I should point out that there was nothing superficial about this interest. Harold spent a large proportion of his day, it seemed to me, studying these things; the Super-Study in Aubrey Road gradually became a kind of emporium of Human Rights literature and books. This was the substance, the backing, behind the speeches, demonstrations and appearances on TV calling attention to a wide number of issues.
However, not everyone who found themselves having a political discussion with Harold in the eighties and nineties, believed that he or she was the luckiest person in the world. I note from my Diary that Harold had a row with Joan Didion in New York as early as January 1981 about US policy towards El Salvador. She countered: ‘What about the Malvinas?’ (the Falkland Islands: Britain’s attitude to them). Joan told him, or he told her, or both, that the other was ‘unreasonable’ but of course they embraced warmly on departure.
Unreasonable, but was he right? Harold countered this by asking: ‘Why don’t they concentrate on what I’m angry about?’ Certainly the accusation of being ‘unreasonable’ or ‘irrational’ was often flung at Harold in political discussions, even, it has to be said, by myself: ‘How can you ignore the fate of writers in Cuba …’ (After Harold died, among the little souvenirs he had kept in his desk I found a place card for some long-forgotten dinner party marked ‘Antonia’ in an italic hand. There had clearly been some row on the opposite side of the table. On the back I have scribbled: ‘Darling – You are right. So SHUT UP.’ This certainly represented my own attitude upon occasion: I felt both honoured and touched to find that Harold had treasured the card.)
In fact Harold’s efforts in the world of international protest concentrated on three main areas. First, there was Latin and South America, with a special interest in Nicaragua. Then there was Eastern Europe and the fate of the dissidents, with a special interest in Czechoslovakia. Lastly there was Turkey. Although these campaigns brought him different allies (Eastern Europe was viewed far more sympathetically by our English friends than Latin America), I could see, when I was in a detached frame of mind, that it was not a question of reason or the lack of it with Harold. He felt profoundly about justice world-wide, and equally detested authoritarianism wherever he perceived it, as he had done since his East End youth: his Conscientious Objection to National Service when he was eighteen being probably the earliest public manifestation of that. Much later I told an interviewer that Harold questioned all rules except the rules of cricket – which just about summed it up.
In the spring of 1985 Harold visited Turkey with Arthur Miller on behalf of PEN International, to protest against the imprisonment and torture of intellectuals. Their guide incidentally was a young writer called Orhan Pamuk.
22 March
Ulysses is back with his Penelope. Gives me the details of the trip. The wives of imprisoned writers and journalists come hundreds of miles once a month to queue all day for three to five minutes’ talk; during this day’s wait, they are harassed by Doberman Pinschers (several bitten) to give sport to the soldiers. As always, it’s the small details – if a dog bite is a small detail – which are so appalling.
Harold: ‘And at every meeting, dinner, lunch, you encounter the ruined lives.’ He means the people who have been imprisoned and tortured, some by now just in a trance. Harold admired Arthur more and more throughout the trip: his complete integrity and cheerful independence. Even when the American Ambassador in effect threw Harold out of the Embassy over his ‘offensive’ remarks on the subject of torture, Arthur insisted on leaving too. On quite a different level, Harold gained an understanding of what Arthur goes through.
The woman journalist (on a right-wing paper) who concluded the interview in her office by producing a half-clothed photograph of Marilyn Monroe. ‘Mr Miller, may I be photographed with you, holding this?’ Answer: NO!
24 March
Harold has just heard from Mehmet Dikerdem, the son of the former Ambassador who had been a victim of a show trial in Turkey, that he and Arthur have been proscribed by military decree in Turkey, following their press conference. (Arthur came back here and gave a stirring speech about Turkey at PEN’s Writers’ Day: How America is pumping millions of dollars of arms into it.)
The next play that Harold wrote, Mountain Language, arose directly out of his feeling for the oppressed Kurds: he learnt that the Kurdish language was forbidden, even among Kurds themselves, and Harold saw in this a bleak symbol of oppression which was always so tightly connected in his mind to language. He began it immediately after his return to England and then put it away until 1986.
3 April 1986
Harold has resurrected Mountain Language, taken it out of its drawer and rewritten it. It’s short, powerful, terrible. He had called it ‘a cartoon’ when he first wrote it. Now he has explicitly withdrawn that.
15 April
Harold’s cheerfulness is delightful. ‘I’ve written a play!’ Also to be at the National, so good actors guaranteed and perhaps even the great Miranda Richardson so long coveted by Harold for one of his plays. So what was apparently a few pages, in 1985, then a quiver of the Muse at the Battersea Arts Centre during a Marguerite Duras play, is now a jewel. (Pretty upsetting jewel too.) Simon Gray compares it to a poem by Browning: very apt. So I am learning ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ as a tribute, my latest attempt to combat insomnia with Positive Thinking above lying awake.
18 October
‘Please say thank you to your husband.’ These words, said by a middle-aged woman, foreign, German Jewish at a guess, seem to sum up what Harold has done with Mountain Language. Of course there will be other very different reactions and I gather from Richard Eyre (Director of the National Theatre) there have been already. But what I saw that first Monday at 6.15 spoke for all women outside all prisons. The performances were of a strength which even given Harold’s committed direction – committed to perfection – took me by surprise. Eileen Atkins, with only two lines to speak but an infinity of expressions, was the star. About the same period Harold gives an interview to Omnibus. Afterwards he gets a stack of letters: ‘At last someone has spoken out … I have been feeling voiceless, but now you …’ His political stance is widely described as ‘courageous’. But Harold didn’t have to be courageous to take a stance, he just had to be Harold! He loves speaking out against the established order; it comes naturally to him.
An extraordinary incident eight years later brought the relevance of Mountain Language – even in England – sharply into focus.
22 June 1996
Some unfortunate Kurds, in exile in North London, performed Mountain Language, having hired stage guns from the National Theatre. They were all arrested by thirty to forty armed police. Who refused to read the National Theatre weapon-certificate of harmlessness. And what is more – this is the unbelievable fact – refused to allow them to speak Kurdish to one another. Talk of life imitating art …
5 July
We went to see this Mountain Language in Hoxton. A ramshackle hall and rooms in a little street, guarded by a very young soldier in camouflage uniform and with a machine gun. Many Kurdish women and children: an impression of very pale faces, heart-shaped, big dark eyes, strongly marked eyebrows, not very tall but well made. Rana Kabbani told me once that the famous Circassians, from whom the most beautiful members of the harem were taken, were actually Kurds. The performance began with the terrifying enactment of what had happened to them the other night, which also acted all too neatly as a Prologue to Harold’s play. During the play itself, however, they actually showed the torture, which, as ever with Harold, according to the text, was supposed to take place offstage. Afterwards I congratulated the actor via an interpreter and told him he was ‘very convincing’. Actor: ‘It was easy for me to be convincing because I myself was tortured just like that.’
In general, however, taking part in marches and demonstrating outside embassies, whether to protest the imprisonment of poets such as the Russian Irina Ratushinskaya and the Malawian Jack Mpanje or the fate of the p
eople of the East Timor, filled one with a proper sense of gratitude at living in England with the privilege of speaking up. As to the efficacy of such things, it was well put by Christopher Hampton when, along with other members of English PEN, we were getting together a fund-raising evening known as The Night of the Day of the Imprisoned Writer: ‘If one guard kicks one prisoner less hard, it will have been worth it,’ he said.
And there were the lighter moments as when I found myself marching with Ian McEwan, Caroline Blackwood and other writers, carrying white flowers for peace, in the general direction of 10 Downing Street. (Having chosen to parade with a long white lily, I felt like the Angel Gabriel in a pre-Raphaelite picture about to annunciate something or other.) The policeman who was walking alongside us asked me: ‘What’s the name of that gentleman ahead? I know his face awfully well from this kind of thing.’ Me: ‘E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class.’ Policeman: ‘Of course it is. He’s a very nice gentleman. Never any trouble.’
11 September 1986
Marched with Harold and members of the Solidarity Committee to mark the thirteenth anniversary of the Chilean anti-Allende coup. Sunlit day. Me to fellow marcher: ‘I like the architectural view of London you get walking slowly down the middle of a main road.’ Fellow member: ‘It makes a change from shouting “Maggie out! Maggie out!” ’ We are led by Chilean girls, black scarves over thick tumbling black hair: they are in mourning. We carry banners with photographs of the Disappeared on them. Policemen escort us from Portman Square to Devonshire Street and guard us from the traffic. I think what it must be like to march and know you will be attacked by the same policemen who are courteously guarding us.
Less satisfying – in that it is difficult in retrospect to see that it achieved anything at all except some hot-air balloons rising – was our experience with the so-called June 20 Group.
19 March 1988
Dinner at Kensington Place restaurant on the night of the Budget given by John and Penny Mortimer. A lot of discussion about the fall in the top rate of tax: John Mortimer as always speaks out where others don’t have his frankness. How he’ll benefit. I mutter that Nigel Lawson should have helped the Health Service as well, which is a sort of cop-out.
Out of this dinner came the idea of an Arts/Politics discussion group. I told John Mortimer, whose idea it was, that there has been just such a group, but High Tory, held at Campden Hill Square by Hugh. John Casey, who attended it, and adored Mrs Thatcher, told me of how she sat on the sofa (now my sofa again): ‘To think her hips sat on that sofa–’ Me: ‘And did those hips in ancient time?’ Our group became known as the June 20 Group after the date of the first meeting. In a move I subsequently came to regret, I offered our house for the first exploratory meeting – the regret was due to the fact that the group became inevitably identified with us, rather than the body of other writers it included, led by John Mortimer.
Monday 20 June
The dinner. We have decided to meet again in September. So that’s what came out of it. On the subject of censorship, personally I would have liked us to have made ourselves more of a philosophy group – for that’s what’s lacking – whereas pressure against censorship is almost universal and most of us present spend a great deal of time signing letters, etc. on the subject. But I noticed there was a division between those who wanted it to be a purely writers’ discussion group and those – particularly those who were not writers themselves – who thought we would be affiliated in some way to the Labour Party. Nevertheless the evening was very jolly: twenty-one people. Tony Howard addressed us for forty minutes – a bit long – and made one provocative statement: ‘How can any of you write for the Murdoch press?’ John Mortimer, leading reviewer for the Sunday Times, merely smiled. Germaine Greer, sotto voce, well, just about: ‘How can anyone employed by Tiny Rowland (i.e. the Observer) protest to us about writing for the TLS?’ Later when they had all gone, Harold read Shakespeare’s sonnets to me with the perfume of my regale lilies, especially strong this year, filling the drawing room. That was really the best part of the evening.
Later I record the last meeting in our house. I am convinced that proportionately we now have far too many journalists and political commentators, and too few real writers. After all, those commentators have plenty of outlets. The best intervention came from David Hare about the meaning of political action as he saw it, to help the working class to escape from restrictions. But that’s the end of it for us. Future meetings will be elsewhere. At least we ‘were the first that ever burst into that sunless sea; a Labour philosophy group as opposed to a Tory one. Even though it’s been a failure, I’m proud of that.
Looking back on it (and reading the Diary entries) I can see the fact that it was much mocked by the press was really the most sociologically interesting thing about the whole enterprise: in the summer of 1988, there was considered to be something absurd about any kind of theoretical talk which was not Tory.
In 1989 we gave a party at Campden Hill Square for Daniel Ortega on his visit to London, as President of Nicaragua. Harold had visited the country the year before and was active in its defence.
Sunday 7 May
Blessed by golden weather – Viva Nicaragua! Graham Greene was the big thrill for everyone, green-eyed, red eye-balled, a hero since he had cracked his rib in his hotel but insisted on coming despite his age – mid eighties. Melvyn Bragg, Peter Stanford, young editor of the Catholic Herald, Bianca Jagger plus surprise guest of her daughter Jade, aged fourteen, the famous Jagger mouth, very nice manners; Rosanna Arquette, tiny, blonde, exquisite mouse, and at least twelve more Nicaraguans than we had bargained for. Then Harold had pleaded for no more than five Special Branch but they filled the hall, the house, everywhere, quite apart from the Nicaraguans, who had broad shoulders, short, very handsome broad faces. Indeed Nicaraguans in general are a very good-looking race viz. Bianca and Daniel Ortega himself. We stood at the drawing-room window and witnessed the motorcade: flashing lights, men on motorbikes, sirens, then dozens of people hustled out of two huge super-limos, all in dark suits except for Daniel Ortega, in khaki, red flash on shoulder, very neat, the famous big sunglasses. Apparently he gets all of this from the British government as a head of state – even a revolutionary state! Rosario Murillo (his lady) short very curly hair, mini skirt, enormous eyes, even larger earrings.
