The lover who made Pinter pause
Richard King in The Australian
February 27, 2010

Must You Go? My Life With Harold Pinter
By Antonia Fraser
Weidenfeld And Nicolson,
NZ $60, 328pp Hardback

OF all the interesting anecdotes in Antonia Fraser's Must You Go? one keeps coming back to me. Fraser's lover, playwright Harold Pinter, is in Hong Kong with his wife, Vivien Merchant. His affair with Fraser is just a few weeks old but there is little doubt about its seriousness. He sends her two poems. The shorter one is called I Know the Place:

I know the place
It is true.
Everything we do
Connects the space
Between death and me,
And you

"This," writes Fraser, "became a favourite poem of Harold's to mark this stage in our lives." Initially, however, Fraser herself was a little more equivocal.
"When the poems arrived on the pale banana-coloured paper of the Peninsula Hotel," she writes, "I protested about the comma after 'me' which divided us and left him on the side of death."
Consequently, the comma was removed, though not, adds Fraser a little grumpily, "put immediately after 'death' as I wanted".
For Pinter to have changed his poem in this way is, in one respect, as powerful a testament to his feelings for Fraser as the poem itself. But what makes this story aesthetically significant is that it is set down in the knowledge that Pinter is on the side of death; Pinter and Fraser are divided.

Closely based on Fraser's diaries, Must You Go? is an affecting book, one in which this kind of detail is deployed with an artist's lightness of touch. That it is written by a gifted biographer who shared more than 30 years of her life with one of the great 20th-century playwrights makes it an intriguing portrait: an insight into a creative soul given to bouts of turbulent inspiration.
Essentially, however, the book is a love story. Hilarious and harrowing, it is less the story of a celebrated couple than the story of two people who celebrated each other.

Their relationship began in 1975, at a dinner party in central London. "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," writes Fraser.

On the face of it, they made an unusual couple. Fraser was a Catholic aristocrat, while Pinter's background was working-class Jewish. They did, however, have two things in common. Both had successful literary careers: Pinter's stock had been rising steadily since the success of The Caretaker in 1960 and Fraser had scored a hit with Mary Queen of Scots in 1969. And both were stuck in unhappy marriages.
The rest at The Australian.