Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [88]
19 January
Harold: ‘I’ve just realized that I would have been dead if the Nazis had invaded. Aged ten.’ Me: ‘Have you never thought this before? I used to look at your parents having lunch at Eaton Manor Gardens in Hove sometimes, your father so feisty, your mother so gracious, and think that these two decent, dignified people would have died in conditions of unspeakable humiliation and terror.’ We then discuss whether the ten-year-old Harold would not have been shipped off by his parents to relatives in the US, fare provided perhaps by Uncle Coleman. Harold warms to the theme: ‘And then I’d probably have grown up to vote Republican. A Reaganite.’ The alternative Harold? Like the Oxford don that never was, the one that drank claret and played cricket and never lifted up a pen.
24 January
A and B are stalking the land again! Harold started to scribble. He came over for supper having written a scene of great power which he read to me. A man and his wife. He then wrote on until after one. Rather erotic. Rather horrible. So far.
28 January
Harold wrote madly on Thursday, seven hours yesterday. He’s very excited about it: as he said. It came to him just as he was talking to Tom Rand, so he bustled him out. (Tom Rand was doing the costumes for Twelve Angry Men which Harold was about to direct.) Now that I have heard the whole thing, it may come from Speer. But the first image is never the point with Harold. It’s now taken quite a different path, i.e. it’s set in the present day.
30 January
The play has grown. Scenes came to Harold in the middle of the night. I found notes scribbled in the bathroom. He even wrote during breakfast.
25 February
Harold read Ashes to Ashes (which will probably be done upstairs at the Ambassadors Theatre – suitably small) to Salman and Elizabeth West. Everyone deeply moved but Salman suggested he put ‘Time: present’, since even Salman hadn’t understood that. And it’s vital. This is taking place now, not in Nazi Germany.
Later, Harold talked about the play to the young foreign playwrights at the Royal Court. This was a gig organized by Elyse Dodgson that Harold took part in annually. The presence of serious young – twenty to thirty-five, at a guess – people of an extraordinary variety of nationalities, Israelis and Syrians, Serbians and Croatians, Chinese, Americans, often brought out answers from him about the meaning of his plays which he would decline to offer to English audiences. Although it should be recorded that on one famous occasion, a man declared himself as a playwright coming from Uganda, then added, ‘I earn my living as a dentist.’ With his scalpel, as it were, he proceeded to dig into the fact that Harold had been writing plays for forty years. ‘So why don’t you retire now and make room for younger people like me?’
On this occasion however, there were no such enjoyable diversions. Harold said an interesting thing about the character of Rebecca in Ashes to Ashes, ‘She is the artist who cannot avoid the world’s pain’, and he equated himself with her (this was the time of the savage war in Lebanon, for which Harold, at a time of great physical weakness, was being asked on every side to speak; sign petitions, etc.). Devlin stands for the rest of the world who ends up by being brutal towards her. I ask him afterwards: ‘But isn’t there another side to Devlin? He is trying to help Rebecca to stay sane and have a normal life, i.e. those references to Kim and the Kids.’
Whatever gloss may be put on it, Ashes to Ashes – whose clear narrative