Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [66]
Harold ends the interview by reading Mountain Language and then Havel rounds it off by reading from his new play, which like Mountain Language has a scene of prison-visiting. Bed at 2 a.m. Harold insisted, still in his left-wing mode, that the critics of Nick Ward’s excellent play about the homeless in London disliked it because of its subject: ‘They don’t want to know.’ He adds: ‘The Caretaker is not about a man looking for his identity; it’s about a man looking for a home.’ Václav, with great dignity: ‘We don’t have the problems of homelessness here. So may we connect your play to our own problems?’
Václav tells us that, unlike Harold, he is getting more and more interested in the mystery – I think he means the mystery of existence (see his Letters to Olga). That is what he likes about Harold’s plays. We are amazed to find that no one appears to have heard of David Hare, our most successful playwright with Pravda and The Secret Rapture packing them in, even when I spell out the name. I point out that critics love him, he’s also at the National Theatre – as for that matter is Mountain Language. But it’s getting a little late for all this. At one point Harold clutches Václav’s hand: ‘If I had been in your circumstances, I like to think that I would have behaved as you have.’ Pause. ‘I think I would.’ Olga took photographs for their album, which the police never confiscate: ‘They like to know what’s going on.’
Of Havel, my main impression is of gentleness combined with authority: a humanity and humanitarianism, due to what he has gone through, which may not have been there before in this jolly extravert fellow. The comparison to Albie Sachs, seen at PEN the night before we left, the South African who had also been in prison, and his declaration of abandoning violence, is strong in my mind. Both men have been persecuted: the result is to concentrate them on ‘the mystery’ as Václav calls it. Harold, who mercifully has not, can talk spiritedly about the behaviour of the CIA in Chile – as he did. Looking at Václav’s expression, which was benign but detached, I could see him thinking: ‘We know all that, alas both ways, because if you know it one way, you know it the other.’
In the dawn I pull up the blind to see the landscape: and am confronted by a little wooden house, really near, which is full of policemen, watching us.
10 June
Václav chucked us out of his workroom: ‘I have to type out a manifesto before I go to Bratislava.’ Me to Harold: ‘It’s just the writer regretting his generous impulse and getting interlopers out of his workroom as soon as possible.’ I remind Harold of our wedding night in his Super-Study when he asked me next morning, ‘Are you planning to stay long?’ as he eyed his desk. ‘A lifetime,’ I should have said. Before we go, we sign postcards to Tom Stoppard and others. Havel with a laugh: ‘I always sign in green, the colour of hope.’
We learn later that Václav reached Bratislava – no mean distance – and was acclaimed by Joan Baez and the crowd, then the police tried to stop him partying with her afterwards. Also a banned singer Ivan Hoffman started to perform: police cut off the sound, crowd roared with fury. Subsequently, the amazing Havel did manage to party, then drove to Prague, picked up Klaus Juncker here in Czechoslovakia for the first time in thirteen years, drove back to Hradecek, further partying, except it’s really more political plotting. Everyone is worried about his health (coughing, for example, ghastly). It’s tension that keeps this heroic man going.
11 June
Party of about fourteen for dissident writers; Harold allowed at last to pay as they took American Express; he was also able to donate to Helsinki Watch. Sat with the novelist Ivan Klíma, also Miroslav Holub, a poet whose work Harold much admires, a grave man of great presence, a bio-chemist by profession. Klíma is anxious to revive PEN by including all three grades of writers: