Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter

  Later the sight of the relatives of the Disappeared weeping on TV is immensely moving. Others scream and leap for joy. Pro-Pinochet women in Chile, mainly blue-rinsed, are seen to lunge at reporters.

  Harold agreed to go on Newsnight. He was quite nervous, he admitted later. He looked calmly vengeful on screen and saw off Norman Lamont, who said that the Chilean people had given Pinochet immunity. Harold: ‘No, Pinochet gave Pinochet immunity.’

  All the time the shadow of the coming (First) Iraq War was falling athwart the British political scene. There was, for example, an Emergency Committee meeting about Iraq at the House of Commons early in 1988.

  12 February

  There were extraordinary scenes outside St Stephen’s entrance, big crowds, flaring TV lights, policemen pretty stroppy. As ‘speakers’ we got in with some difficulty. (We learnt later that neither Valerie Grove of The Times nor Adrian Mitchell, poet and protester, got in at all, being sent to ‘the back of the queue’.) Packed meeting in a large committee room in the far corner of Westminster Hall. As we crossed the Hall, I found myself treading on the plaque to Sir Thomas More – another man of conscience. Tony Benn batted off and was excellent, clear, firm. Stated that he was not in favour of Saddam Hussein, but in his meeting with Iraqi dissidents he’d found that none of them were in favour of any kind of invasion since it would merely strengthen Saddam. Harold was good, short and to the point. He, too, although he had demonstrated against Saddam and his treatment of the Kurds, did not think that bombing civilians was the answer. Diane Abbott, an impressive figure, large, beautiful, high rounded forehead, spoke with authority and verve.

  As an example of a situation developing in a different, more encouraging direction, we visited Belfast (first time for both of us) in the same year.

  2/3 December

  Nothing prepared us for the Terror Tour – local black phrase of taxi drivers. The sheer narrowness of the districts we have heard about on the news. Little Protestant streets, so close to famous Catholic streets. Huge graffiti, but that is not the right word for these awesome artworks on walls: the Red Hand of Ulster or Cuchulainn. We were driven by the distinguished poet Michael Longley. The first police car we saw was like something out of Dr Who: heavy, dark grey all over, an armoured pill box on wheels, narrow slits instead of windows.

  But Michael is actually reporting progress. ‘A year ago there would have been policemen everywhere in the streets, grilles, bricks fortifying every shop, practically no windows. The building of the new centre by the docks is a sign of hope because it has glass. Mind you, the strongest glass they could find, but still glass.’ We liked both the two young writers that escorted us: Colin Teevan, writer-in-residence at Queen’s University and Glen Patterson. Michael Longley is a big, fine-looking man, huge brown eyes, white hair and beard, tweed jacket, rough scarf. I was ignorant of his poetry but Harold has always admired it and read me several poems. Michael Longley told us that he had been offered creative writing courses in America ‘but it’s just too interesting to leave’. I noticed how all of them, including Edna Longley, Professor of Literature, felt they were contributing something to the country – that something being moderation.

  In view of Harold’s general preoccupation with politics and the oppressed in many, many countries, it should be recorded that the first play he wrote in the nineties could not possibly be argued to be political even by the most wily interpreter of his art. This was the play he called Moonlight, written in late 1992 and first performed the next year. In my opinion it derived fundamentally from another very different human experience, his mother’s death, peacefully in a nursing home in Hove in early October, at the age of eighty-eight. Moonlight is redolent of death; it is the story of a dying person, actually a man nursed by his wife, whose sons refuse to come home to say goodbye to him. What tipped Harold into writing a play was, I believe, the fact that he was actually rehearsing to play the part of Hirst in his own play No Man’s Land at the Almeida Theatre at the time. Having spent most of his time with his mother in the summer, now he had to interrupt rehearsals to rush down to Hove at the end. Thereafter, even more importantly, he was closeted in a dressing room with three other actors, Paul Eddington, Gawn Grainger and Doug Hodge. This comradeship was very important to him. Going down to see his father, now alone aged ninety, Harold began scribbling in the train. He gave me the odd bulletin: ‘A mother, a father, two brothers.’ He began toiling throughout the frosty nights, in his Super-Study across the garden. ‘Maybe a daughter,’ he said one evening. The characters were, as usual despite my protests, known as A, B, C & D. Now we had E.

  January 1993

  Mauritius. Royal Palm Hotel. Harold has hired a ‘manual typewriter’ (last of a dying race) and last night got back to the yellow pages, scrutinizing the airline paper he had scribbled on in first class all night on the way here. This was because the noise from the headset worn by Lester Piggott in the row ahead was extremely loud: Lester is deaf but we are not. It proved however creative. More characters have entered. The play begins with a daughter called Bridget. Now Harold types and types and is totally happy. I hear the rat-tat-tat of the typewriter even when I’m swimming in the ocean.

