Profoundly moving but fundamentally dishonest
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Sir Dirk Bogarde was as good a writer as he was an actor (later period anyway). This book is no exception: it is beautifully, sensitively written, conveying all the pain, heartache and everyday irritation of growing old, having close friends die . . . But in this volume of his autobiography, as in the other four, Bogarde is fundamentally dishonest about himself and about his relationships, in particular with Anthony Forwood, his lover for 30 years. After Sir Dirk's death, his family admitted that they had known for decades that he was homosexual, but Bogarde could never face the prospect of it being known publicly. So, in his books there is much obfuscation and disembling, always "my manager", never anything more. It provokes in me a reaction of both disappointment and anger, and it detracts from the extraordinary quality of Bogarde's writing, even more through the immediacy of Bogarde's reading of his own words on tape.
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The Courage to Love What You Have
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Over a period of nearly thirty years Sir Dirk Bogarde established himself as a unique and compelling voice in English literature. This, at times heart rending, always compelling and immensely readable book is his finest hour. It charts the disintegration of the idyll that Bogarde shared with his former manager Forwood in Provence for twenty years. How the onset of old age in both of them and cancer in Forwood made a return to the UK a necessity. The central relationship is a complex one which has been typically and one-dimensionally assumed to be gay by the popular press. I suspect that the relationship was asexual, that of two bachelors by circumstance rather than confirmation who rather drifted to together and melded like the best of marriages. The treatment of the confusion wrought by disease and infermity is moving in the extreme. Bogarde's unselfpitying struggle to rebuild his life in small flat in Knightsbridge can only engender the sympathy of the reader. Interlaced throughout is a eulogy to the friends and life that he left behind in Southern France. This events charted are actually heroic and this book is a real contender for my favourite read of all time.
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Heartfelt, reserved, intensely personal writing
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I'm a youngster and about as far away from the events depicted in this book as you can get but I have never experienced such a moving and involving description of what it's like to grow old as in this book. I quite liked Dirk Bogarde's films but after reading this unforgettable and honest book my repsect for him has rocketed. He'll be missed.
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