Must You Go?

by Antonia Fraser

  1 March 1998

  Visit to Versailles. Our guide, President of Les Amis de Versailles, Vicomte Olivier de Rohan, had been introduced to us by our French friend Laure de Gramont. He was highly energetic, in his marvellously well-cut grey suit, his English included old-fashioned slang learned from his nanny like an aristocrat in a Nancy Mitford novel. ‘I will take you at once to what no one can see …’ Magic words. So we were taken to the Queen’s Theatre which fairly ravished the eye with its blue and gold, its celestial air. Harold deeply impressed but whether by the opportunities for performances here or just the beauty I wasn’t quite sure. I really felt a strange feeling standing on the stage where Marie Antoinette sang Rosina. I would have sung a note if I could sing a note. So I sang a note interiorly. Olivier took us everywhere with one sorcerer’s key. But what struck me most forcibly was the complete lack of security, let alone privacy, with which eighteenth-century royals loved. Their travails in the marriage bed took place virtually – not quite – where the public could gawp.

  We retreated with relief to our rather scruffy apartment off the Champs Elysées, picked so Harold could walk to the Rondpoint Theatre where he was directing; there we ate pork pies bought from the supermarket next door. Far more fun to research and write about Marie Antoinette than to be Marie Antoinette.

  A few years later, I was able to expand that statement: far more fun to make a film about Marie Antoinette than to be her. For Sofia Coppola took an option on the manuscript of Marie Antoinette, six months before British publication. It had been sent to her by my American publisher Nan Talese, a friend of her mother Eleanor Coppola who knew of Sofia’s obsession with the subject. She wrote me a gracious letter referring to her own upbringing as a young woman in a strong family, which had provided the original inspiration. It was all very exciting for two reasons. First, I had been foolishly disappointed when William Boyd’s exciting, religiously challenging script of The Gunpowder Plot failed to get made into a film despite the gentle warnings of Harold, the veteran of these situations. The Omaha bombings in the US convinced the producers ‘that the subject of terrorism was not currently suitable for US audiences’ – whereas from my point of view you might have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion. Secondly Harold and I had much admired the originality of Sofia’s first film The Virgin Suicides, and would find her second, Lost in Translation, made during the five-year period of the on-offs, even more stimulating.

  Our warm alliance with a proper French family in the shape of the Cavassonis gave me new confidence in our French life – up till then I had always been rather frightened of the French. This was based on my unfortunate memories as a British schoolgirl in 1948, going on an exchange visit to a château near Bordeaux: here everything, including my wardrobe and my French accent, was found wanting by cruel French teenagers. My feeling of acceptance was reinforced by the subsequent birth of the Cavassoni twins, Cecilia and Allegra in 2001. Harold, whose works had been done early and done very well in France – they continued to be extremely popular – had had a different experience. Now we both shared the pleasures of a life which veered between Versailles and the supermarket pork pies. We received generous hospitality and there was also much political accord as the shadow of the second Iraq war grew closer and finally enveloped us all in a culture of protest.

  In the same way, the marriage of Damian to Paloma Porraz del Amo in Mexico and the births of Ana Sofiá, Oriana and Miranda, transformed us into Abuela Antonia and Abuelo Harold (whereas we were Grandmère Chat and Grandpère in France) but also, we felt, gave us an interesting perception of Mexican society. For Harold, with his keen interest in Latin American politics, a first-hand experience of Mexico, the country once described as ‘so far from God, so close to the United States’, was a boon. Then there was his deepening affection for the Porraz family, including not only Paloma, a serious museum curator, who actually had the graceful looks of an Infanta painted by Velasquez, but her parents Rosa and Alfredo.

