Must You Go?

by Antonia Fraser

  We loved staying at the Carlyle and did so for many years until the pound began to sag against the dollar and Harold said: ‘Have you noticed we’re the only people staying here who are not millionaires?’ So we took ourselves off downtown to the Wyndham. But I treasure memories of our Carlyle life and still have a tiny dish with a butterfly on it which mysteriously fluttered into my luggage to remind me of those halcyon days.

  15 November, cont.

  Ghastly night at the charity première of The Last Tycoon which Sam Spiegel insisted Harold attend. Unbelievably an anarchist group in the balcony attempted to laugh this subtle and romantic film off the screen! I kept going to sleep (jet lag) while this evil laughter rose and fell. Kazan the director did not attend but almost equally upset at hearing about it afterwards in the Carlyle Bar.

  16 November

  Beginning of my life in the New York Public Library. Young man at the information desk seemed to find my feeble enquiries ‘a pleasure’. (Very different from London.) Then I was ensconced like a princess in the Wertheim Study, financed by the great Barbara Tuchman in memory of her father because she twice had her purse stolen in the library. ‘Barbara Tuchman could afford it,’ said the official. ‘But she felt not everyone could.’ I admire the great historian B.T. more than ever.

  So began a very happy time in our lives. I thought of Donne and his bridal poem: ‘O my America! My new-found-land’. In this case, America really was our newfoundland. Although we had both visited the US many times in our previous lives, we had never quite enjoyed before this feeling of freedom and novelty, which I suppose came from the fact that neither families (or previous lives) had travelled with us. Harold was rehearsing Tom Courtenay in Otherwise Engaged. I would walk all the way downtown to the library. The weather was sparkling: New York in autumn. Everyone we saw in the evenings seemed interesting, hard-working, women and men. We had our own domesticity at the hotel, ordering in from the delicatessen on Madison Avenue in a way which was not yet familiar to Londoners in the 1970s.

  17 November

  In a theatrical pub on Broadway I encounter the playwright Trevor Griffiths. He criticizes me for going on TV book shows such as Melvyn Bragg’s; I criticize him for rewriting The Cherry Orchard from his own point of view to show Mme Ranevskaya not a bourgeois woman, etc. etc. Griffiths to me: ‘Well, what are you doing in the NYPL?’ Me: ‘Rewriting Gibbon from my own point of view to prove he was a devout Christian.’ Well, Harold was pleased as he had felt very indignant about The Cherry Orchard since he reveres Chekhov.

  18 November

  Went to No Man’s Land. The best performance I have seen. The new Foster, Michael Kitchen, brilliantly attractive and perky, making a great difference to the first act. The Knights had honed their work. We took Michael out to Joe Allen’s with his girlfriend Joanna Lumley of Avengers fame. Highly intelligent as well as pretty.

  23 November

  Party at the top agent Milton Goldman’s. Leonard Bernstein had a long talk with Tom Courtenay, over my live body, about music. His gestures were terrific and swooping, but the noises he made were more like Indian war cries than Schubert. Tom, very politely: ‘The trouble is, you’re a conductor. I think we express things differently.’ Later I asked Harold whether I would ever meet his parents as, apart from my curiosity, they must feel curiosity. Harold said they would dread something new and strange. I don’t realize till later that he is really the one dreading it because he’s been through it once before.

  The Pinters disapproved of the fact that Vivien was not Jewish in 1956, compounded by the fact that Harold by mistake – as he could never explain since it would just have made it worse – got married on Yom Kippur.

  24 November

  Delightful American manners: two examples. Brendan Gill of the New Yorker came over to our table at the Algonquin where I was having lunch with Ivan Morris. I congratulated him on something or other. Gill, with great courtesy: ‘I could not listen to your charming remarks if I did not mention that I have given The Last Tycoon an excoriatingly bad review.’ Then my purse is stolen, in the twinkling of an eye, in the New York Public Library. Black security guard, 6′5″ at least: ‘It is the custom, Mrs Fraser, in the United States, even if it is not appropriate to the present occasion, to wish you Happy Thanksgiving. So – Happy Thanksgiving.’ And we solemnly shake hands.

