Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

  26 February

  Tough week. I can’t relate in detail the many, many meetings, calls and manoeuvres. Harold constantly on TV to the extent that worried people rang me up. Highlights: good row with Dada (Mummy on my side) who is in favour of a strong anti-blasphemy law. Much international action: Harold spent all Friday getting Beckett’s signature. Right-wing press, predictably, manages to condemn a) Islam b) Salman c) anyone, i.e. us, who supports him d) the feebleness of the intellectuals’ response in not supporting him.

  28 February

  Moving moment at 12.30 when telephone rang: ‘Antonia, it’s Salman …’ His distress that in England only, people have found it de rigueur to rubbish the book, while defending his right to publish it. It’s all right to say this to me because he knows that Harold and I liked his work even before we liked him. Then he adds he has been taken down from Danger One to Danger Two. Me: ‘Congratulations! I suppose.’

  4 March

  Writers’ Day (PEN). Sweet, cosy, humorous speech by P.D. James and a fine one from Chinua Achebe. Though some members wanted ‘a survey of African literature’, I preferred his discussion of the roots of imaginative literature. The questions included one referring to Salman about the artist’s responsibility as well as the artist’s freedom. In reply Harold made a fine speech about Salman being in the Joycean tradition.

  6 March

  No one talks about anything else except the Rushdie affair, but rather like Suez in 1956, you can’t immediately predict exactly what the reaction will be. A Muslim woman friend said she had been surprised both ways by Bernard Lewis who she thought would be favourable to Salman and Edward Said who she thought would not. I tell her that beneath most people’s attitudes, if you know them, you can discern other very deep-seated convictions they have always had. An example: Harold’s rejection of the dominance of the Jewish religion in his youth, is there somewhere; as well as his feeling for the plight of the artist.

  7 March

  Salman rings up. ‘Antonia I have a favour to ask you.’ He wants to come and spend the night to see his son and meet his own family.

  12–13 March

  The visit. We arranged for the entire equipage to be downstairs in the more or less self-contained basement, in order to have some privacy, not quite realizing that there is not and should not be, any such thing as privacy from Special Branch. Although they were – and are, I’m writing this with them still in the house – amazingly tactful.

  At 12.15 p.m. a ring on the front door bell, an hour early. Rushed to it. I see an enormous, handsome, burly black man with a broad smile: ‘Lenny … Special Branch.’ He showed me his card, adding: ‘You’ve got visitors.’ He went over the garden to the Super-Study, where Salman in a red beret and scarf with his wife Marianne were let in the back way. Much drawing of our curtains, so as to obscure visitors but not so as to draw attention to our house on a bright Sunday morning. Two more Special Branch, all in thick jerseys and all wearing lovely reassuring smiles. In the middle of it all Orlando arrived from Cambridge since I had forgotten to tell him to keep away. It’s complicated by the fact that he has brought his guns with him in the boot of his car, being about to shoot for the University at Bisley. Special Branch rose however magnificently to this challenge and gave him excellent advice. (They were rather disappointed later when, after all this, he didn’t win.)

  The Rushdie family: Mrs Rushdie sad and dignified in a sari; sister Samin very fine-looking, aquiline features with Salman’s heavy-lidded eyes, in flowing trousers and loose tunic holding enchanting baby Maia. Zoffeir, a sweet, gentle little boy looked more like his mother in type. Salman tells us: ‘This is nothing to do with Islam. This is a monster which has come out of a bottle as sometimes happens in history.’

  17 March

  We presented our word-wide petition to the UN offices here. Received by a Dr Jensen in a grey suit, grey hair, little eyes, very polite. Though he told us ‘privately’ that he sympathized with our point of view, he burbled on about the Secretary-General’s need to balance ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘religious freedom’. Which actually means nothing at all if you think about it, since the Muslims are free, as they should be. It’s Salman who isn’t. And nobody should be free to make death threats with impunity.

  A year later when the danger had only intensified, Salman invited Harold to read his lecture at the ICA, in Pall Mall, in his place. There was no way, under the present circumstances, Salman could appear in person. Harold of course immediately accepted.

