Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [49]
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.
Taken by ourselves in a booth at the airport the first time we travelled abroad together.
Gaieties C.C.
Harold and Tom Stoppard, as the wicket keeper, with his celebrated red gloves.
29 July 1975. Taking refuge at Diana Phipps’ barn at Taynton. Harold, George Weidenfeld, Diana.
At the barn.
Patricia Losey, Joe Losey in a ‘Proustian’ T-shirt, Harold: they were working on a film of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (which was never made).
Harold and Anthony Powell in the woods at The Chantry, Somerset.
New York. Visiting the Tall Ships: 4 July 1976.
With Paddy Chayevsky, winter 1976.
New York. Outside the Carlyle Hotel for the American production of Betrayal.
With the theatrical lawyer Arnold Weissberger, 1978.
New York, 1979.
Jerusalem, May 1978. With Mayor Teddy Kollek.
PART TWO
Chapter Nine
WRITING IMAGES
Living with Harold the writer was a rewarding experience since he behaved exactly like artists behave in books but seldom do in real life. He never wrote unless he had a sudden inspiration, an image, as he often used to explain. The image might come to him at anytime and anywhere – in a taxi, in a bar, late at night at his desk looking out of his window into the street lamps punctuating the darkness. Once or twice I was commissioned to write down a sentence or a phrase. At the same time he worked on his work, as it were, extremely hard. Poems or plays might be dashed off in the first instance but then a process of grind, revision began. One poem took a year to perfect.
He also felt strongly that his characters took on a life of their own which had to be respected. I was reminded of this years later when I read an anecdote about Pushkin during the writing of Eugene Onegin: ‘Imagine what happened to my Tatiana!’ he told a certain princess at dinner. ‘She upped and rejected Onegin … I never expected it of her.’ Harold too believed in the autonomy of Emma and Ruth, Hirst and Spooner, and so forth.
Harold’s total seriousness in anything he undertook extended, I began to notice, to his reading. It was not exactly that he never read for relaxation (although he personally might not have recognized reading cricket magazines under that description), more that since he gave every book his close attention, he had no appetite for the delightful genres such as crime and mystery with which I beguiled my leisure hours. He did not understand the mentality of one who was keenly awaiting the publication of the next Lee Child thriller. On one occasion we had dinner à trois with Bob Gottlieb in New York: Bob and I spent the whole meal expatiating on the merits of the novelist Joanna Trollope while Harold sat completely bemused (although he admired Joanna Trollope the person for her magnetism).
In other ways, say, directing or writing screenplays, he was extremely diligent as well as serious, in observing a schedule (his own however). He was generous with reading his stuff aloud in the first instance to me, then to anyone who happened to visit the house. Bridge games in which he rejoiced might well end with a reading, as when Joe Brearley, his old English teacher at Hackney Downs died. Harold, who felt he owed much to Joe’s encouragement, both as an actor and a reader of literature, immediately wrote a poem when he got the news. I remember the emotion that very night when he subsequently read it aloud to Christopher and Gila Falkus.
JOSEPH BREARLEY 1909–1977
(TEACHER OF ENGLISH)
Dear Joe, I’d like to walk with you
From Clapton Pond to Stamford Hill
And on,
Through Manor House to Finsbury Park,
And back,
On the dead 653 trolleybus,
To Clapton Pond,
And walk across the shadows on to Hackney Downs,
And stop by the old bandstand,
And the quickness in which it all happened,
And the quick shadow in which it persists.
You’re gone. I’m at your side,
Walking with you from Clapton Pond to Finsbury Park,
And on, and on.
1981
1 March
We had been married three months. Our visit to Caerhays