Celebration of Harold Pinter
by Julia M. Klein
NOVEMBER 1, 2010 TAGS:
The title of Antonia Fraser’s new memoir, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), borrows the question the famous playwright asked the bestselling historian at a dinner party early in their acquaintance.
It was a charged question, even then. Both were married, though not faithfully, to other people. Fraser’s husband was the Tory MP Sir Hugh Fraser, with whom she had six children. Pinter was married, less happily, to the actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son. But when the two middle-aged writers met, their attraction was mutual and overpowering, not to be denied.
So Fraser told Pinter at that fateful dinner party that, “No, it’s not absolutely essential” that she leave. And that response led to a passionate affair, tabloid scandal, two divorces, and eventually a marriage of true minds that lasted until Pinter’s death at 78, in 2008, from cancer.
But Must You Go? is not primarily a grief memoir or a chronicle of loss. There is far more joy in it than sorrow.
Fraser, best-known for her biographies Mary Queen of Scots (1969) and Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001), has used more than three decades’ worth of pithy, clever and frequent diary entries as the backbone of this tremendously engaging account. In some cases, she has re-organized entries by topic, breaking the chronological flow. She also interrupts periodically to summarize, comment, or fill in gaps. But the interpolations rarely seem intrusive, probably because they share the same sympathetic, dryly witty voice as the journal itself.
The nonlinear narrative does occasion some minor confusion about dates. But, overall, the book works beautifully – as both a rare love story and a sharp portrait of life in the upper echelons of British literary society. This is clearly a very pleasant place to be.
The couple knows everyone, and everyone knows them. They travel around Europe for movie screenings and Pinter festivals, and to New York for Broadway openings. In between solitary bouts of writing, they enjoy lunches, dinners, fancy-dress balls, and after-theater parties with other writers, directors, movie stars, foreign dissidents, and occasional royalty. The gossip is fantastic.
Here, for example, is Pinter exchanging dolorous pleasantries with Samuel Beckett:
“I’m sorry, Sam, if I sound very gloomy,” Pinter says.
“Oh, you couldn’t be more gloomy than I am, Harold,” Beckett responds.
Fraser’s apt comment: “It’s exactly the sort of dialogue people would imagine the two masters having when alone.”
Fraser gives us the household Pinter, a man whose public irascibility turned to private uxoriousness, whose mantra was that their union had made him “the luckiest man in the world.” At times, their love seems mythic. “Ulysses is back with his Penelope,” Fraser announces when he returns from his travels. He writes poems, like “To My Wife,” in which he says, “I was dead and now I live.”
Together, they enjoy a dazzling coterie of friends: the playwrights Simon Gray, Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller; the director Mike Nichols; the novelist Salman Rushdie; the medical memoirist Dr. Oliver Sacks. Fraser’s recollections are mostly gentle and generous. She calls Philip Roth “always very funny” and “marvelous company;” professes herself “platonically in love” with Nichols, and says, after reading Stoppard’s work, she feels “privileged” to be his friend.
Occasionally, thank goodness, Fraser’s observations can sting. She quotes Warren Beatty’s come-on to her: “If you hadn’t met Harold, you would have had a lot of trouble with me….Do you have a sister? How would she feel about a thirty-eight-year-old Hollywood degenerate?”
She is flattered, but not entirely taken in. “That man deserves his reputation!” the diarist records. “Later I watch him working the gold salon, evidently saying something along the same lines to every woman in the room, regardless of age, as a result of which a lot of women are very, very happy.”
A conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who this October won the Nobel Prize for Literature, heads into sit-com territory. He tells Fraser that he is a great admirer of Pinter – especially Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That play is, of course, Edward Albee’s masterpiece, but Fraser reports that she “merely replied ‘Mmmm’ where a less attractive man might have got a curt correction.”
Pinter, who would himself become a Nobel laureate in 2005, is most revered for his plays (The Homecoming, Old Times, Betrayal, Celebration), with their famous pauses, sinister characters and air of foreboding, and his screenplays (Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant’s Woman). But Fraser reminds us that he was also a successful director, a charismatic actor, and a poet of heartbreaking tenderness.
In his later years, Pinter was an often intemperate critic of U.S. and British foreign policy, taking iconoclastic positions that were sometimes too extreme for Fraser. He was, for example, a defender of the Serbs, and opposed the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Fraser says she admired his courage and candor even when she didn’t agree with his politics.
Pinter’s decline began in December 2001, with a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. There followed seven years marked by ulcers, falls, infections, an auto-immune blood disease called Pemphigus, and, finally, lung cancer. Fraser gives us some of the painful details, but also the pleasures of those final years – the Nobel lecture, his heroic wheelchair-bound solo performance in Krapp’s Last Tape, the public tributes, his expressions of gratitude for her devotion.
“I know I’m not the gallant you married,” he tells her. Nor is she any longer the romantic beauty, Fraser replies. And then she adds: “All the same, the gallant and the romantic beauty were never quite forgotten, but seen through a prism of time and also long-lasting happiness.”
As he lies dying, she is there beside him, to the end: “Antonia, who loves you.” The memoir, she says, is her way of calling him back, an anguished cry that is the cry of all mourners: “Must you go?”