  January 1994

  Mexico. Our first visit together (Harold had been on stage at the time of Damian and Paloma’s wedding). While we were at Oaxaca, we stayed in a hotel which was a converted convent. Sight-seeing, or rather ‘having a look round’, although in this case, it was really having a look up. We both climbed up Monte Alban. Two things made Harold laugh in the midst of his exertions. 1. Loud, very loud American voice echoing reassuringly through the clear air: ‘Henry, I’m on top of the next pyramid along.’ 2. Me to Harold briskly: ‘OK, now it’s tombs,’ as I shut my guidebook in a purposeful manner, following our rest under a tree. In the mornings I swam in the icy pool (the only person ever to do so, so far as I could see).

  It was while we were there that I received that long, carefully worded, sensitive but inexorable message which all pet-lovers know must come one day unless their pets happen to survive them. Rowley, our cat aged sixteen, was dying. ‘Unlikely to survive,’ said the vet, ‘until you return.’ Although there were various options which might have staved off death for a little while, all of them put the feelings of the owner above those of the cat and could not humanely be contemplated. I knew I had to take a decision. Rowley must go to his last sleep even though I am not there to hold him. Rowley: one of the kittens we acquired when we first lived together in Campden Hill Square. In his prime, he reminded me of the Persian saying: ‘God created the cat so that man might have the felicity of caressing the tiger.’ When my basset hound died in 1968 I didn’t believe that animals had souls. But now I do. If there is a heaven, how on earth could God’s creation not be fully represented? At least, if we cannot be with Rowley at the last, we are in the right country, as Harold, who was extremely comforting, pointed out to me. In Mexico, death is not sentimentalized, but it is understood and in a certain way celebrated. So: many candles for Rowley in Mexican churches.

  1 February 1994

  Palacio del Artes, Mexico City. Vast Art Deco building. Harold gave a poetry reading. Contrary to all our expectations, and their general rule, the Mexicans were all totally punctual. We learned later that there was a simple explanation for this. Damian had announced beforehand to all his friends: ‘My stepfather is a very violent man and we must respect that.’ The Mexicans all nodded sagely. While peaceful themselves, they understood violent men. ‘And what makes him violent,’ Damian went on, ‘is people who come late to his speeches or poetry readings. Very violent,’ he emphasized. So the Mexicans were all on time. Nor did the press bulbs flash unduly, since that was apparently another phenomenon calculated to provoke violence …

  The hall was packed. Carlos Fuentes, our friend, introduced Harold with a speech in Spanish which we understood to be very gracious, before reading with much spirit some of his own translation of No Man’s Land. Then a languid Mexican actress read a poem with much tenderness followed by Harold reading it with much passion. It was ‘Paris’. I wanted to dig Silvia Fuentes in the ribs and say: ‘That’s written to me, you know.’ I felt an extraordinary tingle when my eyes met Harold’s at the end of this, first poem, written during our first ‘honeymoon’ at the Lancaster Hotel in 1975 and he gave me a small private smile. Afterwards Harold was very pleased and moved by the mass of students who emerged to talk to him, and told him of his works which they were studying, not only Betrayal but also his sole novel The Dwarfs which is virtually unknown even in England.

  31 December 1997

  In Mexico at Puerto Vallarta. Damian and Paloma and little Sofi are in a neighbouring seaside flat. In our hotel, to our delight, are Carlos and Silvia Fuentes, Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, and Eric and Marlene Hobsbawm. We come down to lunch at the little café on the beach and champagne is being drunk. Eric has been made a Companion of Honour. Arthur Schlesinger, sotto voce: ‘Nice to see an old Communist so pleased with an honour.’ He revealed that they had been friends – and disagreed – for sixty years, having been at Cambridge together. Eric explains benignly: ‘It’s all right to take this. It’s from the people. A knighthood would have be
en all wrong.’ Later Harold, who heartily agreed, told Arthur and Alexandra that he would take the Companionship of Honour if offered as it was not political.

