Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

by Antonia Fraser

  5 August

  Incident at dinner left me shaken. An extremely gracious dinner at which only Harold is not wearing a tie. Many tables. Harold and I are separated. Suddenly I notice Harold’s black face and think someone has raised the subject of El Salvador. Later I learn that an old, rather drunken man has made a series of remarks described as ‘Fascist’ but actually blaming the Jews for starting both world wars. Harold, very wearily as he said later, feels he cannot let this pass. Hostess naturally very upset (at the drunken man, who was described as ‘a bit of a lunatic’, not Harold). Harold tells me the worst moment is overhearing someone explaining to the ‘Fascist’ that he, Harold, is Jewish, as if that was in any way the point. Having recorded this, I should also record that the next day at Bailey’s Beach Harold was the centre of polite and sincere attention, and every single person who had been at the dinner came and apologized formally and sweetly. One Senator’s wife said she spoke ‘on behalf of Rhode Island’.

  27 August 1982

  My fiftieth birthday. Harold has brought us all to the North British Hotel, Edinburgh. I’m probably one of the luckiest women to be fifty. To be happily married, no, very happily married to someone who is the centre of my life, to have six of the best in the way of children. Harold of course tells me that I look twenty-seven, and when I say, ‘Oh, come on,’ and he replies, ‘Well, thirty-seven then,’ I’m affronted and find I prefer twenty-seven after all.

  Picnic on King Arthur’s Seat. I see Benjie after a long gap because he has been working in Scotland and going to a restaurant without my glasses, cry out: ‘My son, my son!’ A total stranger rises from his seat and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to have a mother.’ Benjie looks incredibly well and handsome when I do manage to find the right person: how could I have been mistaken?

  9 October

  World premiere of Other Places at the NT, the overall title for A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station and Family Voices. I suppose I will see Alaska many, many times in my life with many, many actresses but I shall never see the experience of Deborah more simply, perfectly and painfully created than by Judi Dench. Those first movements after twenty-nine years asleep: the little broad child-woman, stubby legged, strong as an animal, balancing, unbalancing, falling. And at the end, after the regression (totally convincing, it was happening to her) those last, sad words of a woman going back into the void: ‘I think I have the matter in proportion.’ Pause. ‘Thank you.’

  14 October

  Press night. I began to sob, silently I hope, during Judi’s last agonizing, heart-rending speech, and as we got into the little manager’s office afterwards, collapsed in floods. Peter and Jenny Hall backed out hastily, thinking they had walked in on some personal tragedy: ‘The play, the play–’ I wept.

  Dr Oliver Sacks came from the US and this was the beginning of the privilege of his friendship. Later Harold gave him dinner, together with his close friends Jonathan and Rachel Miller. Harold asked Ollie: ‘May I ask what it is you do?’ He meant: ‘Do you plan to cure people, do good, alleviate, or make medical discoveries?’ Ollie responded with a long letter. I get a helpful book on migraine from him which helps me to understand this wretched condition from which I am a mild and my mother a serious sufferer.

  1983

  I record in my Diary in 1983 that ‘our bridge is strangely brilliant these days’. We win and win, defeating far better players like Peter Jay and Hugh Stephenson and the Waldegraves. I write a poem for our wedding anniversary which expresses my romantic feelings about our union in that respect (as Susanna Gross says much later: bridge, because it’s about partnership, is a romantic game).

  FOR MY PARTNER

  You’re my two-hearts-as-one

  Doubled into game

  You’re my Blackwood

  You’re my Gerber

  You’re my Grand Slam, vulnerable

  Doubled and redoubled

  Making all other contracts

  Tame.

  27 November 1983

  24 January

  Went for a walk with Harold in Kew Gardens in winter sunshine. A notice runs: ‘The wildlife may attack you at certain seasons of the year.’ Harold points to it: ‘But I am in a mellow mood.’ A placid meander: vivid yellow witch hazel, and the huge lovely new temperate plant house.

  3 February

  In Jamaica where Harold’s old school friend (co-evacuee to Caerhays) Maurice Stoppi now lives with his wife, Tiny Henriques – and she is tiny, also exquisite with speedwell blue eyes behind her Christian Dior sunglasses. Maurice vividly remembers Harold as a little boy of ten with a shiny black cash notebook, scribbling stories in it with the stub of a pencil: ‘Cars screeched down the streets of Chicago and there was the rat-a-tat of cross machine-gun fire’, etc. Taxed Harold with this later: ‘Your first work?’ ‘I do remember the notebook. My father gave it to me. He nicked a bundle of those notebooks from the ARP station where he was a warden in the Blitz. So I must have wanted to write something.’

  Harold now writes the first of many little poems about my habit of swimming which intrigues him (he himself rarely swims; when he does it’s with a great splashing like a dog retrieving a ball). It includes the lines: ‘How you swim / Like a flower / Unfolding forever’. Then he reads me ‘Dover Beach’, and he proceeds to make it his task to learn it by heart. Later he talks about his current inability to write since the death of Vivien six months earlier. All he can do is write a private poem about his happiness with me but: ‘Happiness is not dramatic,’ he says sternly. Harold: ‘While she was alive, if you think about it, so much of my work was about unhappy frozen married relationships.’ He gives the example of Landscape and the wife’s retreat at the end into memories of a happy marriage-that-never-was. Harold: ‘I could never write the Strindberg thing. It’s not my way. Not the way of my art anyway. Too cruel.’

  17 February

  New York on the way back. Poor Harold arrives with a serious chest infection which does not help him to face the ceremonies arranged by Sam Spiegel for the launch of the film Betrayal with equanimity. The best thing that happens to us is having dinner in Soho with Oliver Sacks. This is the place where he comes and sits in a booth and just scribbles and scribbles: ‘I always have a notebook and pen with me. The pen must be green.’ For me, meeting Ollie is like having bumped into a prophet by chance. Harold very ill, almost floating with it but groans: ‘I’m sorry you’re not having a nice time.’ As though he was. Actually meeting Ollie is as nice a time as anyone could possibly have.

  The next year we went to City Island to see him. He was standing bear-like as ever, in the porch of his little dark-red clapboard house, smiling in the sunshine. Harold swears his first words were: ‘And so …’ The house was extremely close to the sea and Ollie told us that he swims in and out of the moored boats like a seal.

  18 February

  Sam Spiegel arranges a two-hour press conference. Harold cuts and runs, to find me just finishing lunch with the distinguished scholar Elaine Pagels. We are discussing the asceticism of the Jewish–Christian tradition, and how St Augustine thought that in Paradise there would have been no desire, thus no pleasure in sex; thus pleasure in sex is wrong. Despite the sheer fascination of this conversation, Harold went upstairs and collapsed. I learned later that the questioning went like this: Man: ‘The first performance of The Caretaker was at the Royal Court, wasn’t it?’ Harold: ‘No.’ Man: ‘What is interesting is that my father had a pub just round the corner from the Royal Court.’ Harold: ‘Oh.’ He flees and meets second interviewer in the lift. Second interviewer: ‘Ho, ho, now you can’t escape me.’ Harold: ‘Oh, yes I can,’ and so on. And so he did.

  15 March

  Rebecca West dies. I felt oddly sad, despite her great age – no feelings like ‘She had a good life.’ More: ‘Why couldn’t it go on?’ She was always very nice to me. Unlike the rest of the world, I think she liked our ‘scandal’ and identified with it! I always remember her in a taxi after we judged the Booker Prize together. She
asked me about Mary Queen of Scots, newly published: ‘Are you making lots of lovely money?’ Me: ‘Well, certainly more than I’ve ever had.’ Rebecca: ‘Then spend it’ – said triumphantly – ‘while you are young and pretty.’ Nothing Puritan about her.

  19 May

  Harold’s anvil is beginning to strike sparks. At Le Caprice, he starts to talk about a play about imprisonment and torture: ‘These people would be very aware of their condition … wryly so. Nothing explicit. No blood, no torture scene.’ Me: ‘Quick, quick, there must be a paper and pencil here. This is Le Caprice, Jeffrey Archer’s favourite restaurant.’ Harold then cites the end of Jacobo Timerman’s book about being a political prisoner in the Argentine. He describes a woman taken down from her cell for the morning session. The guard is heard saying: ‘Hurry up, you stupid bitch.’ She’s never seen again.

  This was the first sighting of the play that became One for the Road but the image vanished until the following January.

  9 June

  General Election. Harold and I toddled up the hill to Fox Primary School to vote. He finally decided to vote SDP as a protest against the Tories, and also against Labour’s dishonesty over nuclear weapons (Healey and co. not telling the truth whichever way you look at it).

  23 July

  The Guardian Match (Harold’s own XI against the newspaper’s team). As Simon Gray, ever to the point, said: ‘The Guardian Match is like Christmas, all that anticipation, dread, drama, regret, disappointment, pleasure – and then it’s over.’ It’s true. Like Christmas, the Guardian Match, in my mother’s favourite rhyme, ‘comes but once a year but when it comes it brings good cheer’. Buffet here first in garden, including Ossie Gooding, the prized West Indian bowler, and Benjie, specially here from Scotland. At the match all three boys play. As Hugh specifically broke away from Ascot and ‘the Big Race’ in order to see his three sons performing, it was written in the stars that all three (normally accomplished players) should get ducks. But Hugh in genial mood nonetheless. His appearance was much appreciated by all and he marched about pouring tea for the cricketers out of the huge teapot with much vigour as though this was a constituency event; he particularly liked Ossie Gooding with whom he was able to discuss the West Indies, where he had gone many times as Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office.

  26 July

  In Chichester to see Patricia Hodge, heroine of both the film Betrayal and the TV series Jemima Shore Investigates, as Rosalind, a ravishing girl by Watteau come to life. I dashed into Chichester Cathedral at 9 a.m. while Harold bought some shoes nearby, in his eternal quest for a good pair of shoes (shades of Davies in The Caretaker). A strange mystical experience. For I saw for the first time the Earl and Countess of Arundel lying in stone. Larkin’s poem to their joint tomb was pinned to a nearby pillar. Their hands were touching. ‘All that remains of us is love.’ Deeply moved. Flew to the shoe shop and extricated Harold who clearly thought it was a little early in the morning for all this. Other thoughts were running through his head, to do with plastic bags of shoes and American Express, while I meditated soppily on our ‘stone fidelity’. Finally he did put down the shoes and he did recite the poem and all was well. So in a way, the faint absurdity, it was quite a Larkinesque scene, if not quite in the touching romantic way I had originally imagined.

  27 November

  Gave a party for our third wedding anniversary. Everyone commented on the congenial atmosphere. Rachel pointed out that everyone we asked (the first fifty people who came into my mind) was creative. True when I looked: whether Jean Muir or Alan Bates.

  1984

  6 January

  Harold has a row with two Turkish girls on the subject of torture at a family birthday party; (‘little monsters’). I fell asleep afterwards and awoke to hear Harold saying ‘I’m writing.’

  7 January

  Late at night Harold comes back from the Super-Study: ‘I’d like to read it to you.’ And oh my God! It’s all there – power and powerlessness. I dreamed about it in agonies all night. My personal nightmare: powerlessness to protect those you love. Harold will call it One for the Road: he used Anglo-Saxon names to make it universal ‘although such things don’t usually happen here’. Goes through names of cricketers. I stop him when he starts choosing a name for the child. The child is not seen (thank heaven). But Harold changes his mind: ‘No, I’ll have the child there.’ And writes a new scene there and then, producing the most chilling line of all: ‘My soldiers don’t like you either, my little darling.’ Harold: ‘It feels so good to write. I’d forgotten.’ Me, feelingly: ‘Well, you haven’t lost your touch, to put it mildly.’

  15 February

  Paris. Pinter to Beckett (in the Coupole) after talking for some time about politics: ‘I’m sorry, Sam, if I sound very gloomy.’ Beckett to Pinter: ‘Oh, you couldn’t be more gloomy than I am, Harold.’ It’s exactly the sort of dialogue people would imagine the two masters having when alone. Beckett shows extraordinarily good manners in waiting for me and Damian, late in arrival, and then talking knowledgeably to Damian about rugger.

