Little did I know that by the end of the month, I would have meditating at night of his various houses (having found that for twenty years, I have lived a mile or so from him); that I would have driven down a dark lane to locate the rough whereabouts of his Adam's Farm in Crowborough and also down the lane where his childhood idyll took place, near Alfriston. I noted that a lady put on Amazon that when she closed the last of his biographies she felt 'empty' because there was nothing more of his life she could share. I've definitely not reached that point, having another good book to hand, but I am changed. If you want to know the wider background, I need not repeat it : see here for The Guardian's review of the biography.
This book, though excellent, is no more fascinating than the several volumes of Bogarde's own biographies. Whatever else, Bogarde was (or was not) he was fascinating, very alive and could really write. Since he had skipped a basic education and failed all school exams (he could not spell) becoming a writer with two literary honarary doctorates ("Dr Bogarde") at St Andrews and Sussex universities seems incredible. The secret was that he could connect both visually and in writing and had a definite 'authorial voice'.
One wonders whether, if his nose had been slightly longer and his left profile had been less handsome, if the left eyebrow had not lifted on command (a trick he taught others at school) and if grinding his back teeth together did not show on film as threatening inner conflict, he would have been happier as a journalist. He had edited magazines when he was in the Army. Maybe he would not have ended up a bitter old man, in spite of being the (knighted) toast of literary London - as I well remember, in the late 1980s and 1990s?
John Coldstream, who knew him well, never explains his sheer charisma. It was not really about good looks but about emotion. Behind it all was this rare ability to convey feeling and emotion, backed by high intelligence, storytelling, gravity and humour. The qualities that served him as an actor also went into the writing - showing that the two are closely connected. I don't think it was odd that in England we heard of his death with barely a flicker of the eyelids (he knew that in advance and refused a funeral) while Italy nearly went into national mourning. His ("romantic") heart had been conveyed on his face and worn on his sleeve. Expressiveness was at its core, unusual in an often stiff and formal man. His voice was advantageous but his charisma lay in the power of the conveyed emotion which was enough to unhinge young audiences.
Like Joanna Lumley, the first time I saw him as self-sacrificial, guillotined Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, I ended up in floods of tears feeling I had never seen anything like it (and never have, since). He once gave a talk on the Holocaust at Tonbridge School and masters said that they had never heard anything to compare with its 'liquid emotion' : many boys were crying throughout. What gave him this power to convey feeling in words and expressions? I guess it was instinctive imagination and a liking for (entertaining and moving) people. Coldstream never analyses it satisfyingly.
Bogarde's writing was used, while he was alive, by primary school teachers to teach writing and is still used now, in creative writing classes. I am not surprised as it is immediate and feels searingly honest (though often it is not fully accurate but embroidered). One sees and feels through his eyes and his original similes. He was taught, as a lad, by his artistic father to sit on the Underground and know how many people sitting opposite him were wearing brown shoes: he did that always. He even knew the position of all his books on his shelves. He was not just an artist and observer. He had literary (letterwriting) relationships, which were like love affairs. Often he chose old, lonely women such as a woman nursing her husband with a stroke and the inspiring Mrs X, a Yale librarian, who encouraged him to write (while correcting his spelling). He 'used' some people but he seems to have also loved some of them and he appreciated them in written tributes.
There was so much incident and colour in his life that all our own lives seem dull by comparison . There was the War, the stage, British films and directors, travel, people, relatives, places, houses, the reminder of periods of history so that this biography and his own volumes are a 'feast' of entertainment, filled with one surprising, intimate or laughable thing after another. Yet it all reads like a one-to-one encounter with his voice and personality. How one man can write so much about himself, one wonders, and still not be tedious?
Through this, I have seen for the first time "Victim" (on YouTube) the (1961) film in which he plays a barrister suppressing his bisexuality, which put off many of his female fans, at the time. He uses his usual tehniques of a) the left profile b) the controlled, upperclass voice c) the left arched eyebrow d) the mocking smile as a fragile 'shell' which cannot contain the raging volcano of sexual ambiguity that erupts through this outer 'corset' and explodes, in fireworks, in a rivetting scene with his wife, played by beautiful young Sylvia Sims. He tells her that he was controlling (then) forbidden same-sex desire and that she has 'ripped it out of him'. Apparently, he wrote those lines, himself. He thought films should aim to give audiences disturbing and challenging experiences. That one certainly did. The law at that time was, indeed, 'a blackmailer's charter'.
Of course, there are still some unanswered questions such as "How did he endure the financial insecurity of his acting career for so long?" (what a worrying life!) "What would he have lived on if he had needed another ten years of 24-hour nursing care?" "Do actors ever get pensions?" "Why did he splurge so much earlier on grand houses, staff, Rolls Royces and entertaining?"
He had to write, eventually, in order not to end up in a one-bedroom flat in Brighton, like his bankrupt Belgian grandfather. All credit to him that he mastered writing too, churning out bestseller after bestseller, eventually with advances of < £100,000. The books that sold the best were all about him because the fact remains that Dirk Bogarde was a very interesting person. Some were even illustrated by him. Few if any today can compare : he was a renaissance man.
Peter Hall, the Shakespeare director, gave this assessment of Dirk Bogarde to his face
"He is a dangerous man because he is a man of so many parts. He does so many things and so many things superlatively well...a movie star, a great actor, someone for whom the craft is so seamless that the seam is invisible... so honest with himself that he achieves the state of honest communication. He then went on to be a great writer. There is the same simplicity, artlessness in that writing which there has been in his great performances".
It is a shame that in the end, he championed euthanasia and seems not to have had any faith. Apparently, any (Catholic) faith he did have (he built altars as a miserable schoolboy) died in the killing fields of World War Two.
I have learnt a key lesson from his life this August - which is to try to develop a habit of observing everything minutely. It gave him the upperhand in writing, acting and art.
Recommendation 9/10
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