Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

by Unknown

  I must get back to Chapter 6 of my novel! Very hard work dear, wish I’d never started the sodding thing [ … ] I got a script from M[ichael] Winner last week. Honestly. It’ll make a fortune. They fuck on the first two pages and rape each other on the fifth and sixth and two boys mastubate happily in a hedge on the tenth and eleventh ..... awash with sperm I swam towards the end to find out what I could possibly be playing. He was very nice about it … and just said, ‘Well … perhaps next time?’

  Must go. Thanks for super letter [ … ]

  Great love & affection

  As ever –

  Dirk.

  To Jean-Michel Jarre Clermont

  28 November 1978

  My dear Jean Michel –

  I am forced to write to you in English.

  My French is enough to drive you to suicide and me to a form of hysteria.

  Equinox1 is sublime. I simply love it.

  After five sessions, so far, it gets better and better.

  After two or three moderate glasses of wine it becomes even more fun!

  For that is what it all seems to me to be about. Fun.

  The delight and gaiety is wildely infective.

  Soothing, beautifully, the sadness which also lurks.

  I hope to God that I am saying the right things for YOU.

  I only know that I am saying the right things for ME.

  A Tarentella! A Samba!

  Mardi Gras.

  Jamaica on a beach in the rain I remember well.

  An accordian wistful in a sudden storm.

  ‘Casque d’Or’.

  Renoir.

  Matisse, Monet and even Manet too.

  All the colours I see and you make me ‘feel’.

  The strange thing which is the Nostalgia of France.

  Dieppe.

  Roses, hot tar in the sun, coffee.

  The rain drip drip dripping at the little Bal du village … the passion and power

  and fun and hysteria of that snaking line through the streets of

  New Orleans ..

  And there are whispers of the sad ballrooms of Vienna.

  There is SO much!

  And that long, last, held moment.…

  Sublime.

  I dont know if any of these things are meant to be there.

  I only know that in your music, they are for me.

  You may be as Modern as The Pompidou Center, but you evoke total timlessness, memories, joys, undercutting sadness.

  It is wonderfully Loving Music, wonderfully strong.

  But perhaps most important of all,

  Living.

  With great affection and admiration.

  Dirk.

  To Penelope Mortimer Clermont

  1 January 1979

  P. dear –

  And so another one starts. God knows what this one will bring us all: but I hope it brings you happiness and health … and anything else you need.

  I dont know where we got to, you and I.1 Places. Drifting. Well, thats what friendships are about really, are’nt they? No need to be always ‘in touch’. I knew you’d got back from America, and that you were alright after the scare thing2[ … ] and then there were ‘Shorts’ in some of the Sunday Colour Things and so I thought ‘well,’ I thought, ‘she still seems to be at it … and in form, so I suppose shes alive and well and earning her living.’ And that was good.

  And me? Oh I got fed up with the Acting … too old now for the early Calls, the bickering over money and so on, the Script Writers and the simply APPALING people who now run the Movies.

  God knows they were pretty shitty in my earlier days … but Now!

  This years Festival at Cannes finally convinced me that the gates of Hell had finally opened and filled the Carlton Hotel with it’s entire contents. And so I crept up the hill here shivering with hate and rage and disgust and said no more.

  And I ‘rite’. Well, I try to. I like it. It is pleasanter to sit up here in the old olive store and be away from everyone and bash at this combine harvester of an electric T.riter. Very scary. But fun now I’m used-er to it. So far I’ve been terribly lucky … both books have done far better than I could have ever believed possible … and I rather like the Publishing Ladys and Gentlemen … well, the ones I know and have met so far. Did the ‘Tour’ with the last book all over England … Birmingham, Oxford … all University towns. Fun and moving at the same time. Harrods, on the other hand, was as funny as a babys funeral … millions of ugly people and a rude woman who said, in a v. loud voice, ‘My God! Look what he’s come to. Selling himself in Public!’ … I was too. And rather enjoying it. In a ghastly way.