  6 February 1990

  How brave, everyone kept saying when it was announced. I kept a straight bat: ‘But of course there’s no real danger.’ It was only in the afternoon that it hit me. Up till then I had been buoyed up by Salman’s pleasure a few nights ago, at being able to answer back in his own words at last. Me to Harold: ‘Are you apprehensive?’ Harold: ‘A bit, naturally. But mostly about getting my tongue round the words, not getting dry, doing justice to his language which is not my own.’ Me, anxiously: ‘This ghastly situation is spiralling.’ I referred to the deaths of innocent people such as Salman’s Japanese translator: ‘You could withdraw.’ By way of reply, Harold quoted Horatio nagging Hamlet and Hamlet’s reply. Horatio: ‘I will say you are not fit.’ Hamlet: ‘If it be now, ’tis not to come … the readiness is all.’

  The security was extraordinary, two sets of guards and masses of police outside – all a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. But the event at the ICA had of course been publicly announced. So who knew what might happen … ? As for the lecture, tears had come into my eyes when I first read it a week ago: under such dire circumstances, Salman had managed to produce something so good, and Harold of course reads brilliantly. Lately he talks to Salman on the telephone. ‘Next time we’ll do it the other way,’ says Salman cheerfully. ‘You’ll write the piece and I’ll deliver it.’

  Chapter Eleven

  MOON OVER PRAGUE

  It was all very well attending protests in London and writing letters to imprisoned writers: but what about an actual visit behind the Iron Curtain? I had in fact visited Poland in 1969 but Harold had never been beyond Germany. In spite of several invitations to Russia, he said he had felt inhibited about accepting any kind of official invitation given the position of the Soviet Jews, although he had been part of initiatives to help people like Anatole Sharansky. June 1989 saw our first visit to Czechoslovakia, a country for which we both formed an enormous affection.

  It was our close friend Diana Phipps, Czech by birth, who had first suggested the actual visit, and then arranged it, guided by her cousin Kari Schwarzenberg. But Harold had long been an admirer of the dissident Czech playwright Václav Havel and had corresponded with him (they were linked by their German agent Klaus Juncker). He had also acted in Havel’s plays in England in order to draw attention to them and persistently advocated his freedom from arrest. We were also frequently told about the value of Western protest to dissidents in the East.

  8 June

  We are driven through Moravia by Kari Schwarzenberg, a great handsome force of a man, to meet Mrs Jirous, wife of a prominent dissident. The border post was like a dreary English bus station, plus machine guns, but absolutely no feeling of menace. Masses of poppies decorate the fields on either side, also iris, lupines and peonies in front of the village houses, plenty of little chapels and shrines for this is a very Catholic part of the country. Mrs Jirous has taken refuge with her parents while her husband is in prison and we sit with her outside in the garden, possibly because it’s already very hot, more likely because you must expect every room indoors to be bugged. She tells us that her husband has been moved to a new prison, which is comparatively pleasant. And he has only one man with him in the cell – this is a prison where some cells house as many as twenty-five men. He is even allowed to play ping-pong! Mrs Jirous attributes this welcome change to the tremendous fuss made in the West at the time of his trial in March. Kari Schwarzenberg went to this trial as President of Helsinki Watch. I
f the West keeps up the fuss, the sentence may even be reduced.

  Later in Prague, Kari introduces us to a select band of intellectuals: a low, rather airless room but tremendously friendly atmosphere. My most interesting discussion was with Jaroslav Koran and Zdenek Urbánek, translators of Frayn, Stoppard and Shakespeare, about the future of Czech PEN. Apparently it was currently dormant at its own request, and (as President of English PEN) I had been asked to find out whether there was a move to revive it. They reveal that there is a considerable potential split here between those who ‘will not sit down with the collaborators’ and those who think it must be possible to work out some kind of compromise of the ‘good’ with the ‘bad’. These problems eternally beset International PEN, by the very nature of its structure, as restrictive regimes come and go (not only in Eastern Europe but all over the world). Yet somehow it always manages to keep going, and keep supporting the vital principle of free expression. Harold makes a good, grave speech and drinks a lot of beer which has to be specially brought in. Naturally he pays for it, but then the Czechs insist on us taking the un-drunk bottles away; they are impressively dignified in their desire to seem like dissidents against the state regime, not like spongers.

