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Summary
Summary
A moving testament to one of the literary world's most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser.
In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother of six, and Pinter was married to a distinguished actress. Over the years, they experienced much joy, a shared devotion to their work, crises and laughter, and, in the end, great courage and love as Pinter battled the illness to which he eventually succumbed on Christmas Eve 2008.
Must You Go? is based on Fraser's recollections and on the diaries she has kept since October 1968. She shares Pinter's own revelations about his past, as well as observations by his friends. Fraser's diaries--written by a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process firsthand--also provide a unique insight into his writing.
Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty-three years later. "O! call back yesterday, bid time return," cries one of the courtiers to Richard II. This is Antonia Fraser's uniquely compelling way of doing so.
Author Notes
Antonia Fraser is the author of numerous internationally bestselling biographies, including "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" and "Cromwell: Our Chief of Men".
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Reviews (4)
Booklist Review
Fraser is a highly regarded British biographer, and the late Harold Pinter, her husband, was a Nobel-winning British playwright. So, the circle they generally traveled in was made up of not only fellow writers but also, because of their individual and combined celebrity, fellow celebrities. Fraser's latest book is both joyous and sad. The former because she shares diary entries concerning her relationship with Pinter (they lived together from August 1975 until Christmas 2008), and it was obviously a stimulating love-match. And sad because the book ends when it does because of Pinter's death from cancer; his struggle with the disease had been years-long. As expected, given their fame and the fame of their associates, lots of name-dropping goes on here. This is not, of course, the story of two starving artists trying to scratch together a living in some cold-water flat. But privileged as they were, they nevertheless experienced the normal highs and lows together, and the result is a poignant read. Serious readers will generate demand for this title, and they will respond with gratitude to Fraser's intimacy.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
The quiet brilliance of this book steals up on you. It opens with Fraser's first view of Pinter "across a crowded room, but it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak". Each was married, he with one child, and she with six. Neither knew that they would soon embark on a passionate relationship that would last until Pinter's death more than 30 years later. So this is a love story. But because of who they are - he a Nobel laureate, she a distinguished biographer - and because of who they know (most of the writers, actors and politicians of their age), and because of his increasing political outspokenness, this is also the story of their engagement with late 20th-century arts and human rights. Fraser has interwoven her diaries with later explanatory comments, with remarks by Pinter and others, and with his poetry. It is personal but threaded through with politics; it's funny, clever and controlled - much is revealed but more is not. But there is so much generosity here and so much love, that by the final page, in a London hospital on Christmas eve 2008, I was in tears. - Judith Rice The quiet brilliance of this book steals up on you. It opens with Fraser's first view of Pinter "across a crowded room, but it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak". Each was married, he with one child, and she with six. - Judith Rice.
Kirkus Review
A moving compilation of diary entries written during the course of an artistically fruitful three-decade partnership.Playwright Harold Pinter died from cancer in 2008, soon after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Historical biographer and novelist Fraser (Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, 2006, etc.) has edited her diary entries reflecting their compatible life together. Both were in their early 40s and married to other people when they met at a dinner party on Jan. 8, 1975. The two moved in "different worlds"Fraser, a Catholic aristocrat by birth, was the wife of Tory MP Hugh Fraser, had six children and some years before published her first bestselling history,Mary Queen of Scots; and Pinter, the only child of a Jewish working-class family, had already become wealthy and famous since his 1960 playThe Caretaker, and was married to actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son. Theircoup de foudresundered their respective marriages; Vivien descended into alcoholism, Hugh into blithe bachelorhood, as characterized by Fraser, and neither lived many years longer. Pinter embarked on works such asBetrayal,Moonlight and an increasingly political vision; she on novels and celebrated biographies of Charles II and Marie Antoinette, among others. Together they buzzed among the celebrity bees of the age, from London to New York, captured in precious cameose.g., Samuel Beckett, Laurence Olivier, Salman Rushdie, Jackie Kennedy, then-child actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Vaclav Havel. They married in 1980, and Fraser reveals delightful details of their writerly life together, such as that Pinter only wrote when struck by inspiration and liked to read his work out loud, and both were voracious readers. Throughout, she celebrates her love for Pinter. "I always wanted to know a genius," she writes. "I was lured, compelled by a superior force, something drawn out of me by him, which was simply irresistible."A devoted, respectful tribute.