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
It was a charged question, even then. Both were married, though not faithfully, to other people. Fraser’s husband was the Tory MP Sir Hugh Fraser, with whom she had six children. Pinter was married, less happily, to the actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son. But when the two middle-aged writers met, their attraction was mutual and overpowering, not to be denied. So Fraser told Pinter at that fateful dinner party that, “No, it’s not absolutely essential” that she leave. And that response led to a passionate affair, tabloid scandal, two divorces, and eventually a marriage of true minds that lasted until Pinter’s death at 78, in 2008, from cancer.
But Must You Go? is not primarily a grief memoir or a chronicle of loss. There is far more joy in it than sorrow.
Fraser, best-known for her biographies Mary Queen of Scots (1969) and Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001), has used more than three decades’ worth of pithy, clever and frequent diary entries as the backbone of this tremendously engaging account. In some cases, she has re-organized entries by topic, breaking the chronological flow. She also interrupts periodically to summarize, comment, or fill in gaps. But the interpolations rarely seem intrusive, probably because they share the same sympathetic, dryly witty voice as the journal itself.
The nonlinear narrative does occasion some minor confusion about dates. But, overall, the book works beautifully – as both a rare love story and a sharp portrait of life in the upper echelons of British literary society. This is clearly a very pleasant place to be.
The couple knows everyone, and everyone knows them. They travel around Europe for movie screenings and Pinter festivals, and to New York for Broadway openings. In between solitary bouts of writing, they enjoy lunches, dinners, fancy-dress balls, and after-theater parties with other writers, directors, movie stars, foreign dissidents, and occasional royalty. The gossip is fantastic.
Here, for example, is Pinter exchanging dolorous pleasantries with Samuel Beckett:
“I’m sorry, Sam, if I sound very gloomy,” Pinter says.
“Oh, you couldn’t be more gloomy than I am, Harold,” Beckett responds. Fraser’s apt comment: “It’s exactly the sort of dialogue people would imagine the two masters having when alone.”
Fraser gives us the household Pinter, a man whose public irascibility turned to private uxoriousness, whose mantra was that their union had made him “the luckiest man in the world.” At times, their love seems mythic. “Ulysses is back with his Penelope,” Fraser announces when he returns from his travels. He writes poems, like “To My Wife,” in which he says, “I was dead and now I live.”
Together, they enjoy a dazzling coterie of friends: the playwrights Simon Gray, Tom Stoppard and Arthur Miller; the director Mike Nichols; the novelist Salman Rushdie; the medical memoirist Dr. Oliver Sacks. Fraser’s recollections are mostly gentle and generous. She calls Philip Roth “always very funny” and “marvelous company;” professes herself “platonically in love” with Nichols, and says, after reading Stoppard’s work, she feels “privileged” to be his friend.
Occasionally, thank goodness, Fraser’s observations can sting. She quotes Warren Beatty’s come-on to her: “If you hadn’t met Harold, you would have had a lot of trouble with me….Do you have a sister? How would she feel about a thirty-eight-year-old Hollywood degenerate?”
She is flattered, but not entirely taken in. “That man deserves his reputation!” the diarist records. “Later I watch him working the gold salon, evidently saying something along the same lines to every woman in the room, regardless of age, as a result of which a lot of women are very, very happy.”
A conversation with Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who this October won the Nobel Prize for Literature, heads into sit-com territory. He tells Fraser that he is a great admirer of Pinter – especially Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That play is, of course, Edward Albee’s masterpiece, but Fraser reports that she “merely replied ‘Mmmm’ where a less attractive man might have got a curt correction.”
Pinter, who would himself become a Nobel laureate in 2005, is most revered for his plays (The Homecoming, Old Times, Betrayal, Celebration), with their famous pauses, sinister characters and air of foreboding, and his screenplays (Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant’s Woman). But Fraser reminds us that he was also a successful director, a charismatic actor, and a poet of heartbreaking tenderness.
In his later years, Pinter was an often intemperate critic of U.S. and British foreign policy, taking iconoclastic positions that were sometimes too extreme for Fraser. He was, for example, a defender of the Serbs, and opposed the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Fraser says she admired his courage and candor even when she didn’t agree with his politics. Pinter’s decline began in December 2001, with a diagnosis of esophageal cancer. There followed seven years marked by ulcers, falls, infections, an auto-immune blood disease called Pemphigus, and, finally, lung cancer. Fraser gives us some of the painful details, but also the pleasures of those final years – the Nobel lecture, his heroic wheelchair-bound solo performance in Krapp’s Last Tape, the public tributes, his expressions of gratitude for her devotion.
“I know I’m not the gallant you married,” he tells her. Nor is she any longer the romantic beauty, Fraser replies. And then she adds: “All the same, the gallant and the romantic beauty were never quite forgotten, but seen through a prism of time and also long-lasting happiness.”
As he lies dying, she is there beside him, to the end: “Antonia, who loves you.” The memoir, she says, is her way of calling him back, an anguished cry that is the cry of all mourners: “Must you go?”
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
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