  Now off on a novel.1 Grave mistake I feel. Chapter seven and nothing much has happened. Chatto say all they need is a beginning and middle and an end. Bully for them. All I have at the moment is 90.000 words of beginning. I’ll finish it … determined to … but may just slide it into that proverbial drawer and start something simple. With one lady in a chair in one room in one house. Oh! If only I was as clever as you! Or Caroline Blackwood … so spare, so economical .. so clear in plan. However: I have adjusted to the new work … like it greatly. Fret like fuck. Worry. Wander about splitting logs, washing the floors, laying tables, thinking one world away.

  I am happy you are in your little cottage place … I hope you are happy too? Better than that College with the ‘oddies’. One day write again … meanwhile great love … and be careful … and Happy, happy 1979 ......

  Love D XX.

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  14 January 1979

  Norah dearest –

  Not really a letter this: just a covering note [ … ] I discovered that the Singnoret book2 has sold over 600.000 copies .. which is not at all bad. And splendid for her! She is quite astonished for, like myself, she is not a proper writer and was totally taken by surprise. She earns more for this book than for any film she ever made in her whole long career. Odd. But it does go to show that you can sell books in France.

  P. Hall and his little card3 made me very happy indeed. Really because I know, from experience, what a difficult critic he is .. and how terribly demanding. I am still slightly astonished that he would read my sort of stuff … and deeply gratified that he should bother to write. He is not that sort of chap, and we dont keep in touch much. I [ … ] only send it to you so that you can share my pleasure and indulge in your own satisfaction a bit: for you did say, ages ago, that you wanted the book to reflect the Time as much as the Film Actor. Hall seems to have found that this could be so. Thats what made me so happy. I am so thrilled that I have, perhaps, managed to achieve what you originally wanted.

  This machine has gone ‘funny’ today. It’s the cold I think and the keys are all stubborn and maddening. A bitter mistral and blazing sun … cold, exhilarating, combination: but hell on the hands and feet olive picking, which is in full swing now. I always had such a very lyrical feeling about olives. Jolly peasants, great loaves of bread and flasks of wine, beating the trees in the speckled shade of high summer … Jesus preaching to his dim-wits under a gnarled trunk .. and eating handfulls like pea-nuts. But none of it is like that at all. I had NO idea they were culled in mid winter, that you crawled, blue with cold, among prickly grass with numbed hands searching for the little black fruit which closely resemble sheep droppings. A very dangerous hazard here, for the Shephard has been across the land … ah well. We have about thirty kilos now. Enough to last until the middle of the summer. If one is careful.

  [ … ] A copy of a very odd book from an unknown lady called Diggs-Jones, or the other way round, at Knopf. ‘Birdy’1 … which she says she ‘knows I will adore’ […] I dont think […] that I will adore it.

  It’s all about a chap who wanted to be a bird. And full of that particular American Guilt which I really cannot stand.

  Super review for it in this weeks Time. But not, I fear, my tass de thé. I wonder why she thought it was.

  I struggle, between bouts of olive-picking and washi
ng the kitchen floor, (Lady is still on her Hols in Spain) with your much detested Emmie … and with Pullen and Clair2 and all the others and wonder why I bother. I flee to Mrs Wolf from time to time to see how she coped .. with her people … but she seems not to have had a great problem so far as I have got, and Mrs Dalloway rips along. ‘I write and write and write’ she boasts.

  So do I Mrs Wolf. But not to the same effect.

  So I turn to the Dotty Sitwells3 and wonder who on earth could have ever invented Sir George and made him believable! What a very rum lot they were … uneasy reading, but frightfully well written.

  Trouble with Mrs W. is that she writes so beautifully that she brings tears to the eye .. and thats no good to a budding novelist … with the deepest love and affection ..

  As ever

  Dirk.

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  20 January 1979

  Norah dear –

  Got your copy of the corrected, or cut, book.4 Cant quite work it all out … most seem idiotic. Also your note from [Leonard] Rosoman. Sent him a p.c. and said Do Come and look … I’ll get down to the Frog Cuts in a minute. Probably have to call you before I do anything about it …

  Bit unhappy here today. Had to put poor old Daisy to sleep yesterday morning. V. sudden alas. Cancer, which we knew, but had hoped for a gentle six months .. however it started to race away and we had to make an immediate decision. Bloody.

