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  Unable to share the pleasures offered I chose to remain apart, solitary, detached. It must have been irritating and unfriendly. But that’s what I did. I was desperate to preserve my Summer Life against all odds, and to some extent, to a large extent indeed, I succeeded.

  But in those times of loneliness, in those solitary walks across the ruined fields, the dreadful Teas and Bakings, the reading of knitting patterns and endless games of Solitaire, I did not sit idle and let my mind float off into a vacuum. Instead I turned to my father’s old teaching of the Remember Game and played it assiduously. I “pelmanised” a million details which, one day, I felt would “come in handy”, as Lally had said so often. I looked and I watched continually. Looking and watching, as one knows, are two very different things. I watched.

  My Grandfather Aimé had always said, “You must Observe. Always question.” I started to become a professional, as it were, Observer. I was unable to question for I knew that I should not receive honest answers from people who thought questioning a lack of respect for one’s elders.

  So I observed and from observation answered my own queries. Not always accurately, but satisfactorily enough for me at the time. At least my sluggish brain was working for itself.

  From this easy, silent game, which never intruded on anyone’s conversation or alarmed them, I assembled a rag bag of trinkets into which I am still able to rummage. Aunt Teenie’s dreadful twitch on her poor scarred face became the twitch on von Aschenbach’s face at moments of stress, in “Death In Venice” for example; my own shyness and diffidence and loneliness at those Tennis Parties or Tea Parties became his when he arrived, alone, at the Grand Hotel des Bains. The games I played then, and the things I stole, gleaned, collected, observed, have remained with me, vividly, for the rest of my life.

  At the same time I was also forced to build myself a sort of wall of protection which, until then, I had never had need of. It was unnecessary to protect myself from love, from trust, honour, warmth and companionship, all of which I had had in abundance. Now, those things were to be guarded and protected. From the moment my head hit the bottom of that lavatory pan I laid the first brick of my protection by rapidly learning a foul, but saving, Glasgow accent. The first brick went in. From that day on I didn’t cease my labours, walling myself snugly into my shell slowly, deliberately and undetected.

  I learned to blub without moving a muscle of my face so that even then I was not given away, and began to speak elliptically, so that whatever I said was not precisely what I meant, but nearly so. A habit to which I still, regrettably, cling, and which gets me into a good deal of trouble from time to time. However, it is a hard habit to break and one I am not very willing to try. I am still un-trusting to some degree.

  Of course in the busy building of this wall I left many openings about me, so that I was able to watch, to look, to touch if I wished, and feel. But they did preclude others from getting too near and, like the winkle on the pin, pulling me outside.

  And, perhaps unfortunately for me, I went on building right into adult life. An undeniably self-centred thing to do. But I am. Isolation, even from choice as in my case, incubates self-centredness like a culture. But it has been this wall, or tower really, for a wall does not necessarily contain all that it surrounds, which has allowed me to retain most of the values which I had been taught. This attitude, of course, has cost me dear at times. Living in a tower, however secure it may feel, is hardly a social attribute. It can give the impression that one is withdrawn, insular and distant. Not the accepted qualities for an Actor, where the very reverse is apparently required. It was said of me recently that I suffered from an Obsessional Privacy. I can only suppose it must be true. And it is doubtless because of this that I have never reached the highest peak of my profession. It held me back, mercifully, from “playing the game” to the hilt with the Bosses, the people in power. In a profession rife with insecurity this obsessional privacy was regarded with dislike and suspicion. In the years that I made money for them the Bosses grudgingly accepted this “fault”, but as soon as I stepped out of line to change my direction and fight along with forward-looking Directors like Dearden, Losey, Schlesinger and Clayton, my general popularity waned and the box office receipts crashed accordingly. The films we made so passionately together were considered “intellectual”. The people who had paid good money to see my Little-Boy-Looking-For-God look were very unimpressed, and started to stay away in droves. The films were, by and large, critical successes but box office failures. The Cinema demands that you make money for it at no matter what cost. I recall one of those over-tailored moguls, itching to “do” his “bob” at the Palace, saying pleasantly: “They don’t want that kind of stuff. THEY want tits and bums. Or the Burtons.” Since I was not in that category I quickly found myself unemployable. A cold wind was blowing. It was everywhere. Even the Studios were starting to crumble and close down under the almost intolerable pressures from within. By 1966 I was splendidly on the skids.

