The Blue Touch Paper
Page 33
In 1989 I went to direct The Secret Rapture in New York, first at the Public Theater, then on Broadway. Immediately after it transferred to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre my father died in Bexhill Hospital. During his last years he had attempted something which would pass for intimacy. ‘Nobody tells you,’ he said more than once, ‘nobody tells you what old age is going to be like. It’s bloody awful.’ I flew back to the UK after the opening of the play to console my mother, only to find news awaiting me that the play was to close after only ten days of full performances. Wallace Shawn advised me: ‘Broadway has very low standards, but somehow you don’t even meet those.’ At the weekend I flew back to New York to console the cast and to share sorrows with Joe Papp, who did not yet publicly admit to the cancer from which we all suspected he was suffering. Because he was contemplating the approach of his own mortality, my stillborn production devastated him as much as me. I was mortified to have disappointed him at such a moment. I flew home for my father’s funeral in a cramped chapel outside Battle.
By the end of that year, it was clear that my mother was yielding to the Alzheimer’s which had already shown itself while my father was alive. Nancy was letting go. We had an unhappy Christmas where I found her fully packed and dressed, sitting on the side of the bed waiting to go home, at 3 a.m., after just eight hours staying in my house. After Dad’s death she was well looked after by the Botwrights, her loving neighbours in Newlands Avenue, but after a while they warned us they could no longer vouch for her safety. So we moved her first to a residential home in the Park in Nottingham, near where my sister lived, and afterwards, when the disorientation became more severe, to a nursing home. When we sold her house it seemed pathetically small, the tiny crucible of huge feeling. The plumber to whom we sold it then arranged his surplus lavatory cisterns in rows in the back garden – a social offence for which he would have been run out of town in the 1950s. The world had changed, but Newlands Avenue had changed faster.
By 1991 Peggy Ramsay had long been prey to the same disease. She had persisted in going in to the office even though she had little idea what was happening, preferring to watch tennis on the television instead. Her identification with John McEnroe was by now complete. She loved him best for his hot temper, and most of all when he lost it. ‘People say he’s aggressive, but Caravaggio killed his opponent at tennis.’ When her secretary locked her in her room, saying she had to read a play – ‘This one’s by David, you have to read it’ – she was found a couple of hours later fast asleep on the sofa. Her loyal office had rung me in despair, saying that since I was one of only two people she trusted I might be able to persuade her to go into hospital. She loved me, it was up to me to protect her. She was refusing to go on the grounds that no one she knew who had ever gone into a hospital had ever come out. When I went to try and change her mind, she resisted me so fiercely that I said, very well, she could come and live in my house. Peggy leaned on my shoulder as I took her downstairs to the basement which I had prepared for her, but her condition deteriorated so rapidly that soon she was leaning on my shoulder again as I, feeling a traitor, led her into the hospital she dreaded. She’d been right. She died of bronchopneumonia within a few days. A few weeks later I came home at midnight to find twenty-six messages on my answering machine, all from different people, to tell me that Joe Papp had gone. Coming so soon after Peggy, it was unbearable. Caryl Churchill rang me to say, ‘David, everyone who believes in us is dying.’
In the middle of all this, I met Nicole Farhi. I walked into a party following the first night of a play, and across the room I saw a woman whose eyes laughed at me as though she knew me already. She was a fashion designer whose combination of integrity and style defied everything that is usually implied by the word ‘fashion’. She was also the cousin of my old friend Moris Farhi, who had acted in How Brophy Made Good. Five years previously I had written a film in which an Englishwoman sits envious and content in the bosom of a French Jewish family in Paris eating pot au feu, finding in them a warmth she cannot find in herself. On the eve of my marriage, watching a French Jewish family tuck into the seafood spaghetti, I realised that as so often, I was writing something, then living it. But unlike Gustav Mahler writing music about the death of his children, then having it happen, or Philip Roth giving his hero a heart attack and soon having one himself, my artistic prefiguring was wholly benign.
My mother came down from Nottingham for our wedding, for what was to be her penultimate visit to London. She was so charming and gentle to everyone that the other guests did not notice she was ill. In the coming years, during which my sister Margaret was close to her, it was hard for us to give her a birthday party every February and know that afterwards only Margaret and I would remember it. On one visit in June 1998, I wrote down exactly what Mum said to me, a series of remarks in the form of a Beckett monologue, which nevertheless revealed exactly where her wandering mind was focused.
I’m married to a nice, dear man.
Go quickly and I’ll say nothing and you’ll say nothing and our child will understand.
I get myself so dead I really can’t play with these things.
I can’t get a name to give to you.
Did you have a bad father?
I’ve got the money but I haven’t got the money.
But on occasions, Nancy could also rage. The most insistent theme of her conversation for many years was her desire to leave Woodthorpe Manor nursing home and go back to live with her mother in Paisley. She had had enough. She wanted to go home. Only Euphemia understood her. When she first began to ask for this, she would apologise afterwards. In the back of the car after a lunch with Margaret and me at which she had asked for little else, she said, ‘I’m sorry but I have to say these things.’ Later, however, she ceased to apologise. One day when she was sitting on a bench alone with me in the park, I had said repeatedly that, sadly, I could not take her back to live with her mother because her mother was no longer there. On this occasion Mum turned to me and, very unusually, looked me straight in the eye. ‘Well then damn you. Damn you to hell.’
On 7 November 2001 Mum was given a flu jab. The following day, she was alone in her room when she lay down on her bed and died. She was ninety-one. For her funeral eight days later, Bill Paterson gave me his recording of Robert Burns’s poem ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, which includes the lines:
I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy.
In my eulogy, I remembered how deliberately she’d given my sister and me the freedom which she herself had been denied in her upbringing. It was as if she had stepped aside in order that we might go ahead. Mum wanted us to have something she never had – or feared to have. ‘There is in the narrowness of her expectation something which burnt peculiarly bright, peculiarly pure. In modesty, she found grace. Expecting less than us, she somehow therefore gave more. If the struggle of life is to hold on to what is best in us, Mum won that struggle triumphantly.’
After the wake, Nicole and I drove back to London in silence. The formative events described in this book reached their proper conclusion on a day of streaming winter sunshine on the outskirts of Nottingham. Always expecting trouble round the next corner and absolutely certain I will miss the flight when only ninety minutes early at the airport, I am my mother’s son. In my recessiveness and apprehension of the wine waiter’s disapproval – ‘And a nice Bordeaux’ – am I my father’s? How can I tell? To answer that question I would have to have known him, and the chance has gone. Almost a hundred years ago my dad stole walnuts under the spreading tree in Chigwell. Today I walk the hills and imagine new ideas.
Acknowledgements
PLATE SECTION CREDITS
Howard Brenton © Snoo Wilson
Pen and ink drawing © Richard Cork, 1966
Royal Court: the playwrights of the 1971 season © Sunday Times
DH with Tennessee Williams, Manhattan, 1978 © Arnold Weissberger
Band and vocals for Teeth ’n’ Smil
es, 1975 © Roger Perry
Fanshen, the first production © John Haynes/Lebrecht Music & Arts
Bill Paterson, in Licking Hitler, 1977 © BBC Photo Library
Kate Nelligan as Susan Traherne in Plenty; National Theatre, London, April 1978 © Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL
DH with Kate Nelligan, Dreams of Leaving, 1979 © Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL
All other photos courtesy of the author.
Two short sections of the book, about Lancing and New York in 1965, were previously published in a different form in Areté.
With thanks to Ann and Lindsay Todd, Tom Stoppard, Philip Roth and the Peggy Ramsay Foundation for permission to quote from letters.
Illustrations
Mum and Dad, Abbey Close Church, Paisley, just having married, 22 October 1941
My sister Margaret and DH St Leonard’s, 1951
DH with Roger Dancey, cataloguing the primal scream, California, 1965
The Fields House prefects at Lancing College, 1964: first L, James Watson; third from L, DH; centre, Patrick Halsey, who took me to Dachau
Portable Theatre: watching from the stalls, Snoo Wilson, DH and Tony Bicât
Cambridge: DH pen and ink drawing by Richard Cork, 1966
Howard Brenton, photographed by Snoo
Royal Court: the playwrights of the 1971 season, L to R, DH, Ted Whitehead, David Storey. Front and centre, the gatekeeper, John Osborne
DH with Tennessee Williams, Manhattan, 1978
Andrew Dickson, Rene Augustus, Helen Mirren, Hugh Fraser, Mick Ford, band and vocals for Teeth ’n’ Smiles, 1975
Fanshen, the first production
Bill Paterson, in charge of black propaganda in Licking Hitler, 1977
Kate Nelligan, the bona fide great actress in Plenty
From L to R, Darcy, Margaret, Joe, DH and Lewis, in our loft in SoHo, Christmas, 1978
DH with Kate Nelligan, preparing the dance scenes for Dreams of Leaving, 1979
Also by David Hare
PLAYS ONE
(Slag, Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, Knuckle, Licking Hitler, Plenty)
PLAYS TWO
(Fanshen, A Map of the World, Saigon, The Bay at Nice, The Secret Rapture)
PLAYS THREE
(Skylight, Amy’s View, The Judas Kiss, My Zinc Bed)
RACING DEMON
MURMURING JUDGES
THE ABSENCE OF WAR
VIA DOLOROSA
THE BLUE ROOM
(from La Ronde by Schnitzler)
THE BREATH OF LIFE
THE PERMANENT WAY
STUFF HAPPENS
THE VERTICAL HOUR
GETHSEMANE
BERLIN/WALL
THE POWER OF YES
SOUTH DOWNS
BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Adaptations
PLATONOV by Chekhov
THE HOUSE OF BERNARDA ALBA by Lorca
ENEMIES by Gorky
Screenplays
COLLECTED SCREENPLAYS
(Wetherby, Paris by Night, Strapless,
Heading Home, Dreams of Leaving)
THE HOURS
Prose
ACTING UP
ASKING AROUND: BACKGROUND TO THE DAVID HARE TRILOGY
WRITING LEFT-HANDED
OBEDIENCE, STRUGGLE AND REVOLT
Copyright © 2015 by David Hare
First American Edition 2015
First published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber Ltd
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Hare, David, 1947–
The blue touch paper : a memoir / David Hare. —
First American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-393-24918-7 (hardcover)
1. Hare, David, 1947– 2. Dramatists, English—20th century—Biography.
I. Title.
PR6058.A678Z46 2015
822'.914—dc23
[B]
2015017212
ISBN: 978-0-393-24919-4 (e-book)
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