From The Sunday Times January 17, 2010
Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter
by Antonia Fraser
The Sunday Times review by Robert Harris

My only lengthy conversation with Harold Pinter took place at a party in 2000. We talked about children and what a distraction they were while working, and he described how he had written The Caretaker at a card table with his 18-month-old son, Daniel, crawling over his feet. I asked what the boy did now, at which Pinter suddenly looked miserable and said he had had no contact with him for seven years: “Not a word, closed, don’t speak to one another, that’s it.”

If, as the saying goes, a family is only as happy as its unhappiest child, then one can understand why Pinter, in his later years, often appeared in such a state of advanced gloom. “Sometimes melancholy spreads across the waters of Harold’s life like black water lilies,” notes his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, in this account of their life together.

The fact that he could describe to a stranger in such vivid terms his estrangement from his only child — a rift that persisted until Pinter’s death eight years later — suggests it was never far from the surface of his mind.
Daniel is, of course, mentioned in Fraser’s memoir, but only in passing (“slender, gangly, gym shoes and denim jacket ­brigade”). His mother, Pinter’s first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, is also reduced to an offstage nuisance: a drunken, lonely, unstable shrew. ­Desperate to cling on to her husband, Merchant refused at the last minute to sign the decree ­absolute giving Pinter his divorce, thus greatly inconveniencing Fraser, who had already bought her wedding dress from Jean Muir: “A swirling white crepe number, high neck, ­scattered crystal new moons and stars, which I will wear at the party. I shall feel like Titania.” Merchant’s hopeless gesture in trying to delay the divorce is ­dismissed with chilling contempt as “a final flick of the serpent’s tail”. Within two years the first Mrs ­Pinter had drunk herself to death.

Fraser describes this account, based on her diaries, as “in essence…a love story”, and Must You Go? ­certainly has at times a bosom-heaving, lace-handkerchief-fluttering quality. When it opens in 1975, our heroine is married to Hugh Fraser, the Tory MP, and is the mother of six. She is also avowedly unfaithful (or, as she puts it archly, “there had been romances”). She meets Pinter at a dinner party and takes him home, where he remains (“with extraordinary recklessness”) until six o’clock the next morning.

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 Love and Art are blind to such petty ­differences, and with a toss of her golden mane, Lady Antonia swiftly dismisses them. “Harold and I belonged to the same class: I will call it the Bohemian class.” The affair ­proceeds — “joyous, ­dangerous, unavoidable” — until inevitably, once word of it gets out, it becomes a scandal. But Lady Antonia does not care. The old bosom is quickly swelling again: “I always wanted to be in love... I always wanted to know a genius.”
The full review at Times online.
And The Guardian review.
And in The Telegraph.