  13 January

  Even a cyclone, hoving somewhere in the Indian Ocean near us, does not disturb Harold’s rhythm. In fact it rather inspires him. Read Moonlight as it has become. School of No Man’s Land, if one can talk like that. Harold even scribbled away on his little pad at dinner. I didn’t mind as I was trying to think of a way to scrape acquaintance with Lester Piggott, my hero forever. All my life I always used to bet on him.

  15 January

  Did the timing. Fifty-four minutes. Harold very firm: ‘This is a full-length play.’ But later more scenes come to him. We’re up to sixty-one minutes. And we’re going to have dinner with Lester tomorrow night! With all my timings, 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. Harold very firm that E, now Bridget, who is a ghost, is dead because she has committed suicide.

  3 February

  Doug Hodge ‘crazy’ about Moonlight: wants to be involved. And Ian Holm has put himself forward as Andy, the father, which touches Harold very much, with their shared history over The Homecoming so many years ago.

  7 September

  The first night of Moonlight. Harold, typically, found himself near a woman at the first preview who sorted through her Sainsbury’s bag of shopping throughout the play. The next morning (after the first night) Harold said, ‘Let’s face the music’, the familiar phrase, and went downstairs to fetch the papers. ‘Good God, it’s on the front page of the Guardian!’ And so it was. A large photo of Anna Massey, Ian Holm in bed, and a rave review. Benedict Nightingale insisted on saying he was so pleased Harold had deserted politics – because frankly nobody can possibly pretend Moonlight is a political play. Harold delighted, unequivocally delighted. The Sundays less good although we were both amused when Michael Coveney called, as I predicted someone would, for ‘hard-edged political plays’ – instead of, presumably, boring things about life, death and loss.

  4 November

  Moonlight transferred to the Comedy. Even better than at the Almeida. Boys speedier, wittier. Half the critics think it is a tragedy of a mother alienated from her sons, the others think it’s a father ditto. Why not both? Anna Massey’s Russian husband says triumphantly: ‘Ah, I get it at last. The boys have AIDS.’

  Harold continued to enjoy life on stage as well as behind the scenes. The summer of 1995 saw a particularly happy combination, as I saw it, of Harold directing and acting, and me working on a historical book. My book The Gunpowder Plot, which I had long wanted to do, explored the world of the Catholic recusants – refuseniks as they would be called today – in the Elizabethan world, the factors which led to that great (unsuccessful) terrorist plot in November 1605. It was a subject which had fascinated me ever since my arrival at St Ma
ry’s Ascot. As a Protestant girl of Anglo-Irish and Nonconformist ancestry – about to be converted to the Catholic Church – I there encountered the famous, revered names of England’s Catholic past. It wasn’t a project with built-in commercial appeal, although incidentally it appealed very much to Harold: I had to change my American publisher to persist in the project across the Atlantic.

  In the meantime Harold was delighted to be asked to direct Ronnie Harwood’s new play Taking Sides, about Wilhelm Furtwängler and his relationship with the Nazi regime. He was full of admiration for Ronnie for handling the theme of art and collaboration so well. It was a good year altogether: two grandchildren born, William and Honor, and even our cat, beloved Catalina, gave birth to two kittens under my bed: Pushkin and Placido (Placido is with me as I write).

  *

  At the beginning of August, we rented a house, allegedly near Chichester, which turned out to be near Petworth. Harold acted the tyrannical part of Colonel Roote in his own play The Hothouse; I worked on revising The Plot and was driven over the darkening Sussex hills in the evening to join him for dinner after the theatre. It was a magic time.

  27 August

  My sixty-third birthday. Dada has just told me on the telephone that, at this age, Churchill had yet to become Prime Minister and Attlee did become Prime Minister and so forth. Me: ‘I shall expect the call at any moment.’ Dada continues: ‘And I resigned from the cabinet, and Newman wrote Apologia Pro Vita Sua.’ He added kindly: ‘It’s a zenith.’ Ronnie and Natasha Harwood stayed here, to see The Hothouse. Ronnie on his success with Taking Sides (which Harold had directed): ‘It’s so extraordinary at sixty when one is declining.’ Me: ‘One is not.’ And Ronnie certainly isn’t. Amazing lunch party to which all the actors and their families came, as well as Betty Bacall: always a great hit with staff because she not only is famous but looks famous. The actors ate and ate and ate. They stayed till about six although Harold stumped off for a siesta before that, and issued some Roote-like instructions out of the window for some quiet (which everyone ignored, unintimidated, I was glad to see).