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fraser (The Wives of Henry VIII) is known as a historian and biographer of note and as the author of the Jemima Shore mysteries. Her husband, Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, was widely recognized for his plays (e.g., Betrayal) and his screenplay adaptations (e.g., Sleuth). In this very personal book, Fraser offers insights into her own life and work, the life and work of Pinter, who died in 2008, and the literary/theatrical milieu in which they lived. This is also a lovely, intimate portrayal of a marriage filled with joy and illness (plus a touch of scandal, since Fraser and Pinter fell in love while married to others, although she clarifies that those marriages were already troubled). Based on the diaries Fraser kept, the book, which she wrote in the 26 days following his death, is a tribute to Pinter and a celebration of their life together covering over 30 years. VERDICT This is a wonderful testament to romance, love, shared humor, and true partnership. Pinter wrote extraordinary love poems to Fraser, a number of which she includes. Recommended for readers of literary biography, students and lovers of theater and film, and readers of 20th-century British history generally.-Susan L. Peters, Univ. of Texas, Galveston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One First Night I first saw Harold across a crowded room, but it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak. I was having lunch in the Etoile restaurant in Charlotte Street; my companion pointed to a trio of men lunching opposite us. They were in fact Robert Shaw, Donald Pleasence and Harold; they were discussing Robert's play, The Man in the Glass Booth , in which Harold would direct Donald. My companion admired Robert Shaw intensely: the handsome red-headed star who was said to do his own stuntwork and embodied machismo. Apparently I said thoughtfully: 'I'll take the dark one.' On the next occasion I heard Harold's voice, once aptly described by Arthur Miller as his 'awesome baritone', before we met. There was a recital about Mary Queen of Scots at the National Portrait Gallery, based on my book. Harold's wife Vivien Merchant took the part of Mary, an actor took all the male parts and I read the narrative. These were professionals and I was intensely nervous; a kind friend in the audience told me afterwards that my knees were visibly shaking in my natty white trouser suit which had perhaps been the wrong call as a costume. Nevertheless things were running along smoothly -- Vivien was an accomplished reader who gave Mary the correct Scottish accent -- when suddenly there was some kind of interruption, a man's voice raised, at the back of the gallery. Afterwards I enquired rather crossly what had happened. 'Oh, that was Harold Pinter,' I was told. 'He attacked the attendant for opening the door in the middle of the recital.' 'I didn't hear the door ,' I muttered, having just learned that the projected LP of the recital would have to be abandoned due to the disturbance. Later, when I was introduced to Harold, I asked him if it had indeed been him. `Yes,' he replied with satisfaction, `I do that kind of thing all the time.' In similar situations in the future, I sometimes reflected wryly: `I can't say I wasn't warned . . .' And so to the evening of 8 January 1975 when I went to the first night of The Birthday Party at the Shaw Theatre, directed by Kevin Billington, husband of my sister Rachel. The author was of course there and there was to be a dinner party afterwards at the Billingtons' house in Holland Park. At this point, Hugh and I, Harold and Vivien, had both been married, oddly enough, for exactly the same period almost to the day: that is, eighteen years since September 1956 when Harold and Vivien got married in a Registry Office in Bournemouth (they were in rep there) while I dolled myself up as Mary Queen of Scots and Hugh wore a kilt at the Catholic Church in WarwickStreet, Soho, with a full sung Nuptial Mass. Hugh and I had six children; Harold and Vivien had one. Hugh had been a Conservative MP since 1945; Vivien was a celebrated actress. I was forty-two; Harold was forty-four. I considered myself to be happily married, or at any rate happy in my marriage; I admired Hugh for his cavalier nature, his high spirits, his courage -- friends nicknamed him `Fearless Fraser' after some 1930s trapeze artist -- his independence, his essential decency and kindness. I even admired him for his detachment, although his lackof emotional intimacy -- he once told me that he preferred families to individuals -- was with hindsight probably what doomed us. I on the other hand was intensely romantic and always had been since early childhood; the trouble with romantics is that they tend to gravitate towards other like-minded people, or people they choose to regard as such. So there had been romances. But I had never for one moment envisaged leaving my marriage. Harold, I learned much later, did not consider himself to be happily married. He too had had his romances, perhaps more than the world, which cast him as the dark, brooding, eponymously `Pinteresque' playwright, realized. Later he also told me that he had never been in love before, but had once loved Vivien very much, her essential vulnerability inspiring him with a wish to protect her, before other matters drove them apart. They led essentially separate lives in an enormous stately six-storey house in Regent's ParkTerrace; but he too had never contemplated leaving his marriage. 