  Both holding her caressingly for the needle. Then a pretty filthy journey home from Grasse with an empty collar and the leash.

  Snow not melted and the ground covered in the short hand of her pad-marks.

  We spent a pretty glum day I fear. T. tremendously brave and v. quiet. I sort of in an ache. She arrived here with us as a very small puppy the summer we moved in. Part of the fabric of ones life here. Idiotic to mourn a dog. However one mourns for oneself really …

  In the night the thaw; the pad prints fade … the toys, alas, all revealed. A favourite over-chewed ball, a veal bone … I spent an age hurling everything I could find into the pond to avoid remindings: useless really … crammed her bed into a shed, her food bowl into the dustbin … Labbo, her not-over-loving husband aware of ones distress, stalking very quietly about, keeping near.

  One biscuit now at tea, instead of two ........

  So thats how I am this morning ..

  Cope with the book business tomorrow.

  Love, and love again,

  Dirk.

  To Bryan Forbes Clermont

  12 Febua March. ’79

  My Dear Bryan:

  I have only just realised, see above, that for the last two weeks I have headed everything I have written in the wrong month. Thats typical. I live in clouds it would seem.

  Thanks for letter and Bumph [ … ] since I choose not to live in England what happens there really does’nt affect me. Apart from driving me insane every time I hear the BBC World News. I dont suppose France will go along smoothly for ever … signs that we crack as you have are already evident. But so far it is healthier and less mean-minded. I dont think we’ll ever abandon our sick and infirm: and No Work For Much Pay seems to be peculiarly a British habit. However: we’ll see.

  How good about your book.1 Seven months! Yea Gods! I have completed nine whacking chapters of a twelve chapter novel with about 100,000 words so far and that has taken me like forever. But I cant spell of course. And have to keep going back to Classical Dictionairies or M. Roget and all that.

  And the Publishers, while deeply praising writing, construction, dialogue and description seem not to like my ‘people’ whome they describe as ‘utterly unpleasant and disagreeable’.

  Well: since it is all autobiographical and about an odd year I spent in Java in 1945 while they were having their Civil War there, I suppose that might just figure. However I have shoved it aside for a while to get the land here ready for our summer. Spring is upon us with mimosa and all manner of vulgar things in the grass … including toads who copulate in a disgusting fashion. And I have a lot to do before the first onslaught of Guests which seems to co-incide with the Film Thing in May.

  Lordy and Lady Nextdoor1 were down recently in spanking form and I allowed myself to be taken OUT to dine. A thing I never normally do, I so detest restuarants and the last time we went off to one of Lordy’s Two Stars In The Michelin I had deeply frozen Turbot and the runs all next day. So. But they mean well and I love them dearly. Give Best-Seller2 a big kiss and when you are in the area next, and who can tell? come to supper here … we do a rather good soja bean salad with prawns. Unfrozen!

  Thanks again for info. Stuff it!

  Love Dirk

  To Norah Smallwood Clermont

  21 March 1979

  My very dear Norah –

  A day of delights yesterday. Mixed ones.

  First of all a fat, battered, packet from Watford full of red plastic worms (packing) and bulbs. Great excitement prevailed. They were shipped from Watford on the 15th January [ … ] However they look alright to me. Perhaps a titchy bit shrivelled but nothing which a good soil and some water wont cure. I am terribly tempted to put the Regale into the open ground, they would look so splendid … but maybe I’ll settle for a large pot. We’ll see. At the moment it is raining so hard that it is impossible to do anything outside at all .. the land is flooded completely; my new bits of grass seed washed away for ever, beds of Night Scented Stock and Julien the same .. and the mildew begins. Gardening here is a savage business. And a risky one.

  As you may remember!

