Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

by Antonia Fraser

  25 May

  Took Harold to Holland Park and we sat looking at the irises and the water sculpture. This was the first time he had walked properly and it was real progress.

  There were milestones, like the day that he was pronounced ‘clear’ of cancer: so no need of further chemo – the chemo he had announced beforehand he would not have. I might have disagreed but we had no need to go that route. He was once again a man with black, curly tonsured hair – it did not grow back silver as I had expected. He fell into a routine of lying in the drawing room like a leopard – a convalescent leopard – on a branch, then going out for a couple of hours at night.

  I found that the subsidence of one anxiety, the major anxiety, led to the emergence of another much smaller professional one, which had been concealed by the traumatic events of winter and spring 2002. I was no longer convinced that I could write an interesting book about the Battle of the Boyne – and who wants a boring one? Of the two principal antagonists, I admired but disliked William III and simply disliked James II without admiration. My pulse quickened only when I had to think about Louis XIV, who backed James II and later gave him refuge in France.

  9 June

  Over five hours in a car – to Ilminster and back where I spoke about Marie Antoinette – led me to say to Harold on return: ‘I’m going to Bin the Boyne.’ I told him: ‘It was learning the Irish that did it. I thought – why am I doing this? To give depth to something which is fascinating in itself but doesn’t have depth in me. Never mind the Irish books, the Irish lessons, the prints. Away with them! Versailles here I come (back).’ And furthermore Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette project does not seem quite dead.

  10 June

  Sofia Coppola came to tea. Tiny, lithe, very well-proportioned in her black leggings and little black jersey, shivering in the cold June rain. ‘Flaming June,’ as Harold said, leading her to the French windows where rain was sploshing down into the garden. Sofia and I have an interesting discussion about playboys and the attraction they have for women who know they are destined to be unfaithful, yet can’t help believing ‘I am the one’; this is in relation to Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen.

  15 June

  Harold delighted with the reactions to his award of the CH. The Times runs a leader which mentions Gaieties CC and states: ‘No one who loves cricket can not be a gentleman.’ Splendid old-fashioned stuff. About six years previously, he had rejected a knighthood: ‘I can’t make the sort of speeches I do and be introduced as “Sir Harold”,’ he told me, but he felt the CH was different. I am certain that, whether consciously or not, Eric Hobsbawm’s acceptance in 1997 had influenced him. His only regret about the knighthood had been that it would have pleased his father – then in the last year of his life.

  19 June

  Determined to give Harold treats insofar as he is up to them. I decided that the Lucian Freud exhibition opening at the Tate would be a treat – it might not be everybody’s idea of a treat but it is certainly Harold’s: we have been to at least two previous Freud exhibitions. Harold havered more about the need for a wheelchair than about the treat. It was odd pushing him, I must say, as in spite of Harold’s colossal weight loss, he’s still an adult compared to tiny Mummy. Also it was a reversal of our roles; I felt rather uncomfortable being the director of our progress. But it grew on me, I found. I was soon whisking Harold past huge pictures of full-frontal naked Leigh Bowery in favour of a tender, even beautiful one of Bindy Lambton in a butterfly-strewn jersey.

  28 June

  Visit to Professor Cunningham. Harold is cured of cancer, it was all got out. Cunningham looked at Harold’s body, the war wounds and said: ‘Yes, I can see Mr Thompson has been here.’ He then told Harold he had benign leukaemia of the mildest sort, but people often lived for ten years … This struck a chord with me although I did not say so. I had been saying to myself, ‘Give us ten years, when Harold is eighty-one and I am nearly eighty …’ and copying the message to God.

  4 July

  End of a Diary. I am resolved that the next one will record happier times. Harold and I love each other more than ever, now and forever. That’s the Royalist slogan of the Battle of the Boyne: ‘Now or never. Now and forever’. The Protestant one was: ‘No surrender’. Both seem appropriate.