  The two Dublin festivals of Harold’s works which took place at the Gate Theatre, promoted by Michael Colgan, were not exactly new territory in the same way that Mexico was. I was Anglo-Irish (Irish, my father would have said, while resolutely remaining in England in order to serve in the British government) and with my brother Thomas had visited Ireland all through our shared youth, including wartime. Thomas was destined to inherit a large Regency Gothic castle in Westmeath from my father’s elder brother Edward – who by a strange coincidence had actually owned the Gate Theatre and showed far more interest in it than he ever did in the family estates. Harold had spent much time in Ireland as a young actor which was enormously important to him, working for the travelling company run by the actor-manager Anew McMaster. He had written a fine short memoir about it called Mac which he had given me when we first met. On that occasion I couldn’t help thinking that in his few pages he had evoked the man quite as vividly as I had in any of my long, long biographies.

  8 May 1994

  I realized I hadn’t been to the Gate Theatre for fifty years, since my uncle Edward Longford stood outside, before and after the play, with a begging bowl. The play in question was a terrible adaptation of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, by his wife Christine. Superior fare this time: a whole Pinter Festival. In the city itself we are surrounded by families celebrating First Communions: everywhere there are little brides in white dresses and veils which remind me of Larkin’s poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.

  15 May

  Run-through of Landscape directed by Harold in an empty room at the Shelbourne Hotel on Sunday morning for the Reiszes who have to return to London in advance of the play’s opening. We trail through desolate banqueting suites to get there, a room containing nothing but a wooden table, a teapot and a mug. Only audience: ourselves and Michael Colgan. It was the most appropriate setting: the couple somewhere alone in the big house, in this case the big hotel. And wonderfully done. Penelope Wilton so tender, so lost, Ian Holm beginning tender, finally so violent. Could there ever be a finer performance?

  20 May

  After the first night of Moonlight, directed by Karel Reisz, there was quite a roister. Hangovers all round the next day when the weather is freezing. Everyone, but especially Alison Lurie and Diane Johnson, visiting from Paris, are rushing out and buying scarves and shawls. We too rush out and spend a fortune on a set of Waterford glass at Blarney’s Woollen Mills in Nassau Street. As Harold tested the weight of the glass in his hand – the heaviness is so lovely – he said sadly: ‘I only wish this glass had a drink in it now.’

  Our stay near Chichester when Harold was acting in The Hothouse had been such a success that we decided to enjoy merry England rather than merry airports in the summer in future. Thus for ten blissful years we rented a house near Dorchester called Kingston Russell, in essence a late seventeenth-century hunting lodge transformed into an elegant if slightly bizarre country house, like a stage set, only a single room thick. That is to say, at one moment you were gazing at the amazing façade and the next moment you had already stepped into the back garden. Harold was captivated by the natural beauty of Dorset since he loved anything that could be construed as ‘England’ – which was perhaps why cricket appealed to him aesthetically so much, the cricket on the village green, the cricket match of a David Inshaw painting (the most famous one was actually painted in the neighbouring village of Long Bredy so that we were able to contemplate the celebrated pitch with reverence).

  In 1999 Harold was toying with a play tentatively entitled Restaurant. He had begun it late one Saturday night when we had been unlucky in our very, very loud neighbours at the next-door table in a famous West End restaurant. It was not going well.

  16 August 1999

  Little Hugh Fraser is three and we are at Kingston Russell. He came into the kitchen in Lucy’s arms, fair and small and snuggly and said in a very loud voice: ‘Look out! I’m the birthday boy.’ The next person to come in was Harold who was none of these things just extremely dejected. He said that he had chucked in Restaurant because the people in it were just too nasty. He didn’t even let me read it. ‘You’d hate it. Just letting off some bile.’

  But later that night, when we were feeling rather exhausted, what with the birthday breakfast and a lot of people over to lunch, the subject came up again. By now the only adult guests left were Benjie and Lucy. For want of anything else to do, I suggested idly to Harold: ‘Why not read it to us?’ So he did. And it was hysterically funny, if only for Harold’s brilliant enaction of the so-called nasty people.

