Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [58]
In fact Harold’s efforts in the world of international protest concentrated on three main areas. First, there was Latin and South America, with a special interest in Nicaragua. Then there was Eastern Europe and the fate of the dissidents, with a special interest in Czechoslovakia. Lastly there was Turkey. Although these campaigns brought him different allies (Eastern Europe was viewed far more sympathetically by our English friends than Latin America), I could see, when I was in a detached frame of mind, that it was not a question of reason or the lack of it with Harold. He felt profoundly about justice world-wide, and equally detested authoritarianism wherever he perceived it, as he had done since his East End youth: his Conscientious Objection to National Service when he was eighteen being probably the earliest public manifestation of that. Much later I told an interviewer that Harold questioned all rules except the rules of cricket – which just about summed it up.
In the spring of 1985 Harold visited Turkey with Arthur Miller on behalf of PEN International, to protest against the imprisonment and torture of intellectuals. Their guide incidentally was a young writer called Orhan Pamuk.
22 March
Ulysses is back with his Penelope. Gives me the details of the trip. The wives of imprisoned writers and journalists come hundreds of miles once a month to queue all day for three to five minutes’ talk; during this day’s wait, they are harassed by Doberman Pinschers (several bitten) to give sport to the soldiers. As always, it’s the small details – if a dog bite is a small detail – which are so appalling.
Harold: ‘And at every meeting, dinner, lunch, you encounter the ruined lives.’ He means the people who have been imprisoned and tortured, some by now just in a trance. Harold admired Arthur more and more throughout the trip: his complete integrity and cheerful independence. Even when the American Ambassador in effect threw Harold out of the Embassy over his ‘offensive’ remarks on the subject of torture, Arthur insisted on leaving too. On quite a different level, Harold gained an understanding of what Arthur goes through.
The woman journalist (on a right-wing paper) who concluded the interview in her office by producing a half-clothed photograph of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Mr Miller, may I be photographed with you, holding this?’ Answer: NO!
24 March
Harold has just heard from Mehmet Dikerdem, the son of the former Ambassador who had been a victim of a show trial in Turkey, that he and Arthur have been proscribed by military decree in Turkey, following their press conference. (Arthur came back here and gave a stirring speech about Turkey at PEN’s Writers’ Day: How America is pumping millions of dollars of arms into it.)
The next play that Harold wrote, Mountain Language, arose directly out of his feeling for the oppressed Kurds: he learnt that the Kurdish language was forbidden, even among Kurds themselves, and Harold saw in this a bleak symbol of oppression which was always so tightly connected in his mind to language. He began it immediately after his return to England and then put it away until 1986.
3 April 1986
Harold has resurrected Mountain Language, taken it out of its drawer and rewritten it. It’s short, powerful, terrible. He had called it ‘a cartoon’ when he first wrote it. Now he has explicitly withdrawn that.
15 April
Harold’s cheerfulness is delightful. ‘I’ve written a play!’ Also to be at the National, so good actors guaranteed and perhaps even the great Miranda Richardson so long coveted by Harold for one of his plays. So what