  Harold’s next play which became Ashes to Ashes first emerged in my Diary in 1996.

  25 January

  Harold told me at dinner that Judy Daish (his agent and friend) had almost choked on the telephone when he said: ‘I’m writing.’ Me: ‘Do these people move or is it a radio play?’ Harold did not accept the distinction, saying: ‘Don’t forget that Landscape began as a radio play.’ Harold, having read it through, reported: ‘It’s a plant. It’s alive. Now I shall see whether it wants to grow or wants to remain as it is.’

  He was referring to the fact that none of his recent plays – since Betrayal in fact – had been long. There had been Party Time, for example, timed by me on my stop watch at the first reading by Harold in the drawing room at thirty-three and a half minutes. Harold was happy with that: they were the length they were, as he was fond of pointing out to managements; the latter were faced with the problem – if it was a problem – of the public expecting a full-length evening. I believe that Ashes to Ashes was in some way sparked off in Harold’s imagination by Gitta Sereny’s life of Albert Speer, which he had read with total absorption the whole of one holiday.

  19 January

  Harold: ‘I’ve just realized that I would have been dead if the Nazis had invaded. Aged ten.’ Me: ‘Have you never thought this before? I used to look at your parents having lunch at Eaton Manor Gardens in Hove sometimes, your father so feisty, your mother so gracious, and think that these two decent, dignified people would have died in conditions of unspeakable humiliation and terror.’ We then discuss whether the ten-year-old Harold would not have been shipped off by his parents to relatives in the US, fare provided perhaps by Uncle Coleman. Harold warms to the theme: ‘And then I’d probably have grown up to vote Republican. A Reaganite.’ The alternative Harold? Like the Oxford don that never was, the one that drank claret and played cricket and never lifted up a pen.

  24 January

  A and B are stalking the land again! Harold started to scribble. He came over for supper having written a scene of great power which he read to me. A man and his wife. He then wrote on until after one. Rather erotic. Rather horrible. So far.

  28 January

  Harold wrote madly on Thursday, seven hours yesterday. He’s very excited about it: as he said. It came to him just as he was talking to Tom Rand, so he bustled him out. (Tom Rand was doing the costumes for Twelve Angry Men which Harold was about to direct.) Now that I have heard the whole thing, it may come from Speer. But the first image is never the point with Harold. It’s now taken quite a different path, i.e. it’s set in the present day.

  30 January

  The play has grown. Scenes came to Harold in the middle of the night. I found notes scribbled in the bathroom. He even wrote during breakfast.

  25 February

  Harold read Ashes to Ashes (which will probably be done upstairs at the Ambassadors Theatre – suitably small) to Salman and Elizabeth West. Everyone deeply moved but Salman suggested he put ‘Time: present’, since even Salman hadn’t understood that. And it’s vital. This is taking place now, not in Nazi Germany.

  Later, Harold talked about the play to the young foreign playwrights at the Royal Court. This was a gig organized by Elyse Dodgson that Harold took part in annually. The presence of serious young – twenty to thirty-five, at a guess – people of an extraordinary variety of nationalities, Israelis and Syrians, Serbians and Croatians, Chinese, Americans, often brought out answers from him about the meaning of his plays which he would decline to offer to English audiences. Although it should be recorded that on one famous occasion, a man declared himself as a playwright coming from Uganda, then added, ‘I earn my living as a dentist.’ With his scalpel, as it were, he proceeded to dig into the fact that Harold had been writing plays for forty years. ‘So why don’t you retire now and make room for younger people like me?’

  On this occasion however, there were no such enjoyable diversions. Harold said an interesting thing about the character of Rebecca in Ashes to Ashes, ‘She is the artist who cannot avoid the world’s pain’, and he equated himself with her (this was the time of the savage war in Lebanon, for which Harold, at a time of great physical weakness, was being asked on every side to speak; sign petitions, etc.). Devlin stands for the rest of the world who ends up by being brutal towards her. I ask him afterwards: ‘But isn’t there another side to Devlin? He is trying to help Rebecca to stay sane and have a normal life, i.e. those references to Kim and the Kids.’

  Whatever gloss may be put on it, Ashes to Ashes – whose clear narrative was not fully understood at the time, I thought – ends on a note of savage despair. Harold’s own Weltschmerz was very marked at times. This was quite different from our occasional arguments which one might even call rows. After all, these resulted in some of the most passionate love letters he ever wrote as gestures of reconciliation: certainly the smooth side of the rough, to adapt Harold’s favourite phrase.

  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 h
ad 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.