Dirk Bogarde - A Particular Friendship: Letters

DIRK BOGARDE

To Molly Daubenny with gratitude and very much love

First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Viking

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright 1989 Badger Films

Cover image Getty Images

The moral right of the author is asserted.

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ISBN: 978 1 4482 0818 0
eISBN: 978 1 4482 0817 3

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Never explain, never complain.

I was brought up with those words ringing in my head, but, sadly, this time I have to do a bit of explaining, although I shall not be complaining.

This is an edited version of some of the many letters which I wrote to an unknown woman in America between 1967 and 1972.

We never saw each other (well, she cheated and saw me in a magazine or two) and we never spoke to each other. I dont even know, for certain, what age she was, although in an earlier letter, not published here, she did say that she fell deeply in love with a scrumptious steward on the Lusitania when I was ten. But, I wonder? We both ragged each other in some respects; I twigged fairly soon that she was ill and that the illness was grave. She never told me what it was, and I simply had to add up the clues which were dropped in the years that covered our correspondence. So I wrote to amuse her and to bring some form of lightness into what seemed to me a comfortable, but desperately lonely, existence. Her letters to me were far superior to mine, which were ill-written, as you will see, grammatically appalling and a pretty fair mish-mash. But they were primarily meant to entertain, nothing more; and this I believe, and hope, they did.

Someone reading them a short time ago said that it was the first time in his life that he had felt he must vote socialist. My arrogance and politics apparently got to him, although I am as political as a garden gnome. However, I have felt it wiser not, with hindsight, to alter the letters of one who, in over two decades of living abroad, has had a lot of opinions altered and his life-style greatly changed. I hope for the better. So the letters stand as they were written then: the warts and all. There is nothing that I wish to alter, or should. These were the letters that Mrs X got and so they must remain.

When the time came for me to leave France for my return, permanently, to England, I decided to burn all my diaries, correspondence, and various bits and pieces. This book was discovered, quite by chance, in an office-file, along with two or three letters from Mrs X herself, when I was destroying the office-files of some forty-five years which had been kept by my partner and manager, after his death from cancer in May of last year. I had absolutely no idea that he had kept this copy, or that it was in his files. Rather than send it with the rest of the stuff to the shredder, I read it with some curiosity and decided, perhaps unwisely, to keep it.

So here it is, as compiled in 1978 edited by myself rather crudely, and unfinished as a book. But there is nothing left to fill it out; and somehow I think it is just as well. Books of letters can be tiresome, and monotonous better to leave well alone. I would like to think that my writing has improved over the years. That was Mrs Xs plan for me and I have tried not to disappoint her.

I know that my tolerance has improved, that my politics have radically altered, and that the halcyon years on the hill in Provence brought me peace of mind and a wider understanding of the world about me; but that had to be done without Mrs Xs wise and caring guidance. She had gone, and I had to go it alone.

For obvious reasons I have omitted some names and altered others; otherwise the letters are as they were. Spelling, grammar, warts and all.

London
January 1989

The House
Saturday, 11th March 67

Dear Mrs X,

Thank you so much for your long and charming letter of February 27th enclosing the photographs of the house as it was when you lived here in the thirties. I was tremendously interested, and will reply at length in a day or two, when I shall have a little more time, and hope to be able to answer some of the questions which you ask. Meanwhile excuse this hurried note: I have been away for a time and there is a large back-log to catch up on.

Sincerely,

The House

March 18th 67

I must admit it is very odd. Well, a coincidence is usually odd I suppose, but this one does seem odder than most you must agree?

As indeed you do in your charming letter, your hesitant letter, as you call it. I was surprised and delighted all at the same time.

I gave the interview ages ago and had really completely forgotten it, as one usually does. It was, among so many, a singularly unmemorable one as most of them are and I remember it only now because you have reminded me. A pale, pudgy youth of about twenty-four I suppose. Starting up the ladder of his chosen profession. Shy (they always are), a thin veneer of aggression, a vague North Country accent overlaid by South London. And having difficulty with his vowels. Boulbe not bulb, revoulve not revolve, pickshure not picture. Unattractive. Damp hands which squashed in the handshake; an over active Adams apple betraying the over casualness and determination not to be impressed, though what he thought he might be impressed by God alone knows.

The photographer with him, they always bring The Photographer, was older and wiser and bored stiff. Had done it all before, and heard it all before. He drank a deal of tea, played wearily with the dogs, picked his nose and through what he chose to call my coffee table books which they werent. Really. A bound copy of TheatreWorld for 1933, I seem to remember Beardsley the collected works of Jane Austen. Too big to fit the shelves in the Study.

And the questions. Oh goodness, the questions. The journalistic clichs which deaden response after the years. Shouldnt there be a Handbook for Journalistic Interviewing? Brought up to date monthly. One replies like a dull child to catechism. How rich was I? Did I mind ageing? (I hadnt thought it was showing all that much.) Why hadnt I got married, how many servants did I have? Did I enjoy being a Sex Symbol? He suggested, tiredly, that his women readers would be interested to know the answers since it was they who had paid for all this (a wide wave about the drawing room) I had rather thought that it was myself. No matter. It proves to be The Women Readers, because they pay to see me. As if that gave them the Divine Right or something. Apart from their banality the questions were all asked with a snideness which implied that he already knew all the answers but what was