by Unknown
And that is about that. I’m writing very badly today … hangover I fear. And must presently go and lay up the table [ … ] We are having a huge gigot and a tremendous bowl of Ratatouie and new totties in mint.1 Jealous? It’s a bit silly really, because the heat is belting up off the land, and we’d be better off with cottage cheese and apples. Cheaper too!
My love to you: I am so happy that you are back … there was a feeling of emptiness around … although I knew that you were having a splendid(ish) time I had no one to beef off at!
You thanked me, in your letter before you left for the U.S, for ‘my love and loyalty ..’ magpieing MY line with which I was about to finish this letter.
So I shall simply re-tread it!
Thank you for YOUR love: and loyalty.
Always –
Dirk XXXX
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
October 15th. (Note new type!) 1983
Norah love –
Finally the old machine conked out .. well, half the letters began to fall out like old teeth, and so I searched about for a new machine here with an English ‘clavier’. Impossible to find.
Eventually the shop-keeper said that he could order me a new, and very daunting, ‘Brother’. (Japanese. Need I say.) This arrived just before we left for England and looked absolutely terrifying.
Bells rang, lights flashed, it was enormous and had just about every key you could imagine: none of which, apart from the alphabet, did I need.
But.
There is always a BUT in France.
The type is set on a very sophisticated circular thing called a Daisy! And we could not find an English Daisy to fit the keyboard. So .. undaunted .. I came to London and after all the Medical Chores, went with a light heart and bought my English Daisies. Two. Costing thirty quid!
In Grasse finally, filled with hope and excitement, I went off to the shop and viewed yet again my amazing Japanese computer-typewriter which I knew would take me all of a month to master.
Except that the English Daisy did’nt fit. Ah ha!
When one pressed the key for ‘F’ one got ç. And so on.
The machine had been assembled for Turkey!
As I am not a Turkish writer I bowed out at the loss of thirty quid, but also, quite happily … because the Japanese Monster cost over five hundred pounds and was far more complicated than I could have believed possible.
So: to Cannes. And in a good shop sad shakes of heads put paid to my hopes of an English-bloody-Clavier. No way possible, and to order one would take four months plus Customs, plus TVA.
I was just leaving, sadly, going down the stairs in fact, when I saw this machine sitting like a yellow toad behind a mass of ones which had come in for repair. It had, I instantly saw, an English Clavier! Someone was summonsed and remembered, dimly, that there had ‘been an error last year’. The result of the error is under my fingers now. It cost me just three hundred pounds, is perfect, friendly, un-fussy; no bells or lights ring and flash, and it’s just an ordinary old type-writer without Daisies or anything more alarming than these two keys ¿ and ¡. Now what do they mean? I shall never use them, but they worry me sitting idle there.
This over-length tale is simply to demonstrate the machine. Yours is the first letter that has been written on it: it seemed fitting that you should get the first, dont you think? I write with the knowledge that the Mail Strike persists here, and we have had no foreign mail since our return .. and none since September 18th … which is a hell of a long time to be isolated. I just hope that you will, one day, get this. It is a pastime as vague and uncertain as sending you a letter in a bottle and casting it off the beach at La Bocca.
[ … ] The morning mail has just arrived! A few battered letters from UK all dated 25th–26th September. But still NO MS from Sally. I’m getting very lost, because I depend on each chapter to fashion the next! Maddening. I have had a packet from Canada, however, with a cassette tape of a sermon at an Inter Church Conference somewhere. As far as I can gather from the sender, unknown to me naturally, he is worried that, from reading ‘Snakes And Ladders’ I have a suicidal nature. My choosing of the metaphore, that life is a series of doors, seems to worry him deeply! He’s at great pains to offer me ‘spiritual help’.
Oh dear. Nothing amusing in the mail today at all!
Can you imagine me sitting down and listening to a Sermon?
