{"id":332,"date":"2016-02-25T17:59:50","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T17:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/?p=332"},"modified":"2022-05-29T08:58:36","modified_gmt":"2022-05-29T08:58:36","slug":"must-you-go-my-life-with-harold-pinter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/must-you-go-my-life-with-harold-pinter\/","title":{"rendered":"Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Antonia Fraser<\/strong>
\n 328 pp. New York: Random House<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong>[1]<\/sup><\/a> (Canada)<\/p>\n

\"1193034601\"<\/p>\n

The name Harold Pinter, renowned British playwright, conjures up notions of austerity and menace that emanate from a general impression that his work typically lurches along precipitous Beckettian pauses over which characters teeter as on the edge of complete annihilation.<\/p>\n

The impression may have some validity. However, another, much fuller personality emerges from Antonia Fraser\u2019s clear-eyed, effervescent memoir (done in diary form) of her life with Pinter. Somewhat surprisingly, we get to know him as a man of humour, vulnerability, self-irony and romance. This is an insightful story of two professional writers, both fully fledged members of London literati meeting in mid-life and mid-career, engaged professionally and personally as privileged molders of public opinion.<\/p>\n

But it is also a very private story of two richly endowed people made even more interesting by their differences. He is from Britain\u2019s lower middle class while she is the daughter of a British peer. He is very much left wing while she is married for eighteen years to a Conservative Member of Parliament. He is Jewish (and fairly neurotic). She is Irish Catholic and publicly proper. \u201cI considered myself to be happily married,\u201d says Fraser in an early journal entry, admiring her first husband, the father of her six children for his decency and detachment. \u201cHarold, I learned\u2026did not consider himself to be happily married.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fraser\u2019s cool matter-of-fact tone — and one would expect nothing less from the author of such historical works as Marie Antoinette<\/em> and Mary Queen of Scots<\/em> — both reveals and conceals. Knowing Pinter\u2019s precision with language, how accurately his plays articulate the destructive forces bubbling away in crucibles of the social situations he unflinchingly creates, one can see here how the logics of these two word masters match up. Especially in contrast to his first wife, Vivian Merchant, an avowed anti-intellectual and as apparently \u2018dramatic\u2019 offstage as on. In his standard biography, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter<\/em> (1996), British critic Michael Billington clearly identified Pinter\u2019s creative fascination with what he suggests is the duality of the female — perhaps in life as well as in the plays.<\/p>\n

Fraser, an enthusiastic, modern Pepys in her documentation of the passing scene, does not articulate the deepest levels of their passion, the real mystery of their attraction, although it is there, below the surface, solidly informing every journal entry. Fraser isn\u2019t the poet. Pinter is. In fact his poems to her acknowledge that core intensity, its transformative power: \u201cMy heart is not a beat away from you\/ You turn and touch the light of me.\/ You smile and I become the man\/ You loved before, but never knew.\u201d His avowals of love to her seem as profound as they are simple. \u201cI love you and want to marry you,\u201d emanates from a man who sees in partnership with this woman his fullest self-expression, a realization that prompts him to override her objections with a happily insistent: \u201cI like being married. I think we had better get married.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fraser\u2019s account of how she breaks the news of her new relationship with Pinter to Hugh, her exceedingly likeable husband, adroitly mingles tragedy and farce. When Hugh asks her whether she is in love with this someone else, he is shocked at her affirmative reply but seems to accept it when he comes to understand that his wife has at least fallen in love with \u201cthe best living playwright.\u201d Some weeks later, she brings both men together and then proceeds to watch her husband and lover companionably drink whiskey amidst amiable discussions of cricket, the West Indies and Proust.<\/p>\n

Of course Pinter and Fraser do take the plunge together and, surviving the onslaughts of a prurient press, the dislocation of various moves to accommodate writing and children. Valiantly, they charge off together on a trajectory of fully self-determined lives.<\/p>\n

Fraser\u2019s diaries delight in the couple\u2019s many professional friendships, writers with whom Pinter shares process, among them Tom Stoppard who, we learn, once confronted Pinter about too much swearing in No Man\u2019s Land.<\/em> We find the two playwrights also sharing cricket. There\u2019s even a lovely photo of Pinter and Stoppard striding forth on the cricket pitch with Stoppard as the wicket keeper in bright red gloves. It comes from Fraser\u2019s first foray to watch Pinter in action. She recalls a strenuous game in which this cool collected playwright roars down the pitch, falls, injures a leg and has to be carried away on a stretcher. Gone are any analogies one might make between the long leisurely game and those famous Pinter pauses. In fact cricket, we learn was rigorously recalled by Pinter in No Man\u2019s Land<\/em>, where the characters are named after players from a pre-war cricketing golden age.<\/p>\n

