Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter Page 16

  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: 1) dissident 2) ‘greyzone’ 3) state okayed. Klíma emphasizes ‘our willingness to solve it all positively’. The younger writers, I note, think that change really is in the wind; the older, including Holub, fear a repetition of 1968, the news of arrests in China not exactly allaying these deep anxieties.

  12 June

  Harold went to see Urbánek to do an interview for a video. He loved his book-lined study, for he felt he was looking at a typical Central European intellectual’s room. I taxied to the Castle and walked all the way back on the cobbles (ouch, wrong shoes! In agony this morning). In a bookshop I saw the first signs of the Soviet Union: Russian newspapers, plenty of them, including Pravda, nothing else foreign even in German. In the bookshop, dusty Russian books and books in Czech about Russia: the only foreign author I can make out is Balzac. No catering for tourists in this most beautiful of cities, which makes it a heady relief from Venice. Big effort to find a postcard and only on the Karl Bridge a few leather knick-knacks.

  While we were at Prague Airport on our way home, we wrapped up kroners and posted them, according to instructions by Diana, to a young fifth-year student about whom Harold was concerned. You wrap the money up in paper, put it in a hotel envelope, but take care to post it from the airport.

  Our next visit to Czechoslovakia was in February 1990. By this time Václav Havel had become president of the country – a post he would occupy for fourteen years in the course of which Czechoslovakia was transformed into the Czech Republic. Harold had kept up contacts in the intervening months and was tremendously pleased when Havel gave an interview to the Observer in which he referred to the ‘brotherhood’ he immediately felt with Harold on their first meeting. We had both watched the events of the Velvet Revolution, transfixed, in late November 1989. I thought of Pepys writing about the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660: how it was not to be imagined, ‘the suddenness and the glory of it all’.

  7 February

  General jollity at the airport including from a large body of handsome youths whose luggage establishes them as having come from Cuba. ‘Football?’ I ask hopefully but get nowhere. The answer turns out to be ‘Wrestling’. I bring presents of bath oil, perfume and body lotion for my Czech women friends. (Rita Klimova told Diana she still had the bath oil I bought for her in June – which was not supposed to be the point, she was supposed to wallow.) Vlasta Gallerova, theatre manager, tells us that this is a bad time for the theatre, which used to be the centre of opposition: but nowadays ‘we sit at home watching television’ where such exciting things are happening. Frantisek Fröhlich (Harold’s translator) confirms this: ‘We never even had a television. Now we watch it all the time.’ ‘Dramas?’ ‘No, news programmes, documentaries.’ We realize that Mountain Language will no longer have the same resonance. Frantisek is a very sympathetic man. Tells me that when he hears certain loud noises, he thinks ‘Here they come again.’ For example a helicopter overhead – ironically it turns out to have contained Havel himself. ‘You see, as a little boy’ – he’s born in 1934 – ‘I remember the Germans coming in 1939, then the Russians in 1945 which seemed good, then the Russians in 1948, not good, then again in 1968. Always this noise haunts me: “Here they come again.” ’ He is Jewish and spent the war in Theresienstadt miraculously surviving, along with his mother, though his father and the rest of his family vanished.

  8 February

  Went to Wenceslas Square. People hurrying. Mild weather. Walked the whole way with anticipation, but all the same was taken by surprise by the simple, round memorial to Jan Palach, the student who burned himself to death as a political protest, inset on to the pavement. His face in a photograph, handsome, forever young, looking out of the mass of flowers, mostly made up of quite small bunches, carnations, freesias, daffodils. Then I read the New Year tribute of ‘Pan President Havel 1 January 1990’ when he had been in office all of three days. Marked by its red ribbons, most moving of all the deep – two foot at least – mass of melded and melted wax of many colours from thousands of candles lighted over the years. The statue of St Wenceslas himself is flanked by posters: IT’S OVER: CZECHS ARE FREE! is the one I like best.

  That night at the theatre, Olga, more beautiful than ever, but looking less pained than in June, greets us instantly: ‘What things have happened!’ You couldn’t have put it better or more simply. Olga and Rita described the hideous state of the apartments at the Castle. ‘The Bolshevik had no taste’ is the local saying. She tells us that the police in the little wooden house outside the farm at Hradecek have in theory been replaced by another kind of security ‘because people come to stare’. But sometimes, says Olga, they recognize the same police faces. Rita Klimova is to be Ambassador in Washington: she tells me she felt like giggling when Václav handed her the insignia. She is tremendously excited although the Foreign Office have taken 20 per cent off her salary ‘because I don’t have a wife’. Then we met Havel himself, equally jolly, looking much healthier, in an open-necked check shirt. He’s longing to have his new play put on: not since 1968 … He was finally dragged away, very late, by Olga. ‘You see, I am still a prisoner. Now I am a prisoner to my wife.’

  9 February

  We had a moving experience of what Václav means to the young Czechs. It was now about 10.30 p.m. after a long cheerful dinner which Harold gave. Suddenly Václav made one of his swift moves: ‘Come on, come on, we must go to the Balustrade Theatre, which was my theatre you know, where Jane Fonda is making a speech. She has been trying to see me all week.’ Outside the restaurant were cars with flashing blue lights into which Olga, in her kindly way, piled Francis King and Diana Petre, part of English PEN, our guests. But we walked along with the President (thank God this time my heels weren’t too high!) across the Karl Bridge. Václav: ‘My first walk across the Karl Bridge since I am President.’ It was a full moon with racing clouds, the castle wonderfully lit up behind us. Václav: ‘We must look and see if the flag is still flying, it means that I am still President. If not, good, I can go back to the theatre. Ah, it is still flying. What a nuisance.’

  A group of youths on the bridge call out a greeting and make V signs (Francis King told me that there were many V signs and cries of ‘Olga’ to the flashing cars: she’s already extremely popular and instantly recognizable with that lovely face and snow-white hair). At the end of the bridge, a group of youths stop us. They take out a guitar. They proceed to sing in harmony to Havel. The tune is the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven’s Ninth. The lighting: Havel’s face in profile with his dark coat, the faces of the men and girls, the large guitar, it was all like something directed by Ingmar Bergman. The idealism of the young faces, the tenderness of the older one. These were – all of them – the people who had made the Samet (Velvet) Revolution.

  At the theatre, Jane Fonda is surrounded by a huge entourage of extremely amiable people brought from California: Jane’s personal photographer, etc. etc. Harold, who claimed to know her, embraced her warmly. She asks me: ‘Are you an actress too?’ When an aide tries to correct her, I reply with sincerity: ‘Don’t worry. I’m delighted to be taken for an actress. Who wants to look like a lady writer?’

  10 February

  Frantisek Fröhlich takes us up to the Cathedral which Harold is anxious to see in connection with his projected screenplay of The Trial. He points to the soldiers patrolling the Castle grounds as he drives us up the hill. ‘Before, they patrolled with big dogs. Now, no dogs, by order of the President.’

  Like all our friends here, he emphasizes the dream-like quality of all that has happened. ‘No dogs’ seem to stand for a lot, that and the singing students.


  11 February

  We arrive in East Berlin from Czechoslovakia for a film festival: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for which Harold wrote the screenplay, is part of it. We take the opportunity to go to the Brandenburg Gate, reaching it in fact by a muddy little path beside the blackened Reichstag, German flag flying, and saw the wall. Holes in it grilled over. Later we noticed an orderly procession of East Germans on foot coming in as pedestrians through a wicker gate. Also we see a double-file of very young, soft-faced, sweet-looking Russians soldiers in fur hats marching on their way somewhere or other; I feel rather sorry for them in this rapidly changing world.

  Only one soldier guards the gate. But: ‘I hear the sound of hammering,’ says Harold, in a puzzled voice. And looking to the left, we see this amazing sight of people of all races and nationalities busily bent down towards the wall and hammering away with huge hammers in order to hack their own pieces off. For all the world like the Seven Dwarfs in the film, something comical at any rate, not the Nibelungen in Rheingold. Meanwhile in front of them were ten or so trestle tables on which lay pieces of the wall of all colours (bright blues, greens, as well as pinks, blacks) with enterprising lads selling them. Capitalism, quick off the mark! Harold bought me a pink-and-black piece looking like a jellied eel for about £6. Then I decide to do better myself and borrow a hammer from a dark-eyed energetic girl and hammer away. We photograph each other cordially.

  Scrawled at the highest bit of the Gate were the words: ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ But it was far from being anarchy we saw here, a new kind of order rather.

  21 March 1990

  Havel’s visit to London. We are asked to a small, i.e. non-State, lunch at Buckingham Palace. I wear my impractical white suit, bought for Anne Somerset’s wedding and more or less on hire from the cleaners ever since. A loyal crowd of Czechs, many in national dress, flowing red ribbons, outside the gates. Homemade banners. Other guests: Phyllis (P. D.) James in an elegant beige straw hat, Sir Charles and Lady Mackerras, various kindly attendants such as Sue Hussey.

  When the Queen arrives with the Duke of Edinburgh, into a small sitting room decorated with pictures of the daughters of George III, she looks very like Phyllis but smaller and prettier. I find myself with the Duke of Edinburgh. He asked me what I was writing – I was dreading that. When I revealed that it was The Six Wives of Henry VIII, he said quite angrily and looking irritable too: ‘Why do people always say “Henry VIII and his six wives” as though it was all one word? There is plenty more to say about Henry.’ Me, cravenly: ‘Oh yes, sir, there is, I mean he was a wonderful musician.’ The Duke, sounding even crosser: ‘He was a wonderful military strategist, a fighter, he bashed the French.’ He repeated the words with great emphasis. ‘He bashed the French.’

  At lunch the Queen is notably sympathetic, says Harold. She expresses interest at the change of Havel in his life from being a playwright to being a head of state. ‘But of course you were always working with your head?’ And she sort of mimed it. In the middle of lunch Václav leant across the table and said: ‘I never thought to see an unofficial playwright in Buckingham Palace.’ Pause, while everyone is slightly surprised at his choice of the word ‘unofficial’. Then: ‘No, Harold, I mean you.’ The men from the Foreign Office are convulsed.

  Later Václav answers questions brilliantly at the ICA. Czechs now have liberty, he says, but with liberty comes the need to make decisions – for them to make the decisions. ‘Freedom means what it says. Now you decide. You don’t ask me whether there should be a cable car from Mountain A to Mountain B. That’s not my job.’

  Throughout our summer holiday in Corfu in 1991, Harold had been cracking away at his screenplay of Kafka’s The Trial, to be directed by David Jones. He lurked in the little white annexe to the modest low-built villa, which we called the Cowshed. My mother actually did a watercolour of him at work: Harold was oblivious. He said that he wrote his early plays with his son crawling over him, and simply didn’t notice such things. It is fair to say that when Harold wasn’t working, he was as cranky as most other people when there was noise, maybe more so.

  5 May 1992

  In Prague again: the third time in less than three years. This time it is for the shooting of The Trial. To the Barrandov Studios on a hill, built by Havel’s family. Harold feels strongly that The Trial is about man’s spiritual relationships, his search for God (like The Hound of Heaven, I add) i.e. not political.

  At this point Harold wrote in my diary: ‘Quite right! H.P.’

  5 May cont.

  Later: Havel actually comes to watch the night-shooting when his immense work for the day is over. Harold is delighted. ‘I came to see his work,’ he says. ‘So he came to see mine: that’s how it is between us.’ I see Harold’s and Havel’s faces, close together, dark and fair, in the lighting of the street amid pools of darkness, like a picture by Rembrandt; both animated, and animated also by the human condition.