  25 November – Thanksgiving

  Walked across the park to our friends the writer and economic historian Alexander Cockburn and Emma Rothschild at 3 p.m. Huge feast. Then we went for a walk round the reservoir, Alex sporting the black hat of a mugger, also a thick stick of anti-mugger, under a sickle moon. I suppose it was highly dangerous but somehow a Thanksgiving lunch, lasting three hours, had stopped us noticing. ‘This is your water, New Yorkers, keep it clean’ reads a sign on the high fence round the reservoir. Would this really deter a potential suicide? A sense of civic duty at the last moment?

  1 December

  Finished The Wild Island, as the Scottish mystery is now called. Harold read it. All about my Scottish past, and Hugh’s relations, but not close ones. Meanwhile a visit to the Beinecke Library at Yale (with Emma Rothschild) and the Pierpont Morgan Library has restored my taste for Charles II. Loved reading the King’s saucy notes to his pal Taaffe. Also in the Pierpont Morgan, King Charles’s hand-written, evidently furious declaration that he had never been married to anyone except Catherine of Braganza. Described the thrill to Harold, who says: ‘Yes, that’s how I feel about old cricket scores.’

  11 December

  Last day in New York and with Harold – for three weeks. During which I’ve got to face the divorce, also Christmas. At my own request I give lunch to three playwrights, Simon, Paddy Chayefsky (who is all I hoped from that wonderful play The Latent Heterosexual) and Harold. Chayefsky never draws breath, but nor does Simon so they are a good foil for each other. Chayefsky: ‘Playwrights like each other. Novelists don’t.’ Among other things, Chayefsky told us that dentists always knew how to get you a blue movie (because they were so rich) and also that they had the highest suicide rate in New York. The bill was fifty dollars: the best fifty dollars I spent in New York. Harold gave me an elephant’s-hair bracelet chased with gold, for luck, and I gave him a dark brown cashmere jersey for warmth, from Yves Saint-Laurent. Harold is going to Boston and Washington with the play.

  15 December

  The day I got divorced I went on my own to La Bohème and sat in a black velvet cloak and cried my heart and eyes out in the last act. This was pure self-indulgence as almost anyone I knew would have taken me out to dinner, including Hugh. The day I got divorced I also spent an hour at Euston Station waiting for my middle son Damian’s school train from York. I told Kevin and Rachel (whose own wedding anniversary began at midnight) that if I could attend the first night of The Birthday Party again, I would do so: ‘I have never regretted it.’

  18 December

  Took the children to see Ted Heath sign copies of his book in Rye – my father had published it at Sidgwick & Jackson. Oh, the irony of this warm and jolly creature, chuckling as he wielded the pen like the tiller of a yacht. Ted signed books with joy for exactly those women he had scorned as Tory Party workers.

  21 December

  Visited the Naipauls, first time for ages together, taking them a bottle of champagne. Vidia thin (‘my exercises – I can now carry a dustbin with one hand again’), charming and courteous. Pat so happy he is back.

  Xmas Day – Scotland

  Unlike Xmas Eve, which I have always loathed, I like Xmas Day. Harold even manages to telephone from Canada, a great feat. It must be said that Xmas Eve lived up to its proverbial promise: all hot water went off, followed by all water. Daniel rings up from Launceston Place to which he has returned and says: ‘The heating has broken down. What shall I do?’

  1977

  1 January

  I am awoken by Harold: ‘Happy New Year, darling, and I love you.’ Me, very sleepy: ‘I love you too and now I think I’ll
go back to sleep and dream about you.’ Actually I had stayed up till 2.30 a.m., the girls’ friends all charming; one of the men did a strip-tease which stopped just in time, and a cousin did a sword-dance with skis. We danced reels.

  16 January

  I am going to be strong this year. Vivien out of the Priory where she went for treatment and has resumed telephoning. I speak calmly: ‘It’s Antonia. How are you feeling?’ She is nonplussed but answers after a pause. Afterwards, I find I am shaking, but am pleased with my polite attitude all the same.

  23 January

  Flew to Washington. Saw Otherwise Engaged, Simon’s savage (at heart) and moving play. Tom Courtenay lacks Alan Bates’ mordant humour but gives in the end more sense of how awful it is to be Simon Hench as well as pretty awful to live near him. Got lost walking from National Theatre to our hotel; Washington is like Berlin after the bombing although the buildings are new and the vast space planned.