Daniel makes a very long, very serious speech. All agree: ‘A really straight man.’ I asked a question about the Arts: after all this was supposed to be an Arts for Nicaragua occasion. He looked rather surprised: ‘The revolution is the real cultural contribution of Nicaragua’ was his instinctive reaction before going on to emphasize the general freedom of the arts in Nicaragua. Rosario, who is Minister of Culture, tried to add to this but was shut up by Harold under the impression she was Bianca Jagger. President Ortega was overheard having a discussion with Nathalia (our housekeeper) about the recipe for her Portuguese pancakes. It was only the next day that I listened to two of our neighbours talking on their roof – the weather remained intensely hot and still. One said to the other, indicating our garden: ‘You see, I could have taken out Daniel Ortega.’
Where protest was concerned, both Harold and I were absolutely straightforward in our reaction to the fatwa against our friend, Salman Rushdie.
We were actually in Venice in January 1989 when we got the first inkling that something extraordinary – and horrible – might be happening. We were there for Harold to imbibe local atmosphere as he wrote the screenplay for Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers. In the mornings Harold sat around in his black silk dressing-gown at the Hotel Danieli ‘thinking of ways to kill Colin’ as he put it, referring to the unfortunate doomed young man in Ian’s novel. It was extremely foggy and you could not see across the lagoon, which seemed appropriate enough for this sinister, compelling tale of the backwaters of Venice.
In the afternoon, I became pathfinder and led us through the murk towards the Zattere. We were rewarded by the dazzl
ing, sparkling sun which suddenly found us there and we emerged on the side of the water blinking like the prisoners in Fidelio. Harold was moved to quote Yeats saying that you had to choose between life and art, but he didn’t see the necessity provided he could sit on the Zattere with me in the bright winter sun, look across to the Palladian churches on the Giudecca … and drink Corvo Bianco. This elegiac mood was splintered when we watched Salman’s book The Satanic Verses being publicly burned in Bradford to the accompaniment of raucous shouts. We gazed uncomprehendingly. Was this really happening in England? We were both old enough to have been told that people had quoted Heine in the 1930s about Germany and the rise of Nazism: ‘Wherever books are burnt, men, also, in the end are burned.’
We were leaving Bruce Chatwin’s memorial service in the Moscow Road, Bayswater on 14 February when the actual news of the fatwa was published. A member of the press approached Harold as he was leaving the Greek Orthodox Church and surprised him by asking him if he was Salman Rushdie. ‘No look behind you,’ I said, jokingly, pointing to Tom Maschler. We were told the hideous truth at the wake for Bruce. Thereafter, in my desperate wish to do something, it was at least consoling to be the current president of English PEN, the international writers’ organization. At least I was able to lead deputations to two successive foreign secretaries on the subject. On one occasion the Foreign Secretary said to me as we all gathered in the extremely gracious official drawing room: ‘I believe Mr Rushdie is not too uncomfortable.’ He spoke in a patrician tone which somehow implied that Salman, a man of substance both by upbringing and by his own achievements, was enjoying running water for the first time in his life.
Naturally Harold’s concern for all the issues involved – justice to the individual against an authoritarian decree and the whole question of free speech – made him vehement in public defence of Salman. It was an unequivocal issue for him. It wasn’t a question of any political party. I tried explaining this to Tony Powell when I had lunch with him. ‘These days I only come up to London for the dentist and Mrs Thatcher,’ he told me. ‘I’m madly keen on her,’ he says. ‘It’s like being eighteen again, as I desperately try and think of things to interest her.’ He went on: ‘Of course I hear that your and Harold’s politics these days are practically Militant Tendency.’ Me: ‘Oh, far to the left of that.’ Then he asked how Harold fitted his admiration for Larkin with the latter’s politics. I explained that Harold’s views on literature were quite unaffected, so far as I could see, by his views on social justice, in fact justice in general. He maintained them quite independently without being troubled by the fact that, for example, Eliot’s views on many things would have been very different from his own.