Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [91]
But it set him off, and he has written a poem, one of his best, I think. It was odd seeing him sit in the hotel amid the suitcases and the trades unionists with his pen and yellow pad, earnestly writing: the best example of art not being part of life but working through it. At the end of writing it, all Harold’s agitation with the bureaucrat had disappeared, forgotten; thus you might say the bureaucrat had been the opposite of the person from Porlock who interrupted ‘Kubla Khan’ forever. Harold’s grief for his father remained but had been subsumed.
I have since come to treasure this poem more than any other of Harold’s poems with the exception of those he wrote to me. He incorporated it into his Nobel Speech, and I had it read, the very last words of the brief ceremony to mark his burial.
DEATH
(Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953)
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
Chapter Fifteen
FRANCE: CELEBRATION
I can pinpoint the exact moment in 1995 when I decided to take Marie Antoinette as my new subject, thus impelling me towards what would turn out to be ten years of French research, first on the eighteenth century and then a hundred years earlier for Louis XIV. I was in a taxi on my way to give lunch to my goddaughter Helen Falkus in order to dispense sage advice about A-levels, as godmothers are traditionally supposed to do. The moment I arrived at the restaurant in Portland Road, I brushed aside all questions about A-levels, saying in a rush of excitement: ‘Helen, you’ve just got to listen to me, I’ve suddenly had the inspiration that I’m going to write about Marie Antoinette and I have to talk to you about it.’ When I got home I marked the date in my Diary: it was 16 October, the anniversary of the Queen’s execution in 1793, which I subsequently came to mark with Masses offered in many places in the world.
So this, which became the most personal of all my books with the exception of Mary Queen of Scots, my first love, began with an expedition-that-failed to give advice to a young girl; there was a certain synchronicity here, since the most touching aspect of Marie Antoinette’s life (one that was subsequently stressed by Sofia Coppola in her poignant film based on my book) is her need for advice on arrival in France aged fourteen – and her failure to receive it.
On the whole the press now left us alone except over matters of legitimate comment such as Harold’s publicly expressed political views. The publication of Michael Billington’s authorized biography (for which we had both contributed interviews and which we both liked) did however provide a brief flurry of the old kind of interest, not really experienced for many years.
21 September 1996
Michael Billington biography: press are in a tizzy about the revelation of Harold’s affair with Joan Bakewell in the sixties. ‘Family and friends’ as the saying is, think that Joan has made rather a meal of the whole thing in the book … Whereas I know that Harold had a more intimate relationship at the same time, with the woman he called Cleopatra. Harold indifferent to the whole thing: ‘It’s all a long time ago.’
Seven years later – in 2003 – he was not indifferent to the whole thing when Joan published her own memoirs which, following the failure