ANTONIA FRASER’S DIARY

The most exciting recent news for me has been the opening of the Olympian heated all-season swimming pool in Hackney. It’s the steam in the freezing air which stirs me. Years ago, with the proceeds of MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, I built a small outdoor swimming pool in the north of Scotland which was heavily heated – well, it needed to be – and we regularly spent New Year hogmanaying in and out of the pool, the rising steam making it like the opening scene of Rheingold. Swimming is one of the great passions of my life, although I confess I practice swan-like swimming, head out of the water. Above all there is no age limit to swimming. And I can claim a strong ante-natal outdoor swimming life. I was born, three weeks late, in an August heat wave: my mother languishing in London found her only solace was swimming in the river – the Serpentine presumably – with her young sister-in-law Violet, future wife of Anthony Powell. I used to think that my mother must have exaggerated the heat until I found the entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary for 20 August 1932 (a week before I was born). It was the hottest weather in London for 21 years, she wrote: ‘The coolest place is the front seat of a car going at 40 or 50 miles with the windscreen open.’ I’m glad my mother chose the swimming option over the open car as I suppose antenatal influence might otherwise have made me a racing driver (if a rather slow one). As it is, I shall see if Hackney Olympian swimming pool will grant me access for a touch of swan-like swimming, on the grounds that I am married to a former resident, one born and bred in the district.

‘Going down to Daunts’ is the new pleasure in our neighbourhood. A branch of the Daunts Marylebone High Street bookshop has opened in Holland Park Avenue and I cannot emphasise too strongly what a lift to the spirits it is. We last had a friendly neighbourhood bookshop in Elgin Books, run by the late and very much lamented Mary Mackintosh. I need a bookshop run by people sympathetic enough to murmur this mantra discreetly as I enter: ‘Your book is doing really well.’ My paranoia needs it. By the way, the well brought up author should never question the speaker of the mantra: ‘What book?’ or grosser still ‘Who do you think I am?’ The mantra is the message.

No wonder, however, that we authors are paranoid when even the most famous among our number despise us. Lord Byron himself condemned ‘the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes, by themselves and others’ which he called ‘a sign of effeminacy, degeneracy and weakness’. He added nastily: ‘Who would write, who had anything better to do?’ The latter is the kind of thought that may strike any writer at 5.00am, the hour of anxiety, in the course of a book tour. I’ve been promoting my latest book LOVE AND LOUIS XIV: THE WOMEN IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN KING in both the UK and the US (naturally I am assured at Daunt’s that it is doing really well). In the hours of daylight on the other hand I feel more robust about the writer’s life, including the fact that I have never wanted to have anything better to do. After all, on a book tour, with very rare exceptions, you only encounter charming people who have chosen of their own free will to come out to meet you. It is true one only remembers the rare exceptions. At the 92nd St. Y in New York an attractive well-dressed woman lectured my audience crossly and at length on the more gruesome details of the royal Bourbon habits of post-mortem eviscerating and embalming… If there was a question, I failed to discern it. Eventually I replied feebly: ‘It’s not my area of speciality’ – and got a big (unintentional) laugh.

I am looking forward intensely to seeing Conor McPherson’s new play at the Cottesloe this week. The Seafarer is by all accounts brilliant: it’s McPherson’s debut at the National Theatre, and is described as ‘this powerful, funny, unsettling play’. The unsettling part of it I can well believe: two of McPherson’s other works, The Weir and Shining City contained coups de theatre, one verbal, the other a stage effect. I wouldn’t dream of revealing what either of them are, since like all good plays, McPherson’s works are always being seen somewhere by someone for the first time. In the case of The Seafarer, I note that one critic observes: ‘only a rotter would reveal the outcome’, so I’m prepared to jump out of my seat, either mentally or physically.

Never mind that seat out of which I’m going to jump will not be particularly comfortable, especially for those of us whose knees are challenged. The fact is that I have never had anything but a magic evening at the Cottesloe. A highlight recently was David Hare’s The Permanent Way, and going back, Ian Holm’s interpretation of King Lear. The same goes for the Donmar which is only marginally more comfortable. (I am looking forward to Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho next week.) No other theatres that I recall can claim such an unbroken record of artistic winners so far as I am concerned. Alas, why does art always make one suffer? Physically, that is.