For the Time Being by Dirk Bogarde Viking 301pp, £16.99 in UK
Like its title, the tone of this book is valedictory. Following a stroke, Dirk Bogarde is now wheelchair-bound and incapacitated on one side. After six volumes of autobiography and some novels, themselves partly autobiographical in content, there doesn't seem much left for him to say about himself, so this is a collection of his journalism. Some of it again concerns his own life, however, while some consists of pen pictures of the famous he worked with or encountered, book reviews, done mainly for the Sunday Telegraph, obituaries, and even Letters to the Editor.
Inevitably, parts of this are thin and there is a feeling, perhaps, of the bucket being brought to the well rather too often. But Bogarde always writes well and honestly, and his tremendous career has brought him into contact with some of the most interesting people of the century. The tone can be querulous and, inevitably at his age, he finds himself out of sympathy with much of the times in which we now live. But if he has heard the chimes at midnight, mercifully, there's nothing kiss-and-tell about this book; its author belongs to a class and an age when reticence was regarded as a virtue - would that it could return!
Bogarde (born Van Den Bogearde) was raised in comfortable middle-class circumstances - his father was the first art editor of the London Times. He served in the war, seeing fighting in Normandy and being one of the first liberators into Belsen, about which he writes movingly and perceptively. After the war he became an actor and almost immediately a film star, appearing in a number of featherweight and forgotten English comedies. But the roles he played picked up in importance before too long, the turning points probably being Basil Dearden's Victim, one of the first films to deal with homosexuality, and The Servant, directed by Joseph Losey with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. (There's a good piece, too, about Losey, an American who had to leave Hollywood in the wake of the McCarthyite witch hunts and was a fine director, though apparently something of a monster in his private life).
Bogarde's screen career went on for more than forty years, but by the time he appeared in Visconti's Death in Venice, perhaps his greatest role, he felt he had had enough. One of the best things in this volume is his review of Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion, a book which, though it received surprisingly little attention in its English translation, leaves most film biographies trailing in its wake - but then, that amazing Italian Marxist aristocrat was much more than a film director.
Bogarde gave up the movies, with a couple of brief returns, and bought a house in Provence, where he lived in idyllic retirement. The death of his partner and business manager for many years, together with a change in his financial circumstances, brought it all to an end, however, forcing him to settle in a small and, one would gather, detested flat in central London. Some consolation came from his career as a writer, with its accompanying readings to the public, for which, of course, he was ideally suited.
As with so many journalistic compilations, much of this is lightweight and forgettable - good reading for the beach, perhaps, at this time of year. But there's enough here to remind us, too, that we're in the presence of someone relentlessly, sometimes devastatingly, frank to friend and foe alike, and that we're also meeting a fine writer, as well as a great actor.