  26 January

  There are Haitian refugees placarding the White House: ‘Haiti, paradise for tourists, hell for the people.’ Harold says we should learn more before going there as planned, on the advice of Harold’s extremely left-wing editor Barney Rosset.

  27 January

  Lunch with the Harrimans; Bob Silvers described Averell Harriman as a Renaissance Prince and this quality impresses Harold. Pamela Harriman plump, charming and motherly to us all. She speaks about the problems of women in politics. Begins sentences: ‘We, the women’. Pam!! She is wonderful. (As Pamela Churchill, she had been a friend of Hugh’s and was godmother to our daughter Rebecca.)

  28 January

  Lunch at the British Embassy for ‘theatrical personalities’. Elizabeth Taylor was there, in purple jersey dress and matronly turban: but the purple eyes incomparable. She lacked animation, as if the gaze of the curious had long ago drained it away from her. It was odd being at the Embassy where long ago Hugh and I gambolled with David and Sissy Harlech in Kennedy days after David was appointed Ambassador. Harold replied to the toast for the British theatre in an excellent, short, impromptu speech. That night at dinner at Evangeline Bruce’s, Harold talks happily to Aidan Crawley, the politician who had formerly played for England, about cricket. We still seem to be going to Haiti, thank goodness. Later we went to a party at Carl Bernstein’s (we were keen to go, having seen the film All the President’s Men). Alexander Cockburn: ‘The apartment is a young journalist’s dream of what he would do if he got a million dollars.’

  2 February

  The opening of Otherwise Engaged in New York. A runner came with the first TV reviews: ‘Britain has sent us a beaut.’ ‘That’s me,’ said Simon. An enthusiastic New York Times review is dictated down the phone to the producer and the ‘Adman’. Nobody thinks of telling Simon, who is standing by.

  3 February

  A ‘nervous hit’ when we go to bed. A ‘solid hit’ when we get up. My financial situation not very good at home. I need a £60,000 loan. I’ll simply have to work very hard. And not think about it, better still. It’s only money.

  6 February

  We knew we were in Haiti when the Customs men gave us a real search, much worse than in Poland in 1969. It was books they were after: Harold’s The Collected Works of Louis MacNeice looked extremely suspicious on the counter. We had been warned not to bring Graham Greene’s The Comedians. We are in the Olafson Hotel, appropriately enough in the John Gielgud suite. We begin to relax. Harold even swims towards evening, thrashing round and round the pool with great attack, his eyes rolling fiercely. I am reminded of a dog thrown into a pool who wants to get out.

  9 February

  Lunched at the American Embassy, with an introduction from Arthur Schlesinger, to meet the writer Jean Dominique and wife. He has survived many regimes.

  When an enormous coconut fell into Harold’s glass, breaking it into smithereens, Dominique clearly thought it was a bomb. Talked of the father and the old man and the boy – Papa and Baby Doc – but never mentioned either Duvaliers’ name out in the open.

  15 February

  Back at Heathrow. P.S. I had a short-lived reign as one of the world’s best-dressed women. Journalist in Haiti, having read of my (temporary) inclusion on the newspaper list: ‘Voilà une des femmes les plus soignées du monde.’ Wow! Harold very impressed. But was photographed getting out of the plane in check jacket and crumpled dress, old shoes. Haystack hair. End of reign.

  24 February

  Last night of No Man’s Land. Sir Ralph absolutely superb; I would have hated to miss one savage glint of his eyeball.

  26 February

  A night with the Oliviers after a performance of Stevie in Brighton. I liked their home life, their happy home with a lovely Etty nude hanging on the wall. Sir L.: ‘I have never got over a schoolboy taste for such things.’ So I sent him a Haitian PC of a similarly pneumatic beautiful black lady as a thank you.

  3 March

  Francis Wyndham has given me a short story by Henry James about the man who wanted ‘the uncontested possession of the long sweet stupid day’. It quickly becomes a catchphrase between Harold and me: ‘I’d like the uncontested possession …’

  10 March

  Bad day at Black Rock. Our landlady Yvonne Finch in hysterics: it turns out she has illegally sublet to us although it had been done through an agency. She must have vacant possession in two weeks. You can imagine …

  17 March

  Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce at the National: Harold laughed so much at Derek Newark’s frustrated rage and impotence (seeing himself, he said) I thought he would explode.

