Deborah Jones November 29, 2008
writing in The Australian where she is a senior editor.

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, A$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.

Read the rest of Deborah Jones' interesting story at The Australian online.