Much more productive for thinking about Pinter pauses are some of his moments with Samuel Beckett whose work Pinter admired greatly and in whose company Pinter spent much time. Upon first meeting him, Fraser herself is \u201cknocked sideways by Beckett\u2019s physical appearance, the elegant severity of his tall spare figure, thick grey-white hair and aquamarine eyes.\u201d A later entry sees the two playwrights sitting in La Coupole in Paris moaning about the world. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Sam, if I sound very gloomy,\u201d says Pinter. This is followed by Beckett\u2019s response (no doubt after a long pause): \u201cOh you couldn\u2019t be more gloomy than I am, Harold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fraser\u2019s effervescent phrase-making conveys many memorable moments of close encounter with luminaries such as Peter Hall, Simon Gray, Vaclav Havel, John Fowles, Robert Shaw and Salman Rushdie. These represent truly joyful friendships for both Fraser and Pinter which nourishes them both creatively and personally. And there is never a moment of professional rivalry between Fraser and Pinter. They offer suggestions on each other\u2019s work, disagree at times but they never compete. As cultural heavyweights, their genres and modes are different enough to always avoid acrimony.<\/p>\n

Pinter\u2019s sense of world citizenship and the extra duties that he felt his work as an artist required of him continued to develop through the eighties and nineties. Through Fraser\u2019s eyes, we see his debates with Joan Didion about US policy towards El Salvador. We understand Pinter\u2019s growing frustrations with the personal aspects of his various political battlelines. \u201cWhy don\u2019t they concentrate on what I\u2019m angry about?\u201d he tells his wife. After his death, she records finding a place-card from some forgotten dinner party, on the back of which she had written in response to an argument at the table: \u201cDarling \u2013 You are right. So SHUT UP.\u201d<\/p>\n

During these years of marches and demonstrations and PEN events in support of imprisoned writers around the world, both Fraser and Pinter agree with playwright Christopher Hampton\u2019s assessment that \u201cIf one guard kicks one prisoner less hard, it will have been worth it.\u201d Together they witness the hammering down of the Berlin Wall and welcome Vaclav Havel to London (after their very affectionate time with him in the Czech Republic) where they listen to the Queen express interest at Havel\u2019s change of life from playwright to president with the words: \u201cBut of course you were always working with your head.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fraser refers to an existential despair that she felt descended on her husband in the mid-eighties, partly due to the state of the world and partly to his giving up smoking after her former husband dies of lung cancer. Adverse critical and popular response to his interpretation of a Simon Gray play further extended this melancholia which, she says, spread across the surface of his life \u201clike black water lilies,\u201d (illustrating also that when it comes to understanding the man she loves, Fraser does find poetry).<\/p>\n

His creative angst at this time is tempered by holidays with both family and close professional friends such as Ronald Harwood and Simon Gray. After one week on a Greek island where the three of them gave private readings of their new plays. Fraser quips that their harmony was quite \u201cmiraculous,\u201d since it could, after all \u201chave been an Agatha Christie situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last section of the book, entitled Steps Downward,<\/em> chronicles Pinter\u2019s physical demise and the triumph of their love over heartbreaking pain. In 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with esophagal cancer. Their lives continue as full as ever between chemotherapy, the loss of his brilliant black hair, impossible diets and surgeon consultations which map the parts of his stomach that will be cut. He even writes his own cancer poem, the last stanza of which reads: \u201cThe black cells will dry up and die\/ Or sing with joy and have their way. They breed so quietly night and day,\/ You never know, they never say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each of the lovers worries endlessly about the other. When the cancer is for the moment defeated, Pinter is diagnosed with an auto immune blood disease \u201cwhere the body attacks the body.\u201d Then blazing joy. One morning, from his study, Pinter calls to her office in another part of the house saying, \u201cIt seems I have won the Nobel prize.\u201d The house fills up with flowers. Pinter tells her that he is determined that his Nobel speech will be \u201cwise, lucid, sane and tolerant.\u201d Unable to get to Stockholm, however, and now in terrible physical discomfort, he records his pugnacious speech at the BBC. \u201cSometimes,\u201d he says, \u201ca writer has to smash the mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n

Near the end, he writes her a poem, the first line of which reads: \u201cI shall miss you so much when I\u2019m dead.\u201d They take comfort in their favourite Shakespearean sonnet, \u2018Let me not to the marriage of true minds.\u2019 Life goes tumultuously, bravely on. Until it stops on December 24, 2008. She kisses him and leaves the hospital room admitting that it is finally time for him to go, poignantly echoing the words he said to her upon their first romantic meeting thirty years earlier: \u201cMust you go?\u201d<\/p>\n

A fascinating and tender book. Essential reading for lovers of Pinter. Essential reading too for lovers.<\/p>\n

\n

\"1089381971\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] Patricia Keeney<\/strong> is a Professor of Creative Writing based in Toronto as well as a poet, novelist and theatre critic.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2011 Patricia Keeney
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
\nCreative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Antonia Fraser 328 pp. New York: Random House Reviewed by Patricia Keeney[1] (Canada) The name Harold Pinter, renowned British playwright, conjures up notions of austerity and menace that emanate from a general impression that his work typically lurches along<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":333,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","","tg-column-two"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2016\/02\/1193034601.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7j4tu-5m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}