  9 June

  Set out to stay with Václav Havel in convoy with Zdenek Urbánek and Rita Klimova. We drive and drive and drive and drive, me feeling fairly sick in the back of masterful Kari’s car (he is a very good but swaying driver). At 5 p.m. we reach Havel’s house at Hradecek, near Trutnov. A Union Jack is pinned to the outbuilding. Olga and Václav come out smiling and welcoming but worried because we are so late: had expected us at one, but we stopped off to eat lunch at a merry ‘Cinska’ restaurant i.e. Chinese restaurant run by Czechs. Olga is very thin, in black trousers, with white hair that frames a noble face, strong nose, lovely blue-grey eyes, altogether a beautiful woman. Havel is small, really small, very energetic, bustling about, grinning, sandy hair thinning but a good deal of it still around his attractive rather cherubic face, sensual big mouth. I can easily see the attraction for women (as with Harold, it’s the magnetism of energy). Klaus Juncker has told Harold on the telephone: ‘Václav is a charming man but look out for Lady Antonia.’ Harold to me: ‘Was he serious?’ Me: ‘I hope so!’ We are installed in the living room where among the CDs is the same Jessye Norman I am currently playing at home. Bottles of Czech champagne are opened.

  Havel himself was only just out of prison and the dreadful news of the deaths of the young at Tiananmen Square were filtering through to us: altogether it seemed a perilous time for civil liberties world-wide. If some seer had gazed into the future and told me that we were camping out with the future President of Czechoslovakia – in only six months’ time – I would not have believed him (or her).

  9 June cont.

  Eggs and black caviar provided. We all toast Václav. He gets out a piece of paper and in a rather manic way (he says later ‘I am a pedant’) reads out a schedule which has already been destroyed by our late arrival. Nevertheless he reads it all out. It includes, I note, an hour and a half interview with Harold on the state of the theatre … Je verrai as Louis XIV was fond of saying.

  Then we are shown our rooms. Some embarrassment when Diana and Kari (in fact cousins and friends) are jointly given Olga’s room. Kari, gallantly: ‘Alas, she never liked me.’ In fact he sleeps as a kind of janitor on a mattress in the upper half of this barn-like structure. Václav and Olga will climb a red ladder and sleep in the loft: they’re used to people sleeping over, it’s the dissident way of life. Harold and I are greatly honoured to be ushered into Václav’s workroom, which used to be the woodshed, now adapted into a pleasant light ground-floor room, glass doors on to the great outdoors. Table with large pink notice on it: HERE WILL BE MY NEW COMPUTER CALLED HAROLD. (A lot of us had contributed financially to this computer after the police took the first one.) Havel says Harold is the first contributor he has met. Large photo of Graham Greene on the landing, with a note from him pinned to it; also Beckett (Harold’s own heroes); plus Jack Kennedy. A favourite poster in various forms is ‘All You Need Is Love’ including one with a picture of two rhinos mating. Václav points on the landing to a samizdat collection of books worth ‘100,000 kroners. They didn’t take it at the last search because they didn’t have a lorry; the time before they took everything.’

  Dinner, pork and beef, salad, strawberries and whipped cream followed by the interview – and it does last for almost exactly an hour and a half, nor does Harold protest, thanks to his being under Havel’s spell. At dinner, the charming Urbánek, an ebullient silver-haired seventy-year-old, and Harold agree that in effect anything good is ‘left wing’ and if ‘left wing’ people do bad things, then they become ‘right wing’. How convenient! Everyone argues. Kari says he could argue equally that left wing still has a meaning and that it doesn’t. Urbánek remains romantic about the notion of ‘left wing’ as does Harold. (In this at least Harold agrees with the English fogies of the right who denounce him.) Myself I distrust all these labels; by their fruits, ye shall know them, says I. It’s something Harold and I argue about: even if you can get away with Stalin being ‘right wing’, you just can’t with Pol Pot if language has any meaning at all. Harold tries to deal with him by just saying ‘He’s a monster.’ Urbánek hisses at Václav: ‘I told you you shouldn’t have talked to the Salisbury Review’ (a right-wing periodical).

  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 h
is 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.