  But there was a candle glowing in the window of my discomfort. Hollywood, Italy and France could, it seemed, keep me occupied with the kind of work I still wished to try to do for some considerable time. Nearing fifty, it seemed prudent therefore to follow the beckoning light from Abroad. And abroad in the first instance was personified by Luchino Visconti. My father reluctantly agreed. Either I stayed where I was and went broke, returned to the Theatre after many years absence, or tried my novice hand at Television. These alternatives seemed distinctly chilly.

  “Then clear off, my dear,” he said. “Start again. Go where they want you.”

  It had not escaped our minds that “to start again” would mean leaving England. We looked at each other bleakly. However it was not the England of my Summer Life which I should be forced to leave, it was a fast changing England. A country bent determinedly on its quiet revolution, led by people who, with avuncular joviality, constantly assured the Middle Classes that they were all doomed. And, not unnaturally, people wanted new faces; mine had been hanging about for over twenty years, and a change was needed. From all points of view, then, it seemed sensible to accept the invitations from abroad. But … but…

  “Whatever you do, my dear, don’t shilly shally,” said my father, pouring himself a Worthington. “Do it neatly; mitre your corners.”

  I sold my house, paid all my bills, and left. Perhaps the final bricks in my tower.

  Paradise regained is an impossibility. It is not, perhaps, always even desirable; and in any case is denied to most mortals. However, I tried. With no regrets whatsoever. The day I pushed open the door of this silent, empty house, standing on its hill since 1641, sunlight slanting across the tiled floors, a vine fretworking the wide windows, another Great Meadow lying all about, I knew that, in a physical sense at least, I had at last got back to the Summer Life.

  Almost intact.

  Chapter 13

  A number II bus set me down at The Six Bells, Kings Road, and from there, just across the road, past a row of crumbling Regency houses, is Manresa Road and the Chelsea Poly. Up the broad stone steps and through the big swing doors and I had started, in my own mind, my first steps towards the Theatre. Although no one else but myself knew that.

  At first it was considered, and with reason, that I was too young to attend the Poly. I was not quite seventeen. However Williamson, the Principal, had seen a folio of my “work”, that is to say examples of stage designs, costumes, and illustrations for plays which I had written but which, naturally, had not been performed. Vaguely impressed, as he himself said, by my sense of colour design and “inventiveness”, he waived the few months needed to make me as it were “legal” and I started on my way.

  Some weeks before, my patient father took me to Gamages, to a Fire Sale which he had seen advertised, and within an hour, among piles of slightly damp and smoky garments on the top floor, outfitted me in a grey tweed suit, a bottle green striped one, a sundry collection of woollen polo necked sweaters and a pair of brogue shoes, one
size too large, in suede.

  I was enraptured. These, and the obligatory “smock” which we all had to wear, were to constitute my entire wardrobe for some time to come. I almost slept in the bottle green suit I liked it so much, and the brogue shoes, stuffed with a little wad of paper, gave me a stature and dignity I must otherwise have lacked. At least so I thought.

  This was a very different atmosphere from the school on the Hill. No hulking lumps here itching to kick something, no shared desks, no dustbin lunches. Instead, high, airy rooms, quiet, purposeful people, sitting on stools indulging in the highest form of luxury to me, just painting, drawing and even, at times, doodling away. We signed a book on entrance to each Class and on our departure for luncheon, usually a beer and a sandwich at the Six Bells or a Lyons Tea Shop near Sloane Square—not a beer there, of course, warm tea in a thick cup, but still… it was not a meat pie and Cola.

  The Classes were a mixed assembly of people, sexes and ages. I was astonished, and encouraged, to find that my neighbour in “Illustration” was a woman as old as my grandmother with a smock, a floppy felt hat, a raffia bag full of paints and brushes, rubbers and pens, her sandwiches and a small flask of Brandy from which, during the morning, she would take a strengthening swig.

