Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

by Antonia Fraser

  The Rear Column has opened. Ghastly day. The reviews are terrible (except The Times). Completely unexpected. Simon in despair. Actors numbed. Simon tells actors: ‘All the same, last night was the proudest night of my life.’

  26 February

  Sunday reviews even worse and there isn’t even one dissenter. Harold feels very much for Simon: ‘I’m looking forward to my turn in the autumn.’ I beg him not to read the papers on his way to Hove and urge contact with a great mind, giving him Tolstoy’s story Master and Man. Joan writes an absolutely lovely review for The Wild Island, my new Jemima Shore, in the Mail: generous and funny.

  The Rear Column came off in a few weeks.

  12 March

  Garrick Club dinner given by Melvyn Bragg for Harold to meet John Le Carré (David Cornwell). Harold to Cornwell: ‘How much are spies paid?’ Cornwell explains that these days computers generate so much material and are so expensive to analyse that ‘you are far better off bribing a secretary who knows what was really important’. Harold thrilled by the thought of this secretary. Harold’s continual obsession with spies (i.e. Philby, and he loved John Le Carré’s novel The Honourable Schoolboy) is one for the PhD students.

  16 March

  I quote a phrase taught me years ago by Ushy Adam about a man we knew: Hausteufel, engelstrasse: it describes a domestic tyrant, much loved by the outside world. Tell Harold he is the opposite: ‘House angel, street devil’. It is perfectly true: Harold has the lowest domestic expectations, which is perhaps just as well under the circumstances, never makes angry fusses like ‘Where’s my shirt?’, ‘Where’s my early-morning tea?’, ‘Polish my shoes!’ etc. (Harold polishes his own shoes); but he sure can explode publicly! Harold loves the phrase.

  18 April

  Took all the children to see Alan Ayckbourn’s Ten Times Table. Harold: ‘What a good-natured man! He loves his characters. No one is totally derided.’ He admires Ayckbourn enormously and will always go to a play by him.

  22 April

  Harold’s long programme with Melvyn Bragg. I was pleased by the humour as well as the seriousness. Millions of people now realize that the brooding, menacing fellow actually tells a joke or two. Nice that he refers to the respect for learning in his parents’ home. Harold reveals that his mother is absolutely fed up with the references to ‘East End boy’. ‘We lived in North London,’ she says firmly. ‘But Mum …’ begins Harold.

  7 May

  Bernard Levin in the Sunday Times is predictably foul about The Homecoming (a new production by Kevin Billington); he calls it ‘unendurable’ and gets in a side-swipe at Simon into the bargain. Harold: ‘I’ve been through it too often to care. I care much more about Simon.’

  From 8 May to 22 May we were in Israel, coinciding with the thirtieth anniversary celebrations. Neither of us had ever been before. I had missed going with Hugh (a strong supporter of the state) several times, for trivial reasons of illness, children, etc. Harold was also a supporter; I didn’t know why he had never visited it: his parents for example went at least once. I kept an elaborate Diary, typed daily while Harold had his bath, which, reread another thirty years later, gives me a mixture of pleasure and sorrow, even more than most Diary entries.

  8–22 May

  We are staying at the so-called artists’ colony, Mishkenot Sha’anim. There are many labels in the kitchenette saying ‘Meat’ and ‘Dairy’. I resolve not to let the side down by getting things wrong; Harold quite indifferent to this subject, I noted. Later however his religious past comes to our rescue when we get completely lost trying to return to our pad after dinner and the numbers are in Hebrew. Harold suddenly recalls his Bar Mitzvah lessons (he gave up the practice of religion thereafter) and saves the day by locating our apartment.

  There was a magic moment in the early morning when I woke to the sound of Radio 3, and it was Rostropovich playing Bach, the Sarabande in G. To my surprise when I came to, I was in Israel … and the noise coming through the wall was Rostropovich himself practising for his concert in the evening. We later discovered, puzzled by the absence of this item on the programme, that he was practising for his third encore, for which he returned with great reluctance owing to the tumultuous demands of the audience. Quite right too.

  Security is intense, beginning at the airport – nothing which we had remotely experienced, but travellers to Israel had been blown up at Orly Airport shortly before we departed. It was summed up by Harold looking up in a crowded shopping street and seeing a soldier with a gun sitting just above us: ‘Looking for a familiar face in the crowd.’ The security provided one amusing moment when the very young female soldier-interrogator asked, looking at our passports: ‘Pinter. Fraser. Why are you here together?’ ‘We are lovers,’ declared Harold, opening his arms wide. This tough heroine looked deeply embarrassed.

  We both believed strongly in the right of Israel to exist, a point of view from which Harold never deviated, despite his criticisms, publicly expressed – which he thought to be his duty as a Jew – of the state in later years in its treatment of the Palestinians. I note from my Diary that we never met any Arabs, although we met many ‘liberal’ Israelis, admired Shimon Peres and the Mayor Teddy Kollek. We both read Moshe Dayan’s autobiography while we were there and pondered the problem represented by the dreadful yo-yo of Israel’s existence. Without military strength, it would surely have been extinguished in 1978. Yet Begin (the new PM) seems far from the democratic and secular values on which the state was founded.

  A cousin of Harold’s who lives in Israel and was a pioneer says: ‘I’m sorry you come here when we have a Fascist regime.’ He’s rather disagreeable and out to annoy because he clearly resents Harold’s arrival. He is a strong Socialist and explains the Kibbutz principle to us: ‘The man who negotiates a million-dollar deal and the man who picks a tomato are paid the same.’ I see from my Diary that I continue to ponder the question of settlements – Americans and Indians all over again, who is right? Is there any right in history? – without of course reaching any conclusion. All the same … Instead we concentrate on the thirtieth anniversary concert held in the great valley below Mishkenot, in Jerusalem.

  Ten thousand people. Real cannons beneath us roar in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 symphony, the only firing, although several people mutter: ‘an opportunity for Arafat’. At the end Harold reveals the real reason he didn’t come before, not covered by the terse reply he generally gives to that question: ‘Well, I’m here now.’ He says he privately feared to dislike the place, the people. But he doesn’t. On the contrary he is very happy with both. Above all he likes the intelligence and seriousness of everyone we meet.

  Of our expeditions, there was one successful one: for my sake we went to the Dead Sea so that I could add wallowing there to my swimming experiences. Harold’s own strain at the journey and the heat was alleviated by the imaginative sympathy of Lois Sieff, wife of the chairman of Marks & Spencer, here on a visit. ‘He needs a cold beer,’ she said – and promptly went and got one. Masada on the other hand was a disaster. Arriving at the cable car at an early hour (the energetic Peter Halban made us rise early to avoid the tourists), Harold starts like a nervous horse at the sight of the stable door. Claustrophobia, fear of heights, you name it … In the end he puts his head down and endures the journey upwards. I busy myself having a historical experience, having done much reading on the subject: the gallant stand of the Jews in their mighty fortress, which cannot be stormed from the front but having to watch the encroaching rampart which the Romans are building at the back growing ever nearer and nearer … with no possibility of escape.

  But Harold is totally shaken by the vertiginous rise, and at the prospect of returning on the narrow footpath to get to the cable car – on the outside this time, above the vast abyss which he has glimpsed while I am sight-seeing – simply says he can’t go down. He looks terribly white. I mean, will he live up here? Like the Zealots? Till the Romans come again? Peter Halban is wonderful. He simply forces the upcoming tou
rists to travel on the outside, keeping the inside for Harold. Then Harold brilliantly takes off his spectacles which means he can see nothing and I guide him down, with much trepidation, thinking of the two Jewish women who survived the mass suicide of the inhabitants of Masada by hiding in the gullies. Is there a gully for me? Josephus reveals to me later that one of the surviving women is ‘intelligent beyond the run of women’. I can’t help thinking that someone intelligent beyond the run of women might not have insisted on taking Harold up Masada, and resolve not to be so foolish again.

  For all my good resolutions I never did quite cure myself of this tendency to suggest we went out in open boats in storms, up the Leaning Tower of Pisa at sunset and so forth and so on. I like to think that Harold really loved me for it. Perhaps all it really showed was that Darwinian law by which two open-boaters must not be linked to each other, otherwise human endeavour would get altogether too reckless.

  Chapter Seven

  A SUPER STUDY

  31 May 1978

  Harold took me out to dinner and asked me to be his Literary Executor (he was forty-seven so the possibility of death seemed mercifully remote). I was enormously flattered and promised to be sterner than any Literary Executor has ever been before: ‘Not a comma will be changed, not a pause unpaused.’

  2 June

  Harold had an upset fit (three years later, things very bad in Hanover Terrace) and said we had to go and live in Ireland for tax reasons. Had vision of Harold, cross and lonely in a bog, drinking a great deal, and me soon to equal him. Luckily the fit passed.

  24 June

  Read Tom Stoppard’s new play Night and Day, admirable. Like Professional Foul. Feel privileged to be his friend. At a buffet in their house, Miriam is in curvaceous beige, black black hair and eyelashes flowing, the highest heels you ever saw. She’s fantastic.

  1 July

  Our friend Diana Phipps gave a fancy-dress ball in the country. Harold went in a dinner jacket and red bow tie. He said he was an out-of-work violinist. I wore a wreath of bay leaves and my usual golden kaftan and said I was a muse. Told an Austrian princeling – one of Diana’s relations – that the essence of a fancy-dress party was to spend no money (I picked the bay leaves in the garden, although I must admit they were wilting badly). I suddenly notice he is wearing a vast jewelled turban, two foot high, which he had clearly had specially constructed. ‘I carried it across Europe. Everyone thought it was a bomb,’ he told me proudly. George Weidenfeld went as Scarpia and Lord Goodman as Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet.

  29 July

  The Guardian match (Harold’s own team v. the Guardian’s at Gunnersbury). Damian aged thirteen saved the match as eleventh man by refusing to run when John Hurt opposite tried to score a single and might have been run out. He put up a magisterial hand and stayed him. So it was a draw. Ronnie Harwood ebullient and rather good; Simon a great bat after having grumbled about his low position in the batting order last year; Tom as ever highly professional as wicket keeper in huge bright red gloves. Harold scored a duck, was mistakenly clapped heartily by us (Natasha Harwood and me) as he walked back to the pavilion because we were chatting and hadn’t noticed, thus he got in a wax. Furious with Guardian for putting on a fast bowler in a bad light, having taken off his own; etc. etc. All good fun. Many cheerful drinks afterwards at a pub in Strand-on-the-Green.

  We took the children to Italy for two weeks. Marina di Pietrasanta turned out to be North Oxford-by-the-Sea. Totally flat. Much bicycling: we all bicycled, including Harold, in stately fashion. Children adored eating Italian food in very cheap family restaurants every night. I swam in the sea. Children only cross when I said that everybody but everybody had to have a siesta as I wanted to read my book. I learned afterwards that they went secretly bicycling about the town, every afternoon. Best expedition – beyond the obligatory one when I urged Harold to drive us up some vertiginous mountain – was to Puccini’s villa at Torre del Lago to see Madama Butterfly. As the light of the Italian summer faded across the lake, you saw her still white form, waiting for his return.

  I paid for it all. I was after all the one who wanted to go, the holiday being in the nature of an experiment (although Harold paid for all the dinners). As a result we flew out in very economical fashion, thanks to an offer I’d seen in a small advertisement in a newspaper. Harold said later that he’d enjoyed it all very much, the novelty, having never spent two weeks in a house with eight people in his life before. But in future he would pay for everything and thus make the appropriate travel arrangements. Thirty years of so-called FamHols followed, abroad and latterly in England: all a great deal more luxurious.

  28 August

  Harold very shaken by the death of Robert Shaw. First, the friend: ‘I’d looked forward to all our conversations when we were old.’ Then the dread: he died, in effect, of drink. Harold has promised me he won’t.

  31 August

  Argument with John Gross on the subject of James Joyce’s love letters. I haven’t read them out of deference to Harold’s strong views about Joyce’s privacy being invaded. Francis Wyndham said rather sweetly: ‘I felt it was all right for me to read them, but no one else.’ John said Joyce the writer was a public person. Definitely not Harold’s view.

  6 September

  Harold and I have a row before I fly to Edinburgh to give a talk, it’s my fault not his. Harold, percipiently: ‘Isn’t this about the length of time you have been working on Charles II? Not about us at all.’ He’s right.

  After that I really buckled down to it and it was finished early the following year, published in early September. I hadn’t had a full-length non-fiction book out for six years (although I’d written a short book on King James VI and I, and two mysteries). The book went well in the UK, owing much both to the editing and the commercial promotion of my publisher at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Christopher Falkus, who was a genius at making book club deals. It went much less well in the States, where my friend and editor Bob Gottlieb of Knopf said gloomily: ‘Here in the US we don’t know the difference between Charles I and Charles II.’ Strong implication: ‘and we don’t care’. The book is dubbed Royal Charles in the hope, it seems, that some sucker will think it is about today’s Prince Charles. Either there are no suckers or suckers do not care about Princes Charles either. But this is to anticipate.

  17 September Sunday

  Go with Harold and John Gross to the East End – or North London, as Frances Pinter would say – in the hot autumn sunshine. I get over excited, have the impression of something very green and garden-like, sun on the waters at Clapton Pond. It needs Harold at lunch at Bloom’s later to say: ‘You don’t understand. It was a terribly depressing place.’ John’s grandmother lived in Thistlethwaite Road opposite Harold’s parents. I photographed Harold and John outside the synagogue where Harold made his Bar Mitzvah. But I do see the force of Frances’ observation: this areas with its little gardens was not a place of first refuge: it was the next step on the ladder.

  Preparations for Betrayal: the cast was now Dan Massey, Penelope Wilton and Michael Gambon, directed by Peter Hall. Also Harold had begun to work with the director Karel Reisz on the screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman, something he had long wanted to do. The Reiszes – she is the film star Betsy Blair – come to dinner and play bridge. (This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the four of us.) In October Harold and Karel went down to Lyme Regis to inspect the Cobb, John Fowles, and other Dorset sights.

  27 October

  Rehearsals are not going well at the National. Perhaps this is always the case at this stage? Dan strikes his breast frequently and says he doesn’t feel it here, the humanity of the character. Answer in a chorus: how about acting it then? Penelope (who’s his wife in reality): ‘For that matter, I haven’t had a seven-year affair.’ Then sotto voce to Harold: ‘But if he goes on like this, I may soon.’

  30 October

  Betrayal is now wonderful, Harold says, and he is in love with Penelope
Wilton. But there is a threat of wild-cat strikes at the National Theatre which may ruin everything.

  The strikes continued to threaten, causing much anguish all round except to Peter Hall, apparently, who either had nerves of steel or gallantly pretended to have them. On the first night, no one knew for sure until the curtain went up whether the play would take place. The uncertainty did not necessarily affect the critics’ reaction but they were certainly lukewarm. Read over his shoulder at breakfast in The Times: ‘Pinter master of ambiguity, is blankly obvious.’ Billington of the Guardian, normally so intelligent, read us a lecture about bourgeois-affluent culture patterns … ‘Just what I expected,’ says Harold philosophically. He has after all been here before.

  18 November

  Sunday critics re Betrayal are even worse than the dailies. I read the ghastly self-important Bernard Levin; not sure whether Harold does.

  24 November

  Harold rings from the station (on his way to see his parents). Rave review from Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman who also reviewed the reviewers: ‘glassy-eyed and furry-eared oafs’.

  In December a house was bought for Vivien in Blackheath and Harold looked like getting back his books which, unlike the rest of the contents of palatial Hanover Terrace, he had pined for since 1975. (When we first lived together, he brought his desk, his chair and a picture of a cricket match.)

  24/25 December

  Midnight Mass at Farm Street. Haydn’s St Nicholas Mass which I had just been playing to Harold. Midnight Mass was over in fifty-five minutes, unlike the horror at Westminster Cathedral last year. Fr Peter Knott’s sermon began: ‘I don’t believe in long sermons for Midnight Mass.’ The Jesuits really know how to run things. Flora and I went thumbs-up. Harold’s stocking this year was a flighty long black nylon with a seam. I gave everyone an appropriate mug. His mug said: ‘You are a Genius.’ The mug vanished, the stocking hung around.