  Benjie: ‘You should have some criminals coming in and interrupting it all.’ This was uncanny because that had been Harold’s original plan – but he couldn’t get ‘the ideology of it all’. So he rushed away to his study at the side of the huge, rather empty house, which looked out to trees and the night sky. He worked very late. The next night he read us more; the people who interrupted were not terrorists, but a maître d’ such as Jeremy King at the Ivy and a maîtresse d’ such as Carol at Lola’s, in Islington.

  18 August

  Harold worked on the play, which is now called Anniversary. At 1 a.m. he came into our room in his robe. Took off the robe. Got into bed. Got out of bed. Put on the robe again. He said: ‘It’s no good. It won’t let me rest. I’ve got to go downstairs again.’ Apparently he worked till 5 a.m. and finished the draft.

  Harold read it to me in full, as he then thought, as I lay in bed in our rose-chintzy bedroom. There’s now a Waiter, the best character in the play. It’s brilliantly and savagely funny, Swiftian, one might legitimately say, and I laughed a lot. Privately was depressed by the man–woman relationships of all three couples. Managed not to say so. Later Lucy in a letter recalled Harold’s original title of Celebration and that became the title. Harold told me that the Waiter had talked about Nicaraguan figures like Sandino and Ernesto Cardinale but then he decided that he was planting his own words in the Waiter’s mouth, which he never intended to do to his characters. So now he must listen to the Waiter. It transpired that the Waiter wanted to talk about Gary Cooper, Hedy Lamarr and T.S. Eliot.

  12 September

  People ring up about Celebration choking with laughter. It will be done at the Almeida, paired with Harold’s first play The Room. Apparently this was my suggestion: I think I must have counted up the characters and found they fitted. Harold to Jeremy King at a party for Ed Victor’s sixtieth birthday: ‘It’s about a restaurant, Jeremy, but nothing to do with the Ivy.’ May God forgive him. Harold said himself: ‘I’m slightly high on all this.’

  4 November

  Felt so proud of Harold and then ‘swooned’ when he gazed at me and recited the three love poems, ending with ‘It Is Here’. This was at the British Library, an evening for the American Friends. What a charming, civilized group! Harold himself rejected reading his strident poem ‘American Football’ (thank goodness) only to have a delightful, older lady hiss: ‘I hope you’re going to read “American Football”.’ But he didn’t. It would have been his definition of bad manners to suggest that this cultured, philanthropic group was in any way responsible for the crimes of the American government – as though all Americans were bad Americans, the sort of crude generalization which did not belong to serious debate. Back to the swooning. It was an extraordinary moment. He faced me at his table across the large room, our eyes met and he read … twenty-four years since ‘Must you go?’ and I still swooned.

  20 March

  Celebration and The Room have been received with ecstasy! No other word for it. The atmosphere on the first night on Wednesday was, as all agreed, extremely benevolent, even with all the critics there. And the laughter! A murmur of a special sort when Tom Wheatley entered as the ‘Jeremy’ character, Jeremy King himself having elegantly chosen to be present. Both have the same lofty, handsome appearance
. Later Harold and I decided to tough it out and go to the Ivy. Game, set and match to Jeremy who had his maître d’ say, like the Waiter, ‘May I interject?’ before plonking down a saucer of complimentary gherkins in front of us in another reference to the play. Jeremy sees it as ‘an affectionate portrait’ and that is of course absolutely true. Simon to Harold: ‘If you had to guess the play written by the seventy-year-old, and the one written by the younger man, you would guess the other way round.’ Certainly The Room is a savage, melancholy play which ends in appalling on stage physical violence (something Harold never repeated, as though learning to do it better with words, although plenty of violence is suggested off stage). The melancholy of Celebration is existential. Mick Goldstein, Harold’s old friend: ‘It’s the last play the world would expect from you now. They expected Retribution and they got Celebration.’

  John Peter got it exactly right when he wrote in the Sunday Times: ‘Harold Pinter is in a frisky mood. Imagine an ageing lion, the great yellow eyes aglow with a wicked twinkle, the huge paw might even be about to stroke you. And still you feel a certain unease, a shivery sense of apprehension.’