  There were pretty girls with long blonde hair who were really not serious artists, but merely “Finishing Orf”, as they called it—and who painted endless chains of pussy cats, blue-birds or bunnies, and seldom came back after the lunch break. Others, like Erica Schwartz, were far more serious. Smocked, sandalled, rather grubby, she and her companions worked industriously in “Design” covering yards of material with abstract patterns of blue and mauve which they then turned into skirts and shirts, and stamped about the corridors pinning notices on the Notice Board bearing large Hammers and Sickles. They, these industrious girls, and some men, also ran the Dramatic Society which I was allowed, in spite of my age, to join, so that I could help with the painting of the scenery and the making of the costumes and also to swell the chorus which used to sing “Red Fly the Banners O!” to the tune of “Green Grow the Rushes O!” It was all magical, exhilarating, bursting with promise. I had never, I believed, even at the Cottage, been so happy in my life before.

  My first “task”—we were usually set a “task” at the beginning of every week to set us on a line of thought or design—was to design the cover for a book. In this particular case H. E. Bates’ The Poacher. This of course, normally, meant that one had to read the book, or intelligently “skip through” it in order to get at the “essence”, as it was always called. What the “essence” was depended entirely on what one thought it meant. And one’s work was judged accordingly. I had read the book and set to, as I so often do, without much care and preparation. My sketch book was a riot of fields, woods, dead rabbits and panoramas of Great Britain from Lulworth Cove to Ben Nevis. H. E. Bates’ simple tale was illustrated, by me at any rate, as the natural history handbook of the British Isles, including every single beast which lived within them and some which did not. I was enormously impressed by my own efforts and, as usual, embellished my design with guns and traps, fishing rods, gaffing hooks and snares. I left nothing out. And nothing to the imagination. At the Wednesday Class, covered with pride and a singular lack of humility (everyone else was still at the “blocking in stage”) I offered my finished cover to our patient, calm, gentle teacher, Graham Sutherland. In his neat farmer’s smock, his pale blue knitted tie, with his small dark head and steady piercing eyes, I found him the kindest and most encouraging of all the teachers at the School. He was rather frightening too, because he smiled often, spoke very little; one was never certain of what he exactly thought. And he was not about to give anything away.

  Patiently this day he sat beside me, dragging up a stool to my desk, slowly he examined my startling, lurid, finished cover. Gently he explained that I might have possibly missed the point of the exercise. It was not, he said, to tell the entire story of Mr Bates on the cover, but rather to leave that to the reader to find out for himself which, after all, was the author’s job. Mine, he said gently, as the designer, was to suggest to the reader what he might find beneath the wrappers; to offer him some simple, uncomplicated, symbol which he could recognise enough to tempt him to read the book. Not something which would convince him that he had read it already, or worse, that he knew what it was all about and didn’t want to read it anyway.

  Swiftly, economically, he drew a face, a cloth cap, some rabbits’ legs, a long waving line which was clearly a field of corn, and the entire subject was before me. I apologised in a mumble. He was anxious. “But are you sure you know what I mean? Simplicity, you see … just the suggestion. The essence. Not,” he said gently, “a map of England with all its Blood Sports.”

  I started again much cast down but already agreeing, how could I not, that he was right. But how to simplify … how to find the “essence”? That was my problem, and eventually stealing from him shamelessly I did my design by the end of the week and got top marks.

  But the discovery was magical, I mean the general discovery. Being treated as an equal, as an already proved, which I was not, artist, gave me back a great deal of ebbing courage. I drew and drew and covered page after page of sketch books with a wild assortment of ideas which I then was forced to condense, simplify, coordinate, in short… design. It was not, I was quick to find out mercifully, quite the same as merely “Drawing”.

  Drawing was much harder. Drawing meant, for me, the Life Class. A serious, grimy room. A wide semi-circle of stools round a battered rostrum on which reclined, or stood, in patient humility, and bored indifference, a naked woman or, at times, man. Always ugly, always thin or vastly fat, as unacceptable naked as they must have been fully clothed.