  Chapter Twelve

  STAGE WIFE

  Harold, I noticed, felt a kind of existential despair in the mid eighties. It was partly the state of the world. Giving up smoking – from sixty Black Sobranies a day – no doubt added to it in the short term, although the trauma gave way to a permanent state of what one might call non-addiction and quite soon he said that he never felt the slightest temptation to regress. He had done this after Hugh died of lung cancer in March 1984. Hugh was a heavy smoker of the wartime generation which was unaware of the dangers and as a young soldier probably wouldn’t have cared too much about the prospects of a long life on the eve of a parachute jump. He also had a family blood condition which made smoking specially dangerous: but these things were not known then.

  1984

  9 July

  Harold in a mood which I can only describe as savage melancholy. Directing seems to take more and more out of him. He is infuriated by the mainly adverse critical reaction to Simon Gray’s play The Common Pursuit, the whole episode exacerbated by his lack of smoking. Perhaps no one should accept to direct under these circumstances, especially a play by Simon Gray, the celebrated smoker, but it is easy to be wise after the event. Harold had admired the play even if he didn’t get the best out of it. Harold, leaving the Lyric, Hammersmith, hears a woman shout: ‘Harold Pinter, why don’t you write about the workers?’ Fatally he goes back. Further cries from this woman: ‘What about Chile? What about South Africa?’ As though One for the Road was not about Chile and the whole damn thing. This play had after all been on at this very theatre only a few months earlier as Harold’s attacker appeared not to know. The point is that the ridiculous incident got to him. Sometimes melancholy spreads across the waters of Harold’s life like black water lilies. At such moments he is always careful to except me from his cares. Sometimes when things are dire, he writes a poem to make the point as when he was visiting a relative in hospital.

  DENMARK HILL

  Well, at least you’re there,

  And when I come into the room,

  You’ll stand, your hands linked,

  And smile,

  Or, if asleep, wake.

  1985

  Harold started the year in better nick since he’s going to direct Lauren Bacall in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Also there will be a production of his Old Times with Michael Gambon, Liv Ullmann and Nicola Pagett at the same theatre.

  8 January 1985

  Tenth anniversary of our fatal meeting. Harold gave me an enormous Georgian paste ring, pale golden stone set in subtly gleaming dark paste diamonds and masses of white flowers. I gave him two silk shirts from Angelo’s. Personally, I allowed myself to be cheered up by the progress of the Arms Talks in Geneva. I mean on TV, the Americans, even Reagan, were issuing statements of compromise about Star Wars and Gromyko was quite gracious, if that’s the right word. Harold: ‘Listen, I adore you, that’s my position, and if Reagan and Gromyko make you happy, they’re my boys.’

  The significant event in Harol
d’s change of mood, however had probably taken place the previous autumn when we went to New York and Harold gave an enactment – as opposed to a reading – of scenes from six of his full-length plays at the YMHA, on the Upper East Side, a great venue for such things. I noted at the time that his melancholy was much alleviated. Harold: ‘I was especially proud of my women.’ He was right. His Ruth in The Homecoming was a triumph, Anna in Old Times no less so. I sat next to Jeremy Irons, however, fresh from his own triumph as the lover Jerry in the film of Betrayal. I was amused when amid his generally lavish praise, he commented in his precise, elegant voice: ‘I don’t think he got Betrayal quite right though.’ Harold himself, it was fair to say was dissatisfied with his Davies in The Caretaker. ‘I was too ferocious. I didn’t have the charm.’

  I believe it was this return to acting, as opposed to simply reading, which prompted Harold to return to the stage the next year. Up till then he remained periodically depressed.

  30 June

  Harold had a sleepless night over money. It seems awful to me that he, who earns a great deal of money, who has a wife who does all right by most standards, only one grown-up child to support, parents he happily and successfully cares for, two plays in the West End, directing another, a film opening, Turtle Diary, about to play a nine-week season as author/actor in Los Angeles, should have financial worries to keep him up at night.

  Harold entered as I wrote this and I read him the sentence. He seized the Diary and wrote in enormous letters: ‘I love you wildly and that is my solace.’ Perhaps everybody nice worries about money – and probably everyone nasty too. It’s just the human condition. It’s odd that Harold worries so much more, for example, than my father, who has never had any, let alone made any.