Piercing the Aura

Different Perspectives




 I recently read Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter. Reading it was an experience filled with literary anecdotes and references on almost every page while their relationship was presented through an aura (or haze if you prefer) resulting from the perspective of Lady Antonia. In a review in The New York Times Dwight Garner wrote: “a book of glowing fragments, moments culled from Ms. Fraser’s diaries. The prose is not overly winsome. “My Diary: it’s not about great writing,” she admits. “It’s my friend, my record, and sometimes my consolation.” The result presents a light literary romance with some of the heavy-weight literati. 
  That there might be other perspectives on the relationship between Lady Antonia and Harold was brought home delightfully yesterday as I was reading Stephen Fry's latest installment of his autobiography, The Fry Chronicles. Picking up where he left off with Moab is my Washpot Fry continues his story in this often comedic and sometimes skewed take on his life and loves. One of the many aspects of his eclectic life is acting and some of his early experience was with another of the great twentieth-century playwrights, Simon Gray. Apparently the friendship between Gray and Harold Pinter was volatile and Fry shares his experience of this volatility with the following episode from the late 80s: 
 “I remember once John (Sessions) and I were sitting in the back of the brassarie of the Groucho Club. Harold, his wife, Lady Antonia, Beryl and Simon had a corner table. Suddenly Harold's booming voice burst out. 'If you are capable of saying such a thing as that, Simon Gray, it is perfectly clear that there is no further basis for our friendship. We are leaving.' . . . He turned and barked across the room, 'Antonia!' 
   Lady Magnesia Fridge-Freezer, as Richard Ingrams liked to call her, jerked herself awake (her defence against the madness of Harold's tantrums was always to fall asleep. She would do this in the middle of a meal or sentence, a kind of traumatic symplegia, a condition known only to cats in P. G. Wodehouse, but which I think refers to what we would now call narcolepsy) and softly gathered up her coat. By this time the whole back brasserie was watching the scene unfold and greatly enjoying the embarrassed lacunae, charged glances and menacing exchanges that one associates with the authentically Pinteresque. Antonia smiled seraphically at the Grays and went to join her husband. As she passed our table she stopped and gathered the loose wool at the should of my pullover. 
   'Oh, what a lovely jumper,' she sighed, fingering it for a second. 
   'Antonia!' 
   And she drifted away. I can almost bring myself to believe that the room burst into applause, but I think that would be an instance of the wish being father of the thought.” (pp 46-47) 
   Merely an reminder that different perspectives bring can pierce the aura of perfect, and sometimes imagined, romance. 


 The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry. The Overlook Press, New York 2012
Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry. Soho Press, 2011 (1997)

Life with Harold

Must You Go?: My Life With 
Harold Pinter 

by Antonia Fraser

"What happened was this: we both felt awful at breakfast, Harold from coughing without intermission all night, me from listening to him.  I went up to the Eyrie and assembled notes re the Gunpowder Plot.  Then I chatted to a friend about Dublin.  About eleven thirty, Linda came in and said the odd words: 'Could you clear the line?  Harold has something urgent he wants to tell you.'  Somewhat crustily I did so.  Now it was Harold who was engaged: I thought he might clear his line.  Finally he buzzed me: 'I seem to have won the Nobel Prize.'"
Seldom have I read a book so filled with literary references. They are on every page and, while Antonia Fraser's memoir of her life with Harold Pinter is lightweight, it is intellectually charged with interesting bits of flotsam and jetsam from the literary world of a couple who were immersed in literary lives and lights.
It was while at a social gathering in 1975 that Ms. Fraser walked up to Pinter, before leaving, to say that she liked his play, “The Birthday Party.” The two barely knew each other. He looked back at her with what she calls “amazing, extremely bright black eyes” and said, “Must you go?” He called her his destiny and wrote her love poems, some of them later collected in a volume called “Six Poems for A” (2007). She loved his bristling mind, his “awesome baritone” and the way his “black curly hair and pointed ears” made him look “like a satyr.” They remained happily together (marrying in 1980) for 33 years, through his Nobel Prize in 2005 and until his death from cancer, at 78, in December 2008.
There are many anecdotes that intrigue the reader in this delightful memoir. One of my favorite moments follows:
"Dinner with tom and Miriam Stoppard. The latter tackles Harold about the swearing in No Man's Land: 'This must be something in you, Harold, waiting to get out.' Harold: 'But I don't plan my characters' lives.' Then to Tom: 'Don't you find they take over sometimes?' Tom: 'No.'"
It seems that their life is filled with such moments and, when the literary references wane, there are the political highlights that bring alive the times (a span of three decades) with intrusions of bits about the IRA or left and right-wing political goings-on.
Pinter’s life force — he was mostly anything, it seems, but Pinteresque — comes through clearly here. Ms. Fraser details his love for cricket, tennis and bridge. He threw himself around recklessly on dance floors and swam “with a great splashing like a dog retrieving a ball.” The result is a wonderful read for anyone interested in the life of the epitome of a literary couple.


Must You Go? by Antonia Fraser. Doubleday, New York. 2010.