Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [110]
26 October
Thomas is an extraordinary person. We gave him a copy of the Pinter Poems, originally given to Mummy, and as he was about to register the death, advocated reading Harold’s poem ‘Death’ as a preparation. Thomas: ‘I shall read it to the Registrar.’ And blow me down, he did. And the registrar, a woman, duly asked for a copy.
20 November
Reading my mother’s Diaries, kept in the last seventeen years of her life, which have come to me as her Literary Executor. Amused rather than anything else to see how wrong her judgments were in 1975: they were based on erroneous statements by people like Malcolm Muggeridge who said that Harold was like Peter Sellers: ‘Not husband material’. In fact Harold is the most uxorious person I know. But then Malcolm never actually met Harold but was inclined nevertheless to hold forth to his wondering Sussex neighbours, Mummy and Dada, in his role as a man-of-the-world.
The last months of 2002 and the spring of 2003 were dominated by the possibility of war in Iraq. Increasingly people used sentences like ‘When the war comes’, especially our French friends and family. We both felt passionately on the subject: Harold was in fact one of the people who spoke out publicly who never varied in his view from the pre-war period until the time of his death. He felt from the first that the invasion – if there was to be one – was being done in the oil interests of the US, not out of fear of al-Qaeda who were not even in Iraq (Afghanistan was a different matter). And he was not afraid to say so. For one thing he could shrug off comments that he was supporting a dictator in Saddam Hussein. After all, he had denounced Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds for years, demonstrated on the subject and as usual spoken out.
27 November
University of Turin. Harold made a stirring speech in exchange, as it were, for an honorary degree in a style described by the Italian paper Manifesto this morning as sobrio e secco – sober and dry. At dinner he was neither! The hours dragged on and the later it got, the more he prophesied doom, the end of the world by 2007 in a messianic style. The speech went down tremendously well; unlike Florence last year when an American diplomat walked out, there was no American diplomat present. I speculated that a round-robin of an email is sent to all American embassies at the present time: ‘Danger! Alert! Do not attend Pinter’s speeches! Danger, alert!’ Students all thrilled. The speech itself was along familiar lines (to put it mildly) but then that’s the point of a campaign: you keep on at it, so gradually people find your views less shocking, and finally realize that they agree.
I quarrelled with one word however. Harold all too presciently referred to the possibility of an attack on the London Underground, saying ‘the responsibility will rest entirely on the Prime Minister’s shoulders’. I queried ‘entirely’. ‘No, it won’t,’ I said, ‘it will be shared. It will also be the responsibility of those who order it and those who do it. Free will and self-determination can never be eliminated from calculations of responsibility.’ I see that Harold himself wrote in my Diary: ‘I accept this point!!’
29 November
We celebrated our wedding anniversary two days late: Harold gave me a new Enitharmon edition of David Jones’ wedding poems with woodcuts.
9 December
St Paul’s. In the icy dark an absolute throng of people trying to get in to hear the Great Noam Chomsky speak. Two thousand people inside, I believe, and another thousand outside. It was the tenth anniversary of the Bar Council’s Kurdish Human Rights Campaign. Chomsky, last heard by me and Harold at the Almeida some years back in dialogue with John Pilger, did brilliantly with notes at a lectern and