  21 March

  A large kindly young man, our house lawyer, comes round to sort out this wretched mess about the house. Tells me that we cannot be expected to perjure ourselves as we rented in good faith. We shall not therefore be got out till we want to go in August.

  30 March

  Signed books – Love Letters – at the new Cartier boutique at Harvey Nichols. A dotty lady appeared who had sung in the choir at my wedding at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street: ‘Those boys are all dead now’ – as though they had died in the trenches.

  31 March

  Angus Wilson and Tony Garrett come to dinner. They argue about Otherwise Engaged. Angus: ‘Simon Hench is part of the uncompassionate society of the strong turning on the weak, as represented by Mrs Thatcher.’ Harold: ‘No, it’s not. It’s about the demands the weak make on the strong.’

  5 April

  Laverstock life in Dorset where we stayed with the Warners. Jogging: even Harold appeared in his turquoise tracksuit, athletic glasses, and jogged away somewhere or other. Mine is blue and burgundy, Simone’s black and white, Orlando’s scarlet, Damian’s bright blue.

  29 April

  Long but good meeting with Hugh at Campden Hill Square. A certain melancholy reality begins to creep in. Talk of going up to Eilean Aigas to collect ‘my things’ – like a housemaid! But the whole house is ‘my things’.

  Harold took a noble resolution under the circumstances that he would come and live with me in Campden Hill Square ‘for my children’s sake’ and we would not buy another house; because they would like to remain in the house they knew (and where some of them had been born). It can’t have been easy; and things were as usual very fraught in Hanover Terrace. But he told his son: ‘I’m not going under.’ It’s been such a long time, of course. I had my doubts along the way about the going under. Again and again, Harold told me, he was saved by his feeling that I represented life, as opposed to the condition he was in when he wrote No Man’s Land. He had after all expressed this in his poem to me of 1975: ‘I Know the Place’ which now ended without the original comma after ‘me’:

  Everything we do

  Connects the space

  Between death and me

  And you.

  Chapter Six

  OPEN-BOATING

  28 May

  Quiet as a Nun WAS published. The Daily Mirror saw ‘echoes’ of my affair with Harold … if
you can see them in Nun, which is about a TV reporter obsessed with a married MP and a creepy Gothic convent, you can see them anywhere. A really nice, generous review from P.D. James, my heroine, in the TLS, made my day. Harold took me to watch the MCC against Australia at Lord’s: ‘I’ve never escorted a lady to cricket before.’ When a really nasty review appeared in the Sunday Times, I didn’t mind and I actually acquired the drawing of me as a nun by Mark Boxer.

  5 June

  Harold took Orlando to cricket (his club Gaieties CC) and after being on the TV show Read All About It, I went and found them. Orlando really loved it and the whole team sweet to him. Man among men is how Orlando sees himself.

  16 June

  We had a break in the South of France. The whole thing was overshadowed by me choosing to read Ellmann’s life of Joyce. In the aeroplane on the way back I burst into tears. Me to Harold: ‘What day is it?’ Harold looks desperate, thinking it is one of our anniversaries he has missed. Me: ‘It’s Bloomsday!’ More tears. While I cry, Harold: ‘Don’t be sad, darling, he knew he was a great writer.’

  Earlier we found we were walking past the Villa Mauresque. Me, meaningfully to Harold: ‘All this was earned by a writer’ (meaning Somerset Maugham).

  19 June

  Hugh has read The Wild Island and begins by being very sulky: ‘Is Colonel Henry meant to be me?’ ‘No, no’ (actually it’s his brother Shimi, if anyone). He gets crosser and crosser and I suddenly realize he wants it to be him. Once I say ‘Of course it’s you!’ he’s sunshine itself.

  20 June

  Harold observes that we are happy. ‘When I saw you coming towards me in your blue dress, I was most happy to have made the choice.’ Me: ‘I suppose it’s rather like when the bombing stopped in 1940: you only noticed gradually they weren’t coming; you don’t know at the time. You don’t say, “that was the last Stuka”.’ But Harold had to go through those two years of intermittent colossal pain and unhappiness, which otherwise would not have given due weight to his eighteen years of marriage.