[ … ] On Monday week I ‘do’ a commentary for Thames Television on a rather remarkable, but distressing, documentary on Oskar Schindler … you may recall the book ‘Schindlers Ark’?1 It’s worth doing because I feel it important that the Young should realise just what happened to the Jews in the war. Even the Jews wont believe the appalling events. I have been asked to do it because of the Concentration Camp passages in ‘AOM’ .. anyway off I go to a studio in Monte Carlo: the programme is ‘slated’ for showing in early December. An odd time, I’d say, to put on such a depressing subject. What the Americans would call ‘The Big Turn Off’ programme!
Enough: you are weary I swear. And I am too. But I wanted to test this on you!
With devoted love always – Dirk –
Amused, rather than sad; there was not one single copy of ANY of my books (in any form) in THREE seperate bookstalls at Heathrow on Friday! But ROWS of ‘Lace’.2 Ah well – D.
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
Sunday. 20th November. ‘83 at 5 o clock –
Norah dearest –
Two solid hours work in the filthy old garden: a wilderness of dead leaves and dead summer-planting. Had all that out in a short time: the leaves are a hopeless job. They fall, with soft ‘click clacks!’, about ones shoulders as one sweeps. Boring business. We await a mistral to sweep them all away to the coast. We await rain too. None to speak of since summer. The soil as dry as old bones; the oaks are wilting. This, I am assured, is a NEW and awful desease … like Dutch Elm. The Government are supposed to be spraying from helicopters. But ‘supposed’ is the word. Meanwhile the trees die. Our great big one, at the top of the hill, perhaps five hundred years old, (certainly not less by the girth) started to die back in June .. everyone said it was nothing; a dry winter. But alas! by August it was fiery red, and is dead already. Right there on the top of the hill.
I went to work, after a few moments thinking hard, on the ‘Sedum Bed’ which, you may remember, you pruned back hard for me?
A row of ancient, but ugly, stones bordered the euphimistaclyy-ally named ‘lawn’. (I say. I got into a bit of a mess with the above, did’nt I? Anyway. 10 for trying, I say.) So I have heaved all the stones out, ripped out the sedums, which were failing anyway after a second splitting-up, and levelled the whole place down … I’ll sow grass seed there in Febuary.
It looks much better now. Tidy anyway. The old stones looked like a grinning mouth of rotten teeth and the couch-grass had invaded.
But all this activity did was to remind me, forcably, of Roald Dahl who, once a fanatical gardner, said: ‘Anyone over sixty who digs and plants bloody things in the dirt needs his head testing. Get yerself a couple of boys, make ’em do it, and watch them from a deckchair ..’
He has a point I think.
What was excellent, on the other hand, was seeing Forwood lumping about with barrow loads of weed and sedum plants, and pulling up, with caution, the smaller stones. It was not so very long ago that I wondered, watching him hung about with Drip Feeds and Blood Things, if he’d ever move in a garden again.
See one: even.
So one was cheered. I have laid the fire, he’s made himself a pot of tea and cut himself a chunk of cherry cake, and I’ve come up to the Studio to write to you … because we are all, over that silly sedum bed, very much linked together. Not JUST because of the bed .. you do understand? But it became a modest symbol. And was pleasing to me. You were banging away in the shadows of my mind, trowl and secateurs in hand, the butterfly shirt .. and you were singing too: so there!
How I wish that I could be present at your Party
on the 29th. How maddening to be so far, and so in thrall to Guardians and all that: not to mention the most expensive air-fare in the world … But, in a way, apart from longing to be there to honour you, it is perhaps just as well that I am not.
After all, I’m a very new friend. The others present have known you for so much longer, the lucky creatures, and I’d probably have been a bit out of place. But I’ll think of you that evening.
How you are loved!
What a wonderous reward you have for the years of loyalty, affection, teaching and learning that you have given to so many of us.
Better than a pocket-watch I’d say?
How little I thought, that evening when I ‘did’ the dreaded Russell Harty Show, that my whole life was about to be altered by a stranger from quite another world. And that through that stranger I would be permitted to set foot, all be it modestly, into that world. And that the stranger would shortly become so very dear to me.
Apart from ‘that world’.
And that is far too many ‘worlds’ in three lines!