  5 July

  Harold read my Diaries having gone over to the Super-Study for the first time for months (always a sign of his mental as well as physical health to take the short walk down the garden). He has never read them in depth before, made the occasional jocular interjection when in the mood. But if you live with someone, you keep a diary at your own risk – see Count and Countess Tolstoy who left messages for each other diary-wise. I told him that the Diaries did provide a day-to-day picture of his illness. But of course reading them meant that Harold lived through the whole thing again, all he suffered, all I suffered, which he says he knew but we didn’t discuss. Harold very, very moved, and still in quite an emotional state, which having written the things, left me proud but to be honest a little embarrassed and just a little self-examining. (Did I go on a bit much about my own sufferings? Diaries are self-pitying instruments. Did I criticize Harold? Diaries are also self-justificatory, q.v. the Tolstoys.)

  12 July

  The great news is that Harold is officially cleared of the oesophageal cancer – no trace and no treatment needed for leukaemia. Professor Cunningham told Harold that his poem ‘Cancer Cells’ was quoted from at a recent oncologists’ conference. ‘So you’ve made a pretty good thing out of it.’ Scottish twinkle.

  24 July

  Thrilled with the arrival of Pinter Poems which I edited for the Greville Press at the request of Anthony Astbury. Four copies. Harold gave me number one, I gave him number two, and we gave number three to Edna, the dedicatee, and number four to Victoria and Simon. Harold and I managed to go to the Picasso–Matisse exhibition at the Tate – no wheelchair this time.

  1 August

  Kingston Russell. Benjie and Harold had a session over Benjie’s poems. Harold finds this an extraordinarily exciting development: he loves the poems and helps Benjie choose some for a little book also to be published by the Greville Press called City Poems. At the end Benjie touchingly says: ‘I think this has been the happiest hour of my life.’ Later still I thank Harold for making my son so happy (he’s half asleep but smiles). Lucy reveals that Benjie always wrote poetry, even on their honeymoon, but it was previously ‘unresolved’.

  17 August

  Harold wrote a poem. A perfect image of an embrace.

  MEETING

  It is the dead of night,

  The long dead look out towards

  The new dead

  Walking towards them

  There is a soft heartbeat

  As the dead embrace

  Those who are long dead

  And those of the new dead

  Walking towards them

  They cry and they kiss

  As they meet again

  For the first and last time

  We met Norman Mailer later in the summer and he told Harold he didn’t like the poem. Too soft! But he liked everything else Harold had written. Harold actually delighted with both comments.

  26 August

  Harold gallantly came to Edinburgh Festival where I was booked to speak, and did a gig himself. He was interviewed by an Australian journalist. To my surprise, she began right in about cancer, reading the poem. Harold then talked about it, very frankly, including a tribute to his ‘brilliant’ doctors, ending on his wife. Felt tears coming but saw granddaughter Eliza’s little face beside me and thought: No. Of course it wasn’t all about that. Much vigorous political discussion as Harold defended his position on the Serbian leader Milosevic: he just wants him to have a fair trial.

  27 August

  My seventieth birthday. Turned out to be the happiest day of my life – so far. Part of this was relief, of course, the great unbelievable happiness that Harold is all right, and in fact seems to have be
en given a great fillip by Edinburgh. Then there was the ineffable happiness of the FamPicnic at Hampton Court followed by dinner in our garden. I am the luckiest woman in the world (Harold can no longer claim to be ‘the luckiest man’). In my speech, I determined to embarrass my children as what is otherwise the point of being old if you can’t be roguish? Told the story of the immortal courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, of extreme longevity in her career. She was pursued by a young gallant, but she wouldn’t say yes and she wouldn’t say no. Then one day she named a date three weeks ahead. The day – or rather night – arrived and it was the best night of the young gallant’s life. Towards dawn, however, he did ask: ‘Out of curiosity, beloved Ninon, why did we wait so long and why this precise date?’ ‘Oh, darling,’ she replied, ‘I just wanted it to take place on my seventy-fifth birthday.’