  13 March

  First public preview directed by the author of One for the Road. I understood why Andrew Graham-Yooll’s wife had to leave: ‘She felt we might so easily have been the parents of Nicky.’ During rehearsals I had watched the two little boys who shared the part of Nicky (according to regulations) playing tag all round the theatre. I wanted to cry out: ‘Oh, run away, run away, you don’t know what is going to happen to you.’ Alan Bates as Nicolas: I suppose it’s the most terrifying performance I have ever seen. Harold has written two plays within two years, the most moving part for a woman, the ‘frozen’ Deborah in A Kind of Alaska, and the most terrifying part for a man, that of Nicolas. The actors refused even to take a bow. They felt it would be wrong. Harold says: ‘I’m letting them off today. I’ll put it back tomorrow.’ The play was actually performed at lunchtime, which added in a strange way to the emotion of it all. Emerging after such a powerful experience into the daylight of King Street, a Hammersmith shopping street, was in itself weirdly dislocating. ‘There’s Marks and Spencer’s, people look unmoved and busy, don’t they know … ?’

  As to the character of Nicolas, Simon Gray who had played a conclusive part in persuading his great friend Alan Bates to take the role, had described it to him, after reading the play, as a ‘Dickensian role … school of Fagin’. All I can say is that in performance, the grotesque and thus humorous Faginesque element which one had read in the text seemed to vanish in view of what happened to the man, the woman and above all the child: the ruined family.

  15 March

  Shattering press night – or rather press lunch – of One for the Road. It’s worse when you know what’s coming, the boy’s fate, the poor wrecked woman – as I suppose torture is worse when you wait for it. This morning Michael Billington in the Guardian asks for a precise political location – wants to know exactly what these people have done – and then complains that Harold has lost the mystery. Surely the whole point is that everything horrific is performed off stage and thus resides in our imagination, all the more haunting for that.

  14 April

  We gave a lunch, which turned out to take place in the garden at Campden Hill Square, to mark the end of the run of One for the Road. For once Nature was not out to thwart us, so we were able to give a party when the garden was flourishing and not ‘between seasons’ as generally happens: there were masses of very dark blue hyacinths, daffodils, tall ones, all kinds of pink camellia including the ravishing ‘Countess Lavinia’. The actors brought their children who gambolled about, Roger Lloyd Pack’s son Spencer, Jenny Quayle’s Jack and Alan’s handsome tall dark-haired twin sons Ben and Tristram. I felt that the presence of these children defused the grim experience we had all been through.

  Chapter Ten

  UNREASONABLE BUT RIGHT?

  Politics began to feature increasingly in Harold’s life now that he had become, in his oft-repeated words, ‘the luckiest man i
n the world’. I sometimes speculated whether this interest would have arisen earlier, if he had not been occupied with his own demons, wrestling with them in his work. It has to be said that this was not a popular move in the general estimation. Critics who had not previously regarded his plays particularly highly, asked him to go back to writing them in the old way. One might adapt the saying ‘Nobody liked it but the public’ as follows: ‘Nobody liked Harold’s frequent stands on human rights – except the people he was defending.’

  Nevertheless Harold strongly rebutted the idea that the artist was honour-bound to stick to his art and had no duties as a citizen. He believed the artist had in fact special duties just because he was at the same time a citizen: it was a concept he would stress with increasing conviction as time passed. On the other hand there would always be people, not necessarily critics, who believed Harold represented his public stances best by simply writing plays and otherwise shutting up: in short, leave politics to the politicians. (This was my father’s view, for he believed innately that the House of Lords was the correct forum for any political debate and could never understand Harold’s total lack of any desire to belong to it) He was even accused of ‘taking advantage’ of his position as a playwright of world-wide renown, for it was possible to argue like many other artists in the past and Arthur Miller in his own day, that Harold was more popular abroad than in his own country. Harold accepted the charge with joy.