But this is a love-letter, so I can say just what I like, cant I?
No lovely J.C [John Charlton] to carp and wrestle with over: or; or even ç!
I still cant imagine what ç is doing on an English Machine, can you? And already I seem to have lost the ‘V’, well almost … because I have been writing a mass of biographical memories of Visconti for an American writer who is doing an enormous biography on him.
I’ve been setting some records right: the last biography written on him was by a most poisonous woman called Gaia Servadio, who had NEVER met him! And whose ugly book1 distressed his family and his friends keenly .. I refused to read it; chicken that I am.
But this book is supposed to set things to rights .. I hope that it does. It is SO strange to me that now he is dead everyone has decided, what I knew from the moment I met and worked with him in 1966, that he is The Master … it would have pleased him better to have had that accolade while he was alive. He does’nt, did’nt, believe in Heaven and all that business!
I think that a good bit of ‘Snakes And Ladders’ will be quoted .. and parts about V. from ‘AOM’ .. Simon and Schuster are the US. Publishers.2
The writer sounds very sensible and wise. He knows, very well, what I used to call ‘The Roman Gang’. They were the terribly grand people in Rome; Counts and Countesses, Princes and Princesses, and all manner of idiot people, who cried with delight at parties, to which I was on some occasions bidden. ‘Ah, cher Luchino .. so sad. He is QUITE ruined professionally … no one will give him a single lira to make a film now. SO amusing …’
But they were happily wrong. Golly! He made them pay for those words when the time came! Delicious!
I think that this writer (Gordon Rogoff ) is rather good when he writes of the Servadio book ‘… is quite awful. Not only because it is poorly written and full of gossip, but also because she has no capacity for pain, no sense of complexity, the dark and the light.’ Which is what it is all about.
And now I see from my little window that it is dark already.
Time to light that fire I have laid, and set up the table for supper.
Cold lamb, baked potatoes and a bit of salad. Not as grand as a whole saddle and a souflee! Never mind ..
[…] So very much love –
Dirk
XOXOX.
To Kathleen Tynan Clermont
30th (can you believe it!) Nov. ’83.
Kathleen love –
God! How the time speeds away .. especially at this grim time of year one is reminded. Christmas and all that hideious jollity.
Your long letter of the 20th got here, amazingly, because we have had a foul MailStrike since September and everything is at odds and sodds stage. If you know what I mean? Packets arrive, posted years ago, along with something mailed the day before yesterday. Irritating. Because one has to telephone people and say ‘Your letter of the 20 September has just arrived … I’d have loved to be present for my “Hommage” in Strasbourg but alas ..’ and so on. Boring. They ‘did’ my hommage anyway, without me. Which was fine by me: I’m deadly bored with ‘Accident’ and ‘Portier de Nuite’ et al. It’s all SO long ago. And I’m weary of being called a Legend. Can you imagine such rot? Marlene, yes. Chaplin if you insist, certainly Garbo .. but pas moi.
[ … ] I have just come back from a hellish (because they WILL talk so much) promotion of the translation, excellent I must admit, of ‘Voices In The G.’ which has been most generously recieved … double colour spreads in ‘Paris Match’ ‘Elle’ and ‘Figaro’ and most gratifying reviews suggesting, ever so timidley, that I was ‘Proustian’. Well: it’s balls of course, but I dont terribly mind. The splendid thing about Frog Critics and Interviewers is that they speak about the book! No one askes if you are sixty five, homosexual, the price of your apartment, or if you dye your hair. This I have had recently … in January actually .. as a constant battering in sweet old Angleterre. But the French dont give a fig as long as there are lots of people in ones book to tear apart. And thats fun! I began to argue and scold, and find all kinds of extraordinary symbols in the bloody book which were never in my mind at the time of writing! All good fun.
Paris, the Louvre part,1 was pretty exhausting: five pm shoot until one am and no where in the whole seven kilometers of corridors and galleries to smoke, eat a sandwich, or, worst of all, have a pee. Worse for the girls than for the fellers .. we could always piddle into an empty Evian bottle behind the Winged Victory … but the ladies writhed.
