The Letters of Dirk Bogarde

[Reza]

The constant writer
Deborah Jones | November 29, 2008
Article from: The Australian

Dirk Bogarde's letters are intimate, often sharp and reveal a man as elegant in writing as he was on screen

Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters
Edited by John Coldstream
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 531pp, $55
WHEN Dirk Bogarde had to leave his beloved Provencal farmhouse in 1987, he put most of his papers to the torch.

"Letters, postcards, diaries, journals all the press cuttings I ever saved, that sort of stuff," he writes in A Short Walk from Harrods, a painful exposition of his re-entry into London life after nearly 20 years in France.

His sister Elizabeth was in Grasse to help move Bogarde and his long-term partner and manager Tony Forward, as Forward was very ill. Bogarde describes her dismay:

"All the letters you sent Daddy, during the war? He saved them all for you."

"Burned those too..."

She stood watching me dribble the last of a (watering) can into the steaming embers of half a lifetime.

"I think you're quite daft," she said.

When Forward died, less than a year later, Bogarde had another ruthless cull. "I have managed to destroy 45 years of T's letters and files and bundle off his clothes to Oxfam," he wrote to a friend. "Always a distressing business ... but now the place is empty of his presence, and I must start off all over again." This insistence on destroying personal records could give the impression Bogarde wished to leave little trace of himself other than his film work. It would be more true to say he had a keen interest in presenting a highly controlled view of himself.

A Short Walk from Harrods was his sixth volume of autobiography and there would be another. The books were written partly because Bogarde increasingly didn't care for most of the acting jobs he was offered and needed to make a living, but a higher imperative was his compulsive need to write. He also wrote novels, poems, essays, journalism and criticism, but his own life was his most frequent subject, albeit smoothed and veiled for public consumption. And then there are the letters.

Ever, Dirk is a captivating collection from a man who had the three prerequisites for success in this area: a voracious appetite for letter-writing, a singular gift for it and fascinating friends at the receiving end. Here Bogarde is off the leash, letting the extremes of his personality show, or at least those parts he wished to put on display.

Bogarde was ambivalent about his profession, telling his publisher, Norah Smallwood, that he loved "'being' another person, trying to use his mannerisms, finding what he'd do in a given crisis, how he'd move, walk, use his hands ... tiny things which when added together give the audience the illusion that I am someone else". On another occasion he describes acting as "suchballs".

He'd been a matinee idol when young but became selective as he aged, choosing to make art-house films with directors such as Joseph Losey (The Servant), Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice), Alain Resnais (Providence) and Bertrand Tavernier (Daddy Nostalgie). Not for him the lucrative late-career appearances in popular films that have made the likes of Sean Connery and Michael Caine so wealthy, although he surely could have made some of that lolly if he'd been so inclined. But he wasn't, so sighed endlessly about how expensive everything was.

His greatest passion was for writing -- "a dire necessity to me", as he described it to novelist Penelope Mortimer in 1974 -- and in addition to the published writings he was a prolific correspondent. As he told Smallwood: "I am really not a bit happy unless I am writing. Even a letter will do." He didn't always expect a response, and often said his letters were NTBRT: not to be replied to. The letters gave him a stage he could control entirely. They also combined intimacy and privacy: a meeting of minds could be achieved in solitude. There was the freedom, too, to say what in public would be left unsaid. Some reprehensible attitudes are blithely uncensored.

What makes the book so compelling is the way Bogarde jumps off the page with energy and, frequently, malice and succinct waspishness ("Princess D. will be there, if she's not in the bin"). A bonus comes with the spelling and punctuation, which were erratic and racy to the end. His editors on the autobiographies and novels obviously earned their keep.

John Coldstream (also Bogarde's biographer) decided to print the letters exactly as written, adding greatly to the joy of this volume. Here is Bogarde on getting the famous piano-playing Labeque sisters out of his building in 1994:

I didn't get rid of the bloody Labique's ... I only broke down their door once. After 12 solid hours of practice. Imagine! Those flouncing bitches clanging away at two pianos without a break! ... Jesus ... then when the other people realised that I had complained in rage they all started complaining and finally they were FORCED to leave by universal consent. Two giant cranes arrived one morning (Sunday) big enough to lift a chunk of the Santa Monica Freeway and carted their fart-arseing pianos off to Switzerland. I now have a plump lady from the Germany Embassey ... and she does'nt even play a jews-harp.

Well. She would'nt, would she?

The casual racism and intolerance can be confronting (although perhaps two pianos is too much), but then comes redemption in expressions of love, friendship and understanding. It would take a heart of stone to be unmoved by Bogarde's love for Forward, even if the actor never publicly acknowledged "Tote" as anything more than his manager. It was "the most perfect relationship of my life", one that lasted for 50 years.

As there is nothing before 1969, all the letters relate to life after the early matinee-idol days. Bogarde and Forward have just moved to their house in Provence and there is much about art-house filmmaking, writing, unwanted guests, daily life on the farm, his beloved dogs and the many household names who cross his ken.

His views on other actors are often sour and ungenerous, but you'd have to be dead not to enjoy this vignette about playwright Harold Pinter. A week after sending a splendidly complimentary letter to Pinter in which he talks about being ravished by the language in No Man's Land, which he was recording for radio, he was writing to his dear chum Mortimer thus:

Harold came to the First Reading. We all, of course, read as if we were reading the words of "Nearer My God To Thee" on that ship.

But he seemed jolly enough; replaced three commas and one adverb.

Important, as it turned out, and mis-typed by a lady at the BBC.

Bogarde's public writing career started after Smallwood saw him interviewed on television in late 1974 to promote The Night Porter, directed by Liliana Cavani, and charged a colleague from publishing house Chatto & Windus with asking if the actor would be receptive to writing about his life. Bogarde responded that he had started writing a few essays about aspects of his career, but said he felt books by film stars were "beastly boring" and that he was "not a David Niven".

That said, he was open to persuasion, and memoirs, novels and the rest followed. Coldstream's selection emphasises the close relationships Bogarde had with women: his sister, Smallwood, Mortimer, Kathleen Tynan (wife of critic Ken Tynan), agent Pat Kavanagh and film critic Dilys Powell. Bogarde also wrote affectionately to Visconti and Losey, and he had a particularly devoted friendship with the grumpy and conservative playwright John Osborne.

Bogarde was knighted in 1992, which seemed to please him. He still had in him another volume of autobiography (Cleared for Take-Off) and a novel (Closing Ranks). The letters continued even when he had to dictate them after having a stroke. He died in London in 1999, aged 78.

As Coldstream points out in his introduction, Bogarde claimed that collections of letters "can be tiresome and monotonous". Well, they can be, but not from this pen. To put it as he would, the book is "devine".

It would be wise, however, to take Bogarde's advice on how to extract maximum pleasure from this volume. In 1993, writing to Daphne Fielding, he said he was "wallowing, no other word will do" in Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford. "They are so good and funny ... must be read in little gulps. Not taken all together."

Deborah Jones is a senior editor on The Australian