Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [57]
14 April
We gave a lunch, which turned out to take place in the garden at Campden Hill Square, to mark the end of the run of One for the Road. For once Nature was not out to thwart us, so we were able to give a party when the garden was flourishing and not ‘between seasons’ as generally happens: there were masses of very dark blue hyacinths, daffodils, tall ones, all kinds of pink camellia including the ravishing ‘Countess Lavinia’. The actors brought their children who gambolled about, Roger Lloyd Pack’s son Spencer, Jenny Quayle’s Jack and Alan’s handsome tall dark-haired twin sons Ben and Tristram. I felt that the presence of these children defused the grim experience we had all been through.
Chapter Ten
UNREASONABLE BUT RIGHT?
Politics began to feature increasingly in Harold’s life now that he had become, in his oft-repeated words, ‘the luckiest man in the world’. I sometimes speculated whether this interest would have arisen earlier, if he had not been occupied with his own demons, wrestling with them in his work. It has to be said that this was not a popular move in the general estimation. Critics who had not previously regarded his plays particularly highly, asked him to go back to writing them in the old way. One might adapt the saying ‘Nobody liked it but the public’ as follows: ‘Nobody liked Harold’s frequent stands on human rights – except the people he was defending.’
Nevertheless Harold strongly rebutted the idea that the artist was honour-bound to stick to his art and had no duties as a citizen. He believed the artist had in fact special duties just because he was at the same time a citizen: it was a concept he would stress with increasing conviction as time passed. On the other hand there would always be people, not necessarily critics, who believed Harold represented his public stances best by simply writing plays and otherwise shutting up: in short, leave politics to the politicians. (This was my father’s view, for he believed innately that the House of Lords was the correct forum for any political debate and could never understand Harold’s total lack of any desire to belong to it) He was even accused of ‘taking advantage’ of his position as a playwright of world-wide renown, for it was possible to argue like many other artists in the past and Arthur Miller in his own day, that Harold was more popular abroad than in his own country. Harold accepted the charge with joy.
I should point out that there was nothing superficial about this interest. Harold spent a large proportion of his day, it seemed to me, studying these things; the Super-Study in Aubrey Road gradually became a kind of emporium of Human Rights literature and books. This was the substance, the backing, behind the speeches, demonstrations and appearances on TV calling attention to a wide number of issues.
However, not everyone who found themselves having a political discussion with Harold in the eighties and nineties, believed that he or she was the luckiest person in the world. I note from my Diary that Harold had a row with Joan Didion in New York as early as January 1981 about US policy towards El Salvador. She countered: ‘What about the Malvinas?’ (the Falkland Islands: Britain’s attitude to them). Joan told him, or he told her, or both, that the other was ‘unreasonable’ but of course they embraced warmly on departure.
Unreasonable, but was he right? Harold countered this by asking: ‘Why don’t they concentrate on what I’m angry about?’ Certainly the accusation of being ‘unreasonable’ or ‘irrational’ was often flung at Harold in political discussions, even, it has to be said, by myself: