Lady Antonia Fraser's Memoir of a Third-of-a-century Life with Harold Pinter: "Must You Go?"

Reading Lady Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter, I thought it critic-proof. Who is going to attack a grief-stricken widow recalling not only the good times but the long and losing battle against cancers? (The answer is: Amazon reviewers.)

Lady Antonia, a distinguishes biographer of royalty and writer of detective stories, writes elegantly and palpable love for her partner from 1975 until his death on Christmas Eve 2008, with Nobel Prize for Literature winner Harold Pinter. There is every evidence that they remained deeply in love and insofar as anyone except the one who is dying can face decline and death, they faced it together.

They lived "the good life" in terms of income, status, recognition for their works, and her brood of loving children (six). At the time they met, she had a companionate marriage with a Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir Hugh Fraser (she was the daughter of a Labour MP, Frank Pakenham, who was made an earl; thus she was not to the manor born and acquired the honorific "Lady" in adulthood), and he had a stormy relationship with actress Vivien Merchant, who played troubled and troublesome women in his greatest plays (The Homecoming, Old Times). Neither was in love with their spouse, though each cared about their spouse. The Fraser marriage was dissolved, but Merchant obstructed a divorce until 1980. Immediately after, the two married. (And after both previous spouses died, they were married in the Roman Catholic Church).

It was probably more difficult to take nastiness in the press in stride than Fraser lets on, and perhaps there were bumps in one or more of the children accepting Pinter as a new father, though he seems to have gone to considerable lengths to win them over.

Both Pinter and Fraser knew a large amount of English verse by heart. He would have preferred being a poet to being a playwright (and was also an actor both early and late in his adult life). He wrote love poems for Fraser, but it is not his lyrical gifts that made him a major writer: the poems are not at all "Pinteresque."

Insofar as the diaries that the widow mixed with memoirs, the Pinter household was a happy home, lacking the menace that pervades his pre-Fraser plays, both the domestic dramas through "Betrayal" (based on a long-running affair of Pinter's with BBC journalist Joan Bakewell, first staged in 1978). She has said that the increasing focus on social injustice was not from her influence but from the change from an unhappy, complicated personal life to a happy, uncomplicated one.

Pinter and Fraser were prominent, vivacious members of the cultural elite. He directed plays and consorted with celebrity actors and actresses professionally and socially. I don't think that chronicling this is "name-dropping." Novelist Anthony Powell was her godfather. Peggy Ashcroft, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon appeared in plays his wrote and/or directed (I saw Courtenay in "Otherwise Engaged," a play by Simon Gray, many of whose works Pinter directed, including the film version of "Butley" with Alan Bates.)

I believe him, but I also think that Patricia Naipaul (who had been married to the later Nobel laureate V. S., for two decades in 1975) was right when she exclaimed "Poor Antonia! You will be married to a writer over forty and past his best, of failing creativity." Lady Antonia believes that Pinter's response would have been "F*** creativity," and in my view, V. S. Naipaul was nearing the end of his best word (A Bend in the River, 1979) and was treating Pat abominably. Nevertheless, I also believe that the work for which Pinter is and will be remembered was completed before the "living happily ever after" began (ye olde wound and the bow, methinks). Pinter himself remarked that "happiness is not dramatic." He was aware that while he was married to Merchant, "so much of my work was about unhappy frozen married relationships" (I'd add, more than a few bullies, too, and passive aggressive characters like the John Gielgud character played (Spooner) in "No Man's Land").

Both Fraser and Pinter enjoyed time in New York City, not just with Americans but away from the London gutter press. I guess there is cricket in NYC, but he played and followed it fervently back in England. The strong criticism of torture and military occupation by the Bush administration was not, Fraser takes care to document form diary entries, part of distaste for America/Americans. Rather they had been "Philamerican going back to WWII when we children knew the American soldiers had come to save us ". (BTW, they both voted Tory in the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street, but suffered buyer remorse as it were.)

Pinter was struck down by cancer in 2002. Though its progress was halted, he never recovered his health, and had to videorecord the lecture (Art, Truth & Poltiics) for the 2005 Nobel Prize. Fraser writes with grace and eloquence of the half dozen years of increasing debility.

Throughout the book, the scrupulous historian quotes documents (primarily her diary) from the time, separating her current interpretations of the past from what she thought at the past time. Perhaps some readers were expecting a pathography, "pinteresque" or not. What the book delivers is the story of love that lasted a third of a century and was ended only by death. Lady Antonia does not wear her heart on her sleeve or wail. She endeavors to tell a love story of mutuality and supportiveness, and I think succeeds admirably.