  In winter they froze to liver-sausage blue in the arctic room, warmed only vaguely by a one bar electric fire, around which they huddled at the “rests” in tatty silk kimonos—in the summer they baked and broiled under the relentless glare of the sun from the skylight windows—all for a pittance an hour. Eyes glazed with boredom, they saw past and beyond us, locked into a frozen area of numbness from which nothing save the ringing of the alarm clock, to tell them their time was up, could release them.

  Although, up until then, I had never seen an entirely naked woman, I was completely unmoved. I only remember being saddened by the sight of so much ugly flesh humped so dejectedly in a bent-wood chair. I found drawing their ugliness far harder to cope with than anything else. It seemed that if I started off with a head the left foot usually ended up miles off the bottom of the page and somewhere in the region of my own feet. However much I held up my pencil to measure, as I saw the other students doing with great professionalism, I never got the proportions right, and in spite of constant rubbings-out and starting-agains, the human body defeated me entirely. I sweated on and for ageless days sat in a smaller room with some others who found it as hard as I did, studying and drawing, in vicious detail, every bone and socket in a range of dusty skeletons which hung, dangling feet and hands, from wooden gibbets, swinging forlornly in the draughts.

  “Try not to bother with her too much,” said Henry Moore, who took us for Life and, later on, Sculpture. “She’s not much good really, but it’s very hard to get skeletons these days. Very hard indeed. She’s pretty young, this one, mid-twenties I’d say … died some time about 1890. You see the rib cage? All squashed up, those dreadful corsets of theirs. How did she breathe for God’s sake? You see? Squashed tight. Quite useless for you really. No Form there, simply de-formed. Shocking really. But it’s the best we have at the moment.” Smocked, and with a woolly tie, he too moved among his pupils quietly and gently, correcting and suggesting here and there, patient with the slow, glowing with the more advanced of us. Wanting to share his obvious delight and love of the Human Body. “This absolute miracle of coordination, of muscle and bone. A brilliant conception never yet beaten,” he said.

  But it took me a long time to come towards sharing his d
elight. And although I sat spellbound if he came to my board to tug a muscle or a joint into place, or scribbled a rapid explanation for me on the side of my disordered, erased, smudged drawing, his swathed, mostly faceless figures reminded me a little too sharply of Mr Dodd’s mummies ever to re-kindle a dying interest in the Human Form. I served him better in Perspective, and he was encouraging and kind, and when I said, rather timidly, that I wanted to go in for Stage Design rather than any other form of art he set to with enthusiasm and bashed me into Vanishing Points and Source of Light until, little by little, I abandoned almost altogether Life Class and attended, as often as I could, and more often than I should, Perspective. Which is why, to this day, I can still do a remarkably good bird’s eye view of the Piazza San Marco, Times Square or even Kennington Oval looking as if they had been struck by bubonic plague. My perspectives are empty. However I am very good at people leaning out of windows. That’s about as far as Mr Moore, with all his patient efforts, ever got me.

  If I was hopeless at Life Class I was making tremendous strides towards becoming a Playwright. The Cox family was exceedingly encouraging and welcomed me into their family. Every evening, after I had returned from Art School, I would cycle over to “Chez Nous” and spend a great deal of time with Nerine, who was soft, blonde, gentle and deeply interested in all my theories; discussing the ideas for a new play, the plots and even the sets. We wrote poetry together and spent hours in the depths of Rotherfield Woods talking of my Future. We never, it seemed, ever got around to hers. And at no time did we discuss the world around us which was steadily becoming more and more troubled but which caused us no apparent concern. The pronoun “I” fell rapidly and confidendy from our lips. Except that her “I” was “You”. Which I felt was just as it should be. Eventually, from all this airy chatter and from all these floating plans about my Future a play got written. It was called “The Man On The Bench” and starred Nerine as the Prostitute and myself as the Man. As far as I can recall it was a very long monologue for me interrupted, only here and there, by Nerine dressed in black satin and a feather boa. The trick was the surprise ending when the Prostitute left in a huff and the Man fumbled about in the skirts of his overcoat producing a white stick. Blind, you see.