Should one become absolutely desperate a Guardian, grumpy, was summonsed with huge key, and one trolled behind her, and a tiny torch (the whole building, except the ‘shoot area’ was in total darkness) for miles and by the time I got to the place, which she opened with a flourish and a clatter of metal, I’d forgotten what I’d come for and was utterly dried up. I wrote the text for Charlotte R. and myself, every morning, and she would telephone in from her fast, and glamorous Mercedes, as she was driving, and I’d read her the text. She was on her way into Town for her make-up and hair at fourish … every time she hit a traffic block, she’d call in. Very glamorous, if inaccurate, Text-wise, not driving-wise. She’s very good at that!
‘You just said Lyssipus .. right?’
‘Right ..’
‘And after that what?’
‘The greatest copy done of an original Praxitele work ..’
‘Spell.’
‘P R A X ..’
‘The lights have gone green. Call you back.’
That sort of caper. But we mugged it up, switched it about, and did the lot as impromptu. Not TERRIBLY Kenneth Clark, but better than the original text which was as worthy as a Bishops Gaiters .. and just as dull.
Tote had the dullest part of it all sitting alone in the Lancaster with his supper on a tray and watching DIRE TV. There was nowhere for him to sit in the Louvre, it was too far to walk anyway, and there was no point in hanging about all night.
So we did nothing amazingly interesting .. I worked all morning, did all my interviews in the afternoon until five and flogged off until one am. And got paid handsomly. Plus, on the last night, three hundred grams of Beluga and a couple of bottles of Laurent Perrier … which was VERY nice.
It was mild, golden, and sunny all the time (three weeks) we were in Town .. and it really is the very best of Cities .. even though the poor Champes Elysees is now rather like Times Square or Oxford Street and there are as many traffic blocks as there are bloody Macdonalds … but it still grabs one. And Sunday lunch at Fouquettes2 is still Sunday lunch at Fouquettes .. and expensive. But who really cares? Sitting in the sun: the chestnut trees turning, the sky blue, the wine chilled, and people laughing and arguing and behaving. Very nice.
[…] I am glad that you have reached Chapter 4 … thats terrific. Remember that Chapter Eight is the bastard: that’s when you absolutely KNOW that you’ve written a load of shit! It’s the ‘Wobble Chapter’. But courage! It always happens
apparently. I’ve now completed and had published six books … the seventh is stirring uneasily in the darker recesses of my mind .. but I’ve been busy with the Louvre, and also doing a harrowing (because it is a harrowing film) commentary for a Thames TV Documentary on Schindler. Of the Ark Fame. [ … ] I must get back to work again, I hate not doing something. I was going to do a movie about Middletone Murray and Kathleen Mansfield.1 But it was pretty awful: and he is such a piss-pot [ … ] So I bowed out […]
Courage! And work hard, and huge amounts of love to you, as always … Ever, with love,
Dirk XOXOX
To Dilys Powell
(Postcard) Clermont
25 January 1984
Dilys dear
I’m afraid that an idiot is born everyday! And I was one of them. This is just to amuse you and to tell you that at long last I have reached the age-of-dignity, at least in my beloved France! A Chevalier d’l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres and now, are you perfectly ready? I have been ‘unanimously voted to be the President of the Jury at Cannes’! I MUST be barking mad. I LOATH Cannes more even than you do .. and detest all forms of Comittee or Jury-work .. and the very idea of having to sit through 18 films in ten days appalls me. (Appalls me, looks better!) However, since you have shared my career with me from the first tentative days in 1947 I thought it would amuse you to know that, as Visconti once insisted crossly, there are always heighs to scale! And bloody awful crosses to bear as well! 18 films in ten days! I reel.
One, I am assured, runs for four and a half hours.
Oh well .. Thank you, my dear Dilys for the sweet remarks about long-forgotten films (for me anyway) which seem to have resurfaced on the TV.2 My sister assures me that they are ‘much better than all that foreign stuff you did!’ Ah well. One tries!