Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [96]
1 February 1994
Palacio del Artes, Mexico City. Vast Art Deco building. Harold gave a poetry reading. Contrary to all our expectations, and their general rule, the Mexicans were all totally punctual. We learned later that there was a simple explanation for this. Damian had announced beforehand to all his friends: ‘My stepfather is a very violent man and we must respect that.’ The Mexicans all nodded sagely. While peaceful themselves, they understood violent men. ‘And what makes him violent,’ Damian went on, ‘is people who come late to his speeches or poetry readings. Very violent,’ he emphasized. So the Mexicans were all on time. Nor did the press bulbs flash unduly, since that was apparently another phenomenon calculated to provoke violence …
The hall was packed. Carlos Fuentes, our friend, introduced Harold with a speech in Spanish which we understood to be very gracious, before reading with much spirit some of his own translation of No Man’s Land. Then a languid Mexican actress read a poem with much tenderness followed by Harold reading it with much passion. It was ‘Paris’. I wanted to dig Silvia Fuentes in the ribs and say: ‘That’s written to me, you know.’ I felt an extraordinary tingle when my eyes met Harold’s at the end of this, first poem, written during our first ‘honeymoon’ at the Lancaster Hotel in 1975 and he gave me a small private smile. Afterwards Harold was very pleased and moved by the mass of students who emerged to talk to him, and told him of his works which they were studying, not only Betrayal but also his sole novel The Dwarfs which is virtually unknown even in England.
31 December 1997
In Mexico at Puerto Vallarta. Damian and Paloma and little Sofi are in a neighbouring seaside flat. In our hotel, to our delight, are Carlos and Silvia Fuentes, Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, and Eric and Marlene Hobsbawm. We come down to lunch at the little café on the beach and champagne is being drunk. Eric has been made a Companion of Honour. Arthur Schlesinger, sotto voce: ‘Nice to see an old Communist so pleased with an honour.’ He revealed that they had been friends – and disagreed – for sixty years, having been at Cambridge together. Eric explains benignly: ‘It’s all right to take this. It’s from the people. A knighthood would have been all wrong.’ Later Harold, who heartily agreed, told Arthur and Alexandra that he would take the Companionship of Honour if offered as it was not political.
The two Dublin festivals of Harold’s works which took place at the Gate Theatre, promoted by Michael Colgan, were not exactly new territory in the same way that Mexico was. I was Anglo-Irish (Irish, my father would have said, while resolutely remaining in England in order to serve in the British government) and with my brother Thomas had visited Ireland all through our shared youth, including wartime. Thomas was destined to inherit a large Regency Gothic castle in Westmeath from my father’s elder brother Edward – who by a strange coincidence had actually owned the Gate Theatre and showed far more interest in it than he ever did in the family estates. Harold had spent much time in Ireland as a young actor which was enormously important to him, working for the travelling company run by the actor-manager Anew McMaster. He had written a fine short memoir about it called Mac which he had given me when we first met. On that occasion I couldn’t help thinking that in his few pages he had evoked the man quite as vividly as I had in any of my long, long biographies.
8 May 1994
I realized I hadn’t been to the Gate Theatre for fifty years, since my uncle Edward Longford stood outside, before and after the play, with a begging bowl. The play in question was a terrible adaptation of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, by his wife Christine. Superior fare this