Book Review

Mr and mrs Pinter, at Home

Must You Go? My life with Harold Pinter

Let me admit it: I cried at Antonia Fraser’s description of her husband, Harold Pinter’s, death from cancer. “Must you go?” she writes. “Yes, it was time. Before I left the room, after another, last kiss, I said: ‘Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’.” That passage came close to redeeming the rest of the book. But not quite.

Based on her diaries, supplemented by memories, this book is a way of coming to terms with her loss. It is an account of their life together, a yin-yang diagram, with their different, complementary attributes: the celebrated Jewish playwright and the Catholic historian, he dark and saturnine, she blonde, fascinating, titled (never to be, as one paper put it, merely “plain Mrs Pinter”). As the author says, it is “certainly not my complete life and certainly not his. In essence, it is a love story…”.

Well, yes. But this single-minded focus on Antonia and Harold seems entirely characteristic. The most riveting part of the book is her account of their early relationship, the affair that started when she was about to leave a dinner party at her sister’s, and went over to say goodbye to Pinter: “He looked at me with those amazing, extremely bright black eyes. ‘Must you go?’ he said. I thought of home, my lift, taking the children to school the next morning … ‘No, it’s not absolutely essential,’ I said.” He gave her a lift home and stayed at her house until six the next morning. And from that point on, no consideration about other people seems to have altered her conviction that this passion was something to which everything else must give way.

Yet each of them had been married for 18 years, almost to the same day. He had a wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, and a son; she was married to the long-suffering and devoted Hugh Fraser and had six children. Just how do you walk out on a husband and six young children? We never get to know.

For ordinary people, the children would, merely in practical terms, be a formidable obstacle to an obsessional affair. Yet the series of assignations, including a prolonged stay in Paris, that initiated it seem to have been remarkably unaffected by domestic obligations, even given that, usefully, some of the children were away at school. At the outset it would appear that they were minded by their father – indeed, Antonia has the nerve to say that living as a bachelor with six children probably rather suited Hugh Fraser. Later he tells her he will never be happy again, although he was “content”.

Yet she is kind about Hugh, which is more than can be said for her treatment of Vivien Merchant. She talks about her Medea face, about her alcoholism, about how unhappy she had made Harold, about the sheer inconvenience of her not granting him an unproblematic divorce: all because Vivien refused to make it easy for Pinter to leave her. She behaved like a wronged wife: Antonia didn’t like that.

But you could say that poor Vivien had the last laugh, even though she died, miserably, two years later. Harold Pinter’s first marriage was the context for his great plays; his second was not. As for Joan Bakewell, with whom Harold had a seven-year affair during his first marriage, Antonia is courteous, but points out that during the course of it he had also a relationship with an American whom he called Cleopatra. The love lives of the intelligentsia can seem like so many Russian dolls.

The marriage did make both Harold and Antonia happy. But it’s not their mutual contentment which is so striking. It’s the privileged life of two members of what she describes as the “Bohemian class”. So much time is spent in the company of a succession of VIPs – not, by any means all friends, just a roll call of beautiful people, literary and theatrical celebrities, enjoying the company of other terribly famous people. The backdrop is a series of high-octane, first-night parties, weekends in historic houses, luxurious resorts. Which does not prevent the author reminding us that she is left wing; the glam parties are punctuated with political demonstrations. Sometimes it all gets a bit much. Travelling to a party to celebrate Labour’s election victory, she asks Harold teasingly whether it would be the ultimate in radical chic to insist on a Labour-voting driver. Dear, oh, dear.

There is light relief when Lord Longford surfaces: when he finally decides to accept Pinter as his son-in-law, he follows him determinedly into the gents’ loos at a party, so as to shake his hand.

For anyone interested in Harold Pinter, this is required reading. Here, surprisingly, he displays uxoriousness, personal kindness, friendliness to children – Mr Cuddles, as he once remarked. And, while he had renounced his own Jewish faith, he was respectful of Antonia’s Catholicism, such as it was. When they were finally married by the Church (in the person of the Jesuit, Fr Michael Campbell-Johnston) after the death of their spouses, he joined in the ceremony; indeed, he manifestly had a spiritual side. And there are riveting insights into the way he worked. But for most of us, this book is compelling for a different insight, into the lives of the late-twentieth-century elite in all their spoilt complacency. It’s a love story all right, but so much more besides.

Back to homepage

       

The clear message that emerged from the symposium on child sexual abuse held in Rome from ...

According to the chairman of governors at the Cardinal Vaughan School, west London, one ...

There was an old Sixties TV series, Branded, about a disgraced soldier that always began ...