Critical Essay | Critical Essay by D.a.n. Jones

Critical Essay by D.a.n. Jones

The title [A Postillion Struck by Lightning] is rather dowdy, for a film-star's memoirs…. But this is a very different sort of book, deliberately avoiding humorous anecdotes and name-dropping. Dirk Bogarde has attempted to present certain episodes in his life as chapters in a poetic novel, and one often suspects that he has bent the facts towards fiction….

Look up the reference to Virginia Woolf [mentioned in the index] and you find she is the lonely, creepy lady who disturbed the boy Bogarde and his friends as they were fishing in a Sussex river: they rejected her friendly advances and wondered, after she had gone, why there were so many witches in Sussex. This seems the opposite of name-dropping. Bogarde wants the lonely woman as an image, for poetic purposes, and her name is unimportant, tucked casually into this odd index…. Perhaps, though, he is being craftily throwaway. He will...
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