  But thank you, my dear, for such a fragrant thought … and for such bother and care. Maddening for you, after so much thought and planning-with-Lanning1 that they should arrive late. But at least they are now here and who can tell what May will bring? You may not see more than some wistful ‘sprouts’. On the other hand you may reel with delight at the odour on a warm evening. If there is a warm evening in May!

  I am beginning to doubt everything after these last five days of quite torrential rain and black cloud. Depressing to say the least.

  Second delight Elizabeth. Who left her Family, my tiresome Mamma, her husband and everything, and came to spend both our birthdays here together.2 Which’ll be fun. If rather Elderly! She’ll be here for two weeks [ … ]

  A mixed delight was the arrival, the day before, of a baby Boxer dog.3 Far, far too young. Six weeks. The house is rent with shrieks and wails and deep howls … both ends of the beast function splendidly all over everything. ‘A change of diet’ we say cheerfully, hearts sinking with each lugged bucket of bleach and hot water and rags ... ‘New surroundings of course’ we say brightly … ‘It’ll soon settle down.’

  When?

  Hardly any sleep at nights … I should have bought a bloody Lion.

  And all this to guard us from the wandering Arabs … civilisation.

  An elderly woman up in Chateauneuf, walking in her daughters garden last week to pick wild hyancinths, was caught by a savage Alsation Dog belonging to the people next door, and quite literally, eaten.

  It has caused a huge furore in the village and the Press.

  As well it might.

  But we all have to have Guard Dogs now anyway. So even if they eat us we simply have to manage somehow. Was’nt it LOVELY once upon a time when there were arabs sitting in tents in the sand eating dates?

  Next day. 22nd March.

  Stopped on the other side because suddenly the puppy was ill. Suddenly it was very ill. Vet-trips. Vomit, shivering, up all night … we are well neigh … no: nigh dead [ … ] And this morning your letter of the 19th [ … ] A big stack of letters, also, from ‘Postillion’ addicts. There seem to be quite a comfortable number. They send dreadful picture postcards of Alfriston, Lullington, Seaford etc … plus leather book-marks with appropriate designs of Sussex. But the letters are moving. And are not from children ever. One today from a Canadian journalist who ‘picked it up at Seattle airport thinking I’d have a good laugh, a la David Niven, on my flight to
New York: instead I found it was a kind of kid’s book, and I ended up in tears for my own lost youth … it is a book I shall treasure all my days. In hard-back which I got from New York as soon as we landed.’ Anyway: that sort of thing is most comforting: many complaints, incidentally, over the paperback cover which people find ‘misleading’. But it may not be a bad thing! While ‘Snakes’ clearly appeals to people like Hall, Mercer, Resnais and that ilk … and they have been deeply flattering I smugly admit .. it is ‘Postillion’ which carries the banner. Nostalgia a bit. But as far as I can see from the letters I get it is more a sense of loss .. loss of simplicity .. loss of ease .. of safety .. of sureness in life.

  As I said overleaf … it brings back to it’s readers a time when the arabs sat in the sand eating dates: instead of screaming for their bloody democratic freedome. Whatever that means anyway.

  Something I tried to convey, ineptly, in the aborted Novel … I saw it all happening in Java, this Native Emergence, when I was but a lad of 24 ..... it’s still going on and I’m 58 any moment now.

  I have shoved Miss Foto1 into a drawer with her crowd. They can stay there for a while. Sadly it took me longer to realise than it took clever you, that it was’nt really very good. I think I got most dreadfully carried away in creative euphoria or whatever it is. Parts of it are frightfully good I think. Parts.

  However it is set aside now. Marvellous experience for me .. after all I am still trying to teach myself how to write. Nothing has been lost except perhaps a possible book for you. But I think I must stick to the Autobio Bit … a little longer. Then cut my teeth on something less grand than a twelve-hander Novel.

  I am in a difficult position really because of the modest success of the other two. First two. A first Novel is a brute. And they will all wait for me to fail at my first attempt. Rather as if I HAD gone and done my ruddy ‘Hamlet’ for Larry O. at Chichester.2

  So I must take extra care and not just ‘rush at things’.