Must You Go?, Antonia Fraser’s eulogy to her late husband Harold Pinter, has achieved unanimous praise and was lauded by one critic as “the most touching and enduring of love stories”. A year on from his death, this English PEN event welcomed Lisa Appignanesi (President of English PEN) and Antonia Fraser to discuss her life with one of Britain’s greatest playwrights.
From Mary Queen of Scots and Cromwell to King Louis XIV, Antonia Fraser is no stranger to biographical writing but Must You Go? was a book she never dreamt she would write. During her life with Pinter she had kept diaries as a form of consolation: “With the bad and sad times it’s good to have ‘dear diary’ to hear it,” she said. When, on Pinter’s death, a friend asked in passing whether she kept diaries, it inspired her and after just ten weeks she had already written an astonishing 100,000 words – “I can assure you not my usual process!”
As a professional biographer, Antonia had not found it hard to edit 33 years’ of diaries but re-reading them reminded her of how easy it is to “know all the broad outlines but forget the detail.” The process became an obsession – “It was about us, our relationship… it was fascinating” – but also a hugely emotional experience and looking back she wondered how on earth she did it. However, she did find the writing process cathartic: “It certainly helped me; if you are a writer it’s the obvious thing to do… and there were great periods of happiness”. And while memoir writing made Lisa feel like her life was no longer her own, Antonia felt differently: “I didn’t want it to be over, I wanted to keep it,” she said.
Antonia first met Harold when she attended a party to celebrate his play The Birthday Party, directed by Kevin Billington. Just as she was about to leave, Antonia, who at the time was married with six children, approached Harold to thank him. “I said to him ‘I’m off now’ and he looked at me with these extraordinary black eyes and said ‘must you go?’ I kept thinking I’ve got to get the kids up first thing in the morning… and finish Charles II… and then there were the bills… and then I just thought OK!” She never looked back.
Living with Harold Pinter, Antonia discovered that, as well as being a hopeless romantic – when she first shared a house with him she walked into the hall to find flowers in every room – he also embraced a more novel writing process than most. “Harold would wait for the image before writing. It was wonderful to feel like you were living with a poet in La Bohème!” On one occasion Harold had suddenly asked if Antonia “had a typewriter to hand” and asked her to write the phrase “something is happening”. It turned out to be the first line in A Kind of Alaska. She wondered whether Harold’s uprooting as a child during the war, when he had been sent 600 miles away to a castle near the sea, had any part to play in his “extraordinary imagination”, especially considering “it wasn’t visible in his family tree!”
She recalled another of his plays One for the Road, about torture in an unknown country, which she found terrifying. “I remember Harold coming into the drawing room and saying: ‘I’ve finished, I’m going to read it to you.’ There was a terrible line where a character asks: ‘what about my son?’ only to hear the reply: ‘oh don’t worry about him, he was a little prick,’ and you know he’s dead. I didn’t sleep for two nights.” She also related a wonderful conversation between Harold and Samuel Beckett: “I’m feeling terribly gloomy,” Harold had said, to which Beckett replied: “Well you can’t feel more gloomy about the world than I do!” Antonia had rushed home to write it in her diary: “This is exactly the sort of conversation the world thinks Beckett and Pinter have!”
In response to speculation that Antonia had politically influenced Pinter, she replied: “My own theory is that when Harold’s personal life became happy and contented then he could look outside.” When she was president of English PEN, she invited Harold to events and it was there he found out about what was happening to writers in Turkey, which in turn triggered an interest. Like all married couples there were disagreements – “and why not?” Antonia asked – however, she claimed they never had a political row. “The only disagreement we had was about the trial of Milosevic; Harold felt he was simply the loser being tried by the winners. But it is possible to see both options.”
According to Antonia, Harold questioned all rules except the rules of cricket. “He was anti-authoritarian rule, and very interested in justice for the minority, particularly people who had been tortured, like the Kurds who weren’t allowed to speak their own language.” She recalled an occasion when a Kurdish community had used fake guns from the National Theatre during a performance of Pinter’s play Mountain Language. “Unaware that the guns were fake, the neighbours raised the alarm and they were promptly arrested, put into cells and told to stop speaking Kurdish to each other – the irony!”
During their marriage, and before, the couple endured their fair share of fame. Considering the need for privacy, Lisa asked: should there be limits of free expression in the press? “I’ve worked out a philosophy,” Antonia replied. “I do believe in a free press. The answer is to take action: they can write it, I don’t have to read it! I tell writers about this: if there’s a critical review just screw it up. Some people say you should face the music, I say why!”
As the evening drew to a close, Antonia read her favourite poem ‘It is Here’, which Harold had dedicated to her. “I’d had sleepless nights about reading this for Radio 4. I was sitting in this little booth and I just collapsed. But I said I’d get on and read immediately – the sob should be in the story not in the voice,” she said resolutely. She then picked up the book and read the poem aloud to the hushed audience:
What sound was that?
I turn away, into the shaking room.
What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
to turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.
Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/events/reportsonrecentevents/mustyougo/