8 January 1975 A very enjoyable dinner party at Rachel and Kevin's house in Addison Avenue: a long and convivial table. I was slightly disappointed not to sit next to the playwright who looked full of energy, with black curly hair and pointed ears, like a satyr. Gradually the guests filtered away. My neighbours Richard and Viv King offered me a lift up the road. `Wait a minute,' I said. `I must just say goodbye to Harold Pinter and tell him I enjoyed the play; I haven't said hello all evening.' They waited at the door. I went over to where Harold was sitting. `Wonderful play, marvellous acting, now I'm off.' He looked at me with those amazing, extremely bright black eyes. `Must you go?' he said. I thought of home, my lift, taking the children to school the next morning, the exhausting past night in the sleeper from Scotland, my projected biography of King Charles II . . . `No, it's not absolutely essential,' I said. About 2.30 in the morning, poor Rachel and Kevin were visibly exhausted, and we were the last guests. In the end, it was Harold who gave me a lift home, in a white car with a driver (he never drove at night having once been found `weaving' in Regent's Park). I offered him coffee. I actually gave him champagne. He stayed until six o'clock in the morning with extraordinary recklessness, but of course the real recklessness was mine. * * * We sometimes speculated later what would have happened if I had in fact answered: `Yes, I really must go.' Harold, convinced by then that I was his destiny, would gallantly reply: `I would have found you somehow.' But we had few friends in common: Edna O'Brien was one, and the producer Sam Spiegel another. But fundamentally we lived in different worlds. The night of 8/9 January was the chance and our chance. Subsequently the tabloids made much of our different backgrounds, the working-class Jewish boy from the East End and the Catholic aristocrat with her title. But we were, in our early forties, a long way from our backgrounds and, as usual with the tabloids, these descriptions were more for headlines than accuracy. Although Harold was technically born into the working class -- his father worked in a tailoring factory -- ever since the success of The Caretaker in 1960 he had been extremely well-off by most standards: he was able, for example, to retire his father, worn-out with his labours, to salubrious Hove where his parents would live happily for another thirty years. Again technically, since my father was an earl and my mother a countess, I could be argued to be an aristocrat. But my father, born FrankPakenham, only succeeded to the Earldom of Longford when I was nearly thirty; my childhood was spent in a modest North Oxford house, my father, with no private income, teaching at the University. My mother, being a Harley Street doctor's daughter, was in any case convinced (and thus convinced us) that the middle classes were the salt of the earth whereas the aristocracy was feckless, unpunctual and extravagant, an assumption that our beloved father's attitude to life did nothing to discourage. I had no inherited money myself, and had earned my own living since the age of twenty-one, first working for a publisher and, after marriage, by journalism and books. After the publication of Mar y Quee n o f Scots, an unexpected bestseller in 1969, I found that for the first time in my life I had money to spend. Most of it went on the delightful taskof renovating Eilean Aigas, our house in the Highlands on an island in the River Beauly, which gave the impression of being untouched since the '45 rebellion. Our finances had been so perilous before this, since Hugh was entirely dependent on the then modest salary of an MP, that he had actually sold the house to a cousin by the previous Christmas -- providentially the cousin's finances proved to be equally perilous and he reneged on the deal just in time for my windfall. To give only one example, I put in a heated open-air swimming pool round which the New Year celebrations regularly made the welkin ring. The truth was that by the mid 1970s, both in our different ways successful writers, Harold and I belonged to the same class: I will call it the Bohemian class. 13 January While I was away, Harold had apparently called home on the public line; on Monday morning he called on my private line -- I'm not sure how he got the number. We met for a drinkat the Royal Lancaster Hotel in Bayswater (`an obscure place' he said truthfully) at 6 p.m. The bar was very darkand at first I couldn't see him. That made it all the more like a dream. But `so it wasn't all a dream' was the verdict of us both at the end. Told me of numerous obsessional phone calls -- no answer -- often from the famous Ladbroke Grove telephone box opposite Campden Hill Square. Had evidently told Kevin Billington about the whole thing! I began to guess this and he then admitted it. Can't say I care. `I am loopy about you: I feel eighteen' was the general theme; I said I preferred the word `dippy' . . . The truth is that Harold has mesmerized me. Kept waking all night on the subject of a) him b) Benjie's departure for boarding school at Ampleforth. But a) has quite taken my mind off the horrible sadness of b). (Our third child and eldest son, aged not quite fourteen, was setting forth for his father's old school.) 