Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [89]
21 October 1996
In New York with Harold. I am on a book tour for The Gunpowder Plot, here called Treason and Faith (‘Americans know about treason,’ says my publisher Nan Talese, ‘they don’t know about the Gunpowder Plot’). Harold does a reading of Ashes to Ashes at the YMHA which has a bizarre beginning to question time: the essential comic note, perhaps, to give relief in a deeply serious occasion. First questioner, female dressed in a navy-blue uniform of some sort, cropped blonde hair: ‘Mr Pinter, do you approve of sado-masochism?’ Harold startled, makes some bonhomous reply which, he hopes, neither hints at a taste for whips nor the desire to feel their impact. On she went: ‘Speaking as I do as a professional dominatrix …’ Lugubrious man, monk’s face, very tall, who runs the Y: ‘Thirty years of poetry readings, and this is the first question from a dominatrix.’ All this puts Harold in a very good temper and he indicates he may after all come to New York again.
This was in contrast to the night before. He had had a spat with a political commentator on the right at my publishing party which may have pleased the commentator as fulfilling his expectations, but greatly displeased me. We had the kind of row at the end of the evening which no doubt marks many of the happiest of marriages. Harold said he would never come to New York again and I said that was fine by me. Etc. etc. Even Harold’s usual mantra, ‘We are two strong characters in the same marriage,’ did not assuage my wrath and the sundown must have been one of the latest ever. We were finally reconciled. His very frequent telephone calls to me as I carried out my subsequent book tour amazed my various publishers’ escorts, one of whom asked me: ‘How long have you two been together?’ Actually my mood was of the sunniest by now because while in Canada, quite aside from Harold’s assiduity, I received a wonderful telephone call: Flora and Peter Soros were planning to get married, an event which was celebrated the following January in a style worthy of Louis XIV (to whom, with his sense of style as well as his magnificence and his generosity, I would often compare Peter in future years).
13 June 1997
Harold morose – you have to use the word – at lunch. He is seldom like this. We didn’t seem to be able to talk. At dinner the next day he explained it to me: his overwhelming sense of the sorrows, and thus the evils of the world. I thought I must put my point of view. Which was that this awareness of world-wrong should not spill into our relationship.
Harold: ‘It doesn’t! You’re the one thing …’ Me: ‘But it does when we have a lunch like that one. All I can do is shelter you under the wide umbrella of my love.’ All the same, I have to accept that this too is part of Harold’s character – twenty-three years after ‘Must you go?’ it will never be eradicated, and why should it be? So long as the sorrows and evils are there in the world.
The other side of Harold’s character, which was perhaps less publicly appreciated than it should have been (because the political outbursts were, so to speak, much better copy) was his generosity: a young poet, an older lady living alone in bad health who had years ago been his valued patron, an actor in trouble, a radical magazine … these are only a few of those that come to mind. In particular Harold remembered the acts of generosity which had been shown to him at the start of his career and either consciously or unconsciously (probably the latter) decided to act similarly. He never forgot that the American producer, Roger Stevens, whom he had never met, came to his aid after the fiasco of the first Birthday Party; this was at