There are two excellent reasons to read this partial biography of the Nobel Laureate and playwright Harold Pinter through the diaries of his partner of 33 years, Lady Antonia Fraser. The first is the title, quoting the first words he spoke directly to her at the end of the dinner party at which they met in 1975 – Must you go? (She didn’t; they drank champagne for the rest of the night, and their ensuing relationship became a celebrated literary scandal.)
The second reason is that it is a rare opportunity to reach behind the public figure of Pinter to a private life he guarded jealously. When he and Lady Antonia, herself a biographer with aristocratic connections – her father was the eccentric prison reformer Lord Longford, and her brother, the author Thomas Pakenham, is the current Lord Longford – began their affair they were both married to well-known personalities. Pinter’s wife was the actress Vivien Merchant and Lady Antonia was married to the politician Sir Hugh Fraser.
She was pretty, blonde and successful. He was a handsome Jewish intellectual, famed for his plays’ theatre direction (notably “Pinter’s pregnant pauses”), and acting. He also became an outspoken activist, an especial critic of Tony Blair’s warmongering.
The book is therefore, inevitably, something of a name-dropper. It could not be otherwise. They did know a great many of the celebrities of their day, the rich, the famous and, irresistibly, the very talented writers and intellectuals who were Pinter’s closest confidantes.
Must You Go? is transparently a justification by Lady Antonia, author of historical biographies such as Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots and the rather unfortunate version of Charles II (which did not do well in the USA because, as her publisher pointed out, they were not even aware that there had been a Charles I), of the “inevitability” of their mutual love.
She has depicted Pinter as “the most uxorious of men”, rather surprisingly to the rest of us familiar with his work, and to prove it has included his six love poems to “A”, as well as his final poem to her during his terminal illness, which is certainly a paean to his devotion and the sort of tribute that any woman would cherish:
I shall miss you so much when I’m dead
The loveliest of smiles
The softness of your body in our bed
My everlasting bride
Remember that when I am dead
You are forever alive in my heart and my head (2007).
One cannot argue with the words of the master himself. But their affair of the heart came with a heavy cost to others. Sir Hugh seems to have taken the news of her change of affections rather well, considering they had six children together (all of them apparently – according to her – beautiful, brilliant and very well married, one to a Soros and another to a great-granddaughter of Winston Churchill).
But Pinter’s wife, who knew Lady Antonia, felt betrayed and did not go lightly. Her distress sank into depression and illness from which she did not recover. The author manages to get in a few thrusts, describing the about-to-be-ex-Mrs Pinter as a budding alcoholic, though this is disputed by Pinter’s private secretary who pointed out that he had been just as lavishly affectionate to his first wife (and in several affairs, notably with the actress Joan Blakewell), and that Harold drank just as much as Vivien.
It was during her decline that she became, sadly, overdependent on drink.
Worse still was the gradual withdrawal of Pinter’s only son, Daniel, a teenager at the time of his parent’s split, from the exuberant and glossy “new” family. He was to become permanently estranged, having changed his name (he now lives as a recluse).
There is something triumphal in her writing, which has of course been heavily edited by her. Ten years after they married in a civil ceremony she persuaded Pinter, an avowed anti-religionist, to go through a Catholic solemnisation of their marriage. Another classic is her description of meeting the American politician Jesse Jackson: “naturally he was incredibly pleased to meet Harold and me, we got the impression that it made his day”.
But much must be forgiven in our own quest to discover more about Pinter’s views, affections (especially cricket) and pet hates. It is, however, important to bear in mind that this is her, and not his, account. Certainly, other sources need to be consulted.
He was an utterly remarkable man with a great talent, perhaps unique in his generation. It is one of the abiding delights of my life that I, as a callow young woman, had the foresight to see two great knights of English theatre, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson, in Pinter’s production of his play No Man’s Land, in London in the 1970s. It was breathtakingly unforgettable, and is mentioned in some detail early on in this book.
Must You Go? is not a definitive nor unbiased biography, but it is interesting enough to provide a slightly breathless journey into a great man’s life and is, in the end, affecting. And if you want to read it just as a love story, you can.