23 January Met Harold at 5.30 in the Royal Lancaster Hotel (he has telephoned daily). Parted at 11.30 to our respective matrimonial homes. We never left the bar, just talked and talked. Discussed among other things N o Man' s Land, his new play -- to open at the National in April -- and how he started to write it. At first he thought he was echoing himself (`What, two old men together agai n . . .'), then he thought: `You are what you are.' He had sent me the typescript after our first meeting. I liked the character of Spooner, the failed poet. So I asked him: `Did Spooner get the job?' On the whole he thought: No. `But Spooner is an optimist and there will be other jobs.' I said I would have to stop my ears at the first night for the darkof the ending: Winter/Night forever. But I liked `I'll drinkto that' at the end. `That's the point,' Harold said, delighted . . . I am quite obsessed by him when I am with him. He tells me he is quite obsessed by me all the time -- the days spent waiting to telephone, etc. . . . Described his life as a kind of prison, how, when can we meet, ever? 26 January Taken to supper with Anthony Shaffer, author of Sleuth , by an old friend. The fashionable doctor for artists, PatrickWoodcock, warns me quite innocently against playwrights: `They're the worst.' Thought of Harold. I suppose I'm in love with him but there are many other things in my life. Yet: `oh, oh, the insomniac moonlight' in the words of the Scottish poet I like, Liz Lochhead. 30 January Harold called. He asks: `Does it make you happy that we met? You wouldn't rather we hadn't met?' 1 February I knew it would be a good day. Harold rang up in the morning and said, `Tea is on', having said two days ago `the situation is fluid'. Went at four, discreetly parking the car in Sussex Place. The house in Regent's ParkTerrace is vast, on first impression, and extremely sumptuous. I suppose it would not be so sumptuous if ten people lived in it. But with three, it is. A lot of large beautiful modern pictures in huge quiet rooms, apparently unlimited in number. Harold made tea. We went upstairs to the greeny-grey drawing room, vast pictures, few objects, greeny-grey light, enormous quantity of chairs and low sofas. `I will show you my study presently.' And he did. At the top of the house, sixth floor in fact, we went up and up, like Tom Kitten. A marvellous room, much space, also less hushed. A deskwith windows overlooking Regent's Park and the other way, roofs. A chaise longue. A few chairs. Lots of books, novels and poetry. Harold presented me with his poems. `I would make a good secretary if you ever needed one,' I said, seeing the accommodation. He said: `the same thought had already crossed my mind.' 9 February Joyous, dangerous and unavoidable -- Harold's three words to Kevin Billington about us, quoted by Harold to me on the telephone. Not bad Pinteresque words. 19 February Period of crisis. On Sunday Harold called to say that Vivien was very ill (pneumonia) in Hong Kong, with the dreadful possibility of not being able to go on and film Picnic at Hanging Rock in Australia -- something she really wanted to do. He is racked with guilt. `Something of her own that I didn't write. That's what she wanted.' Much strain of cancellations and late-night calls. Nevertheless we met for drinks in the bar of the Churchill Hotel (twice). 21 February Bought works about Harold at Foyles to feed my obsession. Seems to be in the class of Shakespeare judging by the nonsense that is talked . . . gave me a buzz all the same. 22 February Harold in Hong Kong has written me two poems, one short, one very long, which he read to me twice: `I have spent the evening in my hotel room writing poems to you.' The long one began: My heart is not a beat away from you You turn, and touch the light of me. You smile and I become the man You loved before, but never knew It ended: You turn, and touch the light of me. You smile, your eyes become my sweetest dream of you. Oh sweetest love, My heart is not a beat away from you. This was the short one: I know the place It is true. Everything we do Connects the space Between death and me, And you. * * * It subsequently became a favourite poem of Harold's to markthis stage in our lives and he often recited it. However, when the poems arrived on the pale banana-coloured paper of the Peninsula Hotel, I protested about the comma after `me' which divided us and left him on the side of death and it was eliminated (although not put immediately after `death' as I wanted!). Excerpted from Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Preface | p. vii |
Part 1 | |
1 First Night | p. 3 |
2 Pleasure and a Good Deal of Pain | p. 20 |
3 Reader, We Lived Together ... | p. 34 |
4 Theatre of the World | p. 49 |
5 Our Newfoundland | p. 63 |
6 Open-Boating | p. 79 |
7 A Super Study | p. 97 |
8 It Is Here | p. 113 |
Part 2 | |
9 Writing Images | p. 127 |
10 Unreasonable but Right? | p. 147 |
11 Moon over Prague | p. 162 |
12 Stage Wife | p. 175 |
13 Marriage - Again | p. 188 |
14 Moonlight and Ashes | p. 202 |
15 France: Celebration | p. 222 |
Part 3 | |
16 The Steps Downward | p. 241 |
17 The New Dead | p. 259 |
18 Worst of Times, Best of Times | p. 280 |
19 Fortitude | p. 298 |
20 I'll Miss You So Much | p. 313 |