  12 October

  Shortly after his seventy-second birthday Harold played tennis again, forty minutes, a real breakthrough. I never ever thought this would happen. He slept like a top but no ill effects.

  23 October

  Mummy died peacefully at Bernhurst, as she would have wished. We were there, with the Billingtons and Thomas. Later Kevin said: ‘The Meeting must be taking place about now.’ He was referring to Harold’s poem alluding to the meeting of newly dead Mummy with long (fifteen months) dead Dada. But if I believe anything about the after-life, I believe that Mummy and Dada will be united forever; unlike in the poem, there is no last embrace. Just an eternal one.

  26 October

  Thomas is an extraordinary person. We gave him a copy of the Pinter Poems, originally given to Mummy, and as he was about to register the death, advocated reading Harold’s poem ‘Death’ as a preparation. Thomas: ‘I shall read it to the Registrar.’ And blow me down, he did. And the registrar, a woman, duly asked for a copy.

  20 November

  Reading my mother’s Diaries, kept in the last seventeen years of her life, which have come to me as her Literary Executor. Amused rather than anything else to see how wrong her judgments were in 1975: they were based on erroneous statements by people like Malcolm Muggeridge who said that Harold was like Peter Sellers: ‘Not husband material’. In fact Harold is the most uxorious person I know. But then Malcolm never actually met Harold but was inclined nevertheless to hold forth to his wondering Sussex neighbours, Mummy and Dada, in his role as a man-of-the-world.

  The last months of 2002 and the spring of 2003 were dominated by the possibility of war in Iraq. Increasingly people used sentences like ‘When the war comes’, especially our French friends and family. We both felt passionately on the subject: Harold was in fact one of the people who spoke out publicly who never varied in his view from the pre-war period until the time of his death. He felt from the first that the invasion – if there was to be one – was being done in the oil interests of the US, not out of fear of al-Qaeda who were not even in Iraq (Afghanistan was a different matter). And he was not afraid to say so. For one thing he could shrug off comments that he was supporting a dictator in Saddam Hussein. After all, he had denounced Saddam’s treatment of the Kurds for years, demonstrated on the subject and as usual spoken out.

  27 November

  University of Turin. Harold made a stirring speech in exchange, as it were, for an honorary degree in a style described by the Italian paper Manifesto this morning as sobrio e secco – sober and dry. At dinner he was neither! The hours dragged on and the later it got, the more he prophesied doom, the end of the world by 2007 in a messianic style. The speech went down tremendously well; unlike Florence last year when an American diplomat walked out, there was no American diplomat present. I speculated that a round-robin of an email is sent to all American embassies at the present time: ‘Danger! Alert! Do not attend Pinter’s speeches! Danger, alert!’ Students all thrilled. The speech itself was along familiar lines (to put it mildly) but then that’s the point of a campaign: you keep on at it, so gradually people find your views less shocking, and finally realize that they agree.

  I quarrelled with one word however. Harold all too presciently referred to the possibility of an attack on the London Underground, saying ‘the responsibility will rest entirely on the Prime Minister’s shoulders’. I queried ‘entirely’. ‘No, it won’t,’ I said, ‘it will be shared. It will also be the responsibility of those who order it and those who do it. Free will and self-determination can never be eliminated from calculations of responsibility.’ I see that Harold himself wrote in my Diary: ‘I accept this point!!’

  29 November

  We celebrated our wedding anniversary two days late: Harold gave me a new Enitharmon edition of David Jones’ wedding poems with woodcuts.

  9 December

  St Paul’s. In the icy dark an absolute throng of people trying to get in to hear the Great Noam Chomsky speak. Two thousand people inside, I believe, and another thousand outside. It was the tenth anniversary of the Bar Council’s Kurdish Human Rights Campaign. Chomsky, last heard by me and Harold at the Almeida some years back in dialogue with John Pilger, did brilliantly with notes at a lectern and a large audience. Very well-constructed talk, bringing in not only Turkey, which he had bravely visited to get a treason charge against his publisher dropped, but Colombia where he had recently been. Smallish, battered corduroy jacket, smiling fresh face, slightly baggy trousers, he looked the epitome of the liberal academic.

  13 December

  Resurrection Day. I took Harold to Wilton’s for the celebration of a year to the day of his diagnosis with cancer. It was terribly expensive and I loved doing it. After all Harold is still having the odd ‘hit’ at tennis.

  He subsequently gave it up with great sadness: ‘Just too exhausting’. At the same moment our beloved Vanderbilt Club came to an end, as though in mourning.

  2003

  1 January

  Harold took me to Anything Goes at the National Theatre. Magic evening. Me: ‘You can have Ibsen, Strindberg, Miller, Beckett, even Pinter … just give me Cole Porter.’ Harold: ‘I totally agree.’ This year I am looking forward to Natasha’s biography of Sam Spiegel, Benjie’s poetry, working on Love and Louis XIV and going to Paris again – and Harold’s increasing energies. Not looking forward to the war which no one wants, the grim world predicted by Blair today, financial downturn, people’s troubles all over the world in consequence.

  15 February

  The largest demonstration in British history: so said the papers, even the hostile ones. One million? Maybe twice that. I am so proud for Harold that he was one of the speakers. I think he was very nervous. The park was full of scurrying and walking and pushchair-pushing figures going to and from the large blue-purple baldaquin with its small platform for speakers. Getting inside the wire fence to reach the baldaquin was not easy. Once there we were herded into the ‘Green Room’, actually a small chrome caravan, full of people. One of these was Jesse Jackson, the wide-apart deer’s eyes of so many photographs. Naturally he was incredibly pleased to meet Harold and me, we got the impression that it made his day. Someone, probably George Galloway, was blaring away on the loudspeaker. Then Louise Christian, magnificent Brunhilde of a solicitor came in. Me: ‘What is George saying?’ Louise, cheerfully: ‘Oh, I’m not listening. I’ve heard it all before.’

  On the platform Vanessa Redgrave, Bianca Jagger and beyond them the great sea of the crowd, banners and all. Everybody perfectly attentive. Perfectly in unison. Laughing when laughter was due. Cheering and clapping ditto. Otherwise listening in silence. An ocean of faces as far as the eye could see. Harold got tremendous cheers for his poem ‘The Special Relationship’ beginning ‘The bombs go off …’ Back to the chrome caravan while Harold spoke to Newsnight and thrill, thrill, I met Tim Robbins, he of the cherubic face, the curly hair and the devastating figure. Home, where Harold had a brief rest before setting off to address a demo about Cuba. Madness in my opinion. But admirable madness. I stayed home and listened to Don Giovanni from the Met on Radio 3 and thought about Tim Robbins.

  23 Apri
l

  Paris where I am researching for Love and Louis XIV. Professor Bruno Neveu, a portly fellow in his sixties, of great professorial dignity and charm, took me to see the Institut de France and showed me Mazarin’s tomb. Before that there was an amusing incident when I gave Professor Neveu lunch. ‘Je vous présente mon mari,’ I said, and idiotically never mentioned Harold’s name (he was a last-minute addition to the party as he had bronchitis and couldn’t go out). Harold and I are so famously married, to put it crudely, in England that I would not dream of mentioning his name at home. In fact the good professor had absolutely no idea who ‘mon mari’ was. At the end of lunch he asked Harold politely what his work was. Harold, astonished but equally polite: ‘I’m a playwright.’ Bruno Neveu: ‘And are your works performed?’ Mutters from me of: ‘Just the Comédie Française.’

  24 April

  Today Bruno had an elegant and perfectly prepared way of revenge. As we were in the great room where the new academicians are presented, he told me of an English man, an archaeologist, being presented and ‘a little wife sitting there in an English woman’s flowered hat’. It never occurred to anyone that this was actually Dame Agatha Christie, wife of Sir Max Mallowan. I took the point. Immediately I expressed my immense culpability on the day before in the matter of the flawed introduction, whereupon he expressed his, before we agreed that no one was really to blame.