Missives of a misspelling star

Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters Edited by John Coldstream Weidenfeld Nicolson, 512pp. £25THE LETTERS of Sir Dirk Bogarde - acerbic, witty, mournful, misspelled - arrive in a volume big enough to stop a bullet or stun a rhinoceros. Now, finally, we may get a proper glimpse inside the brain of that most enigmatic of English actors.

Iconic images of Bogarde as somebody else are, of course, carved into the brains of most serious cinema enthusiasts. At the beginning of the 1950s, in The Blue Lamp, he dared to remain damply sexy while shooting Constable George Dixon - Dixon of Dock Green to subsequent television viewers - straight through his reliable, patriotic heart. Later, despite not being the jolliest of men, Dirk made something cosily amusing of Dr Simon Sparrow in Doctor in the House and several equally unthreatening sequels.

In the 1960s, we remember him taking less mainstream roles such as the homosexual barrister in Victim or the predatory, manipulative manservant in Joseph Losey's brilliant The Servant.

By the following decade, Dirk, now living grumpily in France, had become a recognised darling of the European cinema establishment. Few images from that era are more creepily resilient than those of Bogarde weeping over a pale young boy in Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice or being straddled by a swastika-clad Charlotte Rampling in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter.

Useful visions of Dirk Bogarde as himself were, however, somewhat harder to come by. One of the most telling came during an excruciating television interview with Russell Harty in the late 1980s. Following a brief period of gentle probing by the camp Lancastrian, Bogarde curled his lip menacingly and lowered his still verdant eyebrows. "You haven't cracked me yet, you know," he spat.

Many viewed the comment as an attempt to curtail any further investigation of the actor's still unacknowledged homosexuality. Yet a consideration of Bogarde's evasive dealings with friends, family and the media confirms that his resistance to being "cracked" extended to every aspect of his private life.

We are, it is true, discussing a man who devoted large parts of his later years to writing well-received memoirs. But, as John Coldstream, Bogarde's authorised biographer and the scrupulous editor of this fine volume, repeatedly confirms, books such as A Postillion Struck by Lightning and A Short Walk to Harrods were often less than reliable. Dirk made sure the shutters stayed down.

Keeping all this in mind, one approaches Ever, Dirk with particular interest. Beginning in 1969, the year Bogarde and his partner, Tony Forwood, left England for Italy, the book includes letters to such well-known buddies as Penelope Mortimer, Joseph Losey, John Osborne and Kathleen Tynan. He discusses writing with Norah Smallwood, his patient editor, and witters on about gardening to the novelist Julian Barnes.

By eavesdropping on these private conversations, the reader will, surely, succeed where Harty failed and crack some small part of Bogarde's psyche. Not quite. For a start, we have to contend with the author's dizzying incomprehension of basic spelling and punctuation. Coldstream is, on balance, right to leave so many errors uncorrected - the wandering apostrophes and dangling participles help convey Dirk's urgent, conversational thought processes - but, at times, the mangled syntax can obscure meaning. Some of the letters read as if Nigel Molesworth, the semi-literate hero of (as any fule kno) Geoffrey Williams's classic school stories, had a hand in their writing.

Even after penetrating the accidentally experimental prose, the reader will, however, find surprisingly few insights into the inner Bogarde. His trivial discontents are everywhere and he is always happy to detail difficulties with plumbing, neighbours and dogs, but, with even his closest friends, Bogarde holds back from clarifying his relationship with Tony Forwood. Long after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain, Dirk continues to discuss "Forwood", with whom he lived for nearly 50 years, as if he were simply his business manager and housekeeper.

The reader's ears prick up when, while describing Tony's final illness to Hélène Bordes, an enthusiast for the actor's writing, Bogarde refers to the patient as his "partner". But Dirk Bogarde, a fogey of the firmest resolve, would sooner be seen on a skateboard than use that word in its modern sense.

Over 350 pages, in which Forwood appears bewilderingly fleetingly - and then usually in relation to domestic crises - Bogarde's evasions move from seeming neglectful to appearing downright cruel. The actor may have got a knighthood, but I suspect poor Tony, who died in 1988, 11 years before Dirk, probably deserved beatification.

Bogarde exhibits meanness throughout the book. The reader will also encounter eye-watering degrees of racism, egoism, anti-Semitism, snobbery and backward thinking. In later years, he begins a correspondence with John Osborne and Ever, Dirk is every bit as savage in its unreasonableness as the sullen playwright's own, notoriously bitter memoirs.

Coldstream makes an attempt to justify his subject's rants in an otherwise lucid, touching introduction. Despite his horrid comments, Dirk was, apparently, "an admirer of the 'Great Tolerant', Voltaire". Really? "The moment the bloody old wogs crossed the canal my slender savings dwindled to a very thin skin," Bogarde writes in 1974. Coldstream, unable to contain his amusement, adds a helpful note: "A non-historian's reference to the Six-day War (1967)".

Coldstream's wry tone suggests he is well aware that, far from impeding enjoyment, Bogarde's various intolerances will provide many punters with a charge of guilty pleasure. Like the letters of Kingsley Amis or the diaries of Kenneth Williams, Ever, Dirk invites decent-thinking readers to snigger at a public figure's bigotry while silently congratulating themselves on thinking differently. Sometimes, the rages are harmless enough. His creative disgust at the modern world should make even the most right-on Guardian reader smile.

"Whats happened to them all?" he writes of youthful visitors to his French home in 1974. "Draped in poor copies of Carol Lombard from Biba, listening only to the dreary throb of electric Guitars and boys with spotty faces and Neasden-Negro-Voices . . . no one had heard of Pavlova." (Mind you, when Elton John butters him up over tea, he decides the singer is "wonderfully civilised and wise".)

Elsewhere, the combination of snobbery and racism borders on the psychotic. Following the IRA's bombing of Hyde Park, he allows his revulsion to take in an entire nation.

"I think that I hate the Irish more than I ever did before," he writes. "I understand [a friend] who said that she cant even bear to listen to her husbands chauffeur, who has been in their employ for twenty years, talking." He goes on to explain that even Patrick Campbell, the impeccably tweedy Anglo-Irish peer and humorist, fills Dirk with unease when he speaks.

Yet we must not forget that, despite his literary adventures, Dirk Bogarde remained a performer (perhaps the best screen actor Britain has yet produced). Early on in the book, he rages against the Jews who supposedly control Hollywood, but, in later years, Dirk, who claimed to have been one of the first British officers to enter Belsen, lectured school-children on the horrors of the Holocaust. Early disdain for the talents of Glenda Jackson gives way to respect and affection when he gets to meet the actor.

By the time one reaches the close of Ever, Dirk, a suspicion emerges that these hateful opinions - "extreme views, weakly held" as AJP Taylor said of his own political beliefs - are part of an unconscious attempt to distract correspondents from detecting the vulnerable Dirk within. That mask shifts somewhat when Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the great German director, suggests that life is all about despair.

"That is fundamentally NOT TRUE Life is full of hope and promise," Dirk writes back, while putting the case for humane optimism.

Such moments are, however, fairly rare. More often one detects the Bogarde who, in the first volume of his memoirs, described how, as a child, he happened upon the decayed remains of a beloved tortoise. Examining the empty shell, from which ants had chewed all the flesh, the young Dirk formed a life strategy: don't let your head emerge from your hard carapace. Don't let the world see who you really are.

Readers of Ever, Dirk can expect to laugh, sigh and, from time to time, recoil in outrage. But they would be best advised not to hold any hope of cracking its author.

• Donald Clarke writes about film for The Irish Times