Among the souvenirs found in Harold Pinter's desk after his death was a placemat from a dinner party during which he'd been banging on about politics. "Darling You are right," Antonia Fraser had scribbled on it from across the table, "So SHUT UP." The plea might seem to confirm the received media image of their marriage: he combative, cantankerous, a rougher-up; she genteel, discreet, a smoother-over. But the more interesting fact is that he kept the note, in a spirit of rueful self-awareness, perhaps, and in tribute to the woman who not only knew him better than anyone else did but knew when to tell him if ever so sweetly to put a sock in it.
Her memoir of their 33 years together, drawn from the diaries she kept and amplified by retrospective commentary, quietly dispels a number of myths. The first concerns their relative social positions when they met. She was posh, well-connected, the daughter of Lord Longford but, as the wife of an MP, Hugh Fraser, and with six children to bring up, not spectacularly rich since the age of 21 she'd earned her living by writing. Meanwhile Pinter had long escaped his working-class, East End background and was living in an enormous six-storey house in Regent's Park Terrace; that first night he offered her a lift home in a white car with a chauffeur his habitual mode of transport. She'd had flings before but didn't expect to leave her marriage. He'd had two serious affairs with Joan Bakewell and with the pseudonymous "Cleopatra" but remained protective of his increasingly alcoholic wife, Vivienne Merchant. The speed of events and the depth of their feelings came as a surprise. "Joyous, dangerous and unavoidable," Pinter called it. "I love Harold, I adore him," Fraser wrote in her diary, "but I wonder whether I am capable of uprooting myself for anyone? Do I have the courage?"
She did, though not before a scene worthy of a Pinter play, in which she first confronted Hugh then summoned Harold round, only for the two men, drinks in hand, to discuss cricket and Proust while she fell asleep on the sofa.
To those who know only the early plays (Max on his wife in The Homecoming: "It made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face"), the picture of Pinter as romantic lover will come as a surprise. "It may sound like a woman's magazine, but with you I have found happiness," he told her. With touching conventionality, he sent flowers, bought expensive gifts, phoned obsessively, and wrote poems as courtly as those of Sidney or Spenser. There was no let-up when all legal obstacles were removed after five years and the ardent wooer became a husband; nor five years after that, when the marriage was "convalidated" in a Catholic chapel. Uxuriousness can breed contempt, but Pinter's passion was undimmed. "I'm the luckiest man in the world" remained his mantra.
Since his public image was that of a tyrant, Fraser is keen to emphasise his domestic amenability: "house angel, street devil", as she puts it. Estranged from his own son, he was good with her children and grandchildren, provided he kept a distance and they kept the noise down. Loud voices enraged him (regardless of the volume of his own) and his quirks included needless money worries and phobias about flies and heights. When not writing, he could be gloomy ("Sometimes melancholy spreads across the waters of Harold's life like black water lilies"), and in one of the few rows recalled here she reproaches him for enveloping her in his gloom. There might have been other rows, but for her forbearance. An indulged only child ("Mrs Pinter confirms that they never had another because Harold was so difficult"), he never understood why people were sometimes less enthralled talking about his work than he was. "I felt a bit sleepy," the diary records of a tour in Germany. "Not so Harold, who continued to sit against the window, a dark silhouette, discussing No Man's Land till long after I remember."
That's as tart as Antonia Fraser gets: this is a love story, after all. She admits they had their differences politically, best exemplified by a day in July 2005 which she spent happily in Downing Street with Cherie Blair while he angrily indicted Tony as a war criminal in front of an audience at the Royal Court. But on human rights issues they were in accord, and even religion failed to divide them, he having "a deep sense of the spiritual, hence his love of poets such as Eliot". Pinter's view of himself as a poet first and foremost is something she rightly emphasises. Even his working methods showed it: snatched images, scribbled notes, frenzied bouts in the small hours, then the long, slow grind of revision. That there's more poetry in his plays than in his poems isn't the point. A passage like the following from No Man's Land is firmly in the lyric tradition:
Do you ever examine the gullies of the English countryside? Under the twigs, under the dead leaves, you'll find tennis balls, blackened. Girls threw them for their dogs, or children, for each other, they rolled into the gully. They are lost there, given up for dead, centuries old.
"In principle I can't bear it when artists' wives say 'It was all me . . .'" Fraser writes, and her memoir refuses to play that game. She records Pinter's exchanges with fellow playwrights (Beckett, Stoppard, Simon Gray), traces the evolution of plays such as Betrayal and Celebration, and offers some sharp observations ("the half of Harold which is not Beckett is Hemingway"), but doesn't claim to be a muse or amanuensis. "Harold calls me his editor. Not so. I was the midwife saying 'Push, Harold, push', but the act of creation took place elsewhere and the baby would have been born anyway." There's even a suggestion that he might have written more plays had they not met: "Happiness is not dramatic," he once told her. But after the misery of his first marriage, it was a bargain he didn't mind making.
Those hoping for bedroom tattle will be disappointed. The book is intimate without being confessional, and on certain subjects Pinter's estrangement from his son, for example, or her children's initial reaction to the break-up of her marriage she prefers to say nothing. But she's not so discreet as to be dull, and there's a lot of humour. There always was humour in Pinter, where reviewers saw only menace and gossip columnists only rage. Though no wag or wiseacre, he could be witty when he chose, as shown here in a telephone exchange with Steve McQueen ("Don't shout at me, Harold, I'm not your butler." "I don't shout at my butler"), or in his response to his wife's excitement at reading Charles II's handwritten letters ("Yes, that's how I feel about old cricket scores"), or in his description of Merchant's enigmatic silences ("which played better on the stage than at home"). There was even humour of a kind, towards the end, when people rang up asking for tickets to see him in Krapp's Last Tape: "Harold's mildest response: 'I am not a fucking box office.'"
The last seven years of his life were overshadowed by illness. Yet there was triumph, too not so much in the award of the Nobel prize in 2005 (though he was thrilled by that, having assumed he'd missed the chance because of his politics) as in his determination to keep going, as a poet, actor and critic of American (and British) foreign policy. In intensive care three weeks after the announcement of the Nobel, he made the sound of the death-rattle. But he recovered to give his powerful acceptance speech, perform as Krapp, and attend a throng of new productions of his plays. The account of his stubborn courage is very moving.
"No flowers on my grave," he hissed after seeing dead cornflowers on Larkin's. His wishes have been honoured in this book, which is less flowery than most elegies have a right to be, one year on. He had already approved the diary entries he'd read as "a great record of us". Still, he couldn't have known that Fraser would include his poems to her, including the last one, written 18 months before he died, which begins: "I shall miss you so much when I'm dead". Pleased with it at the time, for its inversion of the usual order of things, he'd surely be delighted to find it heading the last chapter. He might even forgive her for misquoting Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb", since her version of it might serve as the message of this book: "All that remains of us is love."
Blake Morrison's new novel, The Last Weekend, will be published by Chatto & Windus in May.
