by Unknown
Our summer, such as it has been (it has almost rained since April) is now on the wane. We really count May to July as the Summer months, anything after that is a bonus and the sun is already moving across the terrace so that the shadows fall longer by the time one listens to the BBC World Service. (And a fat lot of good that does one) at 8pm. Most of the summer flowers are failing or over: the roses have puffed up, exploded in the heat, and gone: the pear trees are just beginning to grow yellow, and the wasps are about. And the Attenboroughs scream and squeal in their swimming pool far across, what once was, a peaceful olive grove. Ah well …
But thank you for the splendid ‘boast-card’ view. I am deeply, deeply impressed, and hope that the beans are good when eaten. Probably at their peak while you are chuntering about in wherever it is you are going to have your hol. But with a little butter, a touch of garlic, and a scatter of FRESH parsley they are, as they say, ‘a meal by themselves’!
Ever Dirk.
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
15 July 1984
Norah dearest –
Ten fifteen am and already the hills are hazed in heat and the terrace steps, which are not under the vine, too hot to walk on. NEVER end a sentence withapreposition. I know!
It’s the sort of heat that you would not care for: I do not. I feel lethargic and flat, if that is not feeling the same thing, and unable to deal with much.
Although I confess that I have just done a ‘large wash’, as Lally would say, shirts, pants, underwear, and a pair of cotton slacks. V. difficult to wash I find: and not entirely clean yet. Inspite of my constant scrubbing at the concret sink in the wash-house.
Lady decided to be ill; so she has’nt been for three days or so, and the washing rises like a tide to smother one. Forwood is NOT frightfully good at blowing his nose on one handkerchief-for-a-week.
He blows it once. On a fresh handkerchief. I blanch. Which is more than the handkerchiefs do under my lavish care and the cake of Le Chat white soap.
Enough! They flutter away on the line in the brilliant sun, and if you do not look closely you would be convinced that a spell-binding washerman had been at work. But dont look too closely.
Frankly, it is about time we had a bit of summer. It has been foul almost since April .. and lowering cloud, humid and depressing, has settled over us up here leaving the plain and the far coast-line sparkling in sun.
It is vastly annoying. But, of course, good for the terrace pots, for they have been spared the full heat and flourish. Even the mildew has, in some miraculous way, been spared us. [ … ] We have still three terraces thigh-high in rank grass because, during May when they should have been cut, it rained ceaselessly and the land became a bog. Now in the intense heat the earth has dried and caked, and the grass is yellow and tangled like a mad-womans hair. Glenda wont mind .. I feel certain .. and there is nothing that we can do until cooler weather comes.
Glenda J. as I told you, arrives on Saturday for a ‘crash-out’ after a very exhausting run in her five-hour play.1 So it’ll be pleasant; because she wanders about by herself, makes her own coffee when she wants it, and gluts on whatever books she can lay her hands on. She says that for so many years, as a child, she was deprived of any kind of learning, and is now, at forty five, making up for it in a big way. She wanted to know if I had got the Ivy Compton B. book2 … and I said no. It is too big and I’m bored with Ivy Compton B. Glenda was v. cross. But said she’d not bring it out because it WAS long and she’d rather talk anyway. Oh dear! However the ‘talk’ is good […]
I have just spoken to Elizabeth on the telephone, who is busy trying to collect information for me about our father for the ‘thing’ I have to write.3 To our consternation Mamma destroyed years and years of photographs and bits-and-pieces. We never realised that she had. The desk in which was the ‘Photograph Drawer’ always appeared to look intact. But it is apparently not. Nearly everything has been destroyed. I cant think why she did this. Fortunatly my brother carted off a lot of stuff from my fathers studio after he died. So there is something left. But early photographs, letters from J.M. Barrie, from Pavlova, from the Astors, from Munnings and [Augustus] John … and many many others, have all gone. Even a collection of rather splendid Brangwyn engravings, dedicated to Pa, have dissapeared. Oh woe! And I have re-read this letter and it is a most disagreeable one! I AM sorry! Deep in grumbles and protestations!
I think that Sundays have a particular gloom about them: especially those which follow National Holidays. (Yesterday was the 14th).
We have been pestered by wandering women who clamber up the hill in quite unsuitable shoes and demand that I sign copies of my books.
As I am usually hidden up here, poor Forwood takes the brunt.
To suddenly open your eyes from under the shade of the lime-tree, where you have taken your after-luncheon rest, and stare at a perfectly strange woman, one yesterday was dressed in a see-through frock with black underwear clearly on display, is a bit of a shock.
So we have wired up the gates, most inconvenient generally, and sit here as if beseiged.
I had so much publicity during the Festival .. pages and pages .. and also I have been on the Television, in French, speaking about my work (!) and then, recently, about poor Losey .. that there is a sudden rush, it is the Holiday Season, of Fans. It is as bad as it was all the years ago when I was a young Film Star with five in Staff to protect me! And now at sixty three it is the same. Odd.
I went through a huge file of letters yesterday from Dorothy Gordon, (my Mrs X.) It was too hot to work, and so I idled through the years ’67 to ’69. I found it a strange, moving, business. There are hundreds of letters, and this file is only for part of ’67 and half of ’68.
I discovered, only yesterday, that she was a direct descendant of Daniel Webster .. which surprised me rather, for I did’nt remember that bit, nor do I remember what D. Webster did, or was! So I looked him up and he was a v.v. important Lawyer and was responsible, in 1842 for defining the border between Canada and the U.S. So there!
I still cant make out exactly WHAT Dorothy’s nationality was. She writes with great dislike of the Americans … and yet claims Webster as her kin, she was Dorothy Webster Gordon, but insists that she has a British-French passport which she renewd every ten years. Refusing to be a ‘damned Yankee’ … but what was mostly interesting, apart from the rememberance of a faded love-affair, for that is what it seems, was finding the second chapter of ‘Postillion’ as written to her on the house letter-paper with virtually no alterations, and just as it stands today in the printed book. I cant, as yet, find Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is simply dated June ’67. Which makes it almost exactly ten years before it got published, by sheer fluke! As you remember …
[ … ] Patricia Losey has just called to say how happy she was with my ‘tribute’ to her husband on the TV. It seems to have pleased all kinds of people, those who were closest to him and those who knew him only as one of the great directors of the Cinema. It’s frightfully hard to ‘do’ those interviews … one speaks for two hours, knowing that only certain pieces will be used to fill, perhaps, a twenty minute piece. I had no idea how it would be used. But I gather it was very well ‘edited’, and moving, and truthful. So thats a relief. His family, all boys, at least have a video recording of it and me and their father. And I was asked to speak of him because, inspite of the thousands of people who knew him better than I did, I knew him first. And started him off, so to speak. His autobiography,1 published last month, strangely, in France, is overwhelmingly generous to me. He has written things there, in this fat book, which he never wrote to me! Nor ever said! Nor ever would have said. One is made to feel humble and proud, all at the same time. An odd mix!
I wish that you had met him. As one always wishes that the people one loves and respects should. He was so incredibly anti-Class, as he knew it in England, and yet so enjoyed its privileges! His taste in everything, from food to writing, to flowers and people, was impeccable. He read everything, a
nd while he was dying he had poetry read to him day and night by his sons, and a friend whose voice he particularly loved. A man of paradox .. a man of generosity, meanness, cruelty, at times, and profound love.
How fortunate I was.
And what pleasure it would have been to have had you both here on the terrace, white wine in hand (essential to him!) and a ‘sparkler’ of a question placed, so that you could worry it, and argue it, and spin off into other regions. But alas! Not now .. but you would have enjoyed it!
And I must leave you with this ill-written piece of rubbish. A Sunday letter, thats all. But bringing with it, as you know, my deepest love and loudest appeals that you do NOT go wobbling about on your concret garden among the floribundas, or whatever! Please ..
Your devoted Dirk XOXOXO
To Norah Smallwood Clermont
4 August 1984
Dearest Norah –
It was very naughty of you to telephone last night. I get quite flustered when you do, thinking of all the pennies which are used up on me when Chatto1 could do with a good belly-full instead. I hardly take anything in, so worried am I … looking at a metaphorical egg-timer all the while.
Still: you called, and it was splendid to hear you, and to know that you had such a ‘scrumptious’ time […] peaches and figs and so on.
Goodness me. There IS a special thing about an English (white) peach .. I dont know why. I who detest fruit in anything but a wine gum (?) do quite like them. We had a tree growing hard against the wall of the house near Hascombe. I fear that the early wasps, or some damned insect, got to them just before we did … but none the less they were delicious.
If you like peaches.
Here they are, presently, tumbled in great heaps in the market and you just eat them all day, it seems. Or perhaps they preserve them? Anyway, there is what is known as a glut … and the white ones are super. French even so!
[ … ] I agreed, to my amazement, to judge (!) a competition for the Mail On Sunday … along with Fay Weldon and Melvin Bragg and some one else I cant recall. The job, our job, was to consider a first paragraph of a novel written by a reader. One hundred words. Confidentially they expected about 250 entries: instead they got 5.500! And had to weed it all down to a mere 21. So we had to judge the 21. It is amazing, reading the stuff, how much people detest their partners! Almost every ‘novel’ started with Mark or Jenny (they were given those two names by the Mail to start them off: ‘Write an opening paragraph of not more than 100 words about someone called “Mark” and “Jenny”) and Mark and Jenny, my dear, killed each other off in almost every piece! Amazing social comment. And they were ALL married.
Not much joy among the lot: but a burning desire to express themselves.
The old adage, ‘There is a novel in everyone’ seems to be true.
I managed to award two only 9 and a 10 (out of ten marks) but it was tough going. What poor David Hughes (who invented this idea for his paper) had to go through reading over five thousand I cant imagine! Put him off writing for life I should’nt wonder … and he’s had such a whopping success with ‘The Pork Butcher’.1 I just wonder if he has sold anything much. The reviews were breathtaking. Even in ‘Country Life’!
I got that out of the way and then had a stab at a portrait of my Pa.2
Difficult. It is almost impossible to write a simple story of 2.000 words about a hugely complex, and interesting, man.
I think it’s alright. Forwood thought so .. but he’s ‘family’ so might be biased .. and he even approved my punctuation. I took great care!
I asked The Times to send me some information on Pa: stuff that I did not perhaps know, for he was a silent fellow, very reticent.
I was amazed at the things which he managed to ‘invent’.
The First infra-red camera, the first underwater camera and film, the first lense to photograph movement, without fuzziness or blurring, in the theater thereby changing photography in the theater AND the cinema for all time all over the world!
His first subjects in this field were Thomas Beecham and Pavlova .. both of whome were amazed, and delighted, to see their ‘action’ in performance for the first time. He also was the first man to use colour photography in the paper, as early as 1931 … and I’m afraid it all went over our heads as kids and we had no idea of his value.
Nor had The Times (today I mean) until they discovered that it was going to be 200 years old on Jan. 2nd and that my father was of such amazing importance to them.
There is one rather moving photograph which they sent me of Pa being presented with a cheque collected ‘from all departments of The Times on his retirement. An amazing amount ..’
Of sixty five pounds!
Even allowing for the fact that in 1957, when he retired, this was worth much more than it is today, it still seems to me pretty wretched.
Mind you: he got an awful lot of ghastly silver junk .. ink-stands and huge cigar boxes and a chalice-thing and God knows what all … this was all stolen from my sisters house two years ago, plus all Grandfathers good silver … whacking big candelabras and plates and cutlery … but the one thing the theives did’nt take was his most treasured possession.
A silver replica of a Tate And Lyle syrup tin. He always kept his pens and pencils on his desk in an old battered original. The Art Department gave it to him when he left. I have it safely here. And keep MY pens and pencils in the original!
What a very uninteresting letter Dirk!
It must be the heat. 88 in the shade and it is not yet noon.
I dont care for this kind of heat at all .. neither, I feel certain, would you. But the sky IS Vermeer blue. For that alone I revel.
I spoke to you, briefly, last evening about my new Pen Friend, Esmond Knight, NO relation to Jill Esmond, that I know of. He has been happily married all his life to the glorious Nora Swinburn[e].
He wrote because he had so enjoyed the three ‘ortobios’ .. at least Nora read to him, for he was blinded during the war in the Navy.
And STILL works in the theater. His next assignment, at the Barbican, is a revival of ‘The White Devils’ … he is seventy eight1 .. I think … and I have encouraged him to write (he learned touch typing at St Dunstans) his book. When everyone had given him up, sightwise as they say, he saw, or Nora saw, in some French paper an advertisement for an eye-doctor who could cure blindness. Unbelieving they wrote to him, made an appointment, went to his clinic (in the marshes near Rye) he had an operation, and two injections of the special potion the doctor had invented, and when the bandages were removed from his eyes the first thing that he saw was Nora, by his bed, holding towards him … a dandelion. ‘By God!’ he said, ‘Nora! Thats a dandelion!’ He saw, well enough, for the next thirty years. But an undiagnosed glaucoma had started in his strongest eye, and he is now totally blind.
But you would never know it! His courage, her courage, are monumental .. and SO English-understated. He may not write anything: I dont know. But I felt he had to be encouraged, and it will be wonderful for him for, as a great player of Shakespear, he ‘knows the words’ .. and uses them accordingly!
So I’ve told him that IF he gets anything down on paper I would ask you to have a look. It would be such a push to him to know that. Nora, his wife, is eighty two … goodness, I hope that I have their courage when I hit that part of time! End of paper … and BORING letter.
but never end of love from Dirk XXXXO
12.30 pm.
Wrote all the over-page stuff and went to have a relaxing little glass of something before luncheon.
Walked to the post box and got your letter and the (one presumes) cover for poor, miserable, ‘VOICES’.1
I did’nt know I’d written a book about Mill Hill.
Or Kingston Hill, come to that.
At first I had to laugh, because ‘weep I dare not’ .. or whatever the phrase is. But God Almighty!
Is that the best they can do at Triad?
Pinch my own ‘idea’ and send it reeling into Suburbia?
[ … ] No respectable person would be seen dead reading ‘VOICES’ on the Tube … and I would have grave doubts that any respectable person would buy it … it’s as nasty as a Girlie Magazine. To be kept in secret in your Macintosh pocket.
Woe is me … ‘What a fell day is this ..’
Alas! D
Norah Smallwood died on 11 October, leaving a list of friends who would be invited to choose an item from her Estate. When her executor, Dorothy Watson, telephoned Dirk and asked what he would like, he replied: ‘I have the whisky glass she always used when she stayed with us in France and that is all the memento I need.’
Dirk was the prime mover behind the ‘wrap party’ in tribute to Joseph Losey which was held on 19 September at Twickenham Studios.
To Patricia Losey Clermont
25 September 1984
Patricia –
Well: I’m just about thawed out now. Coming back from a week in London is strangely exhausting, I dont know why.
Probably Heathrow, which never fails to work it’s ghastly horror on one, has a lot to do with it!
I think we did alright on Wednesday … as you so generously suggested yesterday on the telephone.
It was a happy event, rather than a miserable one, and the feeling of warmth and affection among us all was really contageous .. if that is how you spell it? I think that there is an ‘i’ missing somewhere, but what the hell.
What made it so particularly good, that evening, was not so much that so many had made the trip, but that there were so many young people there, as well as those of my age: who were young … once upon a time.
I thought that was very good. I was particularly touched that the Baker-Boys were there: not that I was ever, what you might call, devoted to Stanley … but he was okay: nicer than his wife anyway. But the boys were splendid.
Your own son is’nt that bad, is he?1 Clever old you .. and the Losey Lot will do very well.
Whatever we all felt, thought, or sensed, happiness rather than gloom was the order of the evening and I am certain that Joe would have almost approved. I say ‘